What You Need to Know About Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by willcritchlow

You may have heard the term "AMPs" thrown around lately. What exactly are Accelerated Mobile Pages, what do they mean for search, and how can you prepare for it all? In this week's British Whiteboard Friday, Will Critchlow and Tom Anthony of Distilled lay out all the important details.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Tom: Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to British Whiteboard Friday. We're filming this in the London HQ of Distilled. This is the founder and CEO, Will Critchlow. I'm Tom Anthony, head of the R&D department, and today we're going to be talking about Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Will...

What is an Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP for short)?

Will: I'm glad you asked, Tom. So an Accelerated Mobile Page (or AMP, for short) is a project from Google and Twitter designed to make really fast mobile pages. At its essence, it's basically a stripped-down form of HTML, a diet HTML if you will. Tom will talk a little bit more about the actual details on that.

But fundamentally, it's an HTML page designed to be super lightweight and critically designs really fast loading. So Google, Twitter, a bunch of other companies have rolled this out — kind of in response to projects like the Facebook Instant Articles project from Facebook and Apple News and so forth. This is designed to be the open response. So it's open source, and there are all kinds of elements of openness to the project.

What makes AMP so fast?

Tom: Absolutely. So as Will said, it's like a diet HTML. So certain tags of HTML you just can't use. Things like forms, that are out. You also need to use a streamlined version of CSS. You can use most of CSS, but some parts are falling under best practice and they're just not allowed to be used. Then JavaScript is basically not allowed at all. You have to use an off-the-shelf JavaScript library that they provide you with, and that provides things like lazy loading.

So the idea is that the whole platform is designed just for pure readability, pure speed. Things such as images don't load until they're scrolled into view, and the JavaScript does all that for you. We anticipate they're going to be at the point where the JavaScript library is built into certain operating systems so you don't even need that either. And then all of this is designed to be really heavily cached so that Google can host these pages, host your actual content right there, and so they don't even need to fetch it from you anymore.

Will, you're going to tell us how that works?

How this works in your mobile device

Will: Yeah, so that's the diagram we have in the middle here. So we're all used to this idea of a regular web page. I've called this WWW in the diagram. This is the regular desktop version of the page. In the source code, if you have an AMP version, you would designate that with the rel AMP HTML link, which points over to your, what we call "hosted AMP page.

So this is a page on your own domain constructed of this stripped down form of HTML. So if you want to see this in action, I've referenced the Guardian here. They were one of the first reference partners. You can put /amp on the end of any news story on the Guardian website and see the AMP HTML. It's linked in display with the AMP HTML link in the source code.

So that's the hosted AMP. That has nothing to do with Google. You can just do that, and it is designed to be faster. But they've also rolled out this free hosted cached platform part of the deal as well, which is labeled here with the gstatic.

So when you actually see these things showing up in Google search results, which we'll talk about in a moment, the version that shows up there will typically be hosted on a gstatic.com, in other words a Google-hosted cached version. And critically both of these, both the one you host yourself and the version that is cached around the Internet potentially even by other people as well, both of those would contain the rel=canonical back to the original. It's similar. It's like a rel alternative in a mobile world.

So it's fast because the HTML is cut down, but it's also potentially designed that these things are bits of content that can be cached potentially by anyone without rel=canonical pointing back to you.

Tom: I think it's worth saying that even on the cached version of the pages, Google have said that you're still going to be able to provide your own adverts. We don't know the details of it yet, but they've built a platform where you can serve adverts from AdSense, Outbrain, most of the major advertising platforms, and you'll still accrue all the revenue. They don't take any of that stuff.

Also with the cached versions you can use Analytics. At the moment, the rolled-out version you can just use a tracking pixel. But we know they're working on a platform where it's a sort of vendor-neutral platform for things like Google Analytics, Omniture, and all of that stuff. So you can still get all of the analytics. You can still provide ads to your pages and everything, even when you're served via the cached versions of the pages.

Will: Yeah, that's very important. That's part of that JavaScript framework that we were talking about, where you get these limited containers, which are a kind of very limited JavaScript functionality that you can use yourself.

Impact on the SERPs

So let's talk a little bit about how this might actually show up in search results. So first of all, what we know at the moment is it's looking like it's mobile only. It's right there in the name, Accelerated Mobile Pages, which is why I brought along my mobile whiteboard to demonstrate this for you. This is the AMP version showing up on a mobile device, tablet, phablet, not quite sure what format.

Right now it's mobile only. It's talking about being mobile. It's not even rolled out just yet. But in the demo that we've seen, it's showing up as a carousel above the regular blue links, typically for news-related terms, because most of this is focused on obviously reading contents. The people who've rolled this out first have been news publishers typically. So you search for a news-related term. You see this carousel of swipeable images above the blue links. Click on one of those, it opens super fast, that's the whole point, and then you can swipe to another AMP page across the way.

It is actually also displacing or appearing for some terms where you'd expect to see paid search ads. I wouldn't read too much into that. This is just in the demo at this point. In the long run, maybe there are paid versions of this, who knows.

We're expecting this to be rolling out soon. Google's latest official line is maybe February in 2016. But, one way or another, we expect to see this in the world some time pretty soon.

So it's not there yet, but it will be soon.

What can we do to prepare, Tom?

Tom: So there's two things. Firstly, you want to be able to start building AMP pages for your site, and you want to make sure that those pages are valid, because as we said, it's like a diet version of HTML, but it's very, very strict on how you build the HTML. The tags have to be in certain orders and certain places. You can't use certain things. And if you do any of that, your AMP page is invalid and they probably won't be using it.

So to validate your AMP pages, you actually use a tool that's built into Chrome. So if you open the developer tools in Chrome, there's a system there — and you can look it up on the AMP project website — where you can actually go to a page and you can ask it to validate, "Is this an AMP page," and it will tell you any problems with that page.

So one, build AMP pages and make sure you're doing it well, and the second bit is working out how to streamline building pages. If you're on a sort of CMS or anything like that, then obviously you want this to be an integral part of your process moving forward. You want AMP pages to be something that all pages or as many pages as possible have an AMP version of those pages. So there's already — for the most popular CMSs, things like WordPress already have plugins available — that you can go away, you can download that plugin, and basically for a lot of the pages it will do a lot of the work for you in creating those AMP pages. Also, obviously, if you're building your own CMS, then you should prioritize trying to get similar functionality into that CMS.

Will: And now is the time to do that, because being there at the launch is the time to get the kind of kick, the benefit from when these things roll out. So that's a lot of the background on it.

For more detail reading, we've got a few resources here you can go and check out. This is an actual demo of what it might look like in search results. You can try out your own searches on that kind of streamlined Google.

Tom: It's worth saying at the moment you'll only see the demo results at this page obviously. So you can only...

Will: Yes, and on a mobile device.

Tom: And on a mobile device, yeah.

Will: And then this is the original, the main project web page where you can find the GitHub repository of code and all those kind of validators and so forth, and we've written some more here. This is a link to our website.

So yeah, we would recommend you check it out if you're into publishing. This is an opportunity for publishers to get a mobile head start.

So thanks for joining us on this Whiteboard Friday. Speak to you soon.

Tom: Bye-bye.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Additional Information and Resources

• g.co/ampdemo – Demo of what AMPs might look like in search results
• ampproject.org – The main project web page, where you'll find a technical intro, tutorial, GitHub repository, and more
• dis.tl/amp-pages – Further information on AMPs and how they work

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Search In Pics: Sundar Pichai In India, Star Wars Google Cardboard & Google Shoe Repair Shop

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO In India:

Source: Google+

Google Hosts The Santa Clara University Men’s Basketball Team:

Source: Google+

Shipments Of Free Google Cardboard Star Wars Editions Arrive:

Source: Twitter

Google Maps Inception:

Source: Twitter

Juan Google Shoe Repair:

Source: Instagram

The post Search In Pics: Sundar Pichai In India, Star Wars Google Cardboard & Google Shoe Repair Shop appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Our Top Tips on Monetization: The Most Popular ProBlogger Posts of 2015

If you were here yesterday, you would know I’m rounding up the most popular posts on ProBlogger this year in the categories of content, social media, general tips, and today’s crowd favourite: Monetization! I hope if you missed them the first time around, that these posts push you in the right direction (or you learn something new you missed on initial reading!) Go forth and earn, my friends.

The Full Blog Monetization Menu: 60 Ways to Make Money with Your Blog

Yes, sixty. Sixty whole ways of making money on or because of your blog. If standard affiliate/ad/sponsored post fare is not for you, you are almost guaranteed to find something on this list you’d rather do to earn some cash with your blog. So comprehensive! It’s a must-see.

Make Money Blogging For Real: 3 Must-Know Factors

• How do you make money online?
• How does AdSense work?
• Should I attend this “make money online” course?

I’m sure you’ve asked or been asked these questions at some point in your blogging career. And while we can’t all be raking in millions of dollars every year, the fact remains you can make good money on your blog… if you heed these three tips.

5 Advanced Techniques I use to Make Money on My Blog

The wonderful Erin from Travel With Bender pulled back the curtain to show us all that there is money to be made on travel blogs, and exactly how she does it.

Make Money Blogging: Start the New Year by Increasing Your Income Streams

Well, it is that time of year! Darren outlined tons of great advice on how to make a legitimate, sustainable income on your blog by diversifying. Check it out if you haven’t already.

Top Tips for Getting the Most out of Monetizing Brand-Blog Relationships

Louisa Claire stopped by ProBlogger HQ to spill all the secrets she’s learned from being both a blogger and the conduit between bloggers and brands. What are brands looking for? What kind of blog do you need? How do you get on a brand’s radar? What’s the first step when you think you might want to work with brands in a sponsored or ambassadorship capacity? Louisa tells all.

Special Mention:

• How I Made over $500,000 with the Amazon Affiliate Program
• A 3-Step Blueprint for Smart Affiliate Marketing
• How to Make Money As a Blogger Through Affiliate Marketing
• How to Increase your Amazon Affiliate Earnings for the Holidays
• 4 Steps to Successful Product Creation Every Blogger Should Know (But Most Don’t!)
• #TodayNotSomeday: Create a Product
• Behind the Scenes of our Latest Six Figure Product Launch

So what do you think? Are you inspired now? Were you surprised by any of these? Which monetization model works best for you?

Stacey Roberts is the Managing Editor of ProBlogger.net: a writer, blogger, and full-time word nerd balancing it all with being a stay-at-home mum. She writes about all this and more at Veggie Mama. Chat with her on Twitter @veggie_mama or be entertained on Facebook.

The post Our Top Tips on Monetization: The Most Popular ProBlogger Posts of 2015 appeared first on ProBlogger.

Yahoo Is Testing Giant Brand Video Ads In Search Results

Yahoo is testing giant takeover video ads in search results pages.

The video ads, seen on a search for “Lands’ End”, expand to take over most of the screen and autoplay on mute.  The ads only appear to be running on desktop and not smartphones. The video does not collapse after ending, which means the user has to scroll down to click on the actual ad or see the other search results.

Visual brand advertising in search is a nut that the search engines haven’t been able to crack in a meaningful way. Google and Bing both test big brand banner ads a couple of years ago. Google has also been experimenting with more visual ads on mobile for automotive advertisers, and Bing just recently rolled image extensions out of beta.

Video, though, has yet to find a foothold in search. There is speculation that Google is prepping to roll out video in search, and Bing may be as well.

The Yahoo video is certainly interesting. Whether the execution will resonate with search users — particularly those with somewhat slower connections — remains to be seen. Yahoo isn’t commenting specifically on the test, telling AdAge, which first spotted the ads, “We’re continuously developing and testing new ways to enhance our products for advertisers, but we don’t have anything to announce at this time.”

The post Yahoo Is Testing Giant Brand Video Ads In Search Results appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google Posts That Local Results Are Influenced By Clicks, Then Deletes That

Are Google Local results influenced by clicks on local listings? Some local SEOs believe so, and Google briefly confirmed this with a post they made in their help forums. But now that reference is gone, and Google won’t say if clicks are used for local rankings or not.
Rahul J., who is listed as an official Google employee, posted the message earlier this week in the forums. It listed several factors Google uses to rank their local results, the Google My Business listings. One of those factors originally read “Search history: In the past how many times has the listing been clicked on by users searching with the keyword.” Rahul then changed it after the community began talking about this to read “Search history: The number of times it has been useful historically on the basis of relevance, prominence and distance.”
Here are screen shots from before and after:
Before:

After:

I asked Google why it was removed, and Google told me because it was inadvertently posted by a Googler. This implies that either the Googler posted incorrect information and then corrected that information or that Google posted information it doesn’t want SEO in Nigeria and webmasters to know.
Google has told us time and time again that click data and other user engagement data are not used in their core ranking algorithm. But that doesn’t mean Google doesn’t use such data for local rankings. When I spoke to them, Google wouldn’t tell me if click data impacted local rankings. They just told me the new language more accurately describes how the algorithm works.
It is worth noting that Rahul J., the Googler who posted these details, seems new to Google. His forum profile is newly registered, and he has only a couple posts in the forums. So maybe he really posted incorrect information?
I have asked Google to go on the record as to whether they use click data or not for local rankings, and I am awaiting a response on that question.
The post Google Posts That Local Results Are Influenced By Clicks, Then Deletes That appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Mobile Web vs Mobile Apps: Where Should You Invest Your Marketing? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Mobile's been a hot topic for a while now. We know it's not something to be ignored, but when it comes to different mobile mediums, it can be tricky to determine where to focus your efforts. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over the differences between marketing via mobile apps and mobile web, examines some criteria that can help guide your decision, and speculates about the future of the mobile world in general.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat a little bit about the mobile world and specifically whether we should be investing our mobile marketing efforts into the mobile web — meaning a website that is responsive and adaptive or just specifically designed for mobile browsers — or whether we should be worried about building a mobile app to help draw in traffic and gain customers and users. I think these two worlds are actually quite different.

So I spent a bunch of time recently here internally at Moz going through a huge number of statistics, trying to gather as much data as I could to understand these two worlds, and I thought I'd share that with you. I'll give a bunch of links in this presentation, probably a good dozen of them that I'll make sure are in there.

Sources:

• Pew Internet: Smartphone Use in 2015
• Comscore & MarketingLand: Apps Eat Digital Media Time
• Morgan Stanley & MarketingLand: No, Apps Aren't Winning, the Mobile Browser Is
• IAB Study & MarketingLand: Despite Time Spent, Mobile Web Just as Important as Apps
• Fred Wilson [AVC]: Mobile Web is Top of Funnel, Mobile Web is Bottom of Funnel
• MarketingLand: Search is Number One Content Discovery Tool for Mobile Users
• SimilarWeb & Clickz: Why Mobile Web Still Matters in 2015
• Andrew Chen: Mobile App Retention Rates
• Smart Insights: Mobile Marketing Statistics
• Think with Google: Mobile Path to Purchase
• Comscore: 2015 Mobile App Report
• Forrester: Mobile Users Spend 80% of Time in Just 5 Apps
• Nielsen: So Many Apps, So Much More Time for Entertainment
• TechCrunch & Nielsen: An Upper Limit for Apps
• TechCrunch & Forrester: Only 5 Apps See Heavy Use
• VentureBeat: Mobile Browser Traffic is 2X Bigger than App Traffic
• Quartz and Comscore: Most Smartphone Users Download 0 Apps per Month

Mobile web qualities

Just to give you a broad overview, basically the mobile web kind of looks like this.

There's a lot less time spent in the mobile web, meaning on mobile websites on a mobile device, than there is in the world of apps — far, far less time spent. But weirdly, and this is very strange but confirmed by several different sources, there's more traffic overall, meaning more unique people making more different visits, which makes a little bit of sense when you think about how those things are done. Remember that a visit to a web page is a much less intense activity than loading up a mobile app and then spending time in it. So sure that can make some sense.

It's also growing faster. So the mobile web is about two times bigger in terms of raw traffic, and it is growing faster than the mobile app world, which will also make sense in a sec when we talk about apps.

This is Morgan Stanley data. I think they're using comScore as one of their sources, and there's another one that backs this up as well.

Mobile traffic is also highly distributed, and you can see that in everyone's numbers, everyone from SimilarWeb to comScore to Nielsen. They're all reporting this. It's a lot like desktop, which again makes sense.

It's not that we spend all our time on just a few websites. In fact, because so much of the time that we spend on the web in desktop is on Facebook's website and on YouTube's website, and that is mostly app traffic in the mobile web, the long tail looks really long when it comes to the mobile web. There's essentially tons of people visiting tons and tons of different websites all across there, I think on average visiting a few hundred to a few thousand unique websites in a month across mobile browsing.

For the mobile web, search, social, and word of mouth or type in or bookmarking, those are the big sources of mobile referrals, which isn't surprising. Those are pretty big on desktop as well.

So pretty distributed broad system here. A lot of similarities to the desktop web. We're pretty familiar with this world.

Mobile app world

Mobile app world qualities, kind of different though. Apps dominate. I mean dominate like they crush the times that we spend on mobile devices. So you might have seen Mary Meeker's State the Internet Report for this year showing that mobile traffic in 2014 eclipsed desktop traffic.

Desktop traffic is weird. It basically kept growing, growing, growing from 1990 to 2010, and then it's basically today almost exactly where it is in 2010. Weirdly, I think a good trivia question would be, "Do people spend more or less time on desktops today than they did five years ago?" Of course, we would all say, "Well, they spend less." But actually we spend a teensy, tinsy bit more than we did then.

It's just that mobile has gone crazy. Mobile has eaten up all of the rest of the time in our lives. We don't see our friends or family any more. We don't eat meals. We just browse our mobile devices.

So mobile is about 85% to 90% depending on the source of time spent on mobile. It's your YouTubes and your Facebooks and all those kinds of things.

It sends and receives far fewer referrals. So basically, most of the ways that people are getting to apps is not from another app or from a website. It's directly from the launcher. They're going to their home screen. They're clicking on that app. That makes pretty good sense.

But they're also not sending out as much traffic. So if you're browsing Facebook on a mobile device, it seems like, on average, you're less likely to click on to a mobile web link and then load up a web page versus maybe if you're browsing Facebook on the desktop web, which also makes sense. You want to stay in the app that you're in. Mobile speeds are slow or especially outside of countries where 4G and LTE are common.

The top 25 to 50 apps in mobile — and it depends on who you ask — some sources are showing that just the top 5 apps are responsible for 80% to 90% of all app usage. This is data from Forrester and data from comScore. Marketing Land did some work on this.

So what we're essentially saying here is if you're not in the top 25 to 50 apps on a platform, you're probably getting very little mobile app activity, because it turns out that the long tail is nowhere near like it is on the mobile web. People don't visit hundreds and thousands of apps. They visit just a few.

In fact, the average mobile owner uses about 24 apps per month, 24 unique apps per month and visits between 10 and 30 times as many unique websites in a given month.

Seven percent of heavy app users (so the people who download the most apps, who use the most apps), they're responsible actually for 50%, a full half of all download activities.

So it's sort of a small subset of app users who just go crazy. They download every app that they can. They treat apps like websites. They have this huge long tail. But for the 93% of the rest of us, a little bit different.

Most new discovery for mobile apps comes from three sources -- mobile web, word of mouth, or app store top lists. That tends to be how we get to the app world.

So these two are very, very different. They're different in usage. They're different in how they operate. They're different in how you would need to do marketing around them.

Things every business needs to optimize for mobile web

It's my general opinion, based on what I've seen about the mobile web, that every business needs to optimize for the mobile web, and you have to optimize in a few ways. That means you must have responsive or adaptive design. It's not just an option any more.

You've got to have a mobile search-friendly experience, so being able to get the mobile search-friendly tag, which means you can rank better.

But it also means that you're delivering a better user experience from search because search is so big to the mobile web world.

You should be SEO-aware and optimize your site for search engines. That's critical. If you're watching Whiteboard Friday, you're probably doing a fine job with that.

You need to load fast, even on slow connections.

I think one of the challenges is that a lot of us assume that everybody is on 4G or everybody is on LTE. That is not the case, especially in a lot of the developing world. But even in the United States and in Europe and in other countries like Japan, there are plenty of connection speeds that are slow or limited due to where people are, particularly when they travel or are inside buildings or are having connectivity issues. I'm sure you've all experienced that.

Finally, you've got to provide that great user experience and a great content experience that delivers answers quickly.

So I don't mean just loads fast. I mean gives people the answers they're looking for quickly, because as we know, Google is using click-through rate and pogo-sticking and all those kinds of things. If you have a bad experience where you're not delivering, even if your page loads fast, you're not delivering the answers someone was seeking when they performed a mobile search, they land on your mobile web page, they're going to click the "Back" button and choose somebody else. They're less likely to choose you in the future, and Google is less likely to rank you in the future. Very frustrating.

My take on mobile app development

But mobile app development — again, this is my opinion — I think that there are plenty of folks out there who have reasonable disagreements about the way that I think about this. But based on what I've seen, I would generally recommend that mobile app development is only right for your organization if you fit a few criteria.

(A) You need to have a great strategy around what your mobile app will do and that there need to be features and value that your app provides that you could not provide well or could not provide at all in a mobile web experience. Apps can do things like push notifications, even when the app is dormant. That's very, very tough for a website to do, although Google has talked about potentially making that available in Chrome someday. So maybe.

Integration with contacts or integration with other apps. Integration with the phone features itself, the calling and the device system or the root functions of the phone. Those types of things, if you can provide value off of that that you could not do through a mobile website, okay.

By the way, the mobile web provides a lot more features and functionality than many folks often think it does. I'll link you to another great piece (What the Web Can Do Today) that was on Hacker News the other day that has just a great chart of all the things that you might want to be able to do and whether they're supported on mobile web or app or both.

(B) You've got to be able to convince not only yourself but convince your team, convince your audience that you can be among the top few — let's say hundred — apps in the world, or you only need a small handful, maybe a few hundred to a few thousand people that install your app in order for it to be successful.

If you can't make one of those claims — either we're going to be one of the top few hundred apps in the world, or we only need a few hundred to a few thousand people on our app — well, the way apps work is the rich, the dominant apps get all the traffic, all the activity.

I think it can be very frustrating to say, "Hey, we're going to build a great app that sits somewhere in the middle of the pack just like our website sits somewhere in the middle of the pack." That's not how it works. All the attention goes to the most popular apps.

(C) Your app can beat the retention curve odds.

So again, in my research what I found time and time again is that mobile app retention, it's just awful, terrible. Basically, the overwhelming majority of apps, I think more than 9 out of 10 apps will never be opened again after 90 days. So you've got to find a way to make your app retain users and keep their interest, keep them coming back to you again and again, and that is no small feat.

(D) You've got an amazing team of app developers or an incredible one or two people who can do great app development and make a world-class product.

Because if you're not going to be best in class, app world just doesn't feel like it's worth it.

This could all change if...

All right. Now let me add a quick caveat at the end of this. So what I want to say is that this world of apps versus mobile web could change.

In fact, I think there's a lot of people in the SEO world who believe that it's on the verge of changing because of what Google is doing with mobile app integration into mobile web search.

So if I do a search today for "best pasta Portland" on my mobile device, I am going to get pretty much exclusively mobile web content. That's true until and unless I perform a search that really is very app-focused or app-centric. So if I were to perform a search like "find best local restaurants near me," it might come up with Yelp or a travel destination app. Google will pull up in my results probably TripAdvisor and stuff like that. That is happening a little bit today, and we do see it. I think there's folks who are going, "Hey, this is an opportunity." It is an opportunity.

But Google has also made another change where they are now indexing content inside of apps, including in Facebook, which was a big announcement a few weeks ago, and potentially will be placing those inside of the mobile search results, potentially even if you don't have that app installed. That's the game changer. If it turns out that mobile search, which is now more than 50% of all search, becomes a place where Google does sort of what they did with Google+, remember where they were giving highly biased, preferential treatment to posts that had been Google Plussed, even from people who were barely in your network or connected to another person and they made Google+ like this center of the local ecosystem and all those kinds of things.

If they do the same thing in the app world and they give this biased, preferential treatment across the board to apps rather than to mobile web content, we could see this equation start to change. Then it might make sense to say, "Hey, even if I can't attract and keep people and build the best app in the world, maybe I should build an app anyway just to be able to expose my content and get the benefit to Google."

I think it would be a little bit of an odd move from Google, but it's not impossible, and I think in 6 to 12 months we're going to know a lot more. There'll be plenty of studies and data about the clickstream patterns on mobile search and how often the results appear and how often they're clicked and how often that leads to a mobile app download. All those kinds of metrics should be available in the next 6 to 12 months. Then we'll be able to report back to you with a lot more about whether this equation has changed.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your comments and we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Avoid Hurdles When Working With Multiple Agencies

Are you a digital marketing professional working with multiple agencies? From PPC to SEO to PR, some companies have a veritable alphabet soup of agencies that each manage very specialized services for businesses.

But all these agencies do not always play nicely. Competing strategies, miscommunications and bottlenecks are just a few reasons that multiple agencies need to align when there is overlap.

The trend of companies working with more than one digital agency likely is not going to slow down anytime soon, and agency growth is on the rise; that means a lot of choices for a lot of companies.

Today, let’s look at a few scenarios that might sound familiar to you when working alongside other agencies. And guess what? The solution to almost every problem in most cases is as simple as communication.

Problem #1: SEO & PPC Clashes

Usually, SEO and PPC work well together to build relevancy, clicks and conversions. But sometimes, when teams on both ends take action without communication, it can cause problems.

When an SEO agency that shares a client with our PPC agency decided to make some changes to the product titles on the client’s website by taking out keywords, it wreaked havoc on the company’s Google Shopping campaigns.

Then came the frantic phone call from the client. Shopping campaign volume had plummeted and left us scratching our heads. We did what we normally do: start investigating with a laundry list of questions.

As you may know, Google Shopping campaigns are tied to the data feed via Google Merchant Center, which pulls information from a website. Any changes to the product pages can directly impact the data feed, which in turn impacts Google Shopping ads.

It was obvious what had happened when we reached the “Have you changed anything on your website?” question. We decided to call up the SEO team. We weren’t sure how invested they were in the changes they were making, so that was an initial concern, but in the end, it was just an oversight on their part.

The crisis lasted all of 24 hours and was a simple fix; however, this is just one scenario that shows how direct and consistent communication between agencies can be key.

Problem #2: Turf Wars

Sometimes larger companies have more than one agency in the same space, which can lead to disjointed results. Case in point: Our paid search agency shares a client with another digital agency, and that digital agency is under contract to provide all the display advertising to the company.

Our client took that to mean that under no circumstances were we to run visual display ads on the Google Display Network (GDN); they would, however, allow one exception: remarketing with text ads on the GDN.

The real kicker is that the other agency isn’t touching AdWords at all, and it’s a shame because time and time again, we see how the GDN can boost overall search PPC performance. Not to mention, we always include display ads within our remarketing campaigns.

But hey, our goal is not to encroach on territory, but rather to do what’s best for the client and work in partnership with others. After a few educationally-based conversations on the benefits of the GDN, the client agreed to do a test case for a specific location only.

This small step was a win. We could then prove the worth of the GDN, and perhaps the client could renegotiate terms with the other agency when the contract was up.

Remember, nothing is clearer than the bottom line, and if you have the chance to improve that but feel others are holding you back, figure out a way to communicate through educational means so you can work together towards the goal.

Problem #3: Creative Blockages

What happens when you’re relying on multiple teams to complete one task? Take, for example, the story of a client who took a really long time to send us their display ads.

The client wanted their creative design team to work on the visuals for the ad, and that team was backed up with other priorities. Yes, we were facing creative blockage.

Time went on, and we decided to take matters into our own hands. We produced an estimate of what it would take for our designer to get the job done, presented it to the client and let them know we would eat the cost just to get the project going.

Strangely enough, that’s sometimes the only nudge a company needs. Whether from pride of ownership or something else, the creative team started working on the display ads right away.

Sometimes if you really want something to happen, and resources are short on the other end, offering a helping hand can make all the difference in getting the ball rolling.

Multiple problems can rear their ugly heads when working with multiple agencies and teams, but I’ve always found direct communication is the best solution — and even better when you can have an open line of communication with the other teams consistently. Unfortunately, that’s not always an option.

In the end, taking a partnership approach, rather than viewing the issue as “us versus them,” will help you think of solutions that can benefit both the company and the other agency.

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Google Is Testing A Car Loan Calculator Quick Answer Box

Google is testing a new loan interactive calculator for car payments. This was spotted by both Dr. Pete Meyers and Kyle Sanders recently. It looks and feels a lot like the Google mortgage calculator feature that Google launched in February of this year.

I am personally not able to replicate this, but here is a picture from Moz:

As you can see, you can enter the loan amount, the interest rate and the period of the loan, and then Google will show you your monthly payments. You can also toggle to see the maximum loan amount, as well.

Will we soon see car loans through Google or maybe a way to buy, lease or finance your new car through Google Comparison AdWords Ads? Maybe?

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