PSPINC Official Company Blog

Google’s Consent Management Platform (CMP) Changes and What It Means

Sep

19

Have you ever gone to a website only to come across a pop-up asking you to consent to the site using your data? That is what’s called a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) message. But you may have also noticed that not every website shows a GDPR message. That’s because privacy laws in the European Union and the UK are different compared to the U.S. when it comes to collecting users’ data.

Advertisers can use IAB’s Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) as a tool to hold them accountable and to comply with the GDPR as well as the ePrivacy Directive, a privacy law regulating cookie usage, data minimization, and more. When advertising with Google AdSense, Ad Manager, or Ad Mob, Google-certified Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) have IAB’s TCF integrated into them, making it easier to serve ads in the European Economic Area (EEA) and/or the U.K. Equipped with IAB's TCF, Google's CMPs, and GDPR messages, advertisers can easily serve ads in the E.U. and the UK. while complying to their privacy laws.

Google’s New CMP Requirements

Starting January 16, 2024, Google AdSense, Ad Manager, or AdMob will start requiring publishers and developers to use a CMP certified by Google. Why? Because IAB Europe’s TCF released a new version (v2.2) recently that comes with even stricter consent requirements, which include:

No longer accepting “legitimate interest” as a legal base of consent for personalization efforts.
Standardized data retention periods for third-party vendors.
Easy access for users to their CMPs for if they want to withdraw or modify their consent and preferences.

For those working with ad technology providers not registered with TCF, Google makes it easy with its Additional Consent specification. While many are already using Google-certified CMPs, those who aren’t will be affected by these new requirements.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#admanager #admob #advertising #blog #business #businesstips #businesstools #cmp #digitalmarketing #eu #europeanunion #gdpr #google #googleadsense #iab #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #smallbusiness #tcf #tech #technology #uk #web

What’s New Newsletter Vol. 185 “Scam Letters”

Sep

14

Recently, our San Diego office received some scam mail disguised as a domain renewal. Upon first glance, it looked like your average domain renewal request, but since we manage our own pspinc.com domain, we immediately realized it was a scam. Apparently, some of our customers have also received similar letters, but have thankfully asked us first if they needed to make a payment. For our web hosting customers, please be aware that our hosting services include domain management (unless you have a separate contract with a separate provider), so there shouldn’t be any additional domain-related charges. If there are, please know that it will come from us at PSPINC directly rather than the domain registrar.

If you ever receive similar scam letters or emails, making payments will potentially result in:

· Unauthorized credit card usage or
· Loss of domain

Luckily, we’re here to assist you with any hosting-related and/or IT-related concerns and issues. So if you ever have any suspicions or questions about these types of scam letters, please reach out to our support team and they’d be happy to help!

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #business #businesstips #businesstools #ecommerce #hosting #marketing #newsletter #officetips #pacificsoftwarepublishing #pspinc #pspincwhatsnewnewsletter #smallbusiness #tech #technology #web #webdevelopment #webhosting

The Importance of Marketing Analytics

Sep

12

Marketing for your business doesn’t just consist of creating content and advertising it; it requires some analysis to result in an effective outcome. That’s where marketing analytics comes in. Marketing analytics refers to using data to evaluate marketing activities for their effectiveness. To make it easier, there are three parameters of marketing analytics you should keep in mind: the past, the present, and the future.

When analyzing marketing data, you’ll want to look back on what projects performed the best, which strategy was most effective, and vice versa. By looking at your current marketing efforts, you can better understand the current market and what’s working versus what isn’t. And looking into trends expected to continue and evolve will help set marketing plans for the future.

Benefits of Marketing Analytics

After collecting a mass of analytical marketing data from website tracking, product data, social media interactions, and transactional data, you’ll get all you can out of them. Using marketing analytics to your advantage consists of compiling customer profiles, monitoring campaign success, creating targeted personalization, and forecasting demand. This will all, in turn, help minimize costs because the data you use is data-proven to help your business succeed.

Marketing analytics will then benefit your business by giving you a better idea of how profitable your business and the market are, what your customers want and how they behave, and who your real competitors are. Overall, it gives you more insight into the market, how your company has performed, and where you should focus your efforts moving forward. But analyzing marketing data means nothing if you don’t act on it. When trying something new with your marketing strategy, the more data to support your hypothesis, the more likely it’ll result in success.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #business #businesstips #customer #customers #data #digitalmarketing #market #marketing #marketinganalysis #marketinganalytics #marketingdata #marketingdigital #marketingstrategy #sales #smallbusiness #socialmedia #tech #technology #web

What’s New Newsletter Vol. 184 “Web Builders Vs. Custom Designed Sites”

Sep

7

Today, people have built many websites using popular web builders that make it easy for non-technical people to create a website. But as great as that is, many of those sites end up looking the same, just with different content. This isn’t to say that there aren’t great website templates out there because there are. But because of how popular these sites are, it results in a lot of similar-looking sites. The only differences are the images and word choices.

While that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it does make it harder for new websites to stand out amongst the competition. That’s why many businesses decide to get their site custom-designed. It guarantees that your site will stand out and lets you add features that may not be available from templates. Get your site custom-designed by our expert design team with one of our budget-friendly web design plans.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #business #businesstips #businesstools #digitalmarketing #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #pspinc #pspincwhatsnewnewsletter #smallbusiness #tech #technology #web #webdesign #webdevelopment #website #websitebuilder #websites #wordpress

How to Repurpose Content

Sep

5

A large part of digital marketing today is creating content, but it can get exhausting having to constantly create new content for your business. That’s where repurposing content comes in. For those worried about Google and other search engines penalizing your site for duplicate content, it’s important to point out that repurposing content is not copying and pasting the same exact content and publishing it again. Instead, it’s updating outdated content and grabbing pieces you can use in a different format. So, since it won’t be identical content, you won’t be violating Google’s guidelines.

Repurposing content will increase awareness of your brand and make it easier to market your business. So, many companies employ that strategy, which allows marketers to focus their efforts on other marketing tasks. Content marketing through multiple different platforms has proven to be effective, but there’s only so much new content you can create on a regular basis. Here are some ways to repurpose old blog content:

Create a YouTube video

Create a (new) infographic.

Create a podcast episode.

Grab snippets (quotes, important statistics) for social media posts.

Updating Older Content

Repurposing content doesn’t just have to consist of picking and choosing snippets of blog posts, videos, social media posts, and other types of content to repost. It can also include updating older content. The business world especially moves at a fast pace, as things are constantly changing. With those new developments, you can make adjustments and additions. Some sites even let you change the publish date, so it’ll show on your blog as a new post, including Bloguru, our blogging platform. With Bloguru, you not only can manually adjust the post date but also the post time.

Repurposing content isn’t a replacement for content creation, but it will help you sustain the constant flow of content you’ll need to post to help increase brand awareness for your business. But, more importantly, blog posts may not be the best medium for your content or your business. So, experimenting with different mediums lets you figure out which works best for your content and which platform you should invest more time in. Repurposing content helps increase brand awareness, makes it easier for marketers, and gives you a better idea of what works best for your brand. So, it’s no wonder why so many companies do it.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #bloguru #branding #business #businesstips #content #contentmarketing #digitalmarketing #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #smallbusiness #socialmedia #tech #technology #web #website #websites

What’s New Newsletter Vol. 183 “Free Social Media Marketing Tool”

Aug

31

Social media is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways for small businesses to market themselves. But for those who aren’t trained or experienced in design, creating visually appealing posts isn’t always easy. And we’ve probably all seen our fair share of less-than-ideal graphics floating around the internet. That’s why Canva, an online graphic design tool, is so helpful to even experienced marketers.

With Canva, marketers can pick from hundreds of templates and royalty-free graphics, images, and even video. We know our marketing team here at PSPINC loves using it to their advantage. With Canva, people can drag and drop elements using their editor to make the design phase simpler so marketers can focus on marketing your business in other ways. To learn more, check out our YouTube video that breaks down all the ways Canva can help market your business. And if you’re looking to outsource your marketing work, reach out to our marketing team.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#advertising #blog #branding #business #businesstips #businesstools #digitalmarketing #facebook #instagram #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #smallbusiness #socialmedia #tech #technology #twitter #web #webdesign #website #websites #webtools

Deepfakes: Explained

Aug

29

Deepfakes are images, videos, and/or audio that are digitally altered to convincingly appear to be something else using artificial intelligence (AI). AI development has been progressing rapidly over the last few years, and deepfakes are no exception. With how popular they’ve gotten over the last few years, it’s become much harder to detect what’s fake and what isn’t online. And with it, the concern about those using the technology to spread false information. But there are, thankfully, other non-malicious uses for deepfakes that more people are exploring today.

How It Works

an artist's illustration of artificial intelligence

There are two ways to create a deepfake. The first way is specific to creating deepfake images and videos through a face swap. With this method, developers use an encoder to run thousands of face shots of two people. The encoder then reduces them to their shared common features and compresses the images. Developers then add two decoders to the process, with one recovering one face and the second recovering the other face from the compressed images. The face swap occurs when the developer feeds the encoded images into the wrong decoder. This means that the decoder trained on person B’s face gets fed person A’s compressed image and vice versa. But for it to result in a convincing video, developers need to do this for every frame.

The other way developers can create deepfakes involves using a generative adversarial network (Gan). A Gan pits two AI algorithms, a generator and a discriminator, against each other. With the generator, developers feed it random noise and it turns into a synthetic image, which developers will then feed into the discriminator, made up of a stream of images of real things like celebrities’ faces. After repeating this process multiple times, the discriminator and generator will improve over time with performance feedback. Eventually, it’ll result in very realistic images of nonexistent people.

Deepfake Use Cases

While the technology initially caused concern for malicious uses like putting harmful words in important political figures’ mouths, there are other completely innocent uses for them. Some other examples include, but are not limited to:

Restoring people’s voices when they lose them to disease with voice-cloning deepfakes.

Enlivening museums and art exhibits.

Dubbing foreign-language films.

Providing personalized responses to caller requests for receptionist services and/or simple customer phone support services.

Manipulating actors’ voices for specific scenes in post-production.

The danger that more people are concerned about is how realistic deepfakes can be. There are a few telltale signs that it’s fake, but even those constantly change because of how fast developers fix it. Fortunately, the technology’s popularity has shifted from malicious intentions to those using it to entertain others. But as deepfakes progress, they will continue to improve quickly, as they already have. What we choose to do with it, however, will largely be up to those who know how to use it.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#ai #artificialintelligence #audio #blog #business #businesstools #customerservice #cybersecurity #deepfake #deepfakes #images #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #photos #security #tech #technology #video #web #webdevelopment #webtools

The Story Behind Apple’s Success

Aug

22

When people think of Apple, they think of its breakthrough products like the iPhone, the iPod, the iPad, and the Apple Watch. Apple is a multi-trillion-dollar company, as it surpassed the $3 trillion mark last year and was the first company to pass the $1 trillion mark back in 2018. But the brand’s success comes from more than just incredible products. It also comes from their organizational structure, which founder Steve Jobs brought back to the company in 1997.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne started the company in 1976 before Wayne left three months later, selling his shares of the company for just $800. Today, it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world. The Apple II, released in 1984, was the company’s second product and introduced a modern graphical user interface to the public. And the rest is history.

Apple's Organizational Structure

an ipad and iphone on wooden table beside a cacti in white pot

Even though Steve Jobs passed in 2011, he’s well-known for his vision for Apple’s products and software. Jobs left Apple in 1982 due to conflict with boardroom member, John Sculley, but returned in 1997 and hired Tim Cook, the brand’s current CEO, to help repair the company’s broken supply chain. While he was gone, Apple had the traditional business structure, with different business departments, each with its own profit and loss (P&L) responsibilities. But Jobs switched it up by putting the entire company under one P&L and combining all departments under one functional organization, aligning expertise with key decision rights. And Apple still retains the same structure today, even though it’s grown dramatically since they adopted this structure in 1998.

Rather than having conventional managers, an overarching P&L statement judges those in control over the product development and sales process. The fact that this structure has brought them so much success and continues to over the years is unique because history shows it’s best to divide the company into multiple divisions as it grows and becomes more complex. But for Apple, operating under one P&L and focusing on expertise works. And it’s why many have followed their example. By focusing on functional expertise, Apple’s been able to flourish, with innovation at the forefront. So, while unconventional, it’s been the key to Apple’s continued success, which is why the company still follows it to this day.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#apple #appleii #applewatch #blog #business #businesstips #digitalmarketing #ipad #iphone #ipod #mac #marketing #ronaldwayne #sales #stevejobs #stevewozniak #tech #technology #web

What’s New Newsletter Vol. 181 “The Difference Between Localization and Translation”

Aug

17

Expanding your business to a foreign country is about more than just translating content. Language is complex, so even though the terms might be similar, they might not mean the same thing. Localization takes translation a step further by putting the foreign country’s culture into consideration. And sometimes, it can cause you to change your mind about expanding your business there if it doesn’t fit. For example, Procter & Gamble (P&G) introduced Pampers diapers to Japan in 1976 by showing an ad with a flying stork delivering Pampers to a Japanese family. But people in Japan were confused; Japanese folklore told of a story of giant peaches floating down the river gently delivering the babies.

So, when they showed this ad in Japan, it failed miserably. P&G didn’t know about this peach story until after the incident. They then changed the imagery to a peach, and it fixed the problem. But problems like this are why localization is about more than just language. It’s about culture, too. Our localization experts not only translate content from English to Japanese, but also review it to avoid any misconstrued information. And it helps avoid problems like this. Learn more by heading over to our Localization Page on our website.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#advertising #blog #branding #business #businesstips #digitalmarketing #english #japan #japanese #localization #marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #pampers #procterandgamble #sales #smallbusiness #translation

Bloguru’s Twitter Integration Changes

Aug

15

Earlier this year, Twitter started charging third parties for API usage, which caused many websites to remove Twitter from their website. API stands for Application Programming Interface and lets developers integrate existing software systems into new applications. Usually, websites use APIs to share information or carry out diverse tasks. With Twitter’s new API changes, many websites have removed Twitter integration. Now, Bloguru has done the same.

It is, however, worth noting that our team is investigating a new API for our users in hopes of enhancing and upgrading the overall experience for our Bloguru users. If you’d still like to share your blog posts with your Twitter followers, copy your post’s URL and paste it into a new tweet.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.