The Infamous Digital Marketing Algorithms That Shape Internet Traffic

An abstract of my lecture today at the Testingmind conference

I really enjoyed being part of the first ever event like this put on by a truly international company. I'd like to thank Ipsita, Kunal, and Kishore for finding me, reaching out, believing in me, even when at one point, I could hardly believe it myself! Testingmind is a consulting and workforce development organisation helping its clients and customers to optimise IT-intensive processes through consulting, training and live summits. Specialising in coaching software companies in implementing the Agile method of project management, they also host a huge number of training events worldwide.

The following is the abstract I wrote for my talk.

Digital Marketing Summit 2019

Algorithms are mathematical formulas forming the heart and brain of software functionality. High volume Internet sites like Google and Facebook have no option but to implement extreme levels of automation, because manual processing would be a much more expensive option, and not scalable or sustainable long term. Understanding these algorithms is essential in the world of digital marketing in 2019, in order to leverage their benefits and avoid their penalties.

Tom Atkinson from Tomachi Corporation explains what shapes the traffic from organic search, pay per click ads, social referrals, email spam, and recently, the flow of cash from advertisers to social media influencers, by these secret software programs. I’ll explain why so many Hip Hop tracks include references to Alizé and we can discuss ideas and theories on what metrics advertisers check on before paying the next YouTube celebrity to hype their product!

Understanding what the platforms are trying to achieve in future is often a better approach than chasing after where they have been in the past. Google Quality Score is there to keep both the searchers and the advertiser happy, removing low quality ads, and sometimes not showing any ads.

INFAMOUS ALGORITHMS covers buzzwords such as Google PageRank, Facebook EdgeRank, Yahoo TrustRank, SEOMoz MozRank, Google Ads Quality scores, search ranking signals, web spam and email spam detection, duplicate content and canonicalization, social authority signals, Klout, Skorr, StackExchange Flair, and Quora Stats: If there is time and interest, I may also cover how website speed and mobile usability affect traffic sent to your site from Google and how to fix it.