Image via We Are Off the Record

WAOTR’s unique approach to growth:

“As far as I know, we’re still the only growth bureau in Europe with our approach to growth — we help startups from within. We work with their in-house teams, which means we are literally in the same room as our clients. We want to lead by example. I don’t believe in any other approach anymore because growth has to come from within the business itself.”

“WAOTR walks the talk: they actually do growth instead of solely advising.” Rutger Planken, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Director & Founder, FoodServicehub

WAOTR’s ideal client:

“Our ideal clients are the ones that understand that growth takes time and doesn’t happen overnight. They understand that we need to touch multiple domains within their business and that growth isn’t only in the marketing or product department but in the entire culture of the company. This is also the reason we insist to work with founders and/or want involvement from C-level positions.”

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already. 

Q&A with We Are Off The Record Founder & CEO Bas Prass

Yvonne Leow: How did you become a growth marketer and start working with tech startups? 

Bas Prass: I started designing websites and building websites at the age of twelve and quickly figured out how to survive in the digital jungle. I learned by doing and was pretty active within online communities.

Read more: techcrunch.com

That means that when a new website is registered it will be crawled by Google’s smartphone Googlebot, and its mobile-friendly content will be used to index its pages, as well as to understand the site’s structured data and to show snippets from the site in Google’s search results, when relevant.

The mobile-first indexing initiative has come a long way since Google first announced its plans back in 2016. In December 2017, Google began to roll out mobile-first indexing to a small handful of sites, but didn’t specify which ones were in this early test group. Last March, mobile-indexing began to roll out on a broader scale. By year-end, half the pages on the web were indexed by Google’s smartphone Googlebot.

Google explained the change to how sites are indexed is aimed at helping the company’s “primarily mobile” users better search the web. Since 2015, the majority of Google users start their searches from mobile devices. It only makes sense, then, that the mobile versions of the website — and not the desktop pages — would be used to deliver the search results.

Mobile-first indexing isn’t the only way that Google has begun catering to the larger mobile majority.

Several years ago, it also began to boost the rank of mobile-friendly webpages in search. Last year, it added a signal that uses page speed to help determine a page’s mobile search ranking. Starting in July 2018, slow-loading content became downranked.

While many sites today now show users across desktop and mobile the same content, those that have not yet achieved this parity have a variety of resources to help them get started. Site owners can check for mobile-first indexing of their website by using the URL Inspection Tool in the search console to see when the site was last crawled and indexed. Google also offers a host of documentation on how to make websites work for mobile-first indexing, and suggests that websites support responsive web design — not separate mobile URLs.

“We’re happy to see how the web has evolved from being focused on desktop, to becoming mobile-friendly, and now to being mostly crawlable and indexable with mobile user-agents,” said Google, in its announcement today.

Read more: techcrunch.com

With this move, Google is making cookies more private and also adding new anti-fingerprinting technology to its browser. While some of the changes here are happening in the Chrome browser, developers, too, will have to prepare for this change and adapt their cookies to this new reality.

“We’ve been thinking a lot about this topic for a while and think it’s really important that users have transparent choice and control over how they are tracked over the web,” Google’s web platform lead Ben Galbraith said in an interview ahead of the announcement.

There will be a number of UI changes in Chrome to enable this, but the company isn’t disclosing any information about this yet. Instead, it is talking about the necessary changes in the web platform to enable this.

The overall idea here is to provide users with more control over how their data is shared. While cookies are very useful to allow you to keep a persistent login to a site or store your preferences, for example, they are also being used to track you across the web. Few users, however, would want to block all of their cookies and lose these conveniences. The compromise here is to only allow the site that originally set the cookie to access it and block third-party cookies, making it harder for others to track you using these cookies.

To do this, Chrome will move to require developers to explicitly allow their cookies to be used across websites. Using the SameSite cookie attribute, developers have to explicitly opt in to make their cookies available to others. SameSite simply stops the browser from sending it when it receives a cross-site request. There are some security enhancements that come with this, but the main goal here is to prevent tracking.

Right now, all cookies pretty much look the same to the browser, so it’s hard to selectively delete third-party cookies. Because this change also makes it easier to identify tracking cookies in the browser, though, users can then also more easily delete them.

“This change will enable users to clear all such cookies while leaving single domain cookies unaffected, preserving user logins and settings,” Google explains in today’s announcement. “It will also enable browsers to provide clear information about which sites are setting these cookies, so users can make informed choices about how their data is used.”

SameSite isn’t new, but it’s not all that widely used, especially given that browsers don’t have to respect it. In the coming months, however, it will become the default in Chrome.

That’s an important fact to stress: This isn’t just about adding a new feature to Chrome that makes it easier to block or delete tracking cookies — it’s about changing how developers use them at a very fundamental level.

Galbraith also tells me that Google will start experimenting with only allowing cross-site cookies if they are served over an encrypted SSL connection. This is currently hidden behind a flag in the Canary version of Chrome, but it’ll likely become more widely available soon, too.

None of these are immediate changes, though. “I compare this to the deliberate way we moved https to the default in Chrome,” Galbraith said. For this, Google signaled its intent for a few years before finally changing the default.

With its anti-fingerprinting technology, Google is doing something similar to what is happening with cookies. “Because fingerprinting is neither transparent nor under the user’s control, it results in tracking that doesn’t respect user choice,” Google explains. “This is why Chrome plans to more aggressively restrict fingerprinting across the web. One way in which we’ll be doing this is reducing the ways in which browsers can be passively fingerprinted, so that we can detect and intervene against active fingerprinting efforts as they happen.”

For a company that makes most of its revenue from advertising, that’s a pretty bold move. It’s also a bit late, given that users have been asking for these privacy controls for a while. Galbraith acknowledged that “this is increasingly an area of concern for users.”

In a related announcement, the Google Ads team today said that it is “committing to a new level of ads transparency.” The first step in actually providing users with better insights into how ads are personalized for them, Google will launch a browser extension that will disclose the names of the companies that were involved into getting these ads in front of you (including ad tech companies, advertisers, ad trackers and publishers) and the factors that were used to tailor the ad to the user.

This extension is going live today in the coming months and will work for all of Google’s own properties and those of its publishing partners. The company is also making an API available to other advertising companies that want to feed the same information into the browser extension.

Even though in the age of mobile apps, tracking users through browser cookies isn’t quite as important as it used to be, it’s still an important mechanism for many online advertising firms, including Google. Google’s move has wide-ranging implications for online advertising and it’ll be interesting to see how Google’s competitors in this space will react to the announcement.

Read more: techcrunch.com