Always use best practices. That seems like a no-brainer, whatever your line of work. In management, in marketing, in tech assessment and implementation, in operations, following best practices means you’re not re-inventing the wheel, and you’re benefiting from the experiences — good and bad — of others.

But think twice, advises martech practitioner Steve Petersen. “Best practices are great ways to work efficiently while learning from the successes and failures of others,” he writes. “However, reaping their benefits requires more than mere implementation.”

Among other things, make sure the situation you’re confronting really is the one the best practice was devised for. Be wary of people promoting best practices as ways of selling a product (or just their personal brand): their motive may not align with yours. Don’t let established best practices stymie innovation, and don’t ease off on measuring results.

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Join us online, February 23 at SMX Report: a deep dive into everything you need to know about analytics for search marketing. Book now for just $99!

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Pega CRM, part of Pegasystems’ enterprise software portfolio, has greeted the new year with predictions for customer service, including the significance of XR: extended reality. Here are the highlights:

• This will be the year of autonomous service, with younger customers preferring to interact digitally rather than with live agents. Businesses at the cutting edge of this trend are offering customer service journeys rather than channel-based service, using hyper-automation, AI, virtual assistants and robotic process automation.
• Agents will continue to be physically distributed, meaning savings on office space, but investment in a digital collaboration infrastructure.
• The pandemic saw a surge in customer service cases which caught many businesses by surprise. Having learned that lesson, smart businesses will be future-proofing against disruption.
• Forget AR and VR in a customer service context: more than 50% of global business leaders are looking at XR — an umbrella term for a combination all immersive experiences (including real world) — as a differentiator in the next five years thanks to its “ability to simulate physical states of being” for remotely located employees and customers.

Why we care. Customer service is a critical element of the customer experience, and shouldn’t be siloed from marketing and sales. It’s also a business function which faces special challenges when teams work remotely: it deserves attention in 2021. Even so, we’re not placing big bets on XR yet.

Privacy laws may not always top of mind for marketers, but the start of the new year is the perfect time to make sure you are up to date with new global privacy regulations. Don’t let your 2021 marketing strategy break the law! Build a customer-centric, privacy-first strategy that avoids harmful business impacts. Join us for this live webinar with OneTrust and discover how marketers can comply with regulations while remaining on-brand and delivering new and engaging user experiences.

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Google Ads’ auction insights report is nifty; it helps you compare performance with other advertisers participating in the same auctions. It is not, however, easy on the eyes — it’s just a big table of data. And, that data isn’t available through an API, either.

Shashank Tiwari, senior engineer at Optmyzr, has developed a drag-and-drop tool that enables you to take auction insights reports downloaded from Google Ads and turn them into a series of customizable charts (as shown above), making the data easier to interpret and easier to show to stakeholders. It’s free, and there’s no registration required.

Read more here.

As time goes on, Google Ads offers more automations and additional complexity. While some automation may be helpful, you need to be sure it’s not compromising your control over your campaigns. After all, Google doesn’t know your brand and the built-in functionality may not be what you’re looking for.

To succeed in 2021, you must be able to integrate more data, retain control over automatic Google optimizations and fight against increased competition… all with the same 24 hours in a day. Let’s look at the 5 New Year’s resolutions you should focus on in 2021.

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Microsoft is continuing the steady process of making its ads platform compatible with Google Ads, which is especially useful to advertisers who prefer to do their optimizing on Google and import those campaigns over. 

It has extended its Google Import capabilities to include In-market Audiences, remarketing and Custom Combination Lists from Google Ads. All existing scheduled imports from Google Ads will be updated by the end of January to enable advertisers to import and update audience lists and associations. Additional audience types like Customer Match are planned for future updates, as well.

Target Impression Share was another feature it teased: “This strategy will use artificial intelligence to automatically set bids at auction time with the goal of showing your ad on absolute top of the page, top of the page, or anywhere on the page.” We’ll see how effective this “goldilocks” approach to bidding actually is when it rolls out, although a launch date was not provided. 

Read more here.