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“OK, Google. Good morning.”

My name is Amanda, and these are the words I use to start my day.

And no later do I utter them, it seems, than a smart home speaker responds with, “Good morning, Amanda,” followed by a brief weather report, and tech news briefings from a handful of sources.

For many consumers, there isn’t anything about this routine that sounds terribly out of the ordinary. In my workplace alone, many of us kick off the day by fumbling for coffee and mumbling a verbal command for news that, somehow, our respective smart home speakers of choice understand.

But here’s the thing: Neither morning doesn’t end there. Throughout the day, I use both Google Home and Amazon Echo simultaneously — each for different tasks, often in different rooms. 

And now, I’ve added an Apple HomePod to the mix.

I know what you’re thinking — what could one woman ever possibly do with more than one — let alone three — smart home speakers?

Think of it this way: I tried using all three at once, so you wouldn’t have to. 

Here’s how that played out.

What Happens When You Use Three Smart Speakers at the Same Time?

It Began With Two

Since the HomePod only became available last week, up until then, I was only using two smart speakers: the Amazon Echo (which I’ll refer to throughout this post as Alexa, the name of its built-in digital personal assistant) and the Google Home.

A lot has changed since I wrote last year about the distinctions between Alexa and Google Home. Both devices have evolved with fresh capabilities and features, creating new differentiating factors.

One of the biggest improvements, when it comes to my day-to-day, is the number of Alexa’s skills versus those available through Google Home. Alexa’s catalog of skills, in fact, has grown into an app store of sorts, with 15,000 available for users to enable.

My personal favorite is My Boxing Coach, which I use at least twice a week. But I don’t use it without the help of my Google Home — and here’s why:

Music credit: “5 out of 6” by Dessa

Allow me to make one thing clear: Tasking multiple smart speakers with different functionalities to create a full home workout experience is what I’d call a “first world problem,” to be sure. 

But, when I shared the experience with my colleague, HubSpot Director of Web Development Dmitry Shamis (whose name you might recognize from our previous coverage of the two devices), he told me, “You shouldn’t have to.”

When Shamis and I were discussing this same topic a year ago, he argued you don’t need both devices, because they share enough of the same capabilities to, say, get through an average day. But now, we’ve both changed our tune.

And while “need” is quite relative when it concerns any tech gadget, it’s very easy to use both speakers at once, for different things — especially when only one of them features something like a workout app. (Google Home, for its part, only lists nearby gyms when I prompt it for a good workout.)

Enter: The Ecosystem

My recent conversations with Shamis got me thinking about the idea of an ecosystem, and the way a series of branded products are often built to work only with each other. That was an issue at this year’s CES, where several Samsung and LG products were designed this way — under a branded ecosystem. 

Between Alexa and Google Home, the latter seems to have a better foundation resembling an ecosystem. Google has its own phone, a suite of communication applications, calendar, and a music service. But its smart speaker is still designed to integrate with services from other brands, like Spotify. 

Alexa is a bit further behind when it comes to an ecosystem. Though the Echo does have features like its own music service, and it allows users to make Amazon purchases through the speaker, the strategy of its parent company focuses more on moving into and taking the lead in major industries (think: online retail, grocery shopping, and more recently, healthcare and shipping).

So, why do you have to use both to have background music for your workout? It’s not like Google is a stranger to an app store. After all, it has its own catalog of Android applications on Google Play. Why leave that part out — as well as the ability to combine skills simultaneously? 

And Then Came the HomePod

When it comes to a branded ecosystem, it’s easy to think of Apple. And while it was a bit late to the smart speaker party, we can’t deny that it was an early market leader in so many of the other things behind these devices: smart mobile devices, a digital personal assistant, voice search capabilities, and a portfolio of products that all look, feel, and sound alike.

Adding a smart speaker to the portfolio not only made sense, but almost seemed like a latent move for Apple.

“Apple is kind of amazing at turning all its products into an ecosystem,” says Kevin Raheja, HubSpot’s Director of Strategic Partnerships. “A really sticky ecosystem.”

It’s a point that became particularly relevant when I began using my own HomePod, and learned that if I want to play music on it, I have to do so through Apple Music — no Spotify, no Pandora, no integration with any other streaming service:

What gives — and what is Apple’s end game with this kind of restriction?

Is Apple that confident in its base of brand loyalists that it can successfully and fully eliminate all other music services from its smart home device especially when one of its top selling points is its superior sound quality?

In a word, Raheja told me: “Yes.”

To underscore that answer, he reminded me that Apple Music already has more user accounts than Spotify’s domestic user base, allowing it an early advantage as it enters the smart speaker market. It’s also important to consider the likelihood that a user would purchase a HomePod because she already uses other Apple devices and services, like an iPhone or MacBook — and is equally as likely to have an Apple Music subscription upon purchase.

But the restriction isn’t limited to, say, personal playlists. The HomePod also has extremely limited availability when it comes to general queries, like this one:

Compare that to the abilities of Alexa and Google Home, which, on some level, understand what kind of music you’re looking for — and can prompt either its own respective music catalog or Spotify’s to play a radio station or playlist to match.

“Apple’s music marketplace and ecosystem are an extension of that sticky platform I mentioned earlier,” Raheja explains. “It already has enough Apple Music users that Apple doesn’t have to bet on being platform-agnostic, like Amazon and Google do.”

The keyword here is “platform”: the idea that Apple is, at once, its own ecosystem, operating system, and brand.

And that, says HubSpot Marketing Fellow Sam Mallikarjunan, could indicate “a war of platform attrition.”

“Everyone wants to be the platform, not be featured on the platform,” he explains. “By adding third-party services, Apple would add value for the subset of users who like both Apple and Spotify, for example, as well as gain some small amount of additional information about their tastes.”

But there’s a catch to obtaining that data. “By allowing Spotify or Pandora, Apple would also be feeding those services additional revenues and exposing its existing base to alternative options,” Mallikarjunan elaborates. “There’s not a ton of upside there for Apple, who would probably like to see a world in which there were no Pandora or Spotify.”

If that were the case, he points out, both Amazon and Google’s native music services would be in direct competition with Apple Music — creating the platform war he previously alluded to.

But This Isn’t Only About Music

The HomePod, overall, is a bit of a general disappointment when compared to the basic functions of Alexa and Google Home — and that’s coming from someone who uses both a MacBook and an iPhone.

Plus, it’s recently come to light that the product might be hazardous, reportedly leaking an acidic substance onto and damaging wood surfaces. See below:

Image credit: Jon Chase, Wirecutter

Oh, and few other things: The HomePod can’t make phone calls. It can’t integrate with my calendar. It can’t send messages. And in a recent accuracy test conducted by Loup Ventures, it only answered 52% of queries correctly, compared to Google’s 81% and Alexa’s 64%.

Keep in mind, Siri can do many of these things on the iPhone. So why take away those functionalities on its giant, borderline cumbersome smart speaker version?

To that, Raheja points to Apple’s tardiness in entering the smart speaker market.

“It’s possible that Apple just wanted to get to market,” he says. “Integrating Siri can be done, but not as quickly as pushing a good consumer speaker, quickly.”

If that’s the case, what’s the fate of the HomePod? Will even the most brand-loyal Apple users be satisfied enough with superior sound quality (the only apparent advantage) that they’ll be able to ignore — or at least tolerate — these seemingly limited capabilities?

“Homepod is a good fit for Apple users, but not great, unless you’re wholly committed to the Apple ecosystem,” says Raheja. “It has Siri, but those abilities are limited. Something like Alexa is much more flexible.”

Who does Raheja think will win the platform war?

“The reason Amazon will win this space, in my opinion,” he says, “is that it also lets you buy things. And very soon, that could be a standard channel for everyday transactions.”

I’m Not the Only One — I Swear

I’ll admit that filling my home with not one, not two, but three smart speakers is what the kids might call “extra”: an unnecessary amount of both clutter and connectivity in a place that’s supposed to be an abode and retreat from my day-to-day tech life.

But I was delighted to learn I’m not the only one who uses multiple devices of this kind under the same roof. When I found out that Marketing Blog Section Editor Karla Cook also has both an Echo and a Google Home, I asked if she uses both for different things.

“Oh, I definitely do,” she told me.

“Google Home is for questions,” she said, with a nod to Google’s origins as a search engine. “Alexa is strictly a kitchen tool.”

And while the Google Home can also be used for cooking purposes like finding recipes, translating measurements, or reading instructions, it does draw attention to the fact that Alexa lacks the general information-finding abilities of its Google and Apple counterparts. Remember that accuracy test from earlier? While both outperform Siri’s information-finding ability, Google Home outperformed Alexa in correct answers by 17%.

Ultimately, what that teaches me is that even with a branded ecosystem, smart speakers are still highly fragmented.

In a way, one might compare them to the different messaging platforms available from Apple (iMessage) and Android devices. Sure, they can work together to some degree and allow users of both products to communicate. But without a cellular connection, for example, they can’t send and receive messages to or from one another.

None of the devices, when used alone, are bad. They all have quite a bit to offer, depending on the preferences of their respective users.

I do look forward to the day, however, when these devices work as true ecosystems — and can maintain a degree of brand loyalty while also allowing individual users to fully personalize their experiences with them. 

But, I will end our little roundup with a sentiment of gratitude. The fact that we are living in a time that — for me, at least — our parents could once only imagine by way of science fiction novels and films, is truly magnificent. We are lucky to witness this technology unfold.

I believe there’s a quote from the Rolling Stones that applies well here: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes, you get what you need.” 

Featured image credit: “Google Home tech” by NDB Photos, used under CC BY / Cropped from original

For a long time, keyword rankings were a staple part of any SEO campaign. In a lot of cases they were a primary metric used to judge performance.

Go back five or six years and we had so much more information on the keywords that users were searching for to reach our web content. All of this information was available transparently within Google Analytics, and you could get relatively accurate search volume estimates from within Google’s Keyword Tool.

The first major update that changed this was Google move to encrypted search and the dreaded appearance of “not provided” within Google Analytics.

This created a ripple effect across many SEO software providers that made a lot of their tools less effective — or at least tougher — to measure the impact coming from organic search on a granular level.

Next up, and more recently, was Google’s decision to move search volume estimate within their Keyword Planner tool to show estimates in broad ranges. Instead of learning that a keyword was being searched for 1,400 times each month, we’re told that it’s searched between 1k-10k times per month. This isn’t overly helpful.

These changes have forced marketers to adapt their search strategy to focus less on individual keywords and shift to a topic-centric content strategy, especially for content sitting at the top of the funnel.

Keyword Rankings are Inaccurate

One of the major criticisms of keyword ranking data is the fact that it is largely inaccurate. Many industry leaders and even software providers of rank tracking data have admitted that this is the case.

The reasons behind this can be broken down into three broad buckets:

1. Personalization.
2. Device.
3. Location.

Personalization

Around the time of the launch of Google+, the SEO industry was talking a lot about personalization within search. Even after the death of Google+, personalization has remained a big consideration.

Bonus points if you remember Authorship snippets (circa 2012).

Ultimately, Google will deliver results that are personalized to a user based on their search history. This means that if I were to search for a query like “electric cars” and I’d previously been browsing the Tesla website, it’s a possibility that Google would tailor the rankings of the search results to show Tesla near the top.

This wouldn’t be the case for someone that hasn’t previously visited Tesla’s website, which makes it very tough to determine which website actually ranks #1 (because it can be different from one person to the next).

Device and Location

Whilst personalization plays a part in the ambiguity of keyword rankings, it’s nothing compared to the role of implicit query factors like device and location.

One of Google major advancements in search over the past five years has been its ability to take into account aspects of a search query that aren’t explicitly stated. To make sense of what I’ve just said, let’s take a query like, “Boston restaurants”.

Go back to 2010 and a search for “Boston restaurants” would yield a list of relatively generic websites that either talk about Boston restaurants or maybe are a restaurant.

Fast-forward to 2018 and a simple search for “Boston restaurants” will arm Google with a whole lot more information than before. They’re able to see which device you’ve searched from, where you’re located whilst you’re searching, even if you’re currently on the move.

Let’s say that you searched on an iPhone and you’re walking around in the center of Boston at 11:30 am. Here’s what this query would actually look like to Google:

“Which restaurants are currently open for lunch within walking distance of my current location in the center of Boston, MA?”

They’ve gathered all of this information without the individual even having to type it. As a result, they’re able to completely tailor the search results to this individual searchers’ current situation.

So … to answer the question of who ranks #1 for “Boston restaurants” becomes an even more challenging task.

Keyword Rankings are Directional at Best

Strong keyword rankings don’t always equate to high volumes of organic traffic, let alone improvements in revenue. As I mentioned at the beginning, we’ve lost a lot of visibility on search volume metrics, which makes it very difficult to accurately estimate the amount of traffic you can gain from an individual keyword. Factor in the changing appearance of the search engine results page (e.g. the widespread increase in featured snippets) and it becomes an even more daunting task.

If keyword rankings are your North Star, you may be traveling in the completely wrong direction.

When all you’re obsessing over is where each page is tracking against a ranking goal, you’ll likely be misses a ton of other value that your content is bringing in. For example, what if you’ve built out some content with the primary goal of driving backlinks or social traffic, but it isn’t necessarily designed to rank for much itself (e.g. a research report)? Using keyword rankings as a determining factor of success could evaluate content in a completely inaccurate way.

Measuring Performance at the Topic Cluster Level

To combat a lot of the issues I raised above, we shifted the way that we measured content at HubSpot. For the past couple of years we’ve taken a step back from analyzing the performance of content on a page-by-page level and looked at the performance of content at the topic cluster level.

Organic search traffic and conversions are our primary search goals, so when we group our content into clusters to try and gain visibility for any searches related to a given topic, we look at the collective performance of these groups of webpages vs just the performance of individual pages.

This model of analysis helps us account for the varying goals of each individual piece of content. Also, running this analysis at scale tells us which topics tend to drive more traffic growth compared to others, and which topics tend to convert traffic at a higher rate.

This information tends to provide much clearer insights for the team as to what they should focus on next without obsessing over individual keyword rankings.

Is There Still a Place for Keyword Rankings?

Despite everything I’ve said above, I’m not actually saying that keyword rankings are dead (I can already see the tweets ready to be fired at me!). Keyword data can be useful for digging into any SEO problems that happen to your site, and also to look into the intent behind certain types of searches.

That said, the new version of Google Search Console that has just recently been rolled out should give you pretty much everything you need here.

More than anything, as a marketer you need to be aware that the data that you’re looking at related to keywords is not 100% accurate. As a result, this should never be your primary performance metric.

This past summer I managed the largest acquisition campaign in my company’s history. I work at HubSpot, a marketing software company that popularized lead-gen campaigns and the whole idea of “inbound marketing,” so this is no small feat (we’ve run massive campaigns over the years).

The campaign, Four Days of Facebook, drove 10x the number of average leads of a typical acquisition campaign and 6x the lifetime value of projected customers.

But I didn’t do it alone. This campaign involved 11 teams and 33 people who directly contributed to the work.

Cross-functional campaigns like this can be big, complicated, and challenging which is why they so often take a boss or recognized leader to make them happen. So I wanted to share my experience as a “non-boss.” I hope it encourages other individual contributors out there to get their co-workers in other departments excited about working on high-impact, cross-functional projects.

Pre-Planning: Create Alignment

You won’t have all the answers on day one, but make sure every conversation you’re having at this stage focuses on one thing: impact. You’ll be asking a lot of people to work hard on something outside of their normal day-to-day, make it clear that your asks will translate into business results.

• Meet with senior leaders of each team before you ask for their employees commitment on helping. Again, make it clear that you won’t be wasting anyone’s time, you’re out to generate big results.
• Have a kickoff meeting with the team who will be responsible for delivering the work. At a high-level, you want to let everyone know that you have senior leadership buy-in and the project will be worth their time. On a more tactical level, you’ll also want to get people up-to-speed on the tools you’ll be using to manage the project.
• Go the extra mile to develop a team culture for your team. You know how developers name their projects crazy-sounding names? It’s surprisingly effective! Give your temporary team a name that makes people feel like they’re a part of something, set up an email alias, and create a Slack channel. Get people excited!

Throughout the pre-planning stage, keep your vision front and center. For Four Days of Facebook we were partnering with Facebook, a fact I repeated constantly.

If people are excited and engaged with your vision, they’ll put up with the inevitable bumps as you achieve lift-off.

During: Maintain Momentum

The Progress Principle is the idea that humans love the satisfaction of wins, even if they’re small. It’s your best friend as you seek to keep multiple teams and dozens of people aligned and moving in the right direction–constantly show (and celebrate) forward progress.

• Display it: I put together a registration goal waterfall chart that was updated everyday to show progress. It’s motivating to close-in on and cross that goal line.
• Never shut up about it: I linked to information about this campaign in my email signature, Slack rooms, wherever I had the attention of my co-workers. And that information was short, sweet, and up-to-date.
• Be a good partner: You’re not technically the manager of the people on a cross-functional team, but you should implement some management best practices: give people autonomy, figure out how they like to work and what kind of support they need from you.
• Ask for feedback: I asked questions constantly– Is this system or process working for you? Can I set up these reports in an easier way? At one point during this campaign I asked the senior manager of a few folks working on the project if she had thoughts on how I could run it better, she told me she would love to see weekly updates sent to her and other senior managers. I was avoiding this as I didn’t want to clutter inboxes, but it ended up being one of my best tools for building internal momentum around the campaign.

Don’t overlook the fundamentals of good project management. A framework like DARCI makes roles & responsibilities super easy so you the project lead can just say, “This meeting is for people who are Responsible and Accountable only, we’ll be covering deadlines for next week”, or “This meeting is for people that need to be Informed, it’ll be a milestone check-in.”

Find a project management framework, and stick to it.

Wrapping Up: Close-The-Loop

I run four to five acquisition campaigns at HubSpot every quarter and running a campaign of this size and impact was a complete rush and I can’t wait to do it again. But before jumping into the next big project, it’s important to do a clean wrap-up, I want people to be excited to work with me and my team again in the future.

• Say thank you: Do it publicly via a company announcement or email, and privately. I wrote handwritten notes to every person who contributed to this campaign.
• Share results soon: Share the quantitative results, but don’t miss Twitter comments from attendees, feedback from partners, or the accolades of your co-workers. This is your chance to make it clear that you promised impact and delivered it.
• Look for improvement opportunities: Because no matter how successful your campaign was, there are opportunities to do better. Were any deadlines missed? Why? Did any team members not work well together? Can this be addressed?

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut of executing one marketing campaign after the next, and it’s scary to think about leading a big cross-functional project that could potentially fail publicly.

But so often the answer to higher impact is better collaboration. Learning how to lead across teams 10x’ed the impact I was having at my company, I hope it does the same for you.