SEO
Conversation Intelligence Trends & Tips From Invoca’s CMO
![Conversation Intelligence Trends & Tips From Invoca's CMO Conversation Intelligence Trends & Tips From Invoca's CMO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/1643720181_Conversation-Intelligence-Trends-Tips-From-Invocas-CMO.png)
In the pursuit of more granular first-party data to better inform marketing campaigns and business decisions of all kinds, conversation intelligence is a field well worth exploring.
Using machine learning and AI-empowered technology to capture, analyze, and even visualize the data from customer calls at scale is driving dramatic improvements in organizations’ understanding of who they serve – and precisely what it is those customers need.
Conversation intelligence adds a data science layer to call tracking analytics.
It’s taking marketers well beyond the simple metrics of how many people called and from which channels to answering complex customer behavior and intent questions such as:
- What trends exist in our customers’ behavior, motivations, and desired outcomes?
- How can we improve the customer experience in the most meaningful ways?
- Which topics and questions are on our customers’ minds?
- What outcomes are being achieved in our customer service agent interactions?
I had an opportunity recently to chat with Dee Anna McPherson, CMO at Invoca and an expert in the field of conversation intelligence.
In this interview, you’ll discover emerging trends in call tracking and analytics, how marketers are using the first-party data gathered through conversation intelligence, and which opportunities should be on your radar as you plan for the year ahead.
McPherson shared tips to help brands make the most of this technology and how AI-assisted call analytics are used in various industries, as well.
Call Tracking & Conversation Intelligence Trends Of Note
Miranda Miller: “Any exciting trends or technological innovations in the call tracking and analytics space that marketers should keep an eye on this year?”
Dee Anna McPherson: “The biggest conversation intelligence trend that we’re seeing is greater usage across the buying journey, particularly for improving contact center performance.
I believe that 2022 is the year when the contact center officially moves from being viewed as a cost center to an opportunity to grow customer lifetime value.
This means that they will need new AI-powered tools to automatically analyze and score agent performance on every call. And, this could have a big impact on conversion rates for search marketers who are spending budget to drive phone leads.
Today, many businesses score agent performance manually by listening to calls, and this means that only 1-3% of calls get scored, leaving a huge margin for error.
Using AI-powered conversation intelligence, businesses can automatically analyze and score 100% of their calls.
The ability to automate Q&A processes leads to better customer experiences, which in turn result in higher conversion rates and improved marketing performance.”
Underutilized Opportunities In Conversation Intelligence
Miranda Miller: “What do you think is the one greatest but underutilized or untapped opportunity in conversation intelligence right now?”
Dee Anna McPherson: “Conversation intelligence is one of the last untapped sources of first-party customer data like digital engagement, behavior, and interactions, purchase history, demographics, and more.
First-party data is increasingly important as the constraints on third-party data tighten up, but how to get it, organize the data, and take action on it still leaves a lot of companies scratching their heads.
Using conversation intelligence, businesses can determine what keywords perform best, get data to precisely retarget and suppress advertising to prospects and customers, and get insight into consumer behavior to guide campaign optimization strategies.
Any business that regularly has conversations with their customers needs to use AI and conversation intelligence to mine that data and make sense of it to be competitive in 2022.”
Conversation Intelligence Strategy For Different Industries
Miranda Miller: “How does conversation intelligence strategy vary by vertical? Are there differences in call tracking and analytics best practices for retail vs. automotive or finance, for example?”
Dee Anna McPherson: “At a high level, all verticals use conversation intelligence to achieve similar fundamental goals, namely to:
- Drive more call conversions and revenue from their marketing.
- Reduce wasted ad spend and unwanted calls and increase ROAS.
- Deliver experiences to convert more callers to customers or patients.
- Uncover more actionable insights from calls to contact centers or locations.
While the fundamentals are similar, customer (and patient) journeys do vary from vertical to vertical – the reasons why consumers call businesses, where those calls go, what a call conversion is, and what elements make up an ideal phone conversation are different from industry to industry.
For example, one of our customers in the retirement communities vertical used Invoca’s AI-powered call analytics to track calls related to COVID-19 concerns, as well as the “tenor and tone” of conversations about the pandemic.
They were able to measure trends by location, and they used this information to update the information they were displaying on their website, and to get a handle on resident and caretaker concerns before they can turn into situations where people are leaving the facilities.
The result was resident turnover actually went down during the first year of the pandemic.
Automotive dealers and service networks face a different set of challenges as calls are routed to individual dealers, not a central contact center. Since the calls are routed all over the place, it makes it difficult to track them and get marketing attribution.
Conversation intelligence can act as a unifier of marketing, sales, and customer experience data, enabling them to improve marketing efficiency and sales performance at any location.
The best practices of conversation intelligence are often the same, but some of the tactics and strategies can differ depending on the industry and what you want to learn from conversations.”
Tips For Call Tracking & Analytics Success
Miranda Miller: “What advice do you have for marketers considering/contemplating adding call tracking and analytics to their stack this year?”
Dee Anna McPherson: “Conversation intelligence has a lot of applications from paid media attribution and optimization to sales to digital user experience.
If you’re thinking about getting started with conversation intelligence, you can see tremendous ROI even if you only focus on one initiative to start.
Many of our successful customers who later expanded their use case started using conversation intelligence for paid search attribution and reporting, and then grew into audience targeting and automated bidding before tackling any other use cases.
So, start off by benchmarking your performance and making one change at a time – we call this the “crawl, walk, run” approach to implementing conversation intelligence across the revenue organization.
Look for a partner that can provide a dedicated onboarding team and that can help you develop an implementation and success plan specifically tailored to your business.
Developing a plan, a clear roadmap, and performance benchmarks with the partner are key to gaining adoption in your organization and exceeding your goals with conversation intelligence.”
Working At Invoca
Miranda Miller: “Thanks for your insight, Dee Anna. Now – for the marketers in the crowd who may be on the hunt for a new opportunity, what makes Invoca a great place to work?”
Dee Anna McPherson: “Being a great place to work takes more than just perks and benefits, especially during ‘the great resignation’ where we have a really hot job market.
Invoca is different than most other technology companies in that we have this “egoless culture” that’s focused on driving value for our customers and our employees.
One of our core values is to “help each other thrive,” and you feel that on every project you work on and any time you reach out for help – someone is always there to support you.
It’s a great feeling knowing that your coworkers always have your back, and you’re not all just competing for the prize. This allows everyone to focus on innovation, our customers, and continuous improvement, and feel good about what they’ve accomplished at the end of every day.
One thing we’ve been focusing on in the last two years is supporting and growing our awesome Invoca culture while shifting to a hybrid workforce that leans toward remote working.
Luckily, we had a lot of remote employees before the pandemic hit, so it was not a big shock to the company or to the people. But, we have implemented initiatives that make everyone feel included and supported, no matter how often they’re in a physical office, if at all.
We’re currently examining how to get the most out of a hybrid approach of people working remotely, working in the office, and coming together for events.
Everything needs to be more curated than it used to be – you can’t just tell people to come in and not have a plan to engage them. Organizing every in-person meeting or event is more like putting together a wedding than a team offsite.
No detail is too small, and we’re paying close attention to everyone’s feedback to provide the best possible experience for all of our employees.”
You can learn more about Invoca’s culture and browse open job postings here.
More resources:
Featured Image: FGC/Shutterstock
In-post Image: Courtesy of Invoca
SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
![WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/WordPress-Insiders-Discuss-WordPress-Stagnation.jpg)
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
![Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Googles-New-Support-For-AVIF-Images-May-Boost-SEO.jpg)
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
![CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CMOs-Called-Out-For-Reliance-On-AI-Content-For-SEO.jpg)
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
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