We all get busy and sometimes important items pass us by. Every other week, Carousel30 will be collecting the important stories for marketers that you may have missed while crunching on a deadline or taking a well-needed vacation.

Here’s what happened while you were out…

Mobile Browser Audience Trumps App Audiences in Size and Growth

Research conducted by comScore revealed that mobile users are concentrating their time in a limited number of heavily-used apps, Facebook being the most popular. Morgan Stanley’s analysis of the research concluded that browser audiences have grown at a pace of 1.2x faster than that of applications, receiving almost 2x the audience size. While applications engage the loyal and expansive audiences, mobile browsers allow for a much greater reach and flexibility with the capability of regular updates.

Don’t Get Distracted: Long-form Content Marketing is on the Rise

Science may say our attention spans are ever-shrinking, but content marketing research finds long-form content is key to improving performance indicators. Neil Patel, author of the QuickSprout blog, conducted a website metric analysis and found that pages with over 1,500 words nearly doubled the amount of Tweets and Facebook shares, compared to pages with significantly shorter content. New studies have shown that sites with longer content are considered more reputable by search engines, ranking higher within Google’s algorithm, receiving higher amounts of backlinks, and are seeing an increase in conversion rates of over 30%. Long story short, the jury is still out on what constitutes long-form content, but the consensus among marketers is that long-form content is anything over 500 words.

SEO Local Searches: The Most Powerful Tool for Local Businesses

BrightLocal’s 2015 “Call & Click Survey” sheds insight on which digital marketing channels are most important when improving overall ROI for small businesses. It seems that local, organic, and direct searches are ranked as most influential, followed by Google AdWords in increasing ROI. The “active” and high-intent audience found behind local, organic, and direct searches, added with the audience insight/targeting features offered by AdWords, allows for accessibility to the right audience which, in return, increases ROI for small businesses.

IBM’s New Software Updates to Watson Mean Smarter Apps

Developers will be able to develop smarter apps with the upgrades to IBM’s cognitive intelligence platform, Watson. The most groundbreaking improvement to the platform is the development of new visual insight capabilities, which will be able to recognize content and meaning of videos and images from social media. The language features were also heavily developed, giving the app the ability to tailor language to the style of the user. To encourage usage among developers, IBM is introducing tools that will reduce the amount of time required to merge Watson API’s with datasets.

Micro-Moments See an Increase in Importance

No longer is demographic segmentation the best or only approach for targeting your marketing campaigns! Rather, Life Event Marketing has been proven by Networked Insights as a more effective strategy that can lead to a higher engagement rate. This engagement rate is a result of marketing content to those who would most relate the content right then and there, by leveraging emotional triggers. With mobile usage becoming more prevalent, strategies should follow Google’s lead and focus on creating content that is targeted towards the micro-moments that really matter which include: “I-Want-to-Know Moments,” “I-Want-to-Do Moments,” “I-Want-to-Go Moments,” and “I-Want-to-Buy Moments.”

Keeping Up With Google

Google has made a lot of small changes for advertisers and publishers. In regards to advertising, display ads will now be measured by Viewable CPMs, an Audience Insights tool now available for use in AdWords, and businesses can update navigation elements faster and easier. For subscription-based publishers, the First Click Free index in Google News has changed: those who visit a subscription-based website are only able to read three articles before having to sign-in, compared to the five previously available. For Google News Publishers, the three-digit numbers in article URLs is no longer needed.