Google updated its Veo 3.1 AI video-generation model with the ability to create native vertical videos for social platforms using reference images. The changes will also make the videos generated from reference images more expressive and dynamic.
When producing AI-generated videos for YouTube Shorts or other platforms like Instagram or TikTok, Veo users can now natively choose the 9:16 vertical format to avoid any cropping. Google is also adding the feature directly to the YouTube Shorts and the YouTube Create app.
Google first released Veo 3.1 in October 2025 with improved audio output and more granular editing controls compared to previous versions.
When you provide reference images, Veo 3.1 now generates videos with better character expressions and movements, even if your prompts are shorter. Google said the update also improves character, object, and background consistency. What’s more, users can blend various characters, backgrounds, objects, and textures to create a cohesive output.
Users can access these features directly in the Gemini app. Professional users can access them through Google’s video editor Flow, the Gemini API, Vertex AI, and Google Vids.
The new update also brings an improved upscaling feature to 1080p and 4K resolutions, which is available on Flow, Gemini API, and Vertex AI in Google Cloud.
The online marketing game has completely changed. Remember spending late nights manually digging through those massive, confusing reports, trying to figure out why your ad performance suddenly tanked, or constantly scrambling to come up with fresh ad ideas? Google is officially ending that headache. They’re rolling out their new AI-powered Ads Advisor and Analytics Advisor.
These tools, powered by Gemini AI, aren’t just fancy reports; they’re essentially your personal, always-on AI consultant. They give you instant, straightforward insights and can even apply those approved fixes directly to your live campaigns. This shift takes campaign management from a manual, reactive struggle to a quick, data-driven conversation. The big opportunity now is learning how to blend these new advisors into your workflow to maximize the power of those AI-based strategies, boost your ROI, and get your campaigns growing faster than ever before.
The AI Advisor Mandate—Speed and Simplification
The fundamental assurance of the Ads and Analytics Advisors is speed. They bring time that was once used to go between the data analysis (Google Analytics) and implementation (Google Ads) into a high-level strategy; instead of implementation, marketers can spend time on the strategy.
1. Ads Advisor: Optimization and Execution in One Place
AI-Generated
The Ads Advisor lives directly inside your Google Ads account, acting as an in-platform AI partner that manages, troubleshoots, and scales campaigns.
Performance Optimization: The Advisor provides personalized recommendations tailored to your specific campaign goals. You can ask a natural-language question like, “How can I optimize my Performance Max campaign for the upcoming holiday season?” and the tool suggests specific actions, such as adding relevant sitelink extensions or adjusting targeting. Crucially, with your approval, it can apply these changes directly.
Creative Generation: This tool acts as a powerful creative co-pilot. It generates new keywords, ad copy, and assets based on your website content and historical campaign data, helping marketers meet the persistent demand for fresh, high-performing creatives. This feature ensures that the implementation of AI-powered strategies is faster and more dynamic than ever before.
Policy and Performance Diagnostics: Campaign troubleshooting is simplified. If an ad is disapproved, you can ask, “Why are my ads disapproved?” The Advisor identifies the root cause, recommends a fix, and can even apply simple policy-compliant fixes for your final approval.
2. Analytics Advisor: Instant Insight from Complex Data
The Analytics Advisor brings conversational AI into Google Analytics, serving as your personal, always-on data analyst.
Fast, Comprehensive Insights: It solves the challenge of getting a holistic view of data. You can ask broad queries like “How is my site performing?” or specific questions like “What were my active users doing over the last 30 days?” The advisor immediately infers the necessary reports to give you a clear, tailored summary with dynamic visualizations.
Root Cause Analysis: When performance spikes or drops, the advisor conducts a key driver analysis to explain the “why.” For instance, if you ask, “Why did my conversions drop yesterday?”, the tool identifies and attributes the most relevant causes, prioritizing drivers that align directly with your business goals. These AI-powered strategies are essential for accelerating analysis.
Pillar 2: Strategic Shifts—How to Maximize AI Advisor Value
These tools are built on the principles of agentic AI—systems designed to identify, explain, and execute improvements autonomously. Maximizing their value requires shifts in how marketing teams operate.
3. Shift from Analysis to Action
The traditional marketing workflow involved hours dedicated to analysis before any action was taken. The Advisors collapse this time frame.
Actionable Step: Focus on Interpretation, Not Compilation: Instruct your analysts to spend less time pulling and compiling data reports and more time interpreting the meaning of the AI-generated insights. The human role shifts to verifying the accuracy of the AI’s suggestions and integrating those suggestions into broader business objectives.
Actionable Step: Prioritize AI-Driven Recommendations: Make it a weekly mandate to review all “High Impact” recommendations surfaced by the Ads Advisor. The AI’s ability to analyse millions of accounts and industry benchmarks allows it to spot optimization opportunities that manual review would miss. Regularly acting on these AI-powered strategies is crucial for compounding gains.
4. Provide Clean Data and Clear Goals
AI systems are only as smart as the data and goals you provide. Marketers must focus on ensuring the AI has a solid foundation for its decisions.
Actionable Step: Define Clear Conversion Goals: Ensure all your conversion goals are correctly configured and accurately track actual business outcomes (sales, qualified leads). Vague or inaccurate goals lead to flawed AI optimization decisions.
Actionable Step: Supply High-Quality Assets: For the Ads Advisor to generate the best creative, you must feed it a variety of high-quality assets (images, videos, headlines). The AI will test and learn which combinations perform best, but the quality of the starting materials is paramount. Utilizing data to execute precise AI-powered strategies starts with clean inputs.
5. Embracing Conversational Workflow
The new advisors require a shift in interaction—you must communicate with them naturally, like speaking to a human colleague.
Actionable Step: Ask Follow-Up Questions: Don’t treat the initial response as final. If the advisor suggests a reason for a performance drop, ask, “Which specific audience segment was most affected?” or “What change did that competitor make?” This continuous, contextual conversation leads to deeper, more nuanced insights.
Pillar 3: ROI and Future-Proofing with AI-Powered Strategies
The primary benefit of the advisors is accelerated ROI by reducing waste, improving targeting, and enhancing time-to-value for campaigns.
6. Accelerating Performance Max and Multi-Channel Efficiency
The Advisors are explicitly designed to optimize complex, AI-driven campaigns like Performance Max (PMax).
The ROI Benefit: PMax thrives on having diverse assets and clear signals. Ads Advisor streamlines asset management and provides tailored recommendations for maximizing reach across Search, Display, YouTube, and Discovery. This ensures your PMax campaigns run at peak efficiency, driving higher conversions at a similar Cost Per Action (CPA). Effective AI-powered strategies are built into these modern campaign types.
The Time Benefit: Analytics Advisor accelerates the time it takes to diagnose cross-channel performance, allowing marketers to quickly shift budget and focus to the highest-performing channels.
7. Future-Proofing Measurement and Growth
The integration of these advisors signals Google’s long-term commitment to AI-first marketing solutions.
Staying Ahead of the Curve: Businesses that adopt these tools now build operational advantages that compound over time. They gain faster feedback loops and greater organizational confidence in deploying more advanced AI solutions in the future.
Enhanced Measurement: The advisors contribute to better measurement by linking analytics insights directly to advertising implementation. This integrated view provides a more accurate understanding of marketing attribution and ROI across the entire customer journey.
Conclusion: The New Mandate for Digital Marketing
The launch of the Ads and Analytics Advisors marks a watershed moment: campaign optimization is now officially a conversational task. These agentic tools promise to eliminate guesswork, reduce manual reporting time, and provide data-driven answers in seconds.
A couple of years ago I attended an excellent conference in Seattle by a well known firm that provides online search and marketing tools. They had a line up of top notch speakers who are experts in digital marketing from the largest corporations, brands and agencies in the country. The theme was Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to drive the most clicks to a website, ecommerce store or content page.
The conference was basically all about Google. Why? Because, even in 2025, Google controls 90 percent of search in the world. To get found you need to please the Google Gods. So what advice did the greatest and smartest people in the online marketing world have for conquering Google search? They all pretty much said the same thing: “beats me.”
No one knows. That’s because Google’s search algorithm is a secret more closely guarded than the recipe for Coke or U.S. nuclear launch codes. Everyone there was trying to figure out what Google was going to do next, where Google may change its algorithm and how these changes would affect traffic to their site.
AI is now changing that. AI is already starting to save small business owners like me from Google’s monopoly on search. And it’s doing so in three ways.
More Options
For starters it’s giving our potential customers more choices to find us. Yes, studies show that Google still dominates search. But already you can see ChatGPT and others like it begin to make headway.
So far, even if ChatGPT’s 1 billion messages per day were search-related, its total share of the search market would be less than 1 percent. Google saw approximately 373 times as many searches as ChatGPT in 2024 and Google searches actually grew in 2024 compared to 2023.
But things are changing. Gartner predicts that by 2026, traditional search volume will drop by about 25 percent, with AI chatbots and virtual agents capturing a growing share of user attention and behaviour Others project that AI-powered searches will grow annually by up to 35 percent starting in 2025, reaching an estimated 14 percent of search market share by 2028, with Google declining modestly to about an 86 percent share. I’m betting that decline will be more pronounced. But regardless it’s heading in the right direction.
I’ve tried Google AdWords and for a small business like mine it’s useless. My company sells customer relationship management software and the big players in this industry already have search results locked up. They spend more money than me. They buy up all the good keywords. People searching for products I sell won’t find me unless they click through to page 8 of their search results and no one does that. Of course, that doesn’t stop Google – the fox guarding the henhouse – from drawing down on my ad budget with their dubious claims of “impressions” and clicks. How can I even verify this? I can’t. They have the monopoly.
AI is solving this problem. As other chatbots take away search market share from Google I’ll be offered more ways for customers to find me. I predict that many small businesses – equally frustrated with the Google monopoly – will gravitate to these chatbots. ChatGPT and Perplexity have already announced their own browsers to compete with Chrome and collect data. Good for them. More competition means more choices and less costs for small businesses like mine.
Less Clicks, Better Clicks
Most have noticed that Google has introduced an “AI View” into their results where search answers are summarized. Some believe that this will result in fewer clicks on links to websites and they’re right. Smart marketing people, like Jason Rose – senior vice president of digital sales and marketing at HR firm Paychex believes that this will have greater benefits for small businesses like mine.
“People are reading the AI summary and kind of getting what they need and moving off,” he said. “But it’s not all doom and gloom because these visitors actually convert at a much higher rate.”
To date SEO has been all about getting visitors to your website. Websites are ranked based on their traffic. But how genuine is this traffic? In 2023, bots made up 49.60 percent of internet activity, almost catching up to human traffic, which was at 50.40 percent. Meanwhile we’re paying Google to send this nonsense to us. AI is fixing this too. It is changing the way people use the web for research, be it academia or shopping.
Rose is right. By reading an AI overview a visitor who clicks through to a website has given some thought to their action and is therefore a more qualified prospect, a better visitor. Google and others will likely charge more for this. I’ll pay. It’s worth it.
Content Creation Opportunities
To be included in an AI overview your content has to be relevant and useful. Unfortunately, a great deal of today’s content isn’t. At the Seattle conference I attended some of the sessions talked about SEO tricks and games you can play with content (keyword stuffing, hidden links, showing different content to search engines than what is shown to users) to get noticed by Google. AI will help to stop this. As it gets smarter it will be better able to root out this nonsense so that it’s displaying the best answers possible.
Which means that the best content will be included in AI overviews and the websites with the best answers will have a better chance of being found. No games. No tricks. Just good, valuable content. And not content generated by AI because AI will be able to figure that out too.
This will be an opportunity for quality content providers – writers, bloggers, creators, etc. – to step up their game and prove their value. The best ones will rise to the top, unburdened by the crawlers and spiders, that held them down. People worry that AI will replace content providers. It’s actually the opposite. It’s creating more opportunities for them.
“AI is reading the same content that the human would have and building summaries based off of that,” Rose said. “So again, you need great content. Content is still king.”
All of this is happening now. But we’re still early days. Google is still Google. ChatGPT and other chatbots are infants in the search world and still hallucinate too much. But you can easily see the future. And the future is a world where, thanks to AI, Google no longer monopolizes search. For a small business owner like me, that world can’t come soon enough.
Feature image credit: Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Until I found the website ooh.directory last year, I hadn’t really understood, completely, how malnourished my internet diet had become. I still had some bookmarks I visited everyday, and the social media feed I checked (too often) for breaking news and interesting stories. But only when I made a conscious effort for the first time in a decade to fill up an RSS reader with bloggers, critics, news sources, and even webcomics did I realize that I’d lost track of the original, primal joy of the internet:
Clicking a link and finding a whole new world unfurl before me, as fast as my dial-up modem or DSL connection could load it in.
I suppose I started taking this experience for granted at some point; once we all came to understand the internet as an infinite repository for knowledge, the obvious goal became accessing that knowledge more efficiently. It’s not that I ever really stopped clicking on links. I just stopped putting in the work of looking for websites through directory listings, like the ones I used to love browsing on Yahoo.com for hours at a time (Home > Recreation > Games > Video Games > Emulation, anyone?).
I realize in hindsight that that was the really magical part, not knowing what I would get when I clicked. Finding a site wholly born from the passion and personality of someone I’d never met was as much the point as the information that site contained.
For 20 years Google has been trying to kill this version of the internet that I loved. At first I think it was with good intentions: the internet just seemed so vast back then (ha!) that a search engine that could truly crawl all of it to surface the “best” stuff was amazing. Then, of course, Google took over the entirety of internet advertising and tightly integrated it with search. It took over browsing with Chrome so it could control the standards websites would have to adhere to. It made it so you could search without even going to Google.com.
(Image credit: Yahoo via Internet archive)
Google itself has become the final form of “Saved you a click,”
It started auto filling what everyone else was searching for, so that it could precisely tailor those results pages (and all the lucrative sponsored links at the top—$198 billion in ad revenue last year!). For years now we’ve watched Google rip more and more information out of the websites it once presented as promising, useful links and act as though it’s done us a huge favour.
Why should you click on George Clooney’s Wikipedia page (the first result when you search his name) when a snippet of it is right there in the sidebar? Surely you want to know “Is George Clooney richer than Brad Pitt?” and the answer is right there for you in the “People also ask” widget, sandwiched between the links.
Surely when you Google “Does Master Chief have sex?” you just want the answer to that pressing question as quickly as possible, right? Google is doing you a great service with its new AI Overview, then, which summarizes “Yes, Master Chief has sex with a human Covenant spy named Makee in a specific episode of the live-action Halo TV series.”
But Google would really much rather entice you to click a button it highlights with swirling RGB lights titled “Dive deeper in AI mode,” where it promises to provide more context. As much context as you want. Endless context. I click it to see what insights it can offer. Master Chief “is often jokingly referred to by fans as a ‘big green virgin,'” Google tells me. Sure!
We all know that Google has, for years, been trying harder and harder to stop helping us navigate the internet and instead be the internet, with the answer to any and every thought or query right there at the top of the results page.
We can all feel in our bones that this convenience has become more and more a hindrance, every search weighed down by paid results and shortform videos and SEO’d-to-hell listicles as autocomplete funnels us to the lowest common denominator results.
And yet the infection eating away at Google’s core goes deeper than “search sucks now.” Google’s AI overviews aren’t just leeching traffic away from the very websites it’s happily pilfering from, with no fucks given in the halls of big tech about fracking the internet’s core until the whole thing collapses in on itself. The rot is spiritual.
Google’s AI overviews demonstrate with diamond clarity that Google views the trillions of links it crawls as nothing more than information—data to be surfaced in any form, the more immediate and convenient the better. Google itself has become the final form of “Saved you a click,” a 2010s Twitter phenomenon that writer Charlie Warzel once succinctly analysed as fighting less against clickbait than “the premise of simply reading.”
“In @SavedYouAClick’s”—or, now, Google’s!—”perfect world, information doesn’t just want to be free, it demands to be right in your face in its entirety—showmanship, gimmicks, and creativity be damned. Your time is, quite simply, too precious.”
AI overviews and everything about the modern Google experience view the totality of the internet as nothing but questions and answers. The same goes for ChatGPT, Grok, whatever—they’re not just offensive because they’re built on stolen material and wrong half the time, but because they don’t even recognize the actual value in what they’re stealing. How else should we interpret Google now deciding to rewrite our headlines with AI, turning this:
‘Child labour is unbeatable’: Baldur’s Gate 3 players discover how to build an army of unkillable kids through the power of polymorph and German media laws
Into this?
BG3 players exploit children
What could the point of these AI headlines possibly be, other than to convince you that all the ‘information’ you ‘need’ is contained within Google’s feed in its most easily digestible form? Don’t waste time clicking away! Rest assured that all flavour will be hewn from the bone and discarded before serving so that you’re left with nothing but a flavourless content broth, so calorie light you can scroll-slurp it forever without interruption.
The thing is: Showmanship, gimmicks, and creativity? That’s what living is for, man! That was the whole original joy of clicking on an old website with no idea what you were going to get; whether it would start auto-playing a midi version of the Star Wars theme or dazzle you with a tiled 32×32 pixel tiled background of the Zelda triforce or a dancing baby.
Search and “AI” … have become so focused on serving up the known that they no longer bear any resemblance to the version of the internet that cherished discovering the unknown
Remember cursing when you landed on a Flash website because it would take so long to load, but then being like damn, this looks cool?
Remember joining a message board because you really liked a website’s Final Fantasy 7 guides and then, I don’t know, marrying someone else who posts there?
Okay, that was not an experience too many people had. But some did! And you sure as hell would never even crack open the door leading to that wholly unpredictable path through life if, in the year 2025, you Googled “what’s the best materia in Final Fantasy 7,” read the AI overview, and never clicked a thing.
(Dumbshit AI can’t even give you the right answer which is that obviously Knights of the Round is the best materia because it’s cool, more practical choices be damned).
Image 1 of 4
(Image credit: EyesonFF.com via Internet Archive)
(Image credit: IcyBrian.com via Internet Archive)
(Image credit: CNCZ.com via Internet Archive)
(Image credit: Zelda: The Grand Adventures via Internet Archive)
There are a million yeah, buts we could get into here: sometimes headlines really are misleading, sometimes websites are so stuffed with ads that reading them kinda sucks (sorry, but I remind you again that Google monopolized the ad market), sometimes search results pages are useless because the few human writers still eking out a living are fighting against a million spammy content mills to win a popular search term Google has told everyone to type in. Sometimes you do just need a quick answer to a quick question.
But Google has made us forget how much more nourishing clicking a link can be—how much beyond mere information could await you when that page loads. Search—and really any sort of “AI” that can answer your every question—have become so focused on serving up the known that they no longer bear any resemblance to the version of the internet that cherished discovering the unknown.
(Image credit: Ooh.directory)
So now, every few months, I find myself back on ooh.directory, clicking around at random. I love the front page, where it shows me a blog that is celebrating its 25th birthday today.
I click the random button and learn there’s a guy out there named Robert X Cringely (wow).
I land on the personal site of a game developer who worked on Doom 2016 and Deer Avenger 4: The Rednecks Strike Back and has created 1,450 pieces of Javascript art (so far), each in under 140 characters of code.
But now I know that there’s a sandwich out there that marries two culinary traditions dating back 3,000 years and 1,400 years, respectively—a sandwich I must eat before I die.
We’ll all need something like a Rou Jia Mo to sustain us during the internet nuclear winter that Google is eagerly creating, and once AI has fully destroyed search you’ll have to look for it the old fashioned way. Go out there, and find your own.
Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he’ll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he’s not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it’s really becoming a problem), he’s probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).
This two-pronged approach to SEO will increase your website’s relevance.
When others link to your website, Google wants to learn what value you can provide to users — the very reason someone gave you a backlink. That’s where digital public relations (digital PR) comes in.
Compared to manual link building, digital PR focuses on teaching a search engine about your expertise, which is reaffirmed by other publications linking to your content.
Let’s take a deeper look at how search engines like Google have evolved, how digital PR works and why using it together with manual link-building efforts is considered best to keep your website relevant.
Google has grown smart
Google is traditionally all about links — the more links inserted, the better. However, it has grown into a smart semantic search engine. Instead of simply looking at the links, it tries to understand the context, including the site’s information, what it offers and similar details.
For example, websites with limited authority, despite their high traffic, are focusing on establishing topical relevance. They’re basically convincing Google that they are experts in a particular topic or niche. And this is one of the defining factors between digital PR and manual link building.
Understanding digital PR
Digital PR is very much like traditional public relations, except that it’s focused on the digital space. It’s the use of online channels to manage your brand’s reputation and build positive relationships with your target audience.
Getting other websites to link back to yours, which improves your website’s authority and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
There’s no single way to perform digital PR outreach. However, a common but effective strategy involves content creation efforts. In other words, you need to create valuable assets, including reports, infographics, white papers, statistics, and other content that is good enough for other publications to link to your work organically.
Digital PR makes for quality backlinks but takes time
Organic backlinks — voluntary links to your content — are considered higher-quality links than those you manually build (either by guest posting or affiliate linking). Digital PR is a powerful tool for acquiring such high-quality backlinks. However, it’s a long shot that requires effort and patience to yield good results. Here’s why.
Building relationships
You must demonstrate your brand’s value and expertise consistently before your target audience members become willing to recommend or link to your content.
Creating valuable content
Researching topics, providing commentary or launching campaigns are not done in one sitting. You need to invest a significant amount of time and resources.
Earning organic coverage
Journalists get pitched constantly, so your content needs to be truly newsworthy and relevant to their audience to stand out and secure coverage. Sometimes, you must also have a strategic outreach plan to pitch your content to the right journalists and publications.
Manual link-building remains an effective SEO strategy
While digital PR is a great way to boost authority, manual link-building remains effective in maintaining your website’s visibility and relevance. The only difference is that you’re proactively getting the backlinks to your website rather than letting journalists voluntarily do the linking.
Still, given the change in the current landscape, you should focus your link-building efforts on earning juicy links rather than spamming them. Here are a few manual link-building strategies that might still provide good results:
Guest posting
Write high-quality articles for other relevant websites in your niche. Then, make sure that you include a link back to your own website within the content.
Broken link building
Find broken links on relevant websites and reach out to the website owners, suggesting your content as a replacement.
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) pitching
There are certain platforms where journalists post their queries on topics that might be too niche. Respond to their questions with great answers, you might potentially earn a backlink in the published article.
Networking and relationship-building
Connecting with influences and leaders in your niche always remains a good tactic. As you build relationships for your business, you may also find natural link opportunities.
Manual link-building risks penalties
Manual link building is seen as a method to replicate digital PR link earning (which can take a long time). While it can be faster, it also carries the risk of getting your website penalized when done incorrectly. Here are some cases where this might happen:
Unnatural link profile
Search engines like Google analyse link patterns to identify websites engaging in manipulative link building. An example of this is when your website has a sudden surge of links that seem unnatural, including those from low-quality websites, identical anchor texts, or links to private blog networks.
Manipulative link-building techniques
Engaging in specific practices can be directly flagged as manipulative and lead to penalties. Examples include link buying, excessive link exchanges and comment spam.
A two-pronged approach to link building is the best
Truthfully speaking, search engines tend to rely more on topic relevance than human-driven linking efforts today. In other words, digital PR is becoming the trend — and you should hop on to it, too.
However, combining both approaches can help your business build a more effective strategy for building high-quality links. In particular, digital PR will help you get natural and authoritative links from reputable sources. Meanwhile, manual link building allows you to target and control link quality.
Digital PR can be resource-intensive, as compared with manual link building. If your team is not yet ready to focus on high-quality content creation, manual link building remains a great avenue to take.
CEO of Pror Marketing. With five years of SEO experience, Jeff has led teams, taught Fortune 1000 companies, and worked with 120+ clients. As the founder of Pror.io, a seven-figure marketing agency, he’s dedicated to boosting businesses with top-notch SEO strategies. Upwork Expert-Vetted Freelancer.
New policies signal a major change for brands that have relied on ‘spray-and-pray’ techniques to drive sales.
We all know the pain of misguided sales spam—and lots of it—cluttering our inboxes. Whether it’s emails to our personal addresses that assume our buying habits of a decade ago are the same today, or sales pitches to our work addresses that are completely irrelevant to our roles and responsibilities, we’ve become overwhelmed with poorly targeted emails. Statista found that spam accounted for 45% of the 333 billion emails sent daily in 2022, while research from Gong shows that only 4% of emails are ever even opened.
Why are business leaders still accepting this antiquated and ineffective way of doing things?
This month marks the beginning of new policies from Google and Yahoo to limit the bulk email sends that result in billions of irrelevant and poorly crafted sales pitches emailed daily. This signals a major change for brands that have relied on “spray-and-pray” techniques to drive sales. And for B2B brands, this too should be a wake-up call.
How will these new policies reshape how sales teams think about attracting customers?
Will mass emails become generally unacceptable in our professional inboxes, in addition to our personal ones?
And how will the disruption of a commonly used sales tactic impact bottom lines?
THE HISTORY OF SPAM
The first bulk emails were sent by Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager for a computer company, to promote the company’s products to some 400 people. Thuerk said in a 2007 interview that “complaints started coming in almost immediately” after sending the emails, but more importantly, the company “sold $13 million or $14 million worth of DEC machines through that email campaign.” With that, cold emailing as a sales tactic was born.
In the decades that followed, the practice grew, and email marketing tools enabled sales teams to contact an ever-growing list of potential customers, forsaking personalized outreach for a broader pool of recipients.
While more data-driven approaches to sales emails have been introduced over the years, the overwhelming volume of irrelevant sales pitches has led to widespread fatigue. In fact, Gong’s research found that 87% of buyers say that the emails they receive are not relevant to them.
This practice can convert to sales. Even if only 4% of bulk emails are opened, that translates to 40,000 people opening those emails for every million sent by a salesperson. But companies need to ask themselves if irritating and alienating the other 960,000 people is an acceptable sacrifice. And, even more importantly, are they missing out on valuable opportunities by not sending thoughtful, personalized messages to the appropriate buyers out there?
RETHINKING SALES SPAM WITH AI
The technology industry is at a pivotal moment. AI is transforming the ways we work, live, and interact with each other. Now bulk emails can be drafted by generative artificial intelligence far more quickly than by a marketing and sales pro.
The potential impact for teams sending out large email campaigns is significant. Will the rise of gen AI mean that inboxes are flooded even more? Can AI make a difference in how these companies communicate with prospects?
AI can also bring new knowledge and perspective. Using AI to draft emails based on a few lines of context isn’t new, innovative, or effective. But done right, it can actually help companies cut down on the volume, and instead target the right customers with the right message.
We’re seeing new applications of AI that capture and analyse customer interactions to create content and thoughtfully personalize outreach based on a holistic view of the relationship. These applications might be the new approach that could reshape how sales teams develop and assess their outreach programs, from the initial outreach to a prospective customer . . . and over the entire relationship.
The era of relying on volume over strategic precision is over.
AI as a blanket solution won’t solve this problem for businesses. Not all of these tools are created equally, and those without the proper knowledge will only exacerbate the problem. However, there is potential for well-designed AI tools to help teams change their approach.
HOW TO CREATE CHANGE
Google’s and Yahoo’s rules are a positive first step to end spray-and-pray practices, but sales teams will need to do more. The good news is that there’s a path forward that not only doesn’t harm the bottom line but also can improve it.
Business leaders need to stop accepting this practice as the status quo and rebuild these programs from the ground up. Teams have often been measured and evaluated on “activity metrics”—how many emails have been sent, how many phone calls have been made. They should instead be measured by meetings booked and qualified opportunities, giving sales teams the motivation, time, and resources to focus on targeted, relevant outreach.
Similarly, leaders should make sure that their teams haven’t become over reliant on email. Research from McKinsey shows that the number of channels that B2B companies use to interact with other businesses has doubled in the past five years, and includes email, phone, web conference, chat, and social. Leaders should ensure that their teams can meet those potential customers where they want to be met.
The onus is on business leaders to evolve their strategies. While a spray-and-pray approach may have worked in the past, the tides are changing, and to stay competitive, businesses need to take a step back and reimagine how their sales teams operate. And they need to do it soon, before their last emails go unanswered.
Back in October, Google and Yahoo unveiled a pivotal update to their bulk sender guidelines.
Launching February 1, these new regulations, which impact both bulk emailers (those sending over 5,000 emails daily to Gmail accounts) and general Gmail users alike, introduced authentication requirements and defined thresholds for spam complaints. Specifically, they defined a spam complaint threshold of 0.3%.
Our preliminary analysis of the announcement was that this 0.3% threshold wouldn’t be a major problem for most email marketers. In fact, for large companies with established customer bases and large inbound lists, this update would probably help those companies. They likely have low existing complaint rates and can more easily and safely expand their outbound efforts.
However, the smaller, less established companies, specifically, those in the B2B space that may be using more aggressive outbound email marketing strategies or have been leaning on ABM to establish their brand, would likely be in trouble.
And it turned out that we were right.
Spam complaint rates across the B2B space
To better understand how these new sender guidelines would impact outbound marketing and sales, particularly in the B2B space, we studied spam complaint rates across various industries.
Our findings showed that complaint rates were well beyond the 0.3% threshold laid out by Google and Yahoo. In fact, it wasn’t even close! The average spam complaint rate across the B2B space was 2.01%, with a range between 1.1% and 3.1%.
Even worse, for the top 9 spammiest verticals, we couldn’t find a single sender that was able to score below the 0.3% threshold. When you break it down by industry, it becomes ever more clear who the top offenders are:
B2B Software: Spam complaint rates peak at 3.2%, with a range of 1.3% to 4.3%.
Political Issue & Electioneering Communications: Rates hover around 2.9%, ranging from 1.5% to 3.4%.
Sales and Marketing Services: Experience a 2.8% rate, with a broad spectrum from 2.0% to 5.3%.
Recruiting: Faces a 2.1% rate, ranging between 1.7% and 3.1%.
Retail and E-Commerce: Encounter a 2.3% rate, with variations from 0.5% to 2.9%.
Real Estate: Deals with a 1.9% rate, spanning 1.5% to 3.4%.
Education and Training Providers: Show a 1.7% rate, within a range of 0.4% to 2.1%.
Financial Services: Encounter a lower rate of 1.1%, ranging from 0.7% to 1.9%.
Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals: Have the lowest rate at 0.9%, with a range of 0.7% to 1.4%.
This data isn’t entirely surprising when you think about it. B2B software companies and sales and marketing companies tend to do a lot of outbound. Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals on the other hand are beholden to pretty strict laws and regulations around communication.
B2B sales & marketing teams must adjust quickly
This data signals a critical issue for B2B outbound marketing. For businesses that rely heavily on outbound emails for lead generation and sales, this is a significant hurdle. Meeting the new sub-0.3% threshold appears daunting, if not impossible. The good news is there are strategies to mitigate these hurdles:
Boost transactional email volume: If we want to reduce the spam complaint rate %, we may want to increase total emails sent and optimize email volume. Increase the volume of non-spammy, transactional emails such as order confirmations, tracking updates, or purchase follow-ups. These are less likely to be flagged as spam and can balance out your overall email metrics.
Prioritize warm leads: Focus your emails on high-intent users (think those who visited your pricing page or added something to their cart). Tools for website visitor identification can be invaluable here.
Provide clear & numerous unsubscribe options: The unsubscribe option should be easily accessible and in multiple places. Hidden or hard-to-find unsubscribe links increase the likelihood of being marked as spam.
Utilize intent-based email lists: In some instances, there is no getting around cold emails. What you can do however is use intent-based email lists that can help you create more appropriate messaging that will resonate with prospects. The more you know about what your audience is interested in, the more personalized messaging you can create.
For B2B companies, adapting to these new guidelines is crucial. While outbound isn’t gone, it is more challenging. The good news for users is that this new complaint rate threshold should improve the email marketing and outbound space as a whole.
These new guidelines will force B2B marketers to evolve their outbound strategies and build better campaigns. For users this means less spam and more relevant emails. For marketing and sales teams, this should mean better targeting, more personalization, and less laziness.
The result? Improved sales to lead time. At the end of the day, large email providers like Google and Yahoo are focused on creating a better user experience and this means less spam. For B2B teams, the answer is simple…don’t be a spammer.
This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro’s Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro
Google unveiled Meridian, an open-source marketing mix modelling (MMM) tool aimed at tackling crucial measurement challenges. MMM tools gauge the impact of marketing and media investments on vital performance indicators, such as sales or revenue, while also forecasting the revenue potential of marketing endeavours. According to Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2023, about 30% of B2C marketers use MMM tools to better understand how marketing drives value for the business.
Unpacking Google Meridian’s Core Pillars
Google’s foray into providing an open-source MMM tool reflects an understanding that restricted access to crucial data points within closed ecosystems impedes advertisers’ ability to effectively measure digital ads. Meridian aims to “[empower] teams to build best-in-class [MMM models] and drive better business outcomes.” The tech giant emphasizes Meridian’s “privacy-durable” approach grounded in innovation, transparency, actionability, and education. But B2C marketers must review Meridian’s claims with a critical eye:
“Privacy-durable” is redundant. MMM inherently maintains privacy durability, since it operates without individual customer behavior data. Inputs focus on aggregated media cost and revenue data, steering clear of clicks, views, or individual sales conversions.
“Innovation” claims are overstated. Most marketing analytics vendors already use the same methods as Meridian. Meridian’s MMM approach leans on solid but common techniques, such as a geo-level Bayesian hierarchical model incorporating seasonality, frequency, and reach data. The inclusion of nonmarketing indicators also remains ambiguous.
“Open source” does not equal complete transparency. While open source allows users to view and modify the MMM algorithm, complete transparency remains elusive, particularly for nontechnical stakeholders such as, for example, a VP of marketing. For many buyers, understanding ML approaches presents a significant challenge, necessitating considerable support and hand-holding.
“Actionability” may be limited to marketing use cases. Meridian’s scenario planning aligns with MMM providers’ offerings, aiding marketers in forecasting future marketing impacts. It’s unclear, however, whether Meridian offers scenario planning encompassing nonfinancial KPIs, constraint functionalities, frequent optimizations, or multiple optimization objectives.
“Education” skews technical, not practical. While Meridian’s technical specifications may satisfy ML engineers and data scientists, marketing executives require more comprehensive education and support. Marketing executives seek guidance on ML-driven models, while data scientists using Meridian need best practices for stakeholder engagement and model adoption.
Unlock Marketing Success Beyond MMM And Build A Comprehensive Measurement Strategy
Google’s announcement underscores the significance of ML-driven marketing analytics for measuring incremental marketing effectiveness and guiding budget allocations. Here are some key considerations before you build an MMM model:
Adopt a layered measurement approach. MMM alone will not provide ad tactic or spot level performance. It offers CMOs a guide on overall marketing mix performance and budget allocation. Incorporate marketing mix modelling as part of an overarching layered measurement strategy, utilizing various techniques to gauge marketing efficacy.
Choose vendors with diverse analytics capabilities. Evaluate vendors based on their industry experience, data normalization processes, measurement methodologies, and supporting services.
Manage expectations with MMM analysis. Expect to see MMM analyses such as channel halo effects, ad decay, optimal frequency of channels, and large-scale programs. But MMM may not offer granular insights into ad tactic performance — the models don’t process clicks and conversion level data as part of their analysis.
Implement incrementality testing. If you need help with an ad spot, or a particular display ad performance, testing approaches can help measure marketing uplift. Your data science teams, data-driven agencies, or independent vendors can help set up a rigorous marketing or media test to analyse the incremental impact of different marketing tactics.
Educate your organization on marketing analytics. Forrester believes that AI suffers from a trust problem, and explainable AI — the techniques and software capabilities for ensuring that people understand how AI systems arrive at their outputs — is a critical transparency mechanism. Prioritize transparency in MMM, and consider tools with explainable AI capabilities to enhance understanding and trust in AI-driven insights.
By Tina Moffett
This post was written by Principal Analyst Tina Moffett and it originally appeared here.
Forrester is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. We help leaders across technology, customer experience, digital, marketing, sales, and product functions use customer obsession to accelerate growth.
Through Forrester’s proprietary research, consulting, and events, leaders from around the globe are empowered to be bold at work — to navigate change and put their customers at the center of their leadership, strategy, and operations.
Our unique insights are grounded in annual surveys of more than 700,000 consumers, business leaders, and technology leaders worldwide; rigorous and objective research methodologies, including Forrester Wave™ evaluations; 70 million real-time feedback votes; and the shared wisdom of our clients.
The Competition Bureau of Canada has secured a Federal Court order to collect further information for its ongoing probe into Google’s online advertising operations.
Started in 2020, the investigation wants to know whether Google’s actions in the online display advertising sector may be stifling competition within the country.
Originally, the Bureau’s inquiry was based on accusations of Google exploiting its dominant position in video advertising to influence the advertiser buying tools market. But the scope has since expanded to investigate potential issues such as Google leveraging its market power to fend off competitors in display advertising technology, while using alleged predatory pricing strategies.
The investigation wants to find out if Google’s advertising practices are designed to undermine competition, affect competitors’ success, or lead to higher prices, fewer choices, and less innovation in the online display advertising services market.
The Bureau is especially focused on figuring out if these practices contravene the Competition Act’s provisions against restrictive trade practices, including abuse of dominance.
Google is mandated by the court order to submit relevant records and written information. While the probe is still underway, there are no findings of misconduct at this stage.
This is not the Bureau’s first investigation into Google’s business practices. In 2021, it obtained an initial court order related to Google’s online advertising business, following a 2016 investigation into alleged anti-competitive practices related to online search and advertising.
Canada is likely following the lead of the U.S., which saw its Justice Department file a lawsuit against Google last year, alleging the latter abused its role brokering digital ads across the internet, points out the WSJ.
New policies signal a major change for brands that have relied on ‘spray-and-pray’ techniques to drive sales.
We all know the pain of misguided sales spam—and lots of it—cluttering our inboxes. Whether it’s emails to our personal addresses that assume our buying habits of a decade ago are the same today, or sales pitches to our work addresses that are completely irrelevant to our roles and responsibilities, we’ve become overwhelmed with poorly targeted emails. Statista found that spam accounted for 45% of the 333 billion emails sent daily in 2022, while research from Gong shows that only 4% of emails are ever even opened.
Why are business leaders still accepting this antiquated and ineffective way of doing things?
This month marks the beginning of new policies from Google and Yahoo to limit the bulk email sends that result in billions of irrelevant and poorly crafted sales pitches emailed daily. This signals a major change for brands that have relied on “spray-and-pray” techniques to drive sales. And for B2B brands, this too should be a wake-up call.
How will these new policies reshape how sales teams think about attracting customers?
Will mass emails become generally unacceptable in our professional inboxes, in addition to our personal ones?
And how will the disruption of a commonly used sales tactic impact bottom lines?
THE HISTORY OF SPAM
The first bulk emails were sent by Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager for a computer company, to promote the company’s products to some 400 people. Thuerk said in a 2007 interview that “complaints started coming in almost immediately” after sending the emails, but more importantly, the company “sold $13 million or $14 million worth of DEC machines through that email campaign.” With that, cold emailing as a sales tactic was born.
In the decades that followed, the practice grew, and email marketing tools enabled sales teams to contact an ever-growing list of potential customers, forsaking personalized outreach for a broader pool of recipients.
While more data-driven approaches to sales emails have been introduced over the years, the overwhelming volume of irrelevant sales pitches has led to widespread fatigue. In fact, Gong’s research found that 87% of buyers say that the emails they receive are not relevant to them.
This practice can convert to sales. Even if only 4% of bulk emails are opened, that translates to 40,000 people opening those emails for every million sent by a salesperson. But companies need to ask themselves if irritating and alienating the other 960,000 people is an acceptable sacrifice. And, even more importantly, are they missing out on valuable opportunities by not sending thoughtful, personalized messages to the appropriate buyers out there?
RETHINKING SALES SPAM WITH AI
The technology industry is at a pivotal moment. AI is transforming the ways we work, live, and interact with each other. Now bulk emails can be drafted by generative artificial intelligence far more quickly than by a marketing and sales pro.
The potential impact for teams sending out large email campaigns is significant. Will the rise of gen AI mean that inboxes are flooded even more? Can AI make a difference in how these companies communicate with prospects?
AI can also bring new knowledge and perspective. Using AI to draft emails based on a few lines of context isn’t new, innovative, or effective. But done right, it can actually help companies cut down on the volume, and instead target the right customers with the right message.
We’re seeing new applications of AI that capture and analyse customer interactions to create content and thoughtfully personalize outreach based on a holistic view of the relationship. These applications might be the new approach that could reshape how sales teams develop and assess their outreach programs, from the initial outreach to a prospective customer . . . and over the entire relationship.
The era of relying on volume over strategic precision is over.
AI as a blanket solution won’t solve this problem for businesses. Not all of these tools are created equally, and those without the proper knowledge will only exacerbate the problem. However, there is potential for well-designed AI tools to help teams change their approach.
HOW TO CREATE CHANGE
Google’s and Yahoo’s rules are a positive first step to end spray-and-pray practices, but sales teams will need to do more. The good news is that there’s a path forward that not only doesn’t harm the bottom line but also can improve it.
Business leaders need to stop accepting this practice as the status quo and rebuild these programs from the ground up. Teams have often been measured and evaluated on “activity metrics”—how many emails have been sent, how many phone calls have been made. They should instead be measured by meetings booked and qualified opportunities, giving sales teams the motivation, time, and resources to focus on targeted, relevant outreach.
Similarly, leaders should make sure that their teams haven’t become over reliant on email. Research from McKinsey shows that the number of channels that B2B companies use to interact with other businesses has doubled in the past five years, and includes email, phone, web conference, chat, and social. Leaders should ensure that their teams can meet those potential customers where they want to be met.
The onus is on business leaders to evolve their strategies. While a spray-and-pray approach may have worked in the past, the tides are changing, and to stay competitive, businesses need to take a step back and reimagine how their sales teams operate. And they need to do it soon, before their last emails go unanswered.
BY AMIT BENDOV