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Accept that your old value proposition is toast Consider how you convinced your existing clients to sign up with your agency. If your pitch included that you produce amazing results because you’re really good at bid management (something machines are getting really good at), you may need to tweak your positioning. You don’t want to make your main value proposition something that can be put on autopilot by anyone — and will hence become very difficult to price at a level that makes you successful. That’s not to say that you should stop thinking about something like bid management altogether. Instead, you should offer skills that are complementary to the AI system rather than skills that compete against it. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, gives the career advice to “become an indispensable complement to something that’s getting cheap and plentiful.” For example, become a data scientist because we’ll need more people to make sense of the data and to figure out how to turn new insights we get from more sophisticated AI into new strategies. In the context of an ad agency, this makes a lot of sense. You want to be able to say you have great data scientists who can make sense of what the automated systems are doing and make solid recommendations for the next thing to test.

Hire one extraordinary (wo)man American philosopher Elbert Hubbard said that “one machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.” And he was on to something. In engineering, a great engineer can do the work of 10 good engineers. So, as more of an agency’s work gets done by machines and you need fewer humans to do repetitive work, having the smartest possible person to work on the tasks that remain will be more important than ever.

opportunities to “recycle” data we already have to find new and different insights. Think about it–if you’re working at a full-service agency, your overall team may have access to a client’s Google Analytics and Adwords, SEMRush, STAT, HotJar, SurveyMonkey, SpyFu, Twitter Analytics, etc.

To get started on connecting utilizing other teams’ data, you have to pay attention to what the other teams are doing.

the key to integration

Springfield College saw a 26 percent drop in enrollment over the past two decades, from 2,844 to 2,114, but recently managed to stabilize its numbers and even saw an increase this year, to 2,228 according to Stuart Jones, the school’s vice president for enrollment management. Among other tactics, the school used targeted digital marketing to recruit a subset of students it believed was likely to attend, he said.

“Institutions in places like Massachusetts and New York and Illinois are going to be really challenged to maintain enrollments,” said Joseph Garcia, president of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, whose research on this topic is the industry gold standard. “There are just not going to be enough wealthy, full-paying students to go around.

If you're going down the path of data analysis, your primary reason for learning how to program is to work with data and do more sophisticated things with data, then I think there's no better language than Python.

If you're going down the path of web development, you want to be a better technical SEO, you want to understand how websites are constructed, JavaScript is an incredibly robust programming language that has boomed in usage on websites over the last few years. It's also very capable of doing backend web development with a language like Node.js, which is just a variant of JavaScript. The only issue with learning JavaScript is I would say that you need to learn CSS and HTML first.

The 22 local search experts sitting on our survey panel also believe that a mix of different citations, from a range of industry and niche sites, is preferential.

This patent tells us that information that may make its way into Google’s knowledge graph isn’t limited to content on the Web, but can also may “originate from another document corpus, such as internal documents not available over the Internet or another private corpus, from a library, from books, from a corpus of scientific data, or from some other large corpus.

there are a couple of tools that will actually let you see results based on geo coordinates, which is really cool and very accurate. Those tools include the Local Falcon, and there is a Chrome extension which is 100% free, that you can put in your browser, called GS Location Changer.

these two levels, depending on what industry you are working in, it's really important to know which level you need to be looking at. If you work with lawyers, for example, zip code level is usually good enough.

if you work with dentists or restaurants, let's say, you really need to be looking at geo coordinate levels. We have seen lots of cases where we will scan a specific keyword using these two tools, and depending on where in that zip code we are, we see completely different three-packs

But there are a couple of tools that will actually let you see results based on geo coordinates, which is really cool and very accurate. Those tools include the Local Falcon, and there is a Chrome extension which is 100% free, that you can put in your browser, called GS Location Changer. I use this all the time in an incognito browser if I want to just see what search results look like from a very, very specific location. Now these two levels, depending on what industry you are working in, it's really important to know which level you need to be looking at. If you work with lawyers, for example, zip code level is usually good enough.

The traffic valuation method can be useful for devising a value for a non-monetized site

a proper valuation of a website or internet business requires hard data, some financial analysis and most importantly, human judgement. This is unfortunately where automated website valuation tools cannot compete.

Earnings multiples are by and large the most popular valuation approach in small internet business M&A. There are two elements to the method that buyers should become experts in: defining profitability and identifying the factors that should influence the multiple

How to influence the organic product carouselIn Google’s blog post, they detailed three factors that are key inputs: Structured Data on your website, providing real-time product information via Merchant Center, along with providing additional information through Manufacturer Center.This section of the article will explore Google’s guidance, along with some commentary of what I’ve noticed based on my own experiences.

Make sure your product markup is validatedThe key here is to make sure Product Markup with Structured Data on your page adheres to Google’s guidelines and is validated.

Submit your product feed to Google via Merchant CenterThis is where it starts to get interesting. By using Google’s Merchant Center, U.S. product feeds are now given the option to submit data via a new destination.The difference here for Google is that retailers are able to provide more up-to-date information about their products, rather than waiting for Google to crawl your site (what happens in step 1).Checking the box for “Surfaces across Google” gives you the ability to grant access to your websites product feed, allowing your products to be eligible in areas such as Search and Google Images.For the purpose of this study we are most interested in Search, with the Organic Product Carousel in mind. “Relevance” of information is the deciding factor of this feature.Google states that in order for this feature of Search to operate, you are not required to have a Google Ads campaign. Just create an account, then upload a product data feed.Commentary by PPC Expert Kirk Williams:“Setting up a feed in Google Merchant Center has become even more simple over time since Google wants to guarantee that they have the right access, and that retailers can get products into ads! You do need to make sure you add all the business information and shipping/tax info at the account level, and then you can set up a feed fairly easily with your dev team, a third party provider like Feedonomics, or with Google Sheets. As I note in my “Beginner’s Guide to Shopping Ads”, be aware that the feed can take up to 72 hours to process, and even longer to begin showing in SERPs. Patience is the key here if just creating a new Merchant Center… and make sure to stay up on those disapprovals as Google prefers a clean GMC account and will apply more aggressive product disapproval filters to accounts with more disapprovals. ”– Kirk WilliamsFor a client I’m working with, completing this step resulted in several of their products being added to the top 10 of the PP carousel. 1 of which is in the top 5, being visible when the SERP first loads.This meant that, in this specific scenario, the product Structured Data that Google was regularly crawling and indexing in the US wasn’t enough on it’s own to be considered for the Organic Product Carousel.Note: the products that were added to the carousel were already considered “popular” but Google just hadn’t added them in. It is not guaranteed that your products will be added just because this step was completed. it really comes down to the prominence of your product and relevance to the query (same as any other page that ranks).