🙋‍♀️ Google deprioritized FAQ and HowTo formatted content.

📺 US teens are twice as likely to recall an advertisement they saw on YouTube vs. one seen on TikTok a study by video ad agency Precise TV finds. YouTube is the most widely used content network (82%), well ahead of Facebook and TikTok.

🤕 SEO company Ahrefs’ mass audit looked at more than a million domains for SEO issues. On top of the list are hard redirects, missing alt texts and meta properties, and slow page loading.

⚽️ Football (soccer) season has started, and European top leagues attract brand sponsorship like never before, according to martech.org.

💬 Open AI's ChatGPT Enterprise Edition launched: Enterprise-grade privacy and security, and much faster queries with up to 32000 tokens.

🙇‍♂️ Reddit launched an AI-driven keyword research tool for better-targeted social media advertisements.

Conferences in September: Inbound, Boston USA and online, 05-08 Sep. SaaStr Annual, San Francisco USA, 06-08 Sep. SMX, Berlin GER, 13-14 Sep. TechCrunch Disrupt, San Francisco USA, 19-21 Sep. DMEXCO, Cologne GER, 20-21 Sep. TestFlix, online, 23-24 Sep. MarTech Conf, online, 26-27 Sep. Content Marketing World, Washington USA, 26-28 Sep.

🚀 WordPress Community Summit 2023 concluded. WordPress 6.3 was released with UI updates on the designer, a new quick-search feature, and more than 170 minor performance updates. Version 6.4 was announced for Nov 07.

⏳ WordPress announced a 100-year subscription plan for $38.000.

𐄷 Drupal, Joomla, Typo3, and WordPress all teamed up to lobby for some harmful regulation in the upcoming EU Cyber Resilience Act.

👏 An empathetic and beginner-friendly article on how to move on from testing mistakes by manual test contractor platform Applause.

👍 Forbes asked sixteen tech leaders for the KPIs they rely on for assessing software quality.

🏁 Test Mu 2023 by LambdaTest concluded. Read Oliver's summary what this QA engineering conference had in store for marketers.

💁 Influencer marketing is expected to grow from $26.3B worldwide in 2022 by 17% to $30.8B in 2023, according to onlyaccounts.io. In China alone, $16.7B is expected to be spent, accounting for more than half the market. 

🔁 Except for just 2, all MarTech categories are less likely to see tool replacements in 2023, according to a new martech.org survey. From a Covid high of 41% in 2020 CMSes and website builders saw the most profound decline to only 11% of respondents saying they consider replacements. The top reasons for replacements are customer experience and costs.

🌐 66% of worldwide users access the internet with the Chrome browser, 13% with Safari, 10% with Microsoft Edge, and 5% with Firefox, according to Software QA company Perfecto’s Test Coverage Report Summer 2023. On desktop computers, 62% use Windows and 18% use MacOS. On mobile devices, Apple and Samsung dominate Western markets while Asian markets are much more diverse.

🗺️ Websites best indicate localized and different language versions of their websites using hreflang tags. An Ahrefs study on hundreds of thousands of websites showed that over 67% are not implementing hreflang tags correctly.

• 🏙️ WordPress Community Summit 2023 in Washington DC, 22-23 Aug 2023

• 🧑‍💻 LamdaTest Conf: 22-24 Aug 2023, online
• 🌍 Test Festival 2023: 09 Sep, Lagos, Nigeria
• 💻 The <break>Point conference by BrowserStack had great presentations on QA market developments, visual and accessibility testing of web applications, manual testing, and many more. We recommend reading Oliver’s recap.

According to Hubspot half of all marketers believe AI will make parts of their roles redundant. Despite that fact, 80% of marketers use AI, and 59% are encouraged by managers. 56% think it could cause GDPR privacy issues, and 43% believe their company leadership has a negative view of AI.

Wix announced an AI tool that creates entire websites from chat prompts. While not the first on the market, Wix is the first that builds infrastructure for e-commerce, scheduling, food ordering, event ticketing, and payment.

Wix launched a new "Studio" product for web agencies and freelancers. It comes with a new editor and a collaboration mode for teams and customers. Also announced were some interesting new features for agencies to manage customer projects better. Studio will be gradually rolled out along with a wealth of educational content and live events in about a dozen cities. The announcement hinted at new AI content features but contained no footage of the prior announced AI-driven website generation features.

• Hubspot adds new AI features around marketing and sales copy generation. Their email inbox plugin has a new generative AI feature in beta.
• Wix announced an AI tool that creates entire websites from chat prompts
• Wix Studio, a product for web agencies and freelancers, was launched

• Breakpoint Conf by Browserstack: 08 Aug
• LambdaTest Conf: 22 Aug
• An interesting interview with senior automation testing manager Seema Prabhu about the future of testing on lambdatest.com

Google Universal Analytics works as before, two weeks after their announced sunset. But for how much longer?

56% of consumers say personalization of their customer experience makes them repeat buyers, which is a 7% growth year-over-year. 68% of marketing managers increase their investment in personalization despite generally tight budgets, according to a new report by Twilio and Segment.

Marketing managers expect marketing tech budgets to double within the next three years in the german speaking markets. The top priorities of marketing managers are customer experience (63%) and performance management (61%), according to the new Marketing Tech Monitor Report 2023.

86% of consumers are willing to share their email addresses with brands they love, but 79% ignore or delete their emails at least half the time. Younger generations, led by Gen Z, are less likely to unsubscribe the intended way, according to mobile UX company Airship.

• Shopify and Roku partner to enable shopping directly from TV.
• Shopify launches an AI assistant for merchants, called Sidekick.
• Webflow announced an in-person conference series visiting San Francisco (also online), Chicago, New York, and London.

• A guest article about generative AI in software QA by Mudit Singh, Director of Marketing and Growth at software QA company LambdaTest on mediabrief.com.
• An interesting article on growing software QA adoption in the slow-moving healthcare industry on mitechnews.com.
• Interview with QA engineer Sruthi Nair of Workhuman on siliconrepublic.com.

Google UA sunset. Only 23% of marketers are fully set up and use Google Analytics 4. 70% are still setting it up or learning how to use it, according to a survey by MarTech.org.

Only 1 in 2 people can spot AI-generated email, with Generation Z much more likely to do so. Only 26% of recipients find AI in brand communication problematic, an Instiller survey finds.

71% of marketers believe AI can outperform humans, and 61% have used AI in their jobs already, according to the new report by InfluencerMarketingHub.

• Squarespace acquired the entire Google Domains business.

A lack of automation resources and, subsequently, low management buy-in are the biggest obstacles to implementing quality assurance. Improving test coverage across business departments is a growing priority, especially using low-code and no-code solutions that can be used by the entire team regardless of skillset. All this is from a new report by software QA company Perfecto. Proovy thanks our friends wholeheartedly for this research.

At the end of this month, Google UA sunsets! Switch now if you haven’t already.

More than half of marketers amongst global brands use AI, a new study by Bynder finds. Surveyed marketers mostly use AI to create first drafts, content optimization, spelling and grammar, and paraphrasing and summarization.

Global ad spending is reaching $874.5 billion in 2023, according to a GroupM report. That is a 5.9% growth compared to 2022. The expected inflation rate of 7% means a net loss.

On average, marketers use five different marketing tech solutions, and 67% believe more automation is essential for their jobs, a study by Mailchimp finds.

• WordPress.com announced an AI assistant for writing headlines, blog posts and other content, called JetPack.

• A guest article about the future of continuous testing by Alexander Tarasov, Head of Technology at KITRUM.
• A guest article about the symptoms of quality assurance misalignment by Suhail Ansari, CTO at continuous automated software testing company Tricentis.