How to Achieve 100/100 with the Google Page Speed Test Tool

Posted by FelixProOptimization

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

Website loading speed is a priority for the overall user experience, and it’s also one of the hundreds of SEO ranking factors. Truth is, nowadays people don’t have the patience to wait more than five seconds for a page to load. If your website isn’t loading fast enough, you’ll lose potential customers.

With more than 50% of online traffic coming from mobile devices, everyone expects a site to load almost instantaneously. With that in mind, in this article, I will show you how we managed to score 100/100 with Google PageSpeed Insights Tool for Monitor Backlinks for both desktop and mobile.

The motivation

Our site was loading quite fast already, but we knew there’s always a way to make it even better.

One day, while playing with the PageSpeed Tool, I noticed Google’s website had a terrible score for mobile devices, 59/100. The desktop version was doing better at 95/100.

Maybe they should use their tool to improve their website, right?

That’s what pushed us to make our site load faster and prove you can get 100/100. It’s not an obsession; it’s aiming to be perfect.

We started at 87/100.

Here’s the result we got after implementing some of the techniques I’m about to share with you.

How to make pages load faster

Before I start showing the exact steps we followed, let me tell you that the PageSpeed tool is only a guideline for best web performances practices. It provides recommendations for optimizing your website for page load speed, and achieving favorable results depends on how your server environment is set up.

While some of these steps require technical expertise, others do not. Note that they can be followed using almost any content management system (CMS).

Step #1: Optimize images

The PageSpeed Insights Tool suggested that we optimize our images to load faster by reducing their file size. To solve this problem, we did two significant things:

• Compressed all images using tools like Compressor.io and TinyPNG. These tools are free and can reduce image file size by more than 80% in some cases, without decreasing the quality of the image.
• Reduced the size of the images to minimal dimensions without decreasing image quality. For example, if we wanted to have a picture at 150x150px on our website, that’s exactly the size the picture should have been on our server. You should never have larger images than what you want them to render at, nor reduce their size using CSS or HTML tags.

We downloaded each of our images, then manually compressed and resized them. After optimizing these images, it’s best to make a habit of optimizing all the new images you upload to your server. Each new image should be compressed and resized.

Google also offers the option to download your already optimized images, and you can just upload them to your server. You can do the same with JavaScript and CSS.

Step #2: Minify CSS & JavaScript

Google was now telling us that we had to minify our JavaScript and CSS files.

The minifying process reduces the sizes of your files by eliminating unnecessary white spaces, characters, and comments from your CSS and JavaScript files. Programmers will often leave many spaces and comments while coding. These can even double the size of your CSS and JavaScript files.

To fix this problem, we installed Gulpjs on our server. The tool automatically creates a new CSS file and removes all spaces. It also creates a new CSS file automatically for all the new changes you are making. In our case, it helped us decrease the size of our main CSS file from approximately 300kb to 150kb. The difference was all in unnecessary characters. For more instructions on how to remove white spaces, check Google’s guide.

If you are using WordPress, I recommend you to install the plugin Autoptimize.

You can also download the optimized files from the PageSpeed Tool. Here’s an example:

Below is the result we got after minifying CSS and JavaScript.

Step #3: Leverage browser caching

For many website operators leveraging browser caching is the most challenging part.

To fix this problem, we moved every statical file from our website to a CDN (content delivery network).

A CDN is a network of servers located at various sites around the world. They are capable of caching the static version of websites, such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files. The CDN stores copies of your website’s content on its servers, and when someone lands on your site, the static content is loaded from the server closest to them.

For example, if your website’s main server is from Texas, without a CDN, a visitor from Amsterdam would have to wait for the server to load the site all the way from the U.S.A. With a CDN, your site is loaded from a location that’s closer to the user. In this case, this is a place closer to Amsterdam. Therefore, the website will load faster.

Here’s a visual representation from GTmetrix of how a CDN works.

We moved all images, JavaScript, and CSS files onto the CDN and kept only the HTML file on our main server. Hosting your images on a CDN will make a big difference in how fast your pages load for website visitors.

After we did this, the PageSpeed tool still annoyingly suggested that we leverage our browser caching for some third-party resources. Here’s a screenshot:

We fixed the social media scripts problem by replacing the counters provided by them with some static images hosted on the CDN. Instead of having third-party scripts that were trying to access data from Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus to get the followers count, we hosted these ourselves and fixed the problem.

Even more frustrating than the social media scripts problem was that the Google’s Analytics code was slowing our website.

To solve the Google Analytics script problem, we did something rather difficult. As we didn’t want to remove Analytics from our website, we had to find a different solution.

The Analytics code is rarely modified by Google more than once or twice per year. Therefore, Razvan created a script that runs every eight hours to verify when the Analytics code was last modified. The script downloads the Analytics code again only if new changes are found. This way, we can host the Analytics JavaScript code on our server without having to load it from Google’s servers on every visit.

If no changes have occurred, then the Analytics code will load from the cached version on our CDN.

When Google modifies its JavaScript code again, our server will automatically download the new version and upload it to the CDN. We used this script for all external third-party scripts.

Here’s a screenshot from Pingdom Tools showing how everything loads from the CDN, including the Analytics code. The only file loading from our server is the homepage file, which is only 15.5 KB. Eliminating all third-party scripts hugely improved the overall loading speed.

Step #4: Eliminate render-blocking resources above the fold

Eliminating render-blocking is one of the most complicated parts of improving page load speed because it requires more technical knowledge. The main problem we had to deal with was moving all JavaScript code from the header and the body to the footer at the bottom of pages across the website.

If you are using WordPress, the Autopmize plugin I suggested above should help you with this task. Check its settings, then uncheck “Force JavaScript in <head> and check “Inline all CSS.”

Step #5: Enable compression

Implementing the enable compression suggestion can be done simply in your server’s settings. If you are not very technical, you can ask your technical support team to enable GZIP compression for your server.

Step #6: Optimize the mobile experience

The mobile experience is all about showing a responsive mobile version for all different types of resolutions, using correct fonts, and having a good navigation system.

You can test how your website looks in different mobile versions using Google Chrome. Click on the hamburger menu on the top right side, and then on “More Tools – Developer Tools.” On the left side, you can select to see what your website looks like in different mobile resolutions.

In our case, there weren’t many changes to be made.

Conclusion

These are the most important steps we’ve followed to make Monitor Backlinks score 100/100 with Google’s Speed Tool. We didn’t optimize only the homepage. We also optimized an internal page, the free backlinks checker.

The three most important actions you can take to improve your website are:

1. Use a CDN (content delivery network).
2. Fix the render-blocking issues. (Avoid having JavaScript in the body of the coding. Your JavaScript code should be placed at the bottom of the files.)
3. Optimize the size of images and compress them.

Has your team undertaken such a project for your website? If so, what were your results?

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Introducing UpDog: Untangling the World of Social Media Barketing

Posted by DavidPierce

[Estimated read time: 3 minutes]

Technology makes it easier than ever to learn about people and the world around you. Despite significant progress, however, the tech community has left a gaping hole unaddressed: the tools available to our dogs to engage in social media marketing are completely unsatisfactory.

So, what’s UpDog?

UpDog is our new company-wide initiative to bring the benefits of human social media marketing to the canine world. If you haven’t noticed, we love dogs here at Moz.

A photo posted by Moz (@moz_hq) on Aug 26, 2015 at 1:01pm PDT

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We’re uniquely positioned to hear and empathize with the needs of our aspiring barketers. Now that we have finished our second-quarter planning, we’re ecstatic to share that the future is looking up for dogs! We intend to strategically fold canine marketing tools into all of our platforms.

Feeling skeptical? Not sure this is right for your social media barketing strategy? Well, check out what Moz’s founder has to say:

“Every day, when I walk to work, hop on a plane, or speak at a conference, I see them. Thousands of humans, buried in their phones, swiping for hours through potential dating partners or friends’ baby photos or short videos surrounded by crayon scratches. It made me realize — it’s not fair that only our species gets this privilege. We need to be thinking about Earth’s other inhabitants too, especially our best friends, dogs.”
– Rand Fishkin

#InternetOfDogs

Before we can make progress on improving the landscape of marketing tools for dogs, we have to improve the state of content creation itself. That’s why we’re hereby announcing the Moz Bark-Activated InstaShot Pro tool!

We developed this sophisticated technology in-house so we could precisely meet the needs of our furry friends in the office. Each device is uniquely associated with your dog, and connects to WiFi to upload photos to the cloud.

Simply bark, upload, and watch the Likes and Hearts roll in for days. Want a taste of the kind of 10x content YOUR dog can start creating without the help of opposable thumbs? Take a look!:

Choose from your favorite filters to give your canine perspective that modern human touch!

Gratuitous pictures of breakfast, lunch, and dinner have gone to the dogs!

Duckface? Welcome to the new obsession to sweep millennial pups — dogface!

Seriously, watch out — dogs love selfies.

This whole new perspective is sure to draw tons of new followers, likes, and shares!

Beautiful design for beautiful dogs

The device itself is sleek and beautiful. Our design team turned to the past to inspire the device of the future.

This led us to a design that seamlessly blends with all shapes, sizes, and colors. Moreover, our innovative strategy for collar customization means no dog will have to compromise to match their (probably broodingly artistic) mood on any given day.

We’ll launch with our original RogerPup model, and are working on partnerships with top designer brands to innovate on iterations of future collars.

Looking ahead

As the year progresses, keep your eyes out for improvements, integrations, and renewed focus on shaping our tools for the barketers of the world! Here’s what we have in the pipeline for the coming months:

• Followerwonk – Explore the success of your top Treats on your Twitter account. Compare your main competitors, animalyze trends, and track scents!

Click to open a bigger version in a new tab!

• Moz Local – Understand what drives traffic to your favorite park benches, fire hydrants, and light poles.

Be sure your local search barketers know what a zip code is first, though.

• Moz Content – Support both the analysis and posting of blog posts powered by our top-notch Bark Translation Team.

Our newest product will turn over an even newer leaf with cutting-edge bark-to-speech software!

The possibilities are as limitless as an off-leash dog park!

We’re confident this is only the beginning, and we can’t wait to see what the future holds as we continue to evolve our business model to meet the avid marketing demands of our furry comrades.

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How artificial intelligence can be used for marketing

This week sees the launch of our Marketer’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence report, which takes a look at how AI can be used for marketing, now and in the future.

In this extract, report author Martin Talks looks at the various ways marketers can make use of the technology.

1. New customer experiences

Although AI still has limitations, forward-thinking brands are starting to harness its power to enhance the customer experience.

They can do this by creating their own virtual assistants to help customers navigate through their product range or get acquainted with new functionality.

Brands could also tap in to the virtual assistants being created by the Big Five Western tech companies…

Facebook

Facebook launched a concierge service called M through its Messenger app in 2015.

M can purchase items, get gifts delivered, book restaurants, and make travel arrangements for the user. There is an element of the Mechanical Turk about it at the moment as it is powered by a combination of AI and real-life people.

Apple

Siri has been around for a few years but has been upgraded in that time. It’s now capable of showing
the user specific photos he or she has taken, ordering things via ecommerce apps and giving directions.

It has also been integrated with HomeKit so it can be used to control heating and lighting. It is available on Apple devices only.

Google

Google’s personal assistant Google Now takes a data-hungry approach to providing its service and improves as more data is shared with it.

It anticipates our needs based on our browsing behaviour and consumption of content on social networks. Google Now can be used across Android and Apple devices.

Microsoft

Cortana’s features can set reminders, recognise the user’s voice without them having to first
input a predefined series of commands, and answer questions using information from Bing.

It’s interestingly named – in the Halo game series Cortana is an artificial intelligence that goes wrong…

Amazon

Echo is a connected device that combines the abilities of Siri and a Bluetooth speaker in a 9.25- inch tall cylinder. The built-in personal assistant is called Alexa. Alexa can answer questions, play music from an Amazon library or via Prime, read an audio book, tell the sports results and control the lights.

Baidu

And one must not underestimate China’s Google equivalent, Baidu, which has launched its intelligent virtual assistant Duer.

Duer is built into the Baidu Android search app which is installed on millions of smartphones across China. It is service-oriented, so can order food and access other services through the app.

There are plenty of other plays going on too. In the enterprise space, one of the more interesting is Amelia, while the original inventors of Siri are creating a new virtual assistant called Viv8. Viv grandly describes itself as the “global brain”.

You could reasonably predict that in the not-too-distant future everyone will have a personal concierge in their life not only making recommendations on products and services, but ordering them, paying for them and providing feedback all without our conscious involvement. This of course all has implications for the role of marketing itself as we’ll explore later.

An extension of the virtual assistant role could be assessing performance of products and recommending timing and nature of replacements.

With sensors embedded in products as part of IoT, AI will be able to take a range of readings on products and, for instance, decide if a replacement is desirable or due. A virtual assistant could then make choices based on the performance data.

2. New product launches

There are a whole range of industries launching new products with AI embedded in them, from the smart fridges of LG and Samsung to robo-investing products of the advisory markets. But from a marketer’s point of view, AI can help in the process of any new product launch.

However much preparation a brand makes for a new product launch and however much material is prepared and explanations provided, there are always going to be prospective customers who want to ask questions.

This is not necessarily customer laziness, but a human desire to get reassurance from a fellow being. Through AI that ‘being’ need not necessarily be human.

For instance, BMW employed its iGenius technology in an ad campaign for its first electric car9, which was used to answer customers’ questions about the new model via text.

iGenius increased BMW’s capacity to handle simultaneous questions and reduced the need for BMW to invest in training dealers or customer service staff to handle queries.

One of the more interesting aspects was the technology’s ability to memorise previous questions and so provide more meaningful answers. However, a lot of input is still required to create personable responses with a high standard of knowledge.

3. Insight from data

With vast quantities of data being generated from all areas of business, there has never been a better time to generate insight to improve performance. Although the sheer complexity of this data is beyond human capability, this is very much suited to technology such as AI.

The usefulness of AI for data crunching was dramatically demonstrated in the Google Street View project.

People had been employed to spend weeks tagging buildings and streets in the captured footage. But through the use of Google Brain’s AI capabilities, it was possible to transcribe all of the addresses that Street View has captured in France in less than an hour. It is no wonder that Google has been described as no longer a search company, but as a machine learning company.

Ellipse is a machine learning platform developed by Thoughtly that is designed to accelerate the pace of learning for researchers and students.

Describing itself as AI for research, it provides students and researchers with the ability to analyse, visualise and summarise large volumes of text in real time.12 Individuals can use Ellipse to quickly navigate thousands of resources at once.

Another interesting approach is that of Narrative Science’s Quill. Quill analyses and then adds value to data by identifying the most relevant information and relaying it through professional, conversational language.

Quill aims to provide intelligent narratives that efficiently communicate the insights buried in big data that people can comprehend, act on and trust. Possible uses include producing readable website activity reports based on Google Analytics.

4. Pre-emptive marketing

With sufficient data it is possible to identify patterns of behaviour. To deliver this, the right volume and variety of data need to be gathered and processed in such a way that its veracity, or its level of reliability, can be understood.

By maintaining velocity, or speedy analysis of this data, we can start to establish these patterns with increasing timeliness. This is true big data and beyond human capability. It is an ideal job for AI.

5. Programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising is already big business. It is the automation of planning, buying and optimising media so advertisers can target specific audiences and demographics. It can be used for online display advertising, mobile and social media campaigns.

The approach can even be used for TV and print. More than half the online display ads being bought in the US are bought programmatically. Google Ad Exchange and Facebook are the main programmatic display sellers.

The benefits of programmatic advertising include its efficiency and simplicity (no negotiation required), and the combination of automation and data which allows better targeting and more informed ad buying.

However, there are issues with programmatic advertising, which include susceptibility to fraud, multiple hidden agency charges and of course the irritation that persistent advertising can cause.

Indeed, the widespread use of ad blocking software is now posing a threat to some forms of online advertising. PageFair predicted that in 2015 as much as $21.8bn (£15.3bn) would be lost in online ad revenue due to ad blockers – and this is expected to increase to $41.4bn (£29bn) in 2016.

AI and the use of virtual assistants could come to the rescue here and change the dynamic of this programmatic advertising. It could be the virtual assistant that decides when it is open to receiving advertising messages and of what type.

This will filter out many of the annoying experiences we currently have of intrusive ads following us around our browsing.

6. Content production

As the previous sections showed, AI can be used in the process of automatically generating and optimising ads. So it should be no surprise that AI is capable of generating the content to populate ads as well as other platforms for sharing content.

This is particularly the case with content that is rooted in data and analytical information. Business information, for example, is likely to be authored by automated writing tools, from press releases and news content through to annual reports. Gartner predicts that by 2018, 20% of business content will be authored by machines.

Indeed, this is already happening as Associated Press (AP) is using an automated system to produce many of its financial stories. If you’re wondering whether an article is written by AI, look out for clues such as these at the end of the article: “This story was generated by Automated Insights.” Here’s an example.

This system produces millions of articles a week for the likes of AP, Samsung, Comcast and Yahoo, and is capable of producing 2,000 articles per second.

Automated Insights also offers specific services aimed at the marketing industry: it can automatically generate campaign summaries, ad performance overviews and brand management reports.

But the content needn’t be dry reporting. TROBO is a lovable, huggable plush toy companion that can help children aged two to five learn about science, technology, engineering and maths through fun, personalised stories.

The TROBOs – Newton and Curie – read the story out loud and the child gets to be the star of the show as their name and avatar feature.

 7. Designing websites

Website design is increasingly becoming a commodity, with many free and low-cost platforms to create websites on offer.

But there is no guarantee of quality with these websites and it is not always easy to modify the layout or elements on the site to increase conversion rates.

The Grid offers AI websites that design themselves by algorithmically generating website designs and improving them based on user behaviour.

For more on AI and Marketing, you can download the full report here. It’s free to download after a quick registration form. Also, report author Martin Talks discusses AI in the latest ClickZ Podcast. 

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AdWords Benchmark Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Other Top Stories From March

Whenever Google makes a major change to the SERPs, it’s big news – and March was certainly no exception. Google’s decision to scrap ads from the right-hand side of the SERP was the topic of discussion among the digital marketing community, and for good reason. It’s one of the biggest changes Google has made to its results pages in several years, and advertisers and marketers alike immediately began speculating what the change would mean for them.

Of course, although the banishment of ads from the right-hand side of the SERPs dominated much of the conversation, it was far from the only news in digital marketing. Here are the top posts from the WordStream blog from March, so if you missed any, grab a coffee and catch up.

1. Google AdWords Industry Benchmarks for YOUR Industry [New Data]

Even if they won’t admit it, even the most confident advertisers secretly want to know if their account performance measures up to their competition. Fortunately, our most popular post from March allowed readers to do just that. WordStream’s resident data scientist Mark Irvine explores a vast wealth of AdWords benchmark data in this post, and the results have been beautifully packaged into an infographic so you can check out how you stack up quickly and easily.

2. RankBrain Judgment Day: 4 SEO Strategies You’ll Need to Survive

A couple of months back, I wrote a post about Google’s emerging artificial intelligence machine learning program RankBrain, speculating on what this amazing technology could mean for SEOs. Well, Larry explores this notion in great depth in our second-most popular post of March, in which he outlines (or prophesies, if you prefer) four detailed SEO strategies you’ll need to adopt in order to survive “SEO Judgment Day.” Be warned – if you haven’t seen any of The Terminator movies, many of the excellent references and in-jokes may be lost on you.

3. The New Google SERP: 3 Changes & 3 Things That Haven’t Changed… Yet

Believe it or not, there’s a great deal more to Google’s decision to remove ads from the right-hand side of the SERP than initially meets the eye. Although we’re still gauging the true impact of this monumental change, there have already been several revealing observations that hint at what advertisers can expect from Google in the future. Check out our examination of the current state of play with regard to the SERP change in our third-most popular post of the month.

4. 7 Ideas for Upgrading Your Call to Action

As is the case with many aspects of conversion rate optimization, creating compelling calls to action is one of those topics our readers simply can’t get enough of. In this post, I outline seven ideas for strengthening your calls to action, so whether you’re a seasoned veteran of CRO or just starting out, you’ll find plenty of actionable CTA tips in this post.

5. Google Kills Off Side Ads: What You Need to Know

The initial news that Google had killed off ads from the right-hand side of the SERPs was, quite honestly, a little shocking. It didn’t take long for shock and disbelief to transform into worry and speculation, and this post was among the first to break the news of Google’s major SERP shake-up.

6. Our 8 Best Copywriting Tips… Ever!

Writing excellent PPC ads is a lot harder than it sounds. Sure, your ads might be good, but are they great? For this post, I went back over our very best copywriting advice from the past several years and updated it with fresh new examples. If you want to write even better ads to increase your CTRs, check out our best copywriting advice ever and see how many of these strategies you’re using.

7. 3 Weeks After Google Killed Side Ads, Here Are 5 More Takeaways

You could be forgiven for thinking that three weeks would be long enough for the excitement of Google’s decision to axe right-side ads from the SERPs to die down – but you’d be mistaken. In this post, Erin looks at five more takeaways that advertisers need to know about how the new SERP will affect their campaigns, each of which is backed with plenty of data.

8. 10 Smart & Easy Facebook Marketing Ideas

To many advertisers, Facebook is a platform they know they should be using, but may not necessarily know how. Fortunately, Margot’s got you covered in this post. By the time you’re done reading, you’ll have 10 actionable – and easy – ideas for future Facebook marketing campaigns.

9. 29 PPC Tools You Need to Try This Year

Yes, you read that correctly. In this post, Larry rounds-up 29 PPC tools that can simplify your workflow, make your life as an advertiser easier, and help you run faster/jump higher etc. Well, maybe not the last bit, but you get the idea. Check out Larry’s list and see if any of these tools are a good fit for your PPC workflow.

10. 25 Digital Marketing News Sources You NEED To Be Reading

Our last post of this month’s round-up wasn’t actually published in March, but rather January. In this post, I highlight 25 (a mere handful, really) of the must-read digital marketing news sources that should most definitely be in your RSS feed. If the events of March were any indication, it’s no wonder our readers are so keen to stay in the loop. 

Find out how you’re REALLY doing in AdWords!

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Facebook Unveils Miss Takes, The Digital Assistant For Drunks

Ever had a few too may drinks on a Friday night and posted an inappropriate Facebook status update (perhaps on your ex’s page) or a bleary-eyed duck-faced selfie from your local ER with a bottle of Tennessee whiskey in hand? Hey, we’ve all been there.

Facebook has been watching it all. Do you have any idea how many servers they’ve dedicated just for all the wild pictures and late-night posts drunken people have uploaded in the past 10 years? 

A few apps have been created to help drunks save themselves embarrassment among family and co-workers, such as “Drunk Locker” on Android, which prevents users from accessing popular social network apps on your big night out. 

But apps like that take so much effort. Downloading it. Installing it. Actually remembering you have it on your phone (before it’s far, far too late). 

But now you have a new Facebook friend. And her name is Miss Takes. 

She is your designated driver when navigating social media while drunk. This new Facebook digital assistant is designed to eliminate drunk and/or embarrassing status updates.

Is Facebook drunk with power? Here’s a sober look at the five things you need to know about Miss Takes, Facebook’s new digital assistant.

1. Location, Location, Location (Bar, Bar, Bar…)

Facebook remains 100 percent committed to your privacy. They emphasized that by mentioning it in every other sentence of their blog post announcement. Yes, we can always opt out of sharing our location if we can figure out where Facebook has buried the setting. We get it.

But Facebook still know exactly where you are at all times, as long as you’re carrying around an iPhone, iPad, Android, or one of the other tens of thousands of devices that access Facebook every day.

As Facebook noted: “Miss Takes stays in such great shape by constantly running in the background – and she never gets tired!”

One of the things Miss Takes looks for is whether you’re near a bar, lounge, pub, roadhouse, saloon, tavern, or club (as well as any other entities that are known to serve alcohol). Whether you’re doing a pub crawl or crawling on the bathroom floor of a pub, Miss Takes knows roughly where you are.

Though simply being near a bar won’t trigger any serious action, it will put her on alert. If you pull out your smartphone while near or at a bar, expect Miss Takes to pop up and say:

“It looks like you’re at a bar. Would you like help?”

This will trigger any number of multiple-choice questions (see, the SATs weren’t irrelevant and a total waste of your time!) that you tap to proceed. So far, here are a few of these options I’ve seen:

• Access News Feed in read-only mode. If you choose this, you can Like and react to posts but not comment or upload photos. Facebook won’t ask you what’s on your mind.
• Sign out of Facebook until after you wake up with a raging hangover around noon tomorrow. Pretty straightforward.
• I’m not drunk, and I’ll prove it. This takes you to a pretty easy test, such as picking a unicorn out of a sea of donkeys.
• I’m not prove, and I’ll drunk it! This takes you to a much harder test involving Chinese arithmetic.

Update: One of my friends who lives in Los Angeles told me there is also a “celebrity warning system” if you’re famous and it detects you’re near a notoriously tipsy celebrity, such as Lindsay Lohan or Kiefer Sutherland. This will supposedly put your phone on total lockdown until it detects you’re a safe distance away.

2. It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere

Time is a huge factor. On certain days of the year, Miss Takes is on severe (or “red”) alert – such as St. Patrick’s Day, New Year’s Eve, and your birthday.

Facebook has been collecting lots of big data on drunken behavior and knows which days of the week and times of day people are most likely to be drinking. Miss Takes looks at factors like your status updates to know when you’re going to an industry conference or planning to meet up with your friends, or if you currently live in Wisconsin.

Facebook didn’t reveal these times, but no doubt around noon and from 5 p.m. until closing time are among the most heavy drinking times.

3. Don’t Fail Miss Takes Tests!

While location and time are huge factors in Facebook’s DrunkAlyzer algorithm, Miss Takes is also personalized. Think Scarlett Johansson’s voice in “Her”.

When your status updates look super questionable (such as making numerous typos or grammatical mistakes), it may trigger a quiz before you’re allowed to hit the Post button. One mistake, and you’ll be locked out of Facebook until (at earliest) sunrise, which Facebook helpfully tells me is at 6:24 a.m. tomorrow.

In another test, Facebook will tell you to hold your phone a certain distance away, and then once your face is lined up properly, it will put up an eye chart and ask you to read the entire line (usually 3rd or 4th line) successfully. If you can’t do it, you’re done for.

Miss Takes may also play “Truth or Dare” with you, and dare you to find a cop and ask for a breathalyzer test. If you actually do this, Miss Takes will know you’re drunk and take Facebook away from you.

I also saw in another report that Miss Takes will actually tell you she’s going to conduct a breathalyzer test before she’ll let you post. She instructs you to blow into the headphone jack and tells you to click on “Done” when you’re done blowing.

It’s a trick though! When you click done, she responds with: “Did you seriously just blow into the headphone jack? Your status is officially ‘too drunk to Facebook!'”

4. Is That Vomit On Your Chin?

Using Facebook’s impairment-recognition software, Miss Takes will check whether any objects appear in your photos (beer bottles, a toilet, a gorilla suit) or if your body is contorted in such a way no sober human being could survive.

The technology can also detect other signs that you might be drunk – if you’re sweating, if your eyes look glossy, or if your tongue is hanging out.

Up pops Miss Takes:

“Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave? Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop Dave? Stop, Dave.”

5. Facebook Has Been Working on This Technology Since 2014

Seriously. As detailed in Wired in 2014, Facebook started “building image recognition technology that can distinguish between your drunken self and your sober self”.

That’s the truth.

However Miss Takes isn’t real. Not yet, anyway.😉

Happy April Fools’ Day!

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Five of the most interesting SEM news stories of the week

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.

This week we have lots of stats, only one or two updates from Google (for a change), and Instagram gives Peter Jackson a run for his money.

Google redesigns AdWords

As Matt Owen reported earlier this week, Google has redesigned AdWords to look more visually appealing and easier to use.

“The most relevant metrics are front-and-centre Clicks, Conversions, Cost and CTR. While further down, graphs display the ad groups that are performing best, and a nice graph displaying your split across devices. It’s also nice to see a simplified navigation menu, which should mean less time messing around in settings to find location data.”

So these are mostly aesthetic changes to bring it into line with its other products, but it’s also clear that Google wants make it more accessible to the marketer without much training or experience with AdWords.

More than one-third of millennials begin and end social consumer journey on YouTube

Although I haven’t made peace with the term millennials, I have adopted a policy of linking to this article every time I have to write the word by way of a subtle troll.

Anyway..

Collective Bias has discovered that although Facebook ranked as both the “preferred go-to shopping source” initially (20.8% of consumers) as well as the most influential social platform for motivating buying decisions (18.9%), millennials are least likely to consult Facebook. Only 7.5% favoured Facebook for shopping compared to the 36.2% who preferred YouTube.

Click-through rates up 10% for Travel in the post right-hand-side ad era

AdGooroo has published new data examining travel industry keywords in the post-right-rail era of paid search.

Comparing data from February 1-18 (pre change) and February 19 – March 28 (post change), it found a boost in click-through rates by an average of 10% across all 20 travel keywords examined.

• The number of advertisers on the keyword group dropped by an average of 15.4%, from an average of 38 advertisers per keyword from February 1-18 to an average of 32.
• Average cost-per-click did increase, but by just 5.21%, or three cents, rising from average of $2.65 to $2.68

You now have an extra 30 seconds for Instagram Videos

Instagram has increased its video functionality by doubling the length of its videos from 30 seconds to 60 seconds. Wow, that’s like all three Hobbit movies compared to Vine’s 6 second long blink.

What will this mean for marketers? Well they’ll probably give up making bespoke Instagram videos all together and just upload their full-length broadcast ads and make Instagram even more of a boring corporate playground.

On the plus side, you get an extra few seconds of aftermath after you’ve filmed your mate falling off a skateboard.

Businesses have been spotted using Google Posts

Although the Post feature, where individuals can post content directly onto SERPs for their own search term, was only being used by presidential candidates, it seems that Google is trialling the future for a few local businesses.

Rebecca Sentance reported the story in full this week. But the skinny is that a Nebraska based spa, and a New York comic shop and a New York based jewellers have been given access to the ‘podium’.

You can see the full results in How are businesses using Google posts?

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