Ad Age-Harris Poll shows VW did not help itself, but it did not hurt itself, either
Despite a wave of negative headlines about its April Fools’ Day prank, Volkswagen is not any worse off with everyday consumers—but the automaker also did not help itself by pretending to rename itself “Voltswagen,” according to a new poll.
Fifty-nine percent of consumers who were aware of the stunt said it did not change their opinion of the brand, according to the Ad Age-Harris Poll. Just 20% think better of VW, while 21% said they now hold a worse opinion of the brand.
The poll was conducted April 2-5 among 1,125 U.S. adults ages 18 and older.
While brands have been pulling April Fools’ Day stunts for years, VW’s joke was more elaborate than most. The campaign, which was handled by Johannes Leonardo, played out over several days and was notable for the involvement of top-level VW execs who were quoted in press releases and used their own social media handles to push the notion that the storied auto brand would rebrand itself “Voltswagen” in the U.S. to push its electric vehicle ambitions.
Several mainstream media outlets, including USA Today, Associated Press and CNBC, reported the name change as fact after being assured by sources inside the automaker that it was not a joke. When it was revealed to be untrue, some of these same outlets ran stories that questioned the automaker’s credibility, while conjuring the automaker’s 2015 emissions scandal in which it was caught cheating to evade regulations.
“The use of deceit is really dangerous. If you’re Volkswagen, it’s doubly dangerous,” Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan business professor, told USA Today. “Volkswagen is the last company that should be playing around with deceiving people, even if it’s for two days. It doesn’t play well when you have admitted guilt to having tricked us before.”
But the saga went unnoticed by a majority of consumers, according to the poll, which found that only 21% of consumers had heard about the “Voltswagen” announcement by the time they were polled. Of those who heard of the news, 73% said they were aware that it was an April Fools’ joke (perhaps because the poll was conducted after reports came out that it was a stunt).
The goal of the prank was to raise awareness of VW’s electric vehicle ambitions, which include the ID.4, a compact electric crossover that the automaker is marketing as “the electric car for the people.”
The poll found that 19% of respondents were more likely to buy a VW after learning of the prank, but 69% said it had no impact on their decision. Only 12% stated that it would make them less likely to buy a VW.
The poll reveals a division on whether brands of any kind should participate in April Fools’ Day pranks: 54% said they should not, while 46% said they should. For those who said yes, the most commonly cited reason was “it’s a creative way for brands to advertise.” The naysayers said the pranks “create confusion for customers.”
But younger people are apparently more into the jokes—64% of millennials and 61% of Gen Zers say brands should partake in April Fools’ Day, but only 38% of Gen Xers and 35% of baby boomers agree.
“Holiday promotions can be a powerful and effective tool for brands to engage with customers and build buzz, but not all holidays are created equally,” states Will Johnson, CEO of The Harris Poll. “April Fools’ Day is polarizing because it gets at the heart of the brand-customer relationship—trust. As our research shows, consumers are divided on April Fools’ Day marketing stunts, so brands must carefully weigh the benefits against the risks.”
E.J. Schultz is the Assistant Managing Editor, Marketing at Ad Age and covers beverage, automotive and sports marketing. He is a former reporter for McClatchy newspapers, including the Fresno Bee, where he covered business and state government and politics, and the Island Packet in South Carolina. He has won awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the Jesse H. Neal Awards, the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the South Carolina Press Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors. A native of Cincinnati, Schultz has an economics degree from Xavier University and a masters in journalism from Northwestern University.
The pandemic forced D&A leaders to step up research and analysis to respond effectively to change and uncertainty, the firm says.
While much of the loudest buzz surrounding the impact of COVID-19 was focused on the dramatic shift from on premises to remote work, the pandemic further affected every aspect of the enterprise, which includes data and analytics technology. The uncertainty of what the tech industry would face forced D&A leadership to quickly find tools and processes — and put them in place — so they could identify key trends and prioritize to the company’s best advantage, said Rita Sallam, research vice president at Gartner, in the company’s recently released information.
Gartner has now identified 10 trends as “mission-critical investments that accelerate capabilities to anticipate, shift and respond.” It recommended that D&A leaders review these trends and consider and apply as necessary. Following is a summary from Gartner of the trends:
Trend 1: Smarter, responsible, scalable AI
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are key factors. Businesses must apply new techniques for smarter, less data-hungry, ethically responsible and more resilient AI solutions. When smarter, more responsible, scalable AI is applied, organizations will be able to “leverage learning algorithms and interpretable systems into shorter time to value and higher business impact,” Gartner’s report said.
Trend 2: Composable data and analytics
Composable data and analytics leverages components from multiple data, analytics and AI solutions to quickly build flexible and user-friendly intelligent applications to help D&A leaders make the correlation between the discovered insights to actions they must execute. Open, containerized analytics architectures make analytics capabilities more composable.
Public or private, data is unquestionably moving to the cloud and composable data, rendering analytics “a more agile way to build analytics applications enabled by cloud marketplaces and low-code and no-code solutions.”
Trend 3: Data fabric is the foundation
D&A leaders use data fabric to help address “higher levels of diversity, distribution, scale and complexity in their organizations’ data assets,” as a result of increased digitization and “more emancipated” consumers.
Data fabric applies analytics in order to constantly monitor data pipelines; data fabric “uses continuous analytics of data assets to support the design, deployment and utilization of diverse data to reduce time for integration by 30%, deployment by 30% and maintenance by 70%.”
Trend 4: From big to small and wide data
Using historical data for ML and AI models was rendered irrelevant, once changes based on the pandemic had an extreme effect on business. D&A leaders need a greater variety of data for better situational awareness because human and AI decision making grows more complex and demanding.
Therefore, D&A leaders need to choose analytical techniques that can use available data more effectively and they can with more insight that now requires less data.
“Small and wide data approaches provide robust analytics and AI, while reducing organizations’ large data set dependency,” Sallam said in a press release. “Using wide data, organizations attain a richer, more complete situational awareness or 360-degree view, enabling them to apply analytics for better decision making.”
Trend 5: XOps
DataOps, MLOps, ModelOps and PlatformOps, which comprise XOps, are necessary to achieve efficiencies and economies of scale through DevOps and using best practices of reliability, reusability and repeatability. This also reduces duplication of technology and processes and enabling automation.
Operationalization must be addressed initially and not as an afterthought because the latter is why most analytics and AI projects fail. The report said, “If D&A leaders operationalize at scale using XOps, they will enable the reproducibility, traceability, integrity and integrability of analytics and AI assets.”
Trend 6: Engineering decision intelligence
D&A leaders can make engineering decisions more accurate, repeatable, transparent and traceable, as decisions grow more automated and augmented. Gartner refers to “engineering decision intelligence,” which applies to a series of decisions of business processes as well as grouped emergent decisions and consequences.
Trend 7: Data and analytics as a core business function
D&A is now making the shift into a core business function, rather than a secondary activity. D&A now is a shared business asset aligned to business results. Gartner noted that D&A silos break down because of better collaboration between central and federated D&A teams.
Trend 8: Graph relates everything
Graphs form the foundation of most modern data and analytics capabilities and are reliant on the foundation to find relationships between people, places, things, events and locations across a wide variety of data assets. D&A leaders rely on graphs as quick answers to complex business questions, which require contextual awareness and an understanding of the nature of connections and strengths across multiple entities.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, graph technologies will be used in 80% of data and analytics innovations, up from 10% in 2021, facilitating rapid decision making across the organization.
Trend 9: The rise of the augmented consumer
Today, most business users use predefined dashboards and manual data exploration, but this can lead to incorrect conclusions and flawed decisions and actions. Time spent in predefined dashboards will progressively be replaced when users’ needs can be delivered with automated, conversational, mobile and dynamically generated insights customized through a predefined dashboard.
“This will shift the analytical power to the information consumer, the augmented consumer, giving them capabilities previously only available to analysts and citizen data scientists,” Sallam said.
Trend 10: Data and analytics at the edge
Support for data, analytics and other technologies are found in edge computing environments, closer to assets in the physical world and outside IT’s purview. Gartner predicts that by 2023, over 50% of the primary responsibility of data and analytics leaders will comprise data created, managed and analyzed in edge environments.
Gartner concluded: “D&A leaders can use this trend to enable greater data management flexibility, speed, governance, and resilience. A diversity of use cases is driving the interest in edge capabilities for D&A, ranging from supporting real-time event analytics to enabling autonomous behavior of things.”
Gartner Data and analytics summit
Gartner analysts offer more analysis on data and analytics trends at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summits 2021, taking place virtually May 4-6 in the Americas, May 18-20 in EMEA, June 8-9 in APAC, June 23-24 in India, and July 12-13 in Japan. Follow news and updates from the conferences on Twitter using #GartnerDA.
A logo is the graphic image of a brand. This advertising strategy has been used for many centuries as it is a way of identifying a company or a creator. Furthermore, the importance of logos lies in the fact that they are easily recognizable, even from childhood.
A logo must be able to condense, in a single image, the personality of the brand , to communicate a clear message to its audience and, above all, to become an effective tool for marketing and promoting the company. These can be made up of the name of the brand, the initials or a drawing that relates to the company, its values or its history.
We present a list of the 10 logos most remembered by our users on social networks. Take their strategies into account when designing your business:
The sports clothing and accessories company has managed to position itself in a remarkable way. The slogan “Just Do It” and the popcorn in its logo are simply unforgettable. Why a popcorn? The NIKE brand was founded in the 60s and both its name and its logo are inspired by the Greek goddess Nike, deity of victory, who had wings and was very fast. The design was created by a young student who was paid $ 35 at the time. We like it because it is simple, easy to remember, attractive and because of its relationship with the values of the company.
A bitten apple is the image of one of the most recognized and innovative companies of the 20th century. There are many theories about the origin of this logo: that it is a tribute to Alan Mathison Turing, inventor of current computing, who committed suicide with a poisoned apple; that it was the favorite fruit of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; which is the emblem of Apple Records , the record label of The Beatles, Jobs’s favorite group; that Jobs’ adoptive father was a farmer and that he belonged to a group of farmers, or a simple reference to Isaac Newton’s apple (the first logo alluded to this character). The logo, designed by Rob Janoff, was initially rainbow and mutated to a bright gray. Many claim that the bite means knowledge or that it means that, in English, it is “bite”, which they alter to “byte”.
This brand is a benchmark in all advertising elements, and its logo is no exception. This only consists of white typeface on a red background (or red typeface). The logo was created by the librarian Frank Mason Robinson in 1885, who thought that two letters “C” would look attractive in any advertisement; he named the brand and added the most widely used cursive font in the United States at that time. In fact, the first design has had very few modifications throughout its history. Coca-Cola is found in more than 200 countries in the world and it is almost a fact that everyone recognizes its logo from a distance.
Sabritas is one of the most loved brands in the Mexican market. The company “Sabrosas Botanitas” was acquired in the 1960s by Pepsico, formed by Pepsi and Frito-Lays, who were in charge of building the image of Sabritas, based on the popular Lays snack in the United States. This logo is said to have been created during a focus group when, in the branding process, participants were asked what this product produced for them, to which many responded with a happy face . From there, the design has been modified over the years, but it remains the main differentiator of this company that “wants to see you smile”.
The logo of this chain of coffee shops is known practically worldwide and is also one of the most plagiarized. As in the case of NIKE, the origin of its name and logo has a mythological and literary basis. The name appears in the famous Herman Melville novel, “Moby Dick,” where Starbucks was the first mate on Captain Ahab’s ship. As for the logo, although many refer to it as a mermaid, it is actually a melusine, that is, a double-tailed nereid. In the beginning, the logo was designed in black ink and then it became green. This element has mutated a lot and currently (as of 2011) a close-up of this character is shown.
When a brand is able to cover its logo, modify its colors and even omit some letters and change them for drawings, it means that it has achieved its mission. And there is no better example than Google. This is demonstrated with doodles (logos that honor certain characters or events). The first doodle appeared in 1998 and was “Burning Man.” Google also changes its colors to gray tones when a world tragedy occurs. The logo of the most important search engine in the world has undergone transformations over time; In the beginning it had an exclamation point (copied from Yahoo! ), until it reached the current one, designed by Kedar Ruth, which is based on the Catull typeface.
The logo of this luxury car brand is one of the most famous because, in addition to its style and elegance, it has become a sign of status. Usually the image shows a black prancing horse on a yellow background with the letters S and F, “Scuderia Ferrari.” The horse was the symbol of Count Francesco Baracca, who served in the Italian air force in World War I. In 1923 Enzo Ferrari met Baracca’s mother who asked him to put the horse that her son used, as it would bring him luck. So it was. Since then, this is the Ferrari emblem to which Enzo added the color yellow to be representative of his birthplace: Modena.
Other famous logos in the automotive sector are the Mercedes-Benz star that teaches mastery on land, sea and air, and the four interlocking Audi rings that refer to the union of four Saxon brands.
The golden “M” for McDonald’s is one of the most well-known symbols in the world. It began to be used in 1962 when Jim Schindler, inspired by the arches that the first establishments had, used this logo in all his restaurants. This large “M”, both for its color and its shape, has great significance: first of all, it encourages hunger and represents a safe and trustworthy place. In addition, the golden hue works for investors who see in this fast food brand a profitable option to have a business. This logo is known as “Los Arcos Dorados” .
Disney is synonymous with family entertainment and fun. Its original logo shows all these qualities. The logo arose from a stylization of the signature of its founder, Walter Elias Disney. However, this large corporation modifies its image according to its products. For example, for the movies, in addition to the typography, it shows the famous castle with a blue background (inspired by Neuschwanstein Castle, in Germany), while for others the unforgettable silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s ears or hand is used.
Nestlé is one of the largest food companies in the world, a recognition it has maintained over the years. The first logo of this company arose in 1868 with its creator Henri Nestlé, who decided to base the design on the meaning of his surname in German (little nest) and on the family emblem. It was not until 1938 that he added the name to it and little by little it was simplified and modernized to give life to the image we know today.
Feature Image Credit: Maximilian Bruck vía Unsplash
‘Grow with Google’ Vice President Lisa Gevelber explains Google’s professional certification training program which could lead to opportunities in high-growth fields.
Google’s online job training program is hoping to “create real economic opportunity for everyone,” according to Grow with Google Vice President Lisa Gevelber.
“Eighty million Americans do not have a college degree and we feel like that is a barrier to getting a good job,” she told FOX Business’ “Cavuto: Coast to Coast” Monday.
According to Gevelber, Google career certificates enable people to get the right skills and connect with the right employers for them.
The certificate courses are designed to be taken online at the participant’s own pace, which allows working people to take advantage of the program, according to Grow with Google’s website.
The average course can be completed in fewer than six months and costs roughly $240.
The job fields covered by the program include I.T. support, data analytics, user experience design and project management, all of which are “in demand” and “high-paying” fields, according to Gevelber.
The program’s site states the average salary for entry-level roles across certificate fields is $63,600.
Google is working with the online learning platform Coursera to offer the certificates and the courses are taught by “experts at Google who have decades of experience,” Gevelber said.
Gevelber believes the most important aspect of the program is Google’s partnerships with employers like Home Depot, Smucker’s, Walmart, Infosys and Better.com.
ProtonMail is a secure email service designed to protect your inbox and identity. So how exactly is ProtonMail different from a “regular” email provider like Gmail? And, more importantly: Is it time to make the switch?
What Is ProtonMail?
While all major email services claim to respect your privacy, ProtonMail goes further than most in a bid to protect you. That’s what makes it different from the big email providers like Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook.com.
ProtonMail is one of a handful of so-called secure email providers that shun the traditional webmail route of plentiful free storage and integrated services in favour of heightened privacy and security features. Unlike with Gmail, you’ll have to pay to unlock many of these additional bells and whistles. Google profits off its free Gmail service by showing you ads, while ProtonMail doesn’t have any ads.
ProtonMail
Google and Microsoft use standard good security practices like two-factor authentication and securing the connection between your browser and their servers. ProtonMail goes further still by not logging identifying information, storing data on the server in a manner that’s useless to third parties, and better facilitating private conversations between users.
While ProtonMail sounds like an upgrade over Gmail, it does come with some caveats. The free plan is limited—for example, it only offers 500 MB of storage. Many of the features that make Gmail so useful aren’t possible in ProtonMail due to the emphasis on privacy and security. For example, it won’t automatically crawl through your email and add events to your calendar.
Deciding between a traditional provider like Google and a secure provider like ProtonMail is a case of weighing up convenience and privacy. If you want an email service with all the conveniences of Gmail, ProtonMail isn’t it.
ProtonMail Prioritizes Data Protection and Secure Messaging
ProtonMail encrypts all data on the server so that it is rendered useless to anyone without the key to decrypt it. In the case of a security breach, data swiped from ProtonMail’s servers wouldn’t be of any use. Not even ProtonMail can read your email.
This isn’t the case with standard webmail providers like Gmail, which only encrypts data between your browser and its servers. Google will use AI to “read” your email for services like the Google Assistant to make useful suggestions at opportune moments. Gmail can tell what you’re doing and when you’re doing it based on the contents of your inbox, and that’s become a feature that many users rely upon.
ProtonMail
In addition to providing encryption on the server, ProtonMail also makes it easy to send encrypted messages between users. All communications between ProtonMail users are automatically end-to-end encrypted so that not even ProtonMail’s employees can read them. ProtonMail also facilitates the use of Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, which allows you to “lock” email contents so that only recipients with the key can open them.
ProtonMail even allows you to send password-protected, self-destructing messages to users of any webmail platform. In essence, this is a bit of a trick, since the recipient must click on a link to open the message, but it works well enough, and it’s not something that Gmail or Outlook provides.
Using PGP inside of Gmail is possible but difficult, with browser extensions like Mailvelope and FlowCrypt making it easier to manage. Unlike with ProtonMail, which explicitly supports the feature, working with PGP inside of Gmail is much less streamlined and borderline unusable on mobile.
ProtonMail’s Servers Are Located in Switzerland
In addition to not being able to read the email stored on their servers, ProtonMail is based in Switzerland, where privacy laws are notoriously strict. This means that ProtonMail can’t be forced to hand over data to authorities in the U.S. Switzerland is not part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing agreement that exists between the U.S., Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.
By comparison, Google is located in the U.S. and may be forced by law to turn over information on its users. (And in the U.S., emails are considered “abandoned” after 180 days, so the government can request them without a warrant.) This includes inbox contents, metadata, IP addresses, and more. This information can then be shared with other members of the Five Eyes allegiance.
Because Google stores data in an unencrypted format on their servers, you don’t need decryption keys to make use of it. The entire contents of your inbox could be handed over to authorities and used against you. If Google experiences a data breach and user data is leaked, there’s no safety net in place to prevent that data from being used.
In the case of Gmail, identifying information like your IP address, real name, cell phone number, and locations from which you have logged in are all stored alongside the contents of your inbox.
ProtonMail Knows Very Little About You
ProtonMail doesn’t require that you provide any identifying information to create an account. You only need to supply a username (the email address you will be using) and a password. You can link a recovery email if you want, but you don’t have to.
On top of this, ProtonMail logs very little about its users. No IP addresses are stored, and tracking is not used to follow users from one site to the next. Metadata is discarded so that it’s harder to link an email to a point of origin. ProtonMail attempts to make you as anonymous as possible, though you should never assume complete anonymity online.
Google is the web’s largest advertising company. It’s responsible for a huge amount of the tracking that takes place across the web. Tools like Google Analytics help website owners monitor traffic, while Google’s advertising arm monitors your web usage to provide “relevant” advertising that you’re more likely to click on.
Google also runs many other popular services. Tracking users removes the need to keep logging in when moving from Google Maps to YouTube or from Gmail to Google Drive.
ProtonMail Is Completely Open Source
ProtonMail is open source, too. You can hop on GitHub and download the code for the ProtonMail webmail application. You can deploy it on your own server if you know how—or simply comb through the codebase looking for bugs or potential security flaws. ProtonMail also uses well-established open-source cryptography techniques including AES, RSA, and OpenPGP.
Having an open-source codebase has two main benefits. The first is that the code can be audited by anyone. ProtonMail states that they do not include backdoor access for law enforcement or security agencies to use. Don’t believe it? Download the source code and have a look for yourself.
ProtonMail
The other upside to open-source code is that anyone can try and break ProtonMail’s security. This “crowdsourced” approach to security exposes any potential weaknesses in a way that closed-source applications do not.
Google also uses open-source technologies, but the Gmail codebase is ultimately closed. Closed-source code isn’t inherently insecure, but it can’t be tested quite in the same way that open-source code can.
Gmail Sacrifices Privacy for Features
On the flipside, Gmail comes with bags of features not seen in ProtonMail. Gmail can be used on virtually any device using virtually any mail app, including basic iPhone and Android mail apps.
Due to the way that ProtonMail handles encryption, you can’t connect your smartphone’s default mail app to your account and use it as is. To access ProtonMail on mobile, you’ll need to download the Android or iPhone app or log in via the webmail interface.
ProtonMail
Gmail is also completely free, with a whopping 15GB of space available to anyone who needs it. This space is shared among your other Google services, and you can buy more for relatively little. Google doesn’t wall off features behind paywalls (unless you’re a Business user). Free accounts get everything: corporate-grade spam filters, optional experimental features, mail aliases, the lot.
ProtonMail is fairly limited by comparison. The free account is limited to 500MB of space and 150 messages a day. Features that are free with Gmail, like custom filters and an autoresponder, require a premium €4/month account. You get three labels, three folders, and a single address (no custom domains) for free.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but decades of free webmail and massive space allocations have convinced many of us that email isn’t a service we should be paying for.
Gmail is also deeply integrated with Google’s other services. Google Assistant can check your inbox for relevant information about upcoming trips or purchases you have made. This enables all manner of interesting and genuinely useful AI-powered features.
ProtonMail is an email service first and foremost, although the company also provides a VPN service and has encrypted calendar and file storage apps in development. There’s no shared pot-of-cloud storage, no machine-learning AI to get your boarding pass ready at the airport gate, and no companion search engine, map, or video-hosting service.
Should You Ditch Gmail for ProtonMail?
By now, you’ve probably already made up your mind about switching to a secure email service like ProtonMail or staying with Gmail. Ultimately, there’s no right answer. Most of Google’s users will never have their data handed over to authorities, and many will happily trade privacy for convenience.
But if you’re looking for an email service that does go the extra mile in protecting you, ProtonMail is a solid option.
Tim Brookes is a technology writer with more than a decade of experience. He’s invested in the Apple ecosystem, with experience covering Macs, iPhones, and iPads for publications like Zapier and MakeUseOf. Read Full Bio »
How this innovation can be a competitive advantage for any business, including yours.
Demand for machine learning is skyrocketing. This growth is driven not only by “middle adopters” recognizing the vast potential of machine learning after watching early adopters benefit from its use, but by steady improvements in machine-learning technology itself. It may be too early to say with certainty that machine learning develops according to a predictable framework like Moore’s Law, the famous precept about computing power that has borne out for nearly 50 years and only recently began to show signs of strain. But the industry is clearly on a fast track.
As machine-learning algorithms grow smarter and more organizations come around to the idea of integrating this powerful technology into their processes, it’s high time your enterprise thought about putting machine learning to work, too.
First, consider the benefits and costs. It’s quite likely that your business could leverage at least one of these five reasons to employ machine learning, whether it’s taming apparently infinite amounts of unstructured data or finally personalizing your marketing campaigns.
1. Taming vast unstructured data with limited resources
One of the best-known use cases for machine learning is processing data sets too large for traditional data crunching methods to handle. This is increasingly important as data becomes easier to generate, collect and access, especially for smaller B2C enterprises that often deal with more transaction and customer data than they can manage with limited resources.
How you use machine learning to process and “tame” your data will depend on what you hope to get from that data. Do you want help making more informed product development decisions? To better market to your customers? To acquire new customers? To analyse internal processes that could be improved? Machine learning can help with all these problems and more.
2. Automating routine tasks
The original promise of machine learning was efficiency. Even as its uses have expanded beyond mere automation, this remains a core function and one of the most commercially viable use cases. Using machine learning to automate routine tasks, save time and manage resources more effectively has a very attractive paid of side effects for enterprises that do it effectively: reducing expenses and boosting net income.
The list of tasks that machine learning can automate is long. As with data processing, how you use machine learning for process automation will depend on which functions exert the greatest drag on your time and resources.
Need ideas? Machine learning has shown encouraging real-world outcomes when used to automate data classification, report generation, IT threat monitoring, loss and fraud prevention and internal auditing. But the possibilities are truly endless.
3. Improving marketing personalization and efficiency
Machine learning is a powerful force multiplier in marketing campaigns, enabling virtually endless messaging and buyer-profile permutations, unlocking the gate to fully personalized marketing without demanding an army of copywriters or publicity agents.
What’s especially encouraging for smaller businesses without much marketing expertise is that machine learning’s potential is baked into the top everyday digital-advertising platforms, namely Facebook and Google. You don’t have to train your own algorithms to use this technology in your next microtargeting campaign.
4. Addressing business trends
Machine learning has also proven its worth in detecting trends in large data sets. These trends are often too subtle for humans to tease out, or perhaps the data sets are simply too large for “dumb” programs to process effectively.
Whatever the reason for machine learning’s success in this space, the potential benefits are clear as day. For example, many small and midsize enterprises use machine learning technology to predict and reduce customer churn, looking for signs that customers are considering competitors and trigger retention processes with higher probabilities of success.
Elsewhere, companies of all sizes are getting more comfortable integrating machine learning into their hiring processes. By reinforcing existing biases in human-led hiring and promotion, earlier-generation algorithms did more harm than good, but newer models are able to counteract implicit bias and increase the chances of equitable outcomes.
5. Accelerating research cycles
A machine-learning algorithm unleashed in an R&D department is like an army of super-smart lab assistants. As more and more enterprises discover just what machine learning is capable of in and out of the lab, they’re feeling more confident about using it to eliminate some of the frustrating trial-and-error that lengthens research cycles and increases development costs. Machine learning won’t replace R&D experts anytime soon, but it does appear to empower them to use their time more effectively. More and better innovations could result.
If the experience of competitor businesses that have already deployed machine learning to great effect is any guide for your own experience, the answer to this question is a resounding yes.
The more interesting question is how you choose to make machine learning work for your businesses. This prompts another question, around what operational and structural changes your machine learning processes will bring. These changes, up to and including reducing headcounts in redundant roles or winding up entire lines of business, could be painful in the short run even as they strengthen your enterprise for the long haul.
Like all great innovations that increase operational efficiency and eliminate low-value work, machine learning does not benefit everyone equally. It’s up to the humans in charge of these algorithms to make the transition as orderly and painless as possible. It seems there are some things machine learning can’t yet do … yet.
A new survey suggests that Apple iPhone brand loyalty increased as Android users became less loyal to their device makers and more willing to switch to another brand.
The survey, carried out by SellCell earlier in March 2021, involved more than 5,000 smartphone users who owned various models of the most popular handset brands. The results suggest that iPhone users are more loyal and less willing to switch to another brand than their Android-using counterparts.
Brand loyalty for Apple reached an all-time high of 92%, up from 90.5% in a SellCell survey the same time in 2019. During that same period, Samsung brand loyalty dipped from 85.7% to 74% in 2019. The SellCell results also indicate that iPhone users are about 18% “more loyal” to the Apple ecosystem than Samsung owners.
While only 8.1% of iPhone users said they planned to switch to another brand, about 26% of Samsung users indicated that they would jump ship with their next smartphone upgrade. Among those potential switchers, 53% said they’d buy an iPhone. Privacy is the primary reason for 31.5% of those switchers, the results indicate.
It isn’t just Samsung that lost loyalty in the survey results. Brand loyalty among Google Pixel, LG, and Motorola users all dipped. For the Google Pixel lineup, brand loyalty dropped 18.8% in two years.
A slim majority of respondents, 46.6%, also said that the iPhone 12 is the current best flagship smartphone range. That’s compared to 30.4% who said the Samsung Galaxy S21 was the best flagship series on the market.
When it came to survey participants explaining why they were sticking to the iPhone, 45% said they liked their current brand, 24% said they’re too tied into the ecosystem, and 16% said they didn’t have a reason to move.
Those who did say they would choose another brand cited better technology (38%) and a preference for the design of other manufacturers (26.4%) as the primary reasons for a switch.
When asked to choose their favorite model of current smartphones, 17% of respondents chose the iPhone 12 and 12.7% chose the iPhone 12 Pro Max. The Galaxy S21 came in third with 11.4%, while the iPhone 12 Pro ranked fourth with 10.6%. In fifth place was the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra with 10%.
SellCell conducted the study via online survey between March 3 and March 10, 2021. It involved more than 5,000 smartphone users aged 18 and up in the U.S., and included 2,000 iPhone users, 2,000 Samsung users, 400 Google Pixel users, and 600 Motorola or LG users.
Knowing how to do an in-depth SEO competitor analysis is crucial to your search engine optimization strategy.
Sadly, not many do it. And those doing it do it haphazardly.
But knowing your competitors is essential to helping you create a roadmap for SEO activities that will help you have the edge over your competition.
What is an SEO competitor analysis (And why is it important)?
SEO competitor analysis is the practice of looking into your competitor’s SEO strategy, especially those who are doing better than you. Conducting an SEO competitor analysis is important as it will help you discover a lot of insights you can use to boost your own strategy.
You’ll be surprised at how much you can learn by simply looking under the hood of your competitor’s SEO strategy.
Some of the things you can discover are:
SEO strategies that are working for your competitors
What they’re doing, that you aren’t
How difficult it is to rank for important keywords
The traffic potential in your niche
However, the most important reason for conducting an SEO competitor analysis is to gain insight into what you can do to create an effective SEO strategy.
Before we dive into the six steps that you should take to analyze your SEO competition properly, you need to gather the right SEO tools to help you mine your competitors’ data. You’ll also need to create a spreadsheet that you’ll use to gather the data you collect.
And because there’s so much work involved, you’re better off hiring a freelance SEO or a full-time one if your organization is large enough.
With that out of the way, let’s get started.
1. Start with keyword research
Keyword research is one of the pillars of SEO.
That’s why when you conduct your competitor analysis, you must start by identifying all your important keywords. More than that, you must understand the intent behind those keywords when your audience uses them in their search queries.
The keywords you want to focus on must be powered by informational, commercial, and transactional intent.
That’s because those are usually the money keywords that result in visitors eventually going down your sales funnel.
But more on that as we discuss competitor keyword analysis.
Knowing which keywords you’re creating content around and trying to rank will play a huge role in later aspects of competitor analysis. So, the most important thing you need right now is a list of your primary keywords. We won’t go into great detail on how you can get them, but if you’re interested, check out this article on how to discover relevant keywords.
2. Identify your real competitors
While it may seem obvious, one of the first steps to conducting a competitor analysis is identifying your real SEO competitors.
Sure, you may think you know who they are, but until you dig deep into the data, you’ll be working on assumptions.
So how do you identify your real SEO competitors?
First of all, be clear on who is not your competitor. Some websites may rank for keywords that are important to you but are not in your same vertical. An example is Wikipedia. They rank for millions of terms but have no intention of monetizing any of them.
Secondly, make a distinction between your primary and secondary competitors. Primary competitors sell the exact products and services you offer and target the same audience as you. Secondary competitors are those interested in ranking for the same keywords as you (thereby creating similar content) but don’t offer the same products or services.
To get a clear picture of who your competitors really are, there are a few strategies and tools you can use. Here are some of them:
Use the SERPs
Google is always your best friend when it comes to anything SEO. Simply type in your main keywords and note which of your primary and secondary competitors rank for those keywords.
Alternatively, you can search for your product and its alternatives. The search results will give you a good picture of who your real SEO competitors are.
Use Competitor Analysis Tools
Another way to discover your real SEO competitors is to use competitor analysis tools. These will help you better understand who your real competitors are and give you the data to back it up. Examples of such tools include Ahrefs Site Explorer and SEMrush’s Competitive Research Toolkit.
To find your competitors, simply enter your domain name into your SEO tool of choice and navigate to the competing domains. You can sort the results using the common keywords tab to get a clearer picture of your closest competitors.
Once you’ve identified your real SEO competitors, it’s time to move on to the next step of your SEO competitor analysis…
3. Benchmark competitor SEO performance
Once you’ve identified your real SEO competitors, you need to gather data and metrics about their SEO performance. The reason for that is so you can have top-level data to use to benchmark with.
Some data you should use to benchmark includes:
Domain Rating and Domain Authority
Two important metrics that you must consider two critical metrics in your competitor analysis: domain rating (DR) and domain authority (DA).
Domain Rating
DR is a metric developed by Ahrefs to show the strength of a website’s backlink profile. It uses a logarithmic scale that goes from 0 to 100. This metric is vital because backlinks play a major role in the way search engines rank websites.
When conducting your competitor analysis, compare your DR to your competitors’. If it’s lower, you will have to build more backlinks to improve your rankings. Note that you’ll probably have to work harder at building more backlinks for competitive pages.
As you look at DR, Ahrefs will show you the backlink profiles of each of your competitors. Make sure to note the websites that you can include in your link building campaigns.
Domain Authority
Domain authority is a Moz metric developed to predict the likelihood of a website ranking on search engines. The algorithm takes into consideration many factors that search engines use to rank websites and calculates the outcome on a scale of 0 to 100.
Again, you can use your competitors’ DA scores to benchmark your own. If yours is lower, you must design a robust SEO strategy to help you catch up and overtake them.
Both DR and DA are good indicators of your starting point in improving your SEO. We’ll touch on how to improve on them later in the post as we look at other aspects of competitor analysis. For the moment, you just need a list of:
Your real SEO competitors
Their DR and DA scores
Your keywords
Potential backlink targets
Armed with this information, you can now proceed to collect more data on your competitors.
Number of Indexed Pages
Another crucial piece of data you’ll need as you conduct an SEO competitor analysis is the number of indexed pages your competitors have. To rank pages, search engines first need to find and index them.
You can use Google to easily check how many indexed pages your competitors have by searching for “site:domain”.
For example, if the Jeff Bullas blog is one of your competitors, here are the results you’ll get:
From the above screenshot, your competitor has 3,500 indexed pages. Do this for all your competitors and put the data in a spreadsheet. You can then compare the number of your indexed pages to those your competitors have.
Again, if you have fewer indexed pages than your competitors, you’ll have to create and index more content to catch up. But of course, the aim is not to catch up but to overtake your competitors. This means you’ll have to create more SEO-optimized content than them to give you a better chance of taking the top spot.
Keyword Rankings
Your competitors’ keyword rankings are another aspect of competitor analysis you must consider. You want to consider whether they’re increasing in the number of organic keywords ranking in the top 10 positions.
Again, you can use SEO tools to get this data.
Competitors who have enjoyed consistent growth in this area over the past 6-12 months are the ones you should focus on. This growth is a sign that they’re consistently creating content and working on improving their rankings.
Traffic Trends
The primary function of SEO is to drive organic traffic to your website.
That’s why checking your competitors’ traffic trends is crucial to your SEO competitor analysis. Here’s an example of PandaDoc’s traffic comparison to their competitors:
As you can see, this electronic signature software company has a lot of work to do to catch up to the prominent players on the market. So what kind of traffic metrics should they focus on as they conduct their SEO competitor analysis?
Monthly Organic Traffic
Identify competitors that are getting the most organic traffic. You can take this to a more granular level by analyzing their traffic at the domain, subfolder, subdomain, and URL levels. This will help you identify the best traffic opportunities.
Organic Traffic Growth
Still on traffic trends, you also need to analyze your competitors’ organic traffic growth. Note whether your competitors’ traffic is:
Growing
Declining
Plateauing
You’ll want to pay attention to those competitors whose traffic has been consistently growing over the past 12 months.
Traffic Value
Your competitor’s traffic value shows how their SEO strategy helps them scale traffic across commercial intent keywords. While this metric is based on traffic brought in by paid ads, it’s a valuable indicator of the revenue your competitors are getting from their traffic.
Backlink Growth/Referring Domains
Trends in referring domains are crucial to helping you develop a backlinking strategy. Growth in this area shows that your competitors are actively building backlinks to their content.
Again, focus on competitors whose referring domain numbers are growing as it shows their link building strategy is working.
Social Media Performance
Social media plays a significant role in SEO.
For one, social signals are an indicator that content is relevant and helpful. Secondly, social media is a good vehicle for getting your content in front of the right audience. It helps drive the right traffic to your assets. Finally, a social media analysis will help you know which types of content gets the most engagement.
Analyze which social media platforms work best for your competitors and which audiences they target there. This will help you design your social media strategy around tactics that work.
Benchmarking your SEO competitors’ performance is one of the essential parts of your SEO competitor analysis. You must take your time and gather as much data as possible at this stage as it will help you create a roadmap for your SEO success.
4. Analyze your competitors’ technical SEO
Each website has its own unique digital makeup. Understanding how your competitors’ boost their SEO through their website’s technical makeup is another essential component of your SEO competitor analysis. That’s why you must make sure to use the right platform to build your website. You must also invest in good web hosting.
Let’s look at some of the crucial technical aspects you must consider in your analysis.
Site Structure
The way a website is structured is essential to SEO for two main reasons:
Determines whether a website is easy to crawl or not
Impacts user experience (UX)
A good site structure makes a website easy to crawl. Search engines reward this with better rankings. Things to note here include how subfolders and subdomains are structured.
UX also impacts rankings as search engines reward websites that offer a positive UX. Besides, good UX results in increased dwell time, one of the known ranking factors.
Analyzing your competitors’ website structure and navigation will help you see any structural changes you may need to make on your website to help improve its performance.
Navigation
Your navigation, especially the top-level navigation (TLN), is also an important part of your site structure. As such, it has a bearing on your SEO. A few things to consider when analyzing your competitors’ TLN include:
Do they link to their main pages from the TLN?
Do they use optimized anchors?
Can users get to important pages within the prescribed minimum of 1-3 clicks?
The insights you get from your competitors’ navigation can help you design optimized menus.
Content Silos
Content silos refer to a technical SEO strategy that involves grouping together topically-related pages. This is usually done by creating a strategic internal linking strategy.
Content silos are a great way of making it easy for search engines to crawl your website and understand your main topic. They’re also great for UX and keeping visitors on site. All these are contributing factors to how websites rank.
Analyze how your competitors’ structure their content and use the insights to optimize your site structure.
Site Speed
Site speed has been a major ranking factor for years. And will continue to be one of the elements of every technical SEO strategy. The reasons for this are that fast sites:
Are easier to crawl
Offer a better UX
Have better conversion rates and fewer bounce rates
Analyzing your competitors’ site speeds will help you gain insight into how they optimize for speed. You’ll have an idea of the changes you can make to your site to make it faster.
Mobile-friendliness
It may be a song that has been sung to death, but yes, mobile-friendliness is still an important design and SEO issue.
With Google’s mobile-first indexing policy, no serious business can ignore the need to have a mobile-friendly website.
Again, checking for mobile-friendliness is easy as you can use Google’s free Mobile-Friendly Test to check if your competitors’ websites are mobile-friendly.
But mobile-friendliness is not just for the sake of making search engines happy. Statistics show that mobile accounts for about 56% of all organic traffic in the US. This means even customers expect to have good mobile experiences websites.
With all this data on your competitors’ technical SEO, you’ll have a clear picture of their strengths and weaknesses. Most importantly, you’ll have an idea of opportunities to capitalize on to give yourself an edge.
5. On-page competitor SEO analysis
Another step you must take in your SEO competitor analysis is to check your competitors’ on-page SEO strategy and performance. This will include elements such as:
Competitor Keyword Research
Competitor keyword research is the practice of analyzing your competitors’ keywords. The point is to identify keywords that your competitors’ are ranking for, but you are not. Take particular note of keywords that are valuable and that you can rank for. You should also pay attention to keywords you’re ranking for, yet you’re still lagging behind your competitors.
Besides primary keywords, you must also look into your competitors’ secondary keywords. These are keywords that add more context to your primary keywords and are usually related to search intent. Search intent refers to one of the four reasons a user is using that particular keyword in their search query:
Navigational intent. This is when users want to go to a particular website or page. An example of navigational intent is “online course platform Teachable.”
Informational intent. When a user wants to know more about a certain product, service, or topic. For example, “online course platforms.”
Commercial intent. This is when a user intends to buy a product/service soon but are still researching their purchase. For example, “What is the best SEO Tool?” Here is a live example.
Transactional intent. People searching with transactional intent are ready to make a purchase. A good example would be “Thinkific online course platform subscription.”
To create web pages and content that meet your business needs, you must leverage keywords and search intent together. Check how your competitors’ are doing this and get some tips from their keyword strategy.
Top-performing Content
Content plays a crucial role in SEO.
That’s why you must analyze your competitors’ top-performing content. Top-performing content simply means content that drives traffic as well as converts well. When analyzing your competitors top-performing content, look for attributes like:
Content Type
Of your competitors’ top-performing content, check which content types work best. Is it:
Long-form vs. short-form articles
Listicles
Reviews
Informational content
How-to guides
eBooks
“Best of” or comparison articles
Product pages
Content Format
Apart from content type, you must also investigate the content formats that work best for your competitors. Common content formats include:
Written content
Video content
Audio content
Visual content (like infographics)
Content Length
Average content length also plays an important role in rankings. Search engines want to serve users content that’s as comprehensive as possible. When analyzing your competitors’ top-performing content, take note of the average length. To create content that ranks, apply Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique and create longer, in-depth, and higher quality content.
The purpose of this step of your SEO competitor analysis is not just to copy the content your competitors are creating. The objective is to know what kind of content you should be creating — then create better content than your competitors.
Internal Linking
Internal links are part of a successful on-page SEO strategy. Building internal links has three important SEO benefits:
Help users navigate a website
Define the information architecture and hierarchy of a website
Help distributes link equity throughout the site
Despite popular belief, you don’t build internal links randomly. There must be a well-defined strategy if you’re to reap the full SEO benefits of your internal links. That’s why it’s a good idea to analyze your competitors’ websites to see how they create their internal links.
With your on-page competitor analysis done, you can now move on to the next step of your SEO competitor analysis — off-page competitor analysis.
6. Off-page competitor SEO analysis
Off-page SEO refers to all activities away from your site that help improve a website’s search rankings. The most common are link building and other promotion strategies that help drive traffic to your website. However, link building is still one of the most significant off-page activities that websites rely on to boost rankings.
And that’s why you must conduct a thorough competitor backlink analysis as part of your SEO competitor analysis.
Let’s face it. Ranking without backlinks is almost impossible.
And obtaining relevant quality backlinks can be quite a daunting task if you don’t know where to get them.
And that’s where SEO competitor analysis comes to the rescue.
Looking into your competitors’ backlink profile will help you know:
Websites that could potentially link your content
The type of content and pages that work best as link “magnets”
Identify link building strategies that work
Gauge how many links you need to build and the timeframe you need to build them in to be competitive
One observation that will help boost your link acquisition is websites that link multiple times to your competitors. It’s a sign that they create content related to your niche and are always on the lookout for resources to link to.
Don’t be intimidated if you find some of your competitors get thousands of links from the same domains or networks. It simply shows they use risky link building tactics like PBNs. Don’t try the same tactics as search engines frown on such tactics.
Looking into your competitors’ backlink profile can’t be done manually, of course. But a good SEO tool can give you all the data you need in a matter of minutes. And once you have the data, you can use it to build your link building strategy.
SEO competitor analysis – Putting it all together
All the data you’ve gathered from your SEO competitor analysis is not the end of the journey. It’s simply a means to an end. Your results and data collected are simply the foundation for the next phase of your task – mapping out your SEO strategy.
Armed with data on your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and industry SEO best practices, you can now devise an SEO strategy that’s bound to help you beat your competitors.
But remember, an SEO competitor analysis is never a once-off project. You must conduct them regularly to help you stay ahead of your competition.
Hanson Cheng is the founder of Freedom to Ascend. He empowers online entrepreneurs and business owners to 10x their business and become financially independent. You can connect with him here.
Want to position yourself as an industry expert? Looking for a Clubhouse strategy to expand your influence?
In this article, you’ll find six ways to use Clubhouse to grow your authority.
#1: Optimize Your Clubhouse Bio for Business and Engagement
Optimizing your Clubhouse bio is mission-critical before you step into any room—big or small. It’s how people know who you are so they can decide if they want to follow you, invite you on stage, and allow you to be a club member.
Name
A funny little point about Clubhouse is that you can only change your name once. I ran into a guy in a room who had his full name “Robert” on his profile. After talking with the people in the room, he said he actually likes to be called Robbie, so they implored him to change it on his bio (which makes sense on an audio platform and otherwise).
Get your name right the first time and stick with it. Know that you only have one chance to change it, at this time, if needed. Hopefully, you won’t need to.
Clubhouse Profile Pic
You musthave a pic up on your Clubhouse profile. It should be your face, not a logo, abstract art, your latest book cover, or your kid’s pic from Facebook. YOU. Ideally, make it a picture that’s consistent with the rest of your avatars on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Pro Tip: Make your profile pic punchy. A lot of people remove the background and put their pic on a nice bright color (like hot pink, chartreuse, or cerulean) to make it stand out in a room on Clubhouse. I recommend picking something that flows with your current brand palette; especially on Instagram since your Clubhouse bio can (and should) connect there.
Clubhouse Bio
How long can your Clubhouse bio be? My current bio is about 1,200 characters including spaces (167 words). To test it, I checked to see how many characters my bio would allow and it tapped out at 2,438 characters (375 words) for me. Now, just because your bio canbe long doesn’t mean it should.
(Pocket-lint) – Now TV has ditched the TV. In its name, at least. The streaming service from Sky is just Now, now.
As well as a new colour scheme and curvy logo, the service itself gets a shiny new look across its TV and mobile apps.
The traditional passes have been rebranded too, with the “pass” name also ditched. Each paid plan is renamed a Now Membership, although the categories are the same: Entertainment, Cinema, Sports, Kids and Hayu.
Boost is still available for £3 per month, to upgrade images to 1080p and audio 5.1.
As well as the TV service, internet packages are now called Now Broadband – which is partly why the name has been changed, we suspect.
“Now has always been the home of quality entertainment and our new brand evolution ensures that, even in a hectic world, no one misses out on the entertainment they love,” said managing director at Now, Marina Storti.
“By moving from Now TV to Now, we marry our world-class quality with brilliant simplicity. This immediacy creates a true destination and community for those who love and live for the best entertainment.”
