Massive Overhaul at Google. Plans Announced for New Operating Structure

August 10, 2015

G is for Google.

As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.” From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have.

We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And we haven’t stopped there. We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about.

We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.

Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet. I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President.

What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main internet products contained in Alphabet instead. What do we mean by far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity). Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related.

Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence. In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed. We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well. We'll also make sure we have a great CEO for each business, and we’ll determine their compensation. In addition, with this new structure we plan to implement segment reporting for our Q4 results, where Google financials will be provided separately than those for the rest of Alphabet businesses as a whole.

This new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google. A key part of this is Sundar Pichai. Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time now, and I’ve been tremendously enjoying our work together. He has really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for our internet businesses. Sergey and I have been super excited about his progress and dedication to the company. And it is clear to us and our board that it is time for Sundar to be CEO of Google. I feel very fortunate to have someone as talented as he is to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations. I have been spending quite a bit of time with Sundar, helping him and the company in any way I can, and I will of course continue to do that. Google itself is also making all sorts of new products, and I know Sundar will always be focused on innovation—continuing to stretch boundaries. I know he deeply cares that we can continue to make big strides on our core mission to organize the world's information. Recent launches like Google Photos and Google Now using machine learning are amazing progress. Google also has some services that are run with their own identity, like YouTube. Susan is doing a great job as CEO, running a strong brand and driving incredible growth.

Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things. Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort. We are also stoked about growing our investment arms, Ventures and Capital, as part of this new structure.

Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Our two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.

For Sergey and me this is a very exciting new chapter in the life of Google—the birth of Alphabet. We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity's most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for! I should add that we are not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with related products—the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands.

We are excited about...

• Getting more ambitious things done.
• Taking the long-term view.
• Empowering great entrepreneurs and companies to flourish.
• Investing at the scale of the opportunities and resources we see.
• Improving the transparency and oversight of what we’re doing.
• Making Google even better through greater focus.
• And hopefully... as a result of all this, improving the lives of as many people as we can.

What could be better? No wonder we are excited to get to work with everyone in the Alphabet family. Don’t worry, we’re still getting used to the name too!

Larry Page

CEO, Alphabet

Google Press Release - First published @ https://investor.google.com/releases/2015/0810.html

Facebook's native ads received a big upgrade with the addition of new templates, an ad manager and horizontal scrolling capability

Just over a year ago, Facebook launched “Audience Network”, a mobile ad network that helped extend marketers’ reach outside of Facebook. One of the unique ad options offered was a native ads API for both iOS and Android devices. Today native ads are getting a big boost with the release of new templates, a native ad manager and the addition of horizontal scrolling.

Publishers looking for an easier route to app monetization will enjoy new native ad templates. These templates allow users to customize everything from height and width to title and button color. This will allow publishers to change the native ads quickly and easily to match the current app environment.

Another boon for publishers is the new Native Ads Manager that will help to store and deliver ads. This will be the biggest help for displaying multiple ads with a vertical or horizontal feed or to refresh ads. Native Ad Manager will pre-load 10 ads and deliver based on projected yield.

Lastly, Audience Network will now have the ability for horizontal scrolling ads. This will be available in both templates and the native ads manager and will help advertisers maximize the number of ads within a set amount of real estate.

For more information see the announcement on the official Facebook Developer blog.

The New Search Analytics Report In Google Webmaster Tools

Google officially launched this morning the new Search Analytics report within Google Webmaster Tools.

The Search Analytics report will ultimately replace the Search Queries report in about three-months when Google removes the Search Queries report from the feature from the tool. Search Analytics does pretty much everything the Search Queries report did plus gives you a lot more data and filtering options. Google has been working on it for a long long time, opening up an alpha test to webmasters back January and then webmasters being approved for that test in February, with another roll out in mid-April.

Google said, “the new Search Analytics report enables you to break down your site’s search data and filter it in many different ways in order to analyze it more precisely.”

They added, “there are some differences between Search Analytics and Search Queries.” They explained the data is more accurate and calculated differently. Google set up a help document to explain the difference.

You can now access the tool within Google Webmaster Tools over here.

Personalised Online Marketing - Amazon, Netflix, Facebook and the rest

Anyone who has shopped online, read a news article online, or is engaged in social media has interacted with recommendation systems in some form or another.  

The one that immediately comes to mind is Amazon, the juggernaut online retailer and the largest internet company in the US.

The ‘response to buying suggestions’ that Amazon offers its customers is said to generate an additional 10% to 30% in revenue for the business.

Other popular sites that rely on recommendation algorithms include Netflix, which even sponsored a $1m prize for improvements to its predictive algorithms, and iTunes, the driving force behind the current music industry revolution.

Less obvious, but equally compelling examples of recommendation systems, include Facebook’s News Feed algorithms, which decide what posts to promote – without which there would be an average of 150,000 posts vying for a reader’s attention at one time.

It’s fair to say that researchers at organizations, such as Facebook and Amazon, are constantly innovating in a quest to improve their recommendation algorithms.

But the above examples reflect the need to incorporate multiple, diverse factors when deciding what to recommend, such as personal browsing/purchasing history, choices made by people with similar purchasing history, influence of friends; as well as factors such as the popularity or “trendiness” of an item or social media post.

The academic community refers to these algorithms as personalised collaborative recommendation systems.

They operate on huge tables that store customer histories – each row is a long series of numbers reflecting everything, i.e. all items that the user has purchased, browsed, liked, etc.

Two items are related if lots of customers have shown interest in both these items.

The use of techniques such as dimensionality reduction helps to abstract away from interest in specific items to more general characteristics such as luxury goods, travel in exotic places, new age music, etc.

In turn this helps to group people based on similar interests.

Retailers who want to leverage recommendation systems on their own portals can either attempt in-house implementations, or utilize third party software.

More recently, recommendation systems are being integrated into complete digital marketing platforms.

As Michael Jordan (the Berkeley professor considered to be one of the top scientists in the area of Machine Learning) suggests:

“Personally I find Amazon’s recommendation system for books and music to be very, very good. That’s because they have large amounts of data, and the domain is rather circumscribed.

"With domains like shirts or shoes, it’s murkier semantically, and they have less data, and so it’s much poorer. ... To get that right across the wide spectrum of human interests requires a large amount of data and a large amount of engineering.”

We are already seeing the use of diverse strategies, or algorithms in recommendation systems; and these algorithms vary depending on the type of product, service, or content that is being recommended.

Such algorithms rely on the ability to infer general characteristics of products and services that a customer prefers, as opposed to purchase history of specific items based on SKUs.

Recommendation systems can also place emphasis or “boost” recommendations for products that are trending on social media. 

Photos of the new Mrs. George Clooney sporting a particular dress or handbag on social media result in those items being sold out in minutes. However such a marketing strategy may not be effective if a customer is loyal to only a few brands. 

Christmas gift suggestions also pose a vexing challenge, to both humans and software systems – neither has detailed knowledge about the recipient’s preferences.

Assuming that a recommendation system is given some basic demographical information of the giftee suggestions could be based on what cohorts in similar demographic groups have shown interest in. 

Any additional information that is available about the gift recipient, including their dislikes, could be used to fine tune suggestions.

But ultimately, the ability to personalise depends on how much we can learn about a customer’s preferences, whether it is directly through their own behavior, the behavior of people with similar tastes, or that of friends or peers. 

Another aspect of personalisation has also been proven to be very effective – that of focusing on the tailoring of the message, whether it is an email, or a text message, or even a window on a web page. 

By monitoring how people react to marketing campaigns, one can learn the message characteristics that cause customers to be most responsive. 

For example, the use of language – colloquial versus refined, visual appeal, placement of the action button - all these can influence how a customer may respond.  

Studies have shown that click rates can be increased by 5% or more by tailoring the message appropriately. 

Finally, true ‘personalisation’ needs to take into account when and where to extend offers to customers. In the mobile age, one can take advantage of a customer’s proximity to a retail location in order to deliver a timely offer. 

An email campaign may be more effective at certain times of the day or week; such information can also be learned based on classifying customers into different behavioral groups.

Marketers who wish to take advantage of this technology must recognise the need for flexible systems where the choice of strategies or algorithms can be dynamically configured based on the marketer’s knowledge of customer trends, marketing goals, seasonal and geographical constraints, world events, etc.

A recommendation/personalisation engine cannot be deployed as a standalone tool, but as part of a comprehensive digital marketing platform incorporating customer segmentation, social analytics, as well as email and mobile marketing. 

The time is ripe for marketers to engage with their customers more effectively through personalized recommendations and offers – we now have the tools to support this.  

Mobile marketing, in particular, needs these tools in order to effectively leverage proximity information without spamming customers with streams of “one size fits all” messages.  

We welcome this new age of marketing facilitated by technology that helps us understand what customers want and how to engage with them.

Article by Rohini Srihari and first published on Econsultancy.com

Online Marketing for 'Multi-Passionate' Entrepreneurs

Often, I get the question, "I do so many different things. How do I put them all on my website?"

The answer, like with most questions, is: "It depends."

Let's start with the easiest scenario to address. Suppose you are a "multi-passionate" freelancer, a jack of all trades who sings and also crafts sock puppets and sells them online. Or a psychotherapist who owns a banana plantation on the side. Wouldn't it be easier for all your potential customers if they could find everything you do in one place?

Bluntly, no. Sure, it would be more convenient for you to build and maintain just one website, but remember that a business website does not perform the same function as a personal blog or even an online resume. Cramming unrelated activities onto one site looks cobbled together and makes you seem unfocused.

Your clients don't necessarily care how well-rounded you are as an entrepreneur. And frankly, they may not want to know what other pursuits you have that take time away from THEIR concerns.

Remember that each one of us has a tiny, reptile part of our brain that fervently believes It's all about ME. That's the part of the customer's brain you should be aiming for when you design your business website.

Put differently, online marketing is all about making sure the right audience finds the right thing you are selling.

Now, let's say you own a single business that provides more than one product or service. Ask yourself if your various offerings serve the same or different audiences.

For example, this is the website for an organization called Washington Talent:

At first glance it might not be obvious what Washington Talent does. The top menu includes seemingly unrelated services like music (bands), videography, novelties (whatever!) and something called "photobooth palooza."

But if you are a professional event planner or a person throwing a wedding reception, this combination of services, along with a giant call to "Start planning your event now," it all makes perfect sense.

Sure, a corporate event planner is technically a different entity from a couple planning their wedding, but both are ultimately looking for the same thing - a group of services that, taken together, spells "party."

By contrast, here is a business that on that surface, appears to offer once service―small business coaching:

In in a sense it is for "one" audience, but a closer look reveals that owner Fabienne Frederickson has actually segmented her audience into three categories, and her site directs each segment to a separate track: If you are in the initial stage and just need more clients in order to survive, click on the GROWTH track...if you are in a more advanced stage and are ready to use what you have built as leverage to expand your business, click on the LEVERAGE track; and if your business is already earning over $150k and you are ready to go big, click on the MULTIPLIER track.

As a coach, Fabienne knows that small business owners at different stages in the life cycle of their company each have very distinct needs. She has therefore developed a different package for each group and invites potential clients to self-select by revenue level.

Psychologically, this audience segmentation has a similar effect as the product differentiation on the Washington Talent website: both offer potential customers additional ways in which they might use this business's services beyond what they originally came to the site for.

Just as Washington Talent makes it easy for someone simply looking for a wedding reception DJ to think about also hiring a videographer to capture the fun, Fabienne's Client Attraction site subtly suggests ways to continue to work together in the future. It seems to say: Hey - you might only be ready for the Growth Track now, but sign up for my business school and in no time you'll be set to franchise yourself. There's a progression that puts you in mind to keep going up the ladder.

Article by  Erika Dickstein. Originally published on the HuffingtonPost
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