Is there anything as versatile, adaptable and convenient as a smoothie? I doubt it. Nor are there many things as universally beloved. Smoothies are scrumptious, indulgent concoctions that tickle the taste buds and, inexplicably, with every sip make you feel just a little bit happier and make the world a little bit friendlier. The smoothie is so much greater than the sum of it's parts. And just to prove the smoothie can do no wrong, it can actually make you more awesome too.
Smoothies contain a smorgasbord of ingredients, and depending on what you throw in, smoothies can ascend from mere flavorsome delight and sweet-tooth satisfier to the dizzying heights of muscle-building, energizing, health-enhancing superdrink. Why eat just one superfood, when you can combine a load of goodness into one easily digestible drink? Plus, it's super quick and absurdly easy to prepare, making it weirdly efficient not just nutritionally, but generally. Created in the 1940's, but perfectly designed for 21st century living.
Tomorrow afternoon, President Obama will lay out his vision for the steps we need to take to prepare our country for the impacts of climate change and in the video below, he describes why this is the time to take action:
This is a big moment, and we want to make sure that people who care about the global fight to climate change know what's going on. So watch the video, share it with your friends, then tune in tomorrow on WH.gov/live to hear the President's speech:
Tomorrow afternoon, President Obama will speak at Georgetown University and lay out his vision for the steps we need to take to prepare our country for the impacts of climate change and lead the global effort to fight it. In the video below, he describes why this is the time to take action. Watch it, then share the video with your friends.
President Obama discusses the bipartisan legislation in the United States Senate that would take important steps towards fixing our broken immigration system, while growing our economy and reducing the deficit.
The U.S. Department of the Interior manages some of America’s most breathtaking national parks, national wildlife refuges and other public lands. That is why we're excited to invite you to join our new photo project, Summer in America’s Great Outdoors.
Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President, had the opportunity to speak at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service in Washington, D.C. Sponsored by Points of Light, the conference is the world’s largest annual gathering of volunteering and service leaders and supporters.
We have a bit of a complicated relationship with Google In the SEO/inbound community. We are often the first, and loudest, to call them out when they get their priorities messed up or hoard data for questionable reasons.
But on the whole, we use more of Google's wares than probably any other industry.
At Distilled, we use Google Apps for email, calendars, document collaboration, reporting, Google+ for internal sharing discussions, Hangouts for live video, chat, and webinars. Most of our clients use Google Analytics (as we do for our own websites). Our PPC specialists have core expertise in AdWords. Our keyword research work invariably turns to the AdWords Keywords Tool for search volume estimates.
While working with our Creative team to plan a data visualization project recently, I learned about a relatively new service from Google (Consumer Surveys â€" see below), and it got me thinking about other Google projects that have proven to be useful for our work and those that promise to be in the future.
This guide is intended for those SEOs/inbound marketers who are familiar the fundamental Google resources (Google Analytics, Apps, the AdWords Keywords Tool) but may not be aware of what else is out there and what is coming soon.
Analytics & Tagging
1. Universal Analytics
This is not particular to inbound at all, but it affects all disciplines of web marketing. Most online marketers have some familiarity with Google Analytics. It’s the most widely-adopted analytics platform on the web, and it's about to evolve.
Universal Analytics (in beta) is apt to change the way we use and think about marketing analytics. This successor of the Google Analytics we know will bring improved performance and, most importantly, new functionality and flexibility to your reporting.
Uses & benefits of Universal Analytics:
Cross device tracking of individual users: We live in a multi-device world. To date, Google Analytics has not had core functionality that allowed for tracking users across all of their devices (one user is tracked as multiple "unique visits," one for each device). Universal Analytics creates a User ID for the individual and allows you to track their interactions with your site/app across their devices allowing for cross-device optimization.
The ability to push "offline" data into the system: Using the same User ID functionality, you can tie this data to a single user â€" across devices and interactions â€" over the lifetime of their relationship with your business. While passing any "Personally Identifiable Information" into GA is strictly a violation of the Terms of Service, this doesn't mean you can't securely keep that information together on your end and (respectfully) use it to manage your customer relationships and otherwise learn who your best customers are.
Performance enhancements: The current iteration of GA passes a lot of data to GA servers from multiple cookies. Universal Analytics (UA) uses a single, simple cookie and stores most data on GA servers. Faster pages = happier users.
20 custom dimensions, 20 custom metrics: You can do a lot with GA's customer variables, but this is really going to open things up. If you want to push offline and other data into your reports, these are going to come in handy.
Set your own session and campaign expirations: Sessions can be set up to 4 hours, campaigns up to 2 years.
Justin Cutroni, one of the most well-informed analytics gurus you'll find publishing online, wrote a nice post about the potential of UA, using his local gardening supply store as a case study of sorts. It is highly recommended reading.
There is so much here that even if you don't start implementing for live campaigns yet, getting your head around the possibilities of UA (if not the measurement protocol itself) is only going to benefit you as this next iteration bridges the chasm to wide adoption.
Note: before you dive in and start using Universal Analytics on your website, keep in mind there are some things still missing: AdSense, DoubleClick, Content Experiments, and Remarketing are not yet integrated. You'll probably want to run UA tracking concurrently with your existing GA tracking. The next resource in the list will help with that.
2. Tag Manager
Again, not particular to inbound, but big enough to matter to everyone. Google Tag Manager was released in late 2012 and has seen strong growth, but many marketers are still unaware of its benefits. Google is certainly not the first entrant into the tag management space, but they may well (and quickly) become the most popular.
Mike Pantoliano wrote a solid technical overview of Tag Manager (and tag management in general) here on the Moz blog that is well worth a read.
Essentially, Tag Manager gives you central control of tracking tags firing in the <head> of any given page, without having to touch the page code itself once you've added the main container. The rules to trigger tag firing are flexible enough that the possibilities here are broad and powerful.
Uses & benefits of Tag Manager:
Central, organized management of your tags/scripts: Targeting a given page with a rule is a lot faster than adding it via a CMS or to the source code directly.
Cuts dev cycle bottlenecks out of the equation: No more waiting a week for your colleagues in dev to update your tracking snippets: Tag Manager takes the work off the dev team's plate, so everybody wins.
Improved performance: Flexible firing rules allow you to load resources only on the pages that require them, cleaning up code on other pages and optimizing page loads.
While Tag Manager's benefits will be greatest for organizations with significant web operations and drawn-out dev cycles, it'll save most web marketers some time and headache, and signup/setup is relatively painless. There's a lot of flexibility here, and I expect more clever uses will emerge as the community gets comfortable with this tool.
3. Tag Assistant
If you are using (or intend to use) Tag Manager, Tag Assistant is a Google Chrome extension that will make double-checking your tag/rule configurations a lot easier.
Here's how it looks:
As above, you can quickly see the details of any tag by clicking the blue arrow to the right of its status.
Uses & benefits of Tag Assistant:
In short, it makes checking your Tag Manager configuration a lot easier.
Market Research
4. Think Insights
Think Insights has been around for a couple of years and recently updated their site. While there is a lot of self-serving promotional material here, there is also a great deal of value.
Organized by industry, marketing objectives, and ad types, this resource includes a wealth of research studies, most of which were co-conducted with Google and partners (often research firms) to come to some data-driven conclusions on the way specific markets and demographics use the web. It also serves as an inspiration center for digital marketing campaigns, linking out to some compelling and innovative pieces.
Uses & benefits of Think Insights:
Free, searchable access to market research studies, organized by industry, marketing objectives, and ad type
Inspiration for your next data visualization project with Chrome Experiments. The "500" home page alone is worth the time to click.
There's also the Creative Sandbox gallery, showcasing creative online campaigns that "blend creative genius and digital innovation." This is skewed toward paid channels, but there are a lot of creative approaches here from which we can learn.
5. Consumer Surveys
Consumer Surveys is the only paid service in this post, but research with surveys, if you want to step outside of your customer email list, will always require an investment. Google's offering is relatively affordable at $.10 a response ($.50 if you need to target a specific demographic).
We are using Google Consumer Surveys for a client project currently at Distilled, and so far the straightforward pricing model and predictable timelines for turnaround are promising.
Trends is a relatively well-known but often overlooked source of historical search volume data.
Search behavior is fluid. If you work in SEO you probably rely heavily on the AdWords Keywords Tool for volume estimates. But if your campaigns are planned for the long term, Trends provides data that tells you something about how users will search in the future.
For example, here's an interesting comparison:
Note: "News headlines" (at top right) can be useful for identifying the cause behind spikes/drops in search traffic. I'd take the "Forecast" option with a sizable grain of salt.
Trends is also useful for measuring client brand recognition over time (vs. competitors), and for discovering the seasonal pattern for a given keyword throughout the year.
The new Top Charts section provides an engaging visual navigation through current trending searches. Perfect for brainstorming content angles.
Also check out the new live visualization of Hot Searches. Useful? Maybe. Entertaining? Yep.
Uses & benefits of Trends:
View historical data for a single keyword, or compare two or more
Discover seasonality in search volume
Browse current trending searches
Export to CSV for your Excel/other reports
7. Zeitgeist
Zeitgeist isn’t exactly a tool or a data set but more of an interactive recap of the year in search. You select the year (and/or country), and Google walks you through the biggest search trends and the related events around the world.
The most recent Zeitgeist for the year 2012 included a well-produced video recapping what the world searched for (and therefore experienced) in 2012:
At 15 million views, not a bad example of content done well in itself
If you’re looking for a large data source for a rich visualization, this is not the place. But Zeitgeist can be useful for brainstorming historical context and content angles.
Uses & benefits of Zeitgeist:
Rich visual "story" experience of historical data
Helpful for brainstorming historical content angles
General nostalgia/inspiration (What? That counts.)
8. Public Data Explorer
Public Data Explorer is Google's portal into government and institutional data sets. While you won't find anything uniquely available here data-wise, the ability to search and browse data sets from one tool can make your research and brainstorming around data visualization concepts far more efficient.
This tool will also allow you to upload your own data sets and visualize them, which might not give you much of a share-worthy result for publishing purposes, but it is a handy way to play with the different ways to present a given data set before the dev team goes to work building the beautiful version.
Uses & benefits of Public Data Explorer:
Search/browse many public data sets from one interface
Upload your own data set
Quickly switch between different chart/visualization approaches for a given data set
This is not an exhaustive list; there are no doubt some other Google applications and features you use for marketing (Related Searches, Ngram Viewer, etc). I am sure I have also missed some uses and benefits of the resources included here. Please share your favorites in the comments!
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Sometimes, marketing enables a pickpocket to steal a wallet--and be thanked for it.
Marketers are responsible for what we do, it's not an activity without effects.
Last year, just one of the big fast food companies made more than $1,300,000,000 in profit (billion with a 'b'). They've also paid their CEO nearly $200 million in salary in the last five years. Sometimes, a big profit is the sign that you're doing something right, creating real value for people able to pay. Sometimes, though, it means you're exploiting a weakness in the system.
The big food companies are brilliant, relentless, focused marketers. Marketing works. It gets people to take action, to change their minds, and most of all, to do more of what they might have had an inkling to do in the first place. Sometimes a lot more. When the ideas of marketing (and the products are part of the marketing, optimized for high consumption) are weaponized like this, they are extraordinarily effective at achieving their goals.
The side effects of this marketing are obvious: both short-term satiation and long-term health degradation. Kids on little league baseball teams may smile with delight when treated to a post-game feast, simultaneously, high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity all rise dramatically over time as a result of consistently consuming vast quantities of the products that these companies market. This is beyond dispute.
In some communities, 70% of the targeted population is now obese.
The challenge doesn't come from one slice of pizza. No, the failing is in abdicating the responsibility that comes from industrial scale. Organizations at scale do far more than give people choices... they change the culture, and must accept responsibility for the changes they choose to create.
If your organization uses terms like share of stomach or hires lobbyists, you've already made a decision to market in a way that changes the culture to benefit you and your shareholders.
What's fascinating is this: the marketing is so powerful that some of the people being hurt actually are eager for it to continue. This creates a cultural feedback loop, where some aspire to have these respected marketing jobs, to do more marketing of similar items. It creates a society where the owners and leaders of these companies are celebrated as risk-taking, brave businesspeople, not as the modern robber barons that they've become.
The cultural feedback loop can't be denied. The NAACP, which represents a population that is disproportionately impacted by the health costs these products create is actually allied with marketers in the fight to sell ever more and bigger portions to its constituents.
The crime continues because the money taken by corporations that change our culture is used to fund campaigns that conflate the essential concept of 'freedom' with the not-clearly-articulated 'right' to respond to marketing and consume stuff in quantities that would have been considered literally insane just three generations ago. And we like it.
[I'll write the previous paragraph's point again here to be clear: we've decided that consumers ought to have the right be manipulated by marketers. So manipulated that we sacrifice our long-term health in the face of its power.]
We ban accounting that misleads, and we don't let engineers build bridges that endanger travelers. We monitor effluent for chemicals that can kill us as well. There's no reason in the world that market-share-fueled marketing ought to be celebrated merely because we enjoy the short-term effects it creates in the moment.
Every profession we respect has limits created and enforced by society. Doctors and undertakers and actuaries live with these limits because it's clear that building for the long run benefits all of us. Sure, it might be fun or profitable to take a shortcut, but it's not the right thing to do. The rules make it more likely we don't race to the bottom as we cut those corners or maximize our profits.
The question is this: are you responsible for the power in your hands? If so, then we need to own the results of our work. If not, someone else needs to step in before it's too late. No sustainable system can grant power without responsibility.
Just because marketing works doesn't mean we have an obligation to do it. And if we're too greedy to stop on our own, then yes, we should be stopped.
[It seems like you could make one of three objections to this line of reasoning:
1. Marketing doesn't work, it's not powerful, it can't get people to do things not in the long-term interest.
2. Marketing does work, but marketers ought to have the right to sell anything they want, and they're not responsible for what they do.
3. If we regulate the dramatically obvious bad cases, we're on a slippery slope to regulating everything.
It seems to me that all three of these straw horses don't hold up under scrutiny.]
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