We all get busy and sometimes important items pass us by. Every other week, Carousel30 will be collecting the important stories you may have missed while crunching on a deadline or taking a much-needed vacation in honor of Columbus day.
Here’s what happened while you were out…
Video ads now available in AdWords
Google has added the TrueView campaign targeting option within AdWords. Google began dabbling in video ads last April when TrueView Ad testing began on YouTube. Subsequently, Searchmetrics conducted a broad study that found 14% of searches yielding video results, with 82% of those videos coming from YouTube. More recently, Google announced that TrueView video ads are now available within AdWords. The integration of video into Google Adwords will make the advertising process more expensive and time consuming for advertisers, but opens up a new world of search engine capabilities to interact and engage customers.
SEO, or shall we say, Super Exciting Opportunities
Search assistant optimization is becoming more prevalent as mobile searches through Siri, Spotlight Search, Cortana, and other mobile search assistants increase. Forbes is forecasting the rise of digital search assistants as the primary tool of connecting web users to websites. Because these assistants do not use standard search engines, more than just SEO and PPC advertising should be included in marketing strategies moving forward. Optimizing website searchability among these assistants means looking into Apple Search and iOS indexing, Google Search and Deep Linking, and making sure that a company’s basic information is readily available for assistants to pick up on.
Don’t Ho-Ho-Ho(ld) Off on Holiday Advertising Spending
The holiday season is upon us, and digital marketers should be preparing! Sophie Newton, the head of innovation at BrainLab, reported that 25% of holiday shoppers started buying in October, with 48% having completed their shopping by Cyber Monday. According to the National Retail Federation, the top search days for holiday shopping during 2014 were Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and December 2nd. With a projected 32.2% increase in mobile sales, holiday advertisers should also focus on mobile commerce advertising.
AMP Up Your Mobile Experience
Google announced the Accelerated Mobile Page Project (AMP), an open-source initiative to improve the mobile experience and distribution system of mobile content. The initiative’s goals include improving content, distribution and advertising. Google has also been working with Twitter to recreate the “Instant article” feature to significantly lower the download times of articles by allowing publishers to pull from a library of scripts as well as Google cache.
Under the Influence with Social Media Marketing
Social Media influencers’ impact on marketing has been on the rise over the past few years as their reach and impact have dramatically increased the marketer’s ability to utilize word of mouth marketing to assist in their efforts. Augure recently published the second edition of influencer engagement research, which revealed that over 84% of marketers plan to include social media influencers in their marketing campaign in the next year. Over 67% of marketers already use influencers for content promotion, and 59% for content creation. Overall, 74% of those surveyed said there is an interest to increase (33%) or maintain (41%) the budget allocated to these activities, making influencers a staple in marketing strategies.
Keeping the Moment[um] with Adaptive Marketing
Adaptive Marketing has been identified as the next big marketing trend of the year, and Twitter has joined the movement. Twitter recently released their own version of Google’s Moment strategy by creating a Moment section that captures what’s happening on Twitter, and only on Twitter. These Moments help users find more information on topics that matter to them through videos, Vines, and GIFs. These Moments give users the ability to read information posted by Twitter users they do not even follow. This Moment section will help brands spread awareness to new audiences by providing useful and relevant content.
In other social news…
In an effort to help identify conversion and improve conversation, LinkedIn will be making all Groups private as of October 14. Facebook began testing Reactions, an extension of the Like button, to identify stories that matter the most to individual users within the News Feed. Facebook has also released an Advertiser Outcome Score (AOS), a new network performance metric that helps identify opportunities for advertising optimization. Pinterest now offers the opportunity to sell products on Pinterest through Buyable Pins on new commerce platforms. Tumblr is now including a “More You Might Like” section within content pages of your Tumblr to help guide visitors to other pages they may have missed.
0 Comments