Digital marketing might have already passed its peak and is currently on the downslide. In the future, it’s likely that robots and machine-learning will dominate the advertising sphere, which would make human intervention almost irrelevant.
Nevertheless, it appears as if its death is greatly exaggerated—in the near future at least. The rise of eCommerce, as brick and mortar stores are closing at a rapid pace, does highlight the need to hire a digital marketing agency to drive traffic to your site, and more importantly, convert this traffic into sales.
You might say, “I can do this myself. How hard can that be?” This has to be one of the most common phrases uttered by businesses before quickly realizing their mistake when their self-initiated marketing strategy goes down in flames.
If you do decide to hire a digital marketing agency, here are seven tips in choosing one:
1. Narrow Down Your Goals
It’s going to be hard to craft a focused digital marketing campaign when you don’t know what your targets are. Do you have a specific amount of monthly traffic in mind? Do you want to land among the top results in search engine pages? Do you want a data report to determine where you are in your industry? It’s important that the digital marketing agency is able to provide you with all of these options.
2. Don’t Get Too Hung Up on Price
Sure, price is definitely going to be a factor when hiring somebody to handle your marketing campaign, especially if you are on a tight budget. But this should not be a deal-breaker. Avoid making the mistake of hiring somebody because they are the cheapest when they bring little value to the table.
3. Look for Someone You Understand
If you walk out more confused than when you walked in, it’s time to walk away and never look back. Be wary of
agencies that can’t give you straight answers to simple questions, or try to regale you with technical terms and jargon without really explaining anything.
4. Don’t Forget the Expert
Executives like to talk to fellow execs, and that’s understandable. During meetings, you are likely going to talk to the top honchos of the digital marketing agency. But really, they are not going to be the ones who will do the heavy lifting.Try to find the one who will be assigned to your account and deal with that person directly.
5. Vet, Vet, Vet
Always take their word at face value. When you hire your employees, you always ask for their CVs and conduct extensive background checks. It’s the same with digital marketers who have to prove their capability to handle your account. Ask for references and talk to those clients personally. Would they recommend the company to you?
6. Look Forward to the Future
You have to grow with the digital marketing agency. Bestraightforward with each other in the effort to boost your numbers. You need somebody who will think of your company as a showcase of their best practices, and not just a means to earn a profit. If the agency doesn’t return calls immediately, you could be down the totem pole in terms of their priority.
7. Check Your Ego
Some executives and supervisors are too proud to admit their ignorance. If you can’t understand what the digital marketing agency is saying, just ask. If you want something done but you’re not sure how to do it, collaborate. The success of the marketing campaign should not be the sole responsibility of the third-party provider. This is your business and you, more than anybody out there, has the biggest stake in the outcome.
It seems Mark Zuckerberg’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012 is paying off, as the social media site is expected to hit $5 billion in sales by 2018.
In fact, apart from Facebook or Twitter, Instagram has become the go-to platform for businesses seeking to increase awareness and engagement, not to mention sales. While other social media sites such as Twitter have suffered some fluctuations in sales and population, Instagram has benefited from piggybacking on the Facebook architecture.
Instagram users are only a drop in the bucket when compared to Facebook’s 1.9 billion users. But what Zuckerberg provides is stability. As Facebook grows possibly to be the first company to be worth $1 trillion, the photo-sharing site is bound to be carried along.
Below are some tips on how to leverage the platform in marketing your business:
1. Use Instagram Insights
Just like Facebook Insights, there’s a tool in Instagram which is invaluable to any business, providing important metrics such as the number of times your post or video has been viewed (impressions), the number of clicks your link is getting, how many followers you are getting daily, and more. The results of this tool also include demographic info, which indicates the gender and age of your followers. This gives you a quick peek into the general profile of your followers so you can customize your marketing campaign to match their preferences.
2. Engage Your Followers
Followers, particularly die-hard fans of a particular brand, like to be rewarded for their loyalty. This is why businesses should also assign an administrator to reply to relevant comments if they can’t do it themselves. Your customers will appreciate that their voices are being heard whether they’re giving suggestions or expressing complaints. It’s also good to follow your followers back to learn about their tendencies, likes, travels, hobbies, and any information you can use for your own benefit.
3. Link Your Instagram Page to Your Website
Some businesses don’t connect their websites to their official Instagram account and vice versa. This is a lost opportunity for further marketing. You should also avoid flooding your page with photos of your products. Instead, use it as an opportunity to show the “human side” of your business. Buzzfeed is well-known for using its employees in its videos. As a result, traffic has gone up because viewers now relate more to the company because they know the people behind it. Don’t forget to add the location to your photos and videos for geo-tagging or search engine optimization.
4. Contests and Rewards
Small tokens are a great way to reward your followers. You can hold contests like who can write the best caption or description for a photo or video that you share. You can also ask your customers to send their best photos during holidays or special occasions like Mother’s Day. This type of marketing campaign is considered “low-cost, high-reward.”
5. Make Hashtags More Relevant
Industry specific hashtags in Instagram marketing are a given, but try to find your niche in the industry to distinguish yourself from all the companies out there. There are websites such asSoldsie that help businesses tweak their hashtags for optimization. It’s important that your hashtag is related to the image or video to prevent it from being categorized as spam. Piggybacking on trending hashtags is also a good idea, but make sure you don’t overdo it.
One more thing to consider is timing. This is very important for Instagram marketing. Whereas peak hours will yield you more traffic (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday), sharing your post after 5 p.m. EST will likely result in more engagement. If your marketing campaign is geared for other businesses, weekdays would be a good time to go online. Posting at 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. would be worthless as this has been found to be the worsttime for engagement.
Facebook’s goal is to connect with everyone, yes every single person in the world. Not just that, but Facebook wants to connect to everyone at all times, in every waking moment. Facebook envisions a future where you will always be engaging with some part of the Facebook ecosystem, whether it’s on its mega social platform at Facebook, using it’s search engine, messaging a business associate or communicating on video or via a virtual reality environment.
But first lets talk business.
“I often talk about how when we develop new products we think about it in three phases, said Zuckerberg. “First, building a consumer use case. Then, second, making it so that people can organically interact with businesses. And then third, on top of that, once there’s a large volume of people interacting with businesses, give businesses tools to reach more people and pay. And that’s ultimately the business opportunity.”
During the earnings call yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg opened the curtain into Facebook’s plans, strategies and dreams for the future. He first provided the latest metrics illustrating Facebook’s continued success, 1.7 billion people now use Facebook every month, and 1.1 billion people use it every day. He said that Facebook revenue grew by 59% year-over year to $6.4 billion, and advertising revenue was up 63% to $6.2 billion.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook said that Q2 ad revenue grew 63% and mobile ad revenue hit $5.2 billion, up 81% year-over-year, and was approximately 84% of total ad revenue. Facebook is now truly a mobile app rather than a desktop experience for the vast majority of its users.
Zuckerberg said that they continue to see excellent growth and over the past year Facebook has added over 200 million people using Facebook on a monthly basis. Time spent per person increased double digit percentages year-over-year across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. And that doesn’t even include WhatsApp yet.
Facebook is still growing rapidly and that’s because it has continued to evolve. It’s evolution has happened because of increased bandwidth, technological advancements, acquisitions of new platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram and most importantly continuing to be on the cutting edge of what people want in a social network. All of this while simultaneously building a successful business model that pays for this evolution.
What’s really interesting however, is how Zuckerberg sees Facebook transforming in the future. “Our results show our progress as we work to make the world more open and connected across our three-, five- and ten-year horizons,” he said. “Over the next three years we are focused on continuing to build our community and help people share more of what matters to them. The next five years are about building our newer products into full ecosystems with developers and businesses. And over the next ten years we are working to build new technologies to help everyone connect in new ways.”
Facebook is seeking to be the world’s business platform, not just the peoples. More on this below in the Search section on a Facebook future where it is competing with LinkedIn.
“We’re excited to announce that we now have 60 million monthly active business Pages on Facebook,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. “We also continue to grow the number of active advertisers on our platform. This shows that both our free and paid products are providing value to marketers of all sizes around the world. We continue to focus on our three priorities — capitalizing on the shift to mobile, growing the number of marketers using our ad products, and making our ads more relevant and effective.”
Trust me, this is just the beginning of Facebook’s morphing into both a personal and business platform in the future.
The Future of Facebook is Video
Facebook used to be mostly text and over the years they changed to be photo centric, with many people using Facebook as their family photo album. People still do that but Zuckerberg envisions a huge change coming. “We see a world that is video first, with video at the heart of all of our apps and services.”
“Over the past six months we have been particularly focused on Live video. Live represents a new way to share what’s happening in more immediate and creative ways,” Zuckerberg said. “This quarter Candace Payne’s Chewbacca mask video was viewed almost 160 million times. Live is also changing the way we see politics, as news organizations and delegates go Live from the Republican and Democratic conventions. And we have seen in Minnesota and Dallas how Live can shine a light on important moments as they happen.”
At Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London, Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA at Facebook, predicted that the Facebook newsfeed will be all video in 5 years. “It will definitely be mobile. It will probably be all video,” Mendelsohn said. “I just think if we look, we already are seeing a year on year decline in text. We’re seeing a massive increase as I’ve said on both pictures and video. So yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say video, video, video.”
“When you think about what’s happening on video on our platform we’re really excited by the production and consumption of video and we’re seeing the full range from people posting the things in their personal lives; the power of what a mobile phone can produce and distribute now is pretty incredible when you compare it to just a few years ago to some of the most sophisticated content producers in the world producing for us,” added Sandberg.
Facebook Focuses on Search
Facebook is moving into the search space aggressively, definitely to help it compete with Twitter and perhaps even Google in the future. Facebook launched true keyword search in late 2014 that allows users to search not just profile names or just your friends posts, but also everyone’s public posts. And, if you didn’t know, all postings default at public, which means that anyone can search for your posts.
The first goal for Facebook with search is to become more like Twitter, where people post their thoughts, feelings and most importantly news reports, especially the on-the-scene kind. When the next plane lands in the Hudson, Facebook wants the survivor standing on the wing to use their platform to post about this breaking news, not Twitter. More precisely, Facebook wants you to use Facebook Live to stream your personalized live news coverage.
“We’re making good progress on core services within the Facebook app, like Search,” Zuckerberg stated. “A growing way people use search is to find what people are saying about a topic across the more than 2.5 trillion posts in our network. Now, people are doing more than 2 billion searches a day, between looking up people, businesses and other things that they care about. Continuous, steady improvement to services like search are an important part of helping people connect and realizing our mission.”
He also said this in minimizing their true plans, in my opinion.
So I’d say we’re around the second phase of that in search now. We have a pretty big navigational use case where people look up people and pages and groups that they want to get to and look at and search. One of the big growing use cases that we’re investing a lot in is looking up the content in the ecosystem and that is an area that we’re very excited about which helps people find more content.
But certainly there’s a reasonable amount of behavior in there which is looking for things that over time could be monetizeable or commercial intense and at some point we will probably want to work on that but we’re still in the phase of just making it easier for people to find all the content they want and connect with businesses organically.
But what’s their next goal? Facebook has certainly focused on the business use of their platform as they continue to look for monetization opportunities. My guess is that Facebook will seek to compete with LinkedIn as the business platform of record.
Over the last few years LinkedIn has certainly moved from a glorified directory of business professionals to a platform for business related news, conversation and connection. Facebook has the platform but would need to figure out how to easily separate family life from business life, which could be done rather easily. With Microsoft buying LinkedIn, Facebook will be highly motivated to compete.
Google tried to compete with Facebook with Google+ and it failed miserably, but that’s because it’s harder to get people to change their social habits than it is their search habits. You don’t need your friends to use Facebook Search in order for you to find it useful, but you definitely need your friends to move to a new social platform to make it work for you. That was Google’s dilemma, but it won’t be Facebook’s.
“Since it refocused on keywords, Facebook is now seeing 2 billion searches per day of its 2.5 trillion posts,” stated TechCrunch writer Josh Constine. “That’s compared to 1.5 billion searches per day in July 2015, and 1 billion in September 2012. That’s a 33% climb in just 9 months.”
That’s lets than half a reported 3.5 billion searches per day on Google. The difference is that Google’s searches are monitizable, while Facebook searches, not so much. However, this must scare the heck out of Google because it shows how ingrained people are to use Facebook for search. Therefore, over time I predict that Facebook will add web indexing to it’s search engine. They already have 3.5 billion searches, why not open up search to everything and in the process open up a huge monetization opportunity.
One other prediction, Facebook will disconnect its search app from just Facebook.com, just like they did Messenger. Then, voilà, Facebook is competing with Google.
Making Instagram Stronger
Instagram was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion while it was just getting off the ground. It is now center to its plans on connecting with everyone in the world on a constant always on basis. That’s why Instagram is so important to Facebook, it has a foothold with younger people and its active user base is not a clone of Facebook’s, so it expands the corporate Facebook’s universe of connectivity and engagement.
“Over the next five years we are working hard to build ecosystems around some of our newer products,” said Zuckerberg. “Instagram now has more than 500 million monthly actives, with more than 300 million daily. Now we’re working to make the experience more engaging.”
He said that when Instagram, despite user pushback, began to rank its feed in order to improve the experience, that they are already seeing a “positive impact” with people spending more time and share more content within the platform.
As always, business is important to Zuckerberg as well. “We’ve also introduced our advertising tools on Instagram and we’re seeing marketers engage with people in creative and innovative ways.”
Messaging with Messenger & WhatsApp
“In the two years since we separated Messenger from the main Facebook app — which was a controversial decision at the time — we’ve improved performance and given people new ways to express themselves,” commented Zuckerberg. “Now, for the first time, more than 1 billion people are using Messenger every month.”
Facebook sees a huge opportunity with messaging because it moves them closer to their goal of connecting everyone on a constant always on basis. That’s why they paid $22 billion for WhatsApp, which is a service that barely had a business model.
“I’m also happy with the updates we’re making to WhatsApp — which also has a community of more than 1 billion people,” said Zuckerberg. “This quarter we launched new desktop apps and end-to-end encryption, and millions of people are using WhatsApp’s voice calling features.”
Facebook has big plans for messaging because not only does it help them bring even more people into Facebook’s universe, but it moves them into the business space, where Facebook desperately wants to be, because that’s where the money is.
“The scale we’ve achieved with our messaging services makes it clear that they are more than just a way to chat with friends,” Zuckerberg noted. “That’s why we’re also making it easier for people to connect with groups and businesses as well. We are going to keep focusing on this over the next several years.”
Facebook owned messaging has now taken over standard text messaging according to Zuckerberg.
“Between Messenger and WhatsApp I think we’re around 60 billion messages a day which is something like three times more than the peak of global SMS traffic.”
It’s incredible to think that Facebook now owns the messaging space. Who would have thought that 3 years ago?
New Technologies
“I’m also excited about the early progress we’re making on our 10-year initiatives,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during their recent earnings announcement. “We are investing in new technologies to give more people a voice — including the 4 billion people around the world who aren’t yet online — and helping more people take advantage of the opportunities that come with the internet.”
Facebook is seeking to connect everyone in the world, regardless of any obstacle. It’s a long term plan, but Facebook is on it.
“One of the biggest opportunities to grow our community is in developing countries where connectivity is less advanced than what we take for granted here at home,” Zuckerberg said. “So over the past couple of years, we’ve began making steady improvements to our apps to make them work regardless of the device or connection people are using. We also built a light-weight version of our Android app, called Facebook Lite, that is tuned to work on 2G networks and is now used by more than 100 million people.”
Virtual reality is another huge area of investment for Facebook, especially with their $2 billion purchase of Oculus. They see VR as an extension of connecting and sharing. Know one really knows the future of VR, but it will be deeply engrained in advertising in the future and since all of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising, they need to be in this space.
“We believe that virtual reality can help people share richer experiences and help everyone understand what’s going on around the world,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s really early for us in VR but we’re hitting some important milestones. As of the second quarter more than 1 million people a month are using Oculus on mobile phones through our Gear VR 4partnership with Samsung.”
Zuckerberg also commented on the potential revenue importance of their investment in VR:
“More than 300 apps are already available at the Oculus store for Gear VR, we’ve filled all of our pre-orders for Oculus Rift and we are seeing increasing demand from retail as stores plan for the holidays. While it’s still early for augmented reality, we’re doing AR research and are seeing lightweight versions of AR technology today in mobile apps like MSQRD.”
Facebook is Just Getting Started
“So that’s a recap of the progress we’re making in our 10 year plan,” said Zuckerberg. “We have a saying at Facebook that our journey is only 1% done — and while I’m happy with our progress, we have a lot more work to do to grow our community and connect the whole world. That means making big investments and taking risks — focusing not just on what Facebook is, but on what it can be.”
Virtual Reality is in its infancy but will very shortly have a major impact on everyone, especially marketers. Every major tech company is focused on Virtual Reality and because of that the technology has rapidly improved over the last couple of years. Last year Facebook paid $2 billion for crowd-funded Oculus Rift in order to enter the space running. Other players include Sony, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, HTC, Nokia, Intel, IBM, Samsung, Qualcomm and hundreds more.
According to research by Digi-Capital augmented reality and Virtual Reality are predicted to be a $150 billion industry by 2020. The study forecasts that AR (augmented reality), a less intense experience, will take the lion’s share around $120 billion and VR $30 billion.
Virtual Reality headset shipments will approach 30 million by 2020, driven by video & gaming according to a September 2015 Juniper Research study, “Virtual Reality: Market Dynamics & Future Prospects 2015-2020.” The study predicts that the technology is poised to transform the entertainment industry including gaming and video over the next few years, while offering the potential to quickly expand into other markets such as industrial and healthcare. Report co-author Joe Crabtree commented, “The recent attention to and investment into Virtual Reality is helping to revitalize the industry and with major brand commercial launches imminent, there is huge potential for rapid market expansion.”
Google is actually doing something very low tech in order to increase public interest in VR, sending people Google Cardboard viewers. As Google says, it’s a VR experience starting with a simple viewer anyone can build or buy.
“Every single video on YouTube can be viewed in VR, making it the world’s largest library of VR content,” wrote Aaron Luber who is in charge of Google and YouTube partnerships in a think with Google report. “This is giving many people all over the world their first taste of VR, and mainstream interest is growing; global search interest for Virtual Reality on Google has grown by nearly 4X in the last year.”
Virtual Reality is a technology that can be very disruptive in that it has the potential to impact how we live and what we do and from a marketers perspective it opens up a whole new world. “The technology has the potential to change our daily lives—from how we communicate to how we spend our leisure time,” said Luber. “It’s early days, but it’s already happening, and now is the time for brands and creators to understand what it all means.”
The Future With Virtual Reality
“The promise of VR is what the industry calls “presence”—the feeling that you’re really somewhere else,” said Luber. “VR cameras like Jump can capture the entire experience of a place—every corner, every angle. In the not-so-distant future, cameras like these will be capturing experiences all over the world.” Google’s Jump is a camera rig consisting of 16 camera modules in a circular array that are optimized to work with the Jump assembler, which is a powerful computer that turns 16 pieces of video into stereoscopic VR video.
Luber explains that VR creates a time machine like experience where what you record now can be played back in the future and it will seem like you were there. For families, VR recordings of your daughters 4th birthday or your own wedding will let you relive the events, bringing much more emotional impact than traditional video.
This is why advertisers are so interested in VR. Emotion sells products much more than utility and that reality positions Virtual Reality as a game changer in the advertising industry.
“At Google, Cardboard was our first step toward this future,” says Luber. “Soon, our VR platform Daydream will enable even more powerful, mobile, high-quality experiences with a headset that’s comfortable at an accessible price. We’re also building mobile apps for VR like Google Play, Maps, and YouTube.”
YouTube is actually a great place to view many 360-degree videos where viewers can see the video from every angle just by swiping or moving the phone or tablet around—no headset required. Luber says that uploads of 360-degree videos are growing and have doubled over the past three months. He says that brands are also using 360-degree video with ads and to film events. “BMW used this technology for an ad featuring a 360-degree car race,” says Luber. “The “School of Rock” musical created a 360-degree music video. AT&T simulated a car crash to drive home its phone safety message.”
YouTube even categorizes 360-degree videos so you can conveniently browse through them.
The Power of VR in Telling a Story
“And this makes filmmakers– a lot of them are credible ones that have been around for a while– makes them freak out, like this is horrible, this is dangerous,” said Jessica Brillhart, the principal filmmaker for Google VR in a talk at Google I/O 2016. “But let’s just breathe for a second. Have we lost complete control? Or maybe it just lives somewhere else in this. Us humans have a knack for following what calls attention to itself, no matter where it is, no matter where it goes.”
“One of the fascinating challenges in these relatively early days of Virtual Realty is how to tell actual stories,” says a post on the Wevr blog. “The most common comparison so far has been to live theater, where an audience watches events unfold with no real time direction to focus their attention. It’s an aspect that allows for a new kind of experience, yet also seems to frustrate many experienced story tellers.”
Wevr is a company that believes “virtual reality has the power to alter people’s lives more than any other medium to date with the potential to deliver memories that stick.”
Brillhart says that “our control as creators is in this understanding of the potential experiences a world contains so that we can prepare for this, prepare for how someone might engage with the space.” She said that a videographer or directors craft is about responding to all “potential experiences”. She added that “our jobs as creators is not to preciously craft something that someone may never look at and then forget the rest of it, but instead to guide visitors through a crafted universe.”
Connor Hair, Award winning VR Director and Co-Founder of the VR production company Perception Square, talked about how he used VR to tell a story. “One of the reasons I went with the 180 degree view for the VR segments was that I wanted to maintain some of the control you have as a filmmaker,” Hair said. “To craft it like you would a film and directed the audiences attention and not worrying about what is behind them. It also enabled me to stand behind the camera and direct actors as I would in a film.”
After working as a cinematographer on six feature length projects, Hair changed his focus toward directing virtual reality experiences. In 2015 he directed two short films for virtual reality, “Real” and “En Pointe“. His bio states that he “is constantly experimenting with emerging technology and has a passion for telling stories in unique and innovative ways.” Watch out Steven Spielberg!
Real 2D Version – The 3D VR experience will soon be released as an app for the Oculus Rift:
En Pointe – 360 VR Short Film – Selected as a Winner of Samsung’s “There in 60 seconds” VR contest.
Storytelling with VR and 360-degree video is “an incredibly powerful tool to create empathy,” said Luber. “When a viewer feels like they are there, they have a greater sense of the situation. Messages become more impactful.”
Brands Can’t Wait for VR
Nothing tickles the fancy of brands more than learning of a new way to create personal, powerful and impactful marketing messages. Brands are learning more about VR everyday through research and by understanding the technology and its potential and some are already using it.
Cadillac is creating virtual showrooms where customers will find VR headsets and no cars. These high-tech showrooms will save tons of money because dealers won’t have to purchase inventory according to a WSJ.com article. “They can still sell the same volume,” said Will Churchill, owner of Frank Kent Cadillac in Fort Worth, Texas, and head of Cadillac’s dealer council. “They don’t have to stock the 15 cars and hope that they have the right one…the data shows they probably don’t.”
Time Warner and Nielsen are actually partnering up to study the emotional impact of Virtual Reality. “Given the increasing role that VR is going to play with our content and even with our advertisers in the future, I think that alone gives us an interesting opportunity to partner with Nielsen and an unparalleled opportunity to integrate both the biometrics part of research and also the neuroscience piece to help us understand how consumers are really engaging with the VR experience,” Kristen O’Hara, Time Warner’s CMO for global media told Adweek.
VR Can Be Very Powerful For Marketers
VR can be powerful for marketers. “Virtual Reality is not a media experience. When it’s done well, it’s an actual experience,” Stanford University, Professor Jeremy Bailenson said. “In general, our findings show that VR causes more behavior change, causes more engagement, causes more influence than other types of traditional media.”
“I think what our clients and I think this lab is going to be able to do very well is separate the sort of ‘wow factor’ of VR from really full-on engagement with content and advertising,” Carl Marci told Adweek. Marci is the Chief Neuroscientist, Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience at Nielsen Company. “How do you tell stories in a VR environment? How do you make someone who’s engaged in a totally surrounded and immersive environment go from a beginning, middle and end? How do you introduce characters?”
The New York Times actually has a VR app, which puts viewers into news events around the world. “Go underwater or on the campaign trail,” says the NYT promot. “Experience life through the eyes of a refugee or explore previously unseen worlds. Experience stories reported by award-winning journalists, all told in an immersive, 360-degree video experience.”
“For the brand and user the intimacy of VR is really dramatic,” GE’s CMO Linda Boff told The Guardian. “It’s a tool to tell a powerful story in a way that’s much more personal and up close than we’d normally be able to.”
Brands are also looking forward to technological leaps that are in works such as haptic technology which recreates the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, or motions for the user to experience. Apple famously includes haptic technology in its current versions of the iPhone, for example.
“You can see brands creating room-scale simulations where consumers will interact with branded content,” Anthony Batt told the Guardian. Batt is co-founder of the Virtual Reality firm Wevr. “For example, Airbnb could create sims for real rental properties so users could experience what it would feel like to stay there.”
Marketing has become the the breeding ground for Virtual Reality technology. “You have to start experimenting,” says Boff. “Marketing may be a proving ground, but if we can take this tech and make it a business application, that’s huge.”
Ominous Warning
A person named Zeigeist commented on an article about VR and delivered this ominous warning: “Way before the movie the Matrix was created, I realized that our concept of reality is entirely controlled by our ability to receive stimuli through our senses. If you are able to control the input a person receives, without their awareness that the input source was generated by something other than the expected “real world”, the person would never know.”
Of course, we aren’t expecting the Matrix to actually happen, but Virtual Reality technology and application are just getting started. Who knows what the future holds.
Outreach marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on human-to-human connection and consumer psychology to position ideas, brand, and products to the right audience at the right time.
The simple act of connecting with prospects (your audience) not only helps them learn more and understand what you are about, but can also help them.
Having other people tell your story or market your product (after they have used it or seen it) leads to more traffic, more sales and a better return on investment.
Most consumers value another consumer’s recommendation as compared to the seller pitching for his/her products.
The Blogger Difference
Bloggers, on the other hand, use their platforms to provide useful, unique content and in return acquire high-quality links and exposure into their target audience.
However, I have seen many bloggers posting quality and high-value information on their blogs but get very little exposure or traffic.
Traffic (that converts) is everything in online marketing, and if you cannot get enough traffic or exposure, you are doomed to fail.
While search engine optimization and smart marketing will help your site/blog gain more traffic, outreach marketing exposes your blog to your target audience easily and you can do so via a more personal interaction (as you’ll see).
Authority sites get more traffic and are much more respected, hence a great place to market your brand and products.
TIP: A good rule to follow: to drive more traffic, build authority and get REAL visibility, spend 80% on promoting yourself and 20% on your quality long form content (1500-2000+ word articles are recommended).
Here are 9 Clever Ways for Outreach Marketing you can use:
1. Identify your target audience
The first step to getting your content published on authority sites is by identifying your target audience and what they enjoy.
With the target audience already identified, it will be much easier for you to present and publish content that may interest them.
You can learn key insights by browsing through rival websites to see how they do it. Twitter search can provide a treasure trove of information.
It would also be advisable to go through the authority sites in your market to see how they like content created for them to publish your content.
Reading through their guidelines and terms of service may also help you know how to approach them, and learn more about the target audience.
2. Knowing who your target audience influencers are
A little digging is required to get this valuable information. Put yourself in the consumer’s shoes to find out what they might expect from you.
Social media has made it pretty easy for marketers. Many people turn to their favorite social media platforms for info and recommendations on particular products and services.
With billions of people using social media networks these days, you can use this to your advantage to learn about them, and then start working towards filling in the ‘void’ they may be having.
Buzzsumo.com provides great details about top posts, # of shares and their sharers.
Followerwonk is another great tool to help you find your top influencers, or you can use AuthoritySpy to get a lot more data.
3. Publish informative and high-quality articles on your blog
Armed with information from points 1 and 2, you must first focus on creating high quality and informative content for the target audience to consume. If you have few references, no materials or low quality to share, it will be slow-going.
As long as you can provide your readers and contacts with quality information on topics they are looking for, it will be much easier for them to share the content with their friends and networks.
Before you can publish any post, make sure it is free from errors and that your research and data is easy to back up. Your readers do not want to follow your ideas based on an assumption.
Do proper research on the topic and construct everything carefully based on facts, and in an easy to understand language.
Share your new findings and complimentary research to work they are already interested in.
4. Work on content marketing
Publishing quality content on your blog alone isn’t enough. Especially in a growing, crowded online marketplace.
You need to create and promote.
Use your blog and showcase content, tools, infographics via outreach (email, phone, social) and seek to publish content in strategic locations from your research.
It is only by offering to share highly informative and valuable content that search engines and authority sites will take note and interact with you.
Ensuring only quality posts are published on your blog and other key locations is your best chance of attracting attention from your target audience.
5. Use strategic email marketing campaigns
Email marketing is one of the best outreach marketing campaigns one can adopt.
Creating an avenue for your audience, webmasters and editors to communicate back, by either allowing them to publish comments on your blog or sharing their personal email addresses for further communication is invaluable.
Note: Never embark on buying leads or email lists with the hope of getting more traffic and exposure, unless you can get validated traffic and conversion numbers.
As long as the audience are willing to provide their contact information, and allow you to send them more information, there is a higher chance that they will consume and even share your information.
TIP: The best way to reap big rewards through targeted email marketing is by keeping it simple and making the messages short and to the point. Use references and always include a “helpful” angle to all your emails. Don’t come off as a “sales person” and plan ahead on what they should do next. Make it easy for them.
6. Make use of video posts and video marketing
This is one of the best ways of reaching out to a target audience and receiving improved online exposure.
Many people today prefer watching a short video clip other than reading a long post of written text. (Note: you should test this for your market).
Technology plays a big part in this since consumers have Internet-enabled handheld devices (such as smartphones, iPads, or tablets) and can search & view your materials from anywhere. That includes accessing apps in app store directories.
With these devices capable of playing video clips online, uploading high-quality video clips (how-to or explainer videos) to your blog and network can help drive more traffic to your blog. You can send them the information directly via email too.
TIP: Make use of free video hosting sites (such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) to upload videos for increased ranking, exposure and ease of sharing.
7. Social media marketing
Social media is one of the leading sources of traffic for most sites and blogs, and is very helpful during a startup phase.
Millions of people log on to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn to communicate, to make new friends and connections every day.
This creates opportunities to tap into traffic, deeper research and ease of outreach to your target audience.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn already allow bloggers and marketers to share information through different techniques (posts, paid advertising, #hashtags and @mentions).
Using these features not only increases exposure but also helps drive essential traffic to your blog or website.
While posting informative, creative, or funny content helps gain following on these social networking platforms, it would be advisable to allow users to be able to share content from your blog to their social feeds.
This makes it easier for other audiences to read through the shares hence improving your reputation online.
TIP: When posting to Twitter, include images as they have shown to improve sharing opportunities, but also creates attention and further branding opportunities. Let your targeted audience know about these quality shares.
8. Host on-site blogger events
This is more advanced, but easily one of the best ways of bringing bloggers together, where you act as the leader of the event.
Hosting a blogger event not only improves brand visibility but also creates a stronger ongoing relationship with influential bloggers and editors.
This alone can help you win the hearts of influential site managers hence allow you to publish your content on their sites and vice versa.
TIP: Consider using a series of webinars for these events, and invite other bloggers to speak and present. Using blogger outreach programs to strengthen bonds and brainstorm on new ideas can also market your brand beyond borders, which in turn will improve your authority, trust and online visibility.
9. Work with brand ambassadors
Using or working with a brand ambassador on your blog can also help increase visibility and authority online.
This not only approves the authenticity of your blog posts but also shows that you are an easy to reach person.
Most bloggers hide behind their computer screens and rarely go out to public functions and events.
Attending events also expose you to target audience in person, thus creating a much stronger relationship with them.
It will not be long before you start trending on social media and other influential channels on the Internet.
CONCLUSION:
Outreach marketing not only makes your blog/brand known to target audience but also exposes you to a larger market on the globe.
TIP: Use tools like Pitchbox, HARO and Buzzstream to find quality webmasters, websites and to completely automate the outreach process.
Google is starting to send some publishers messages about AMP in Search Console.
G-Squared Interactive digital marketing consultant Glenn Gabe shared a screenshot on Twitter (via Search Engine Roundtable) showing what it looks like. It tells publishers:
Google has detected that news content on your site might benefit from enhanced exposure on Google Search if you implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)…
One month from launch, Google starts sending GSC messages to news publishers about implementing AMP. It's close 🙂 pic.twitter.com/7efahFeJI9
Early last year, Google and Twitter formed a partnership giving Google full access to the Twitter firehose, meaning that it could once again provide real-time tweets in search results as it once had.
The two companies shared a deal years ago that led to the creation of an actual real-time search feature in Google results. This provided scrolling results from Twitter and a variety of other sources for timely searches. In 2011, however, the companies failed to renew their deal, and the feature went away as a result. It was clear that while Twitter wasn’t the only source of real-time content, it was the most important (by far).
As a result of the real-time search feature going away, Google’s search results suffered.
It was interesting then that in 2015, the companies were once again reuniting as Twitter needed more traffic to grow its user base as a public company – something it continues to struggle with.
Google’s new implementation of Twitter is significantly different than its previous real-time search feature. Now, Google shows tweets for people and organizations and/or topics as it deems necessary.
Stone Temple Consulting has been keeping an eye on how much indexing of tweets Google really does, even since before the partnership went into effect.
Back in the summer, they saw a 466% increase of indexation of tweets less than 7 days old between February and June. This was based on the over 900 accounts they track. While the increase was “massive,” the percentage of tweets was still pretty low at 3.4%. It showed that Google was continuing to index more and more tweets, but still a relatively small slice of the available Twitter pie.
This week, Stone Temple is talking about its findings again as Google has made a small, but potentially significant change to its Twitter integration.
Stone Temple’s Mark Traphagen on the takeaways of the firm’s findings.
The aforementioned new tweak to Google’s Twitter feature, as spotted by Dan Barker and reported by Search Engine Roundtable, adds a “View on Twitter” link to the individual tweets in the search results. This is a clear call-to-action to view this content on Twitter, which is precisely what Twitter gets (and needs) out of this deal.
Google have amended their Twitter integration a bit – they've added a "View on Twitter" call to action on Tweets. pic.twitter.com/F85wPgJEjm
If Google expands the presence of Twitter search results it could also lead to increased traffic and followers to individual Twitter accounts. For those it’s already indexing, this will almost certainly be the case.
This of course feeds right into that concept described by Traphagen as the more visibility that Google gives to an account, the more that Twitter account itself is likely to benefit. The more that Twitter account benefits, the better shot it has at gaining additional visibility in Google.
Overstock.com has had a lot of financial trouble over the years as a direct result of how its content shows up in Google search results. It is perhaps one of the best examples of how drastically a reliance on Google traffic can hurt a business when things go wrong.
Overstock released its financials for Q3 this week, with earnings down a reported 11% thanks in part to algorithmic changes at Google. This wasn’t the only problem the company pointed to, but it was a significant one.
In the actual earnings report, Overstock said, “We are experiencing some slowing of our overall revenue growth which we believe is due in part to changes that Google made in its natural search engine algorithms, to which we are responding. While we work to adapt to Google’s changes, we are increasing our emphasis on other marketing channels, such as sponsored search and display ad marketing, which are generating revenue growth but with higher associated marketing expenses than natural search.”
CEO Dr. Patrick Byrne told investors on a conference call, “Third of the problem was the Google search change, as it affects everybody. It affected — it was a little bit different this year than it was in previous years in some respects in who it helped and who it hurt. But we think we’ve already learned our way out of that.”
These comments did not thing to help the company’s stock price, which immediately tanked by 17%.
Overstock was famously penalized by Google for its search tactics in 2011. The company had been encouraging websites and colleges to post links to Overstock pages so students could get discounts. Before the penalty hit, the program had already been stopped, but thanks to a slow removal of links from some participating sites, Google caught wind of it and dealt a major blow to the company, leading to an ugly financial year for Overstock. They went from having top position search results to page five and six results.
That debacle happened because of what Overstock did. These were unnatural links, and the company learned the hard way that Google won’t stand for them. This time, they just got hit by the algorithm as so many often do.
Facebook may be doing more with is ads to help local businesses, but local search is still much more effective.
BrightLocal recently released results from a survey (via Search Engine Land) finding that local search drives more clicks and calls than any other marketing channel as well as greater ROI than any other digital marketing channel.
The firm polled local business owners in August in order to understand which marketing channels drive the most traffic, calls, and offline visits to local businesses. It covered “all types” of businesses including plumbers, accountants, dentists, etc. 477 people who optimized for 8,200 locations in the past year responded to the survey.
It found that local search and organic search deliver the highest quality leads and that 34% would choose local search over any other channel. It also found that social media, display ads and Bing Ads deliver the lowest ROI.
Here’s a look at how much time respondents dedicated o various channels:
And here’s how they rated effectiveness of each channel:
Businesses consider phone calls to be the most valued success metric compared to web traffic, search rankings, and significantly over customers actually walking through the door or inquiring via website. With that in mind, here’s what BrightLocal’s respondents reported about calls generated by various channels:
Be sure to take a look at the full report, which provides a great deal of analysis and additional finding.
Pinterest is often thought of as a social network, and it is to an extent. You can follow people (including friends), and they can follow you back. You can interact with them and even send them direct messages. In these regards it’s very much in the same stable as Facebook, Twitter, and others. Like Facebook and Twitter, it also has a search feature. Pinterest wants marketers to know that this is more what they should be focusing on. Not the social aspects.
Now that advertising on Pinterest is a thing, the company is working to get more businesses using it. The Wall Street Journal reports that in its ad pitch to companies, it’s trying to distance itself from social networks like Facebook and get advertisers to shift some of their search budget to Pinterest.
Does Pinterest currently have a place in your search marketing budget? Your marketing budget in general? Does it deserve one? Let us know what you think.
Pinterest Use Among Consumers Can’t Be Ignored
Last month, we looked at research from Pew Research Center showing that the proportion of online adults who use Pinterest has doubled since 2012, though like other social platforms, didn’t experience significant growth in usage between September 2014 and April 2015. Still, in 2012, the percentage of online adults using Pinterest was 15%. Now, it’s 31%. 27% of those Pinterest users use it daily. That’s up from 17% last September.
“Some 31% of online adults use Pinterest, a proportion that is unchanged from the 28% of online adults who did so in September 2014,” the study said. “Women continue to dominate Pinterest – 44% of online women use the site, compared with 16% of online men. Those under the age of 50 are also more likely to be Pinterest users – 37% do so, compared with 22% of those ages 50 and older.”
Here’s a look at Pew’s demographic findings for Pinterest:
Another study from Ahalogy polled over 1,000 people and determined that 82% are female and 18% are male, but that men on Pinterest have increased 4% since 2014.
Beyond gender, the study looked at race, education, employment, marital status, age, household size, sexual orientation, pets, kids, and income. 75–80% identified themselves as white compared to 10% and 5% African-American. 45% have graduated college or postgraduate. 56% said they are employed with 15% saying they are a homemaker, 12% unemployed, and 10% students. Respondents were more likely to be single and living alone (33%), and less likely to be divorced (9%).
82% of daily pinners are under 40. 88% heterosexual, and active pinners are more likely to have pets than not. 61% have dogs while 43% have cats. The number of active pinners with children dropped to 36% from 46% in 2014. Users are also more likely to be affluent with 45% having household incomes of at least $60k and growth in the $60-100k range.
There are really a ton of different comparisons throughout that report, but here’s a look at categories most browsed by active and daily pinners:
Here’s an infographic (via Social Media Today) highlighting even more from the study:
Notice the parts that say 39% use Pinterst as a general search engine, 49% use it instead of browsing catalogs, and 35% skip e-commerce sites and look for products on Pinterest instead.
Pinterst Wants Your Search Ad Dollars
As the Journal notes, while the social network ad space is becoming a more and more crowded playing field, Pinterest wants to focus on marketers’ search budgets as search is still the dominant part of the online advertising industry with 45% of digital ad spend in the U.S. in 2014 (eMarketer).
The report says Pinterest has been “making the rounds” with advertisers, trying to convince them to look at its service with a search eye rather than a social one. It quotes a Pinterest exec as saying that Pinterest isn’t a place where people go to connect with family and friends, but rather to “go through the catalog and do searches”.
Last month, the company hired the former head of Twitter’s brand advertising products Nipoon Malhotra to work on its ad tech. Malhotra also worked in search advertising at Microsoft (Bing).
“Nipoon is a proven leader with the ability to execute and scale teams and revenue generating products,” said Pinterest head of product for monetization Jonathan Shottan in August. “We are thrilled to have him as part of the team as we continue to grow and innovate on ads and commerce.”
There is plenty to potentially be gained from organic Pinterest search optimization as well. Here are some things to consider on that front. There are even opportunities for visibility in more traditional search engines like Bing and Google with a focused Pinterest strategy. Bing has been showing Pinterest content in search results for quite a while, but Google launched a new integration a few months ago.
Do you view Pinterest as part of the search landscape? Do you treat it as such in your marketing efforts (either organic or paid)? Discuss.
A new freelance job search engine called giantGator launched today, aggregating job postings for freelancers from a number of sources including Freelancer.com, eLance, UpWork, Guru.com, and others.
A spokesperson for giantGator tells WebProNews, “Thanks to the Freelancer’s Union study, we know that an estimated 53 million Americans are freelancing – but how many freelance jobs are out there, and how easy are they to find?”
The estimated number of posted freelance projects giantGator has aggregated since February is 1.36 million, and the average number of projects posted daily is 8,245. The typical lifespan of a posted project is about four days, it says.
“These new numbers demonstrate how extremely fast-paced the freelance marketplace is operating,” the spokesperson says. “giantGator aims to streamline the daunting search process for freelancers by aggregating opportunities in one place.”
The interface is simple, and certainly nothing fancy, but it’s useable, and to the point, which is really all you need when you’re looking for a job. No need to overcomplicate things.
It gives you a couple of sliders that let you indicate what kind of wages you’re looking for (see image above), which helps you refine your searches.
The running count of how many new projects have been added in the last 24 hours is nice too, as it can give you an idea of how much the job pool is being updated. You can also set alerts for specific searches.
GiantGator can be used to search for jobs in writing, application development, database administration, design, sales, SEO, data entry, ecommerce, video services, marketing, lead generation, research, etc.
Kapost, the company behind the marketing content engine of the same name, recently released an ebook called The Blueprint of Modern Product Launch Marketing looking at how to “make a splash” when launching a product.
In marketing that, the company shared an infographic (via MarketingProfs) looking at The State of B2B Product Marketing in 2015. It makes use of research collected by Regalix, which spoke to senior marketers about trends and practices. At nearly 70%, understanding the buyer was the most cited go-to-market strategy, and creating marketing collateral is a top priority.
Most B2B companies do invest in product marketing as only 16% do not, according to the findings. Websites and email are the dominant digital channels. take a look at the graphic for a summary of the findings.
Noted Pinterest marketer Vincent Ng (whom we recently spoke with about Pinterest marketing tactics) is pointing out that Pinterest is testing a new feature called Flashlight for Pinterest, which he says “will change the way that Pinterest works and the world of visual search discovery”.
The company quietly announced the feature at a conference back in February, and Ng thinks its still in the alpha stage of testing. We reached out to the company for more info, but they didn’t have much to say about it.
A spokesperson told us, “As mentioned in the visual search announcement a few weeks ago, we’re experimenting with many different uses for visual discovery technology, but it’s too early to share any further details.”
The announcement the spokesperson is referring to deals with experiments Pinterest is doing with real-time related pin recommendations and object recognition. More on this here.
So what is Flashlight? You can actually get a look at it in this video from Pinterest Engineering toward the end at about an hour and twenty-six minutes in:
As demonstrated, you can click the flashlight feature at the top of the screen and crop any part of an image, and in real time, it displays search results on the right side. It’s pretty cool.
According to the presenter, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Very interesting stuff on the horizon from Pinterest as it moves toward more of a shopping experience.
In other Pinterest news, the company just announced expanded gender options and will soon roll out Buyable Pins.
The world of search engine marketing is ever-changing, and it’s no secret that mobile continues to take over the desktop. Google has a new feature, even beyond a related ranking signal for organic search on mobile devices, that gives businesses more incentive to have mobile apps for search marketing purposes. It essentially expands as search marketing-related benefit device-wide, as opposed to limiting it to the actual search results page.
At Google I/O, Google announced the launch of something called Google Now On Tap. It’s a new feature in the latest version of Android, which the company unveiled in developer preview. You’d be forgiven if you missed that particular announcement as the company made many of them.
Google Now on Tap is essentially a way for you to utilize Google Now on your own terms rather than in the confines of Google itself. While Google Now already served as a virtual assistant, this makes it even more so.
“Since we launched Google Now, we’ve been expanding the ways it can help and do more of the work for you,” says director of product management Aparna Chennapragada. “You can get notifications like where you parked your car, news stories based on your interests, or help with travel like your upcoming reservations. We’ve also gotten better at giving smarter answers to some of your questions (‘Is my flight on time?’) and at helping you get things done across your apps (‘Ok Google, play Sugar on Spotify’).”`
“We’re working to make Google Now a little smarter in the upcoming Android M release, so you can ask it to assist you with whatever you’re doing—right in the moment, anywhere on your phone,” Chennapragada explains. “With ‘Now on tap,’ you can simply tap and hold the home button for assistance without having to leave what you’re doing—whether you’re in an app or on a website. For example, if a friend emails you about seeing the new movie Tomorrowland, you can invoke Google Now without leaving your app, to quickly see the ratings, watch a trailer, or even buy tickets—then get right back to what you were doing.”
“If you’re chatting with a friend about where to get dinner, Google can bring you quick info about the place your friend recommends,” Chennapragada adds. “You’ll also see other apps on your phone, like OpenTable or Yelp, so you can easily make a reservation, read reviews or check out the menu.”
When the user taps and holds the home button, Google presents options for its best guess of what might be helpful in the moment. If it doesn’t provide the right thing(s), the user can say, “Ok Google” from any screen or app. If it works as advertised it’s pretty smart. If you’re listening to a band on Spotify, Google says you can simply ask “who’s the lead singer?” and it will get you the answer.
As Google notes, it shows apps from your phone that may help with what you’re doing based on context. It might tap IMDb for movie review, OpenTable for reservations, etc.
There’s an SEO element to all of this. App indexing. Google recently made App Indexing a ranking signal for mobile search results on Android devices, and announced that it’s starting to index iOS apps as well. Google Now on Tap is another reason to utilize app indexing.
Clickz says Google Now on Tap “makes app search optimization more critical than ever.” Emily Alford reports:
While the announcement comes as a boon to app developers, it also means that it’s now more important than ever for brands to think about App Search Optimization> (ASO) along with SEO, since Google is taking both into consideration for Now on Tap, according to Danielle Levitas, senior vice president of research and analysis for App Annie, which provides app ranking data and mobile analytics for businesses.
“Part of the reason Google is providing deep linking is to give developers another way to be discovered outside of the app store,” says Levitas. “SEO is still critical, but you’ve also got to think about ASO, which has to do with keywords for discoverability, how an app is described, and even its reviews. But Now on Tap actually makes mobile and the app experiences easier for brands to execute because they can think about discoverability as a continuum as opposed to these two very disparate platforms.”
Google says Now on Tap another way to get apps in front of users at the right moment. If you have an app with content that people need to see, well, that applies to you. Luckily, beyond app indexing, there’s nothing else you really have to do to be integrated with Now on Tap. Just have your app indexed by Google.
While optimizing for Google via app indexing is one thing, businesses will also need to market their actual apps in other ways to drive app installs. The more people who have your app installed, the more chances they’ll have to actually see the content within via Now on Tap. As the Clickz article points out, a lot of downloaded apps are rarely opened, and Now on Tap could be just what those apps need to get more engagement from the users who downloaded them in the first place.
In other words, if you’ve found app creation to be a waste of time in the past because you didn’t think people would really use your app, this means that people may actually use it more, provided that you can convince them of its usefulness enough in the first place to get then to download it.
Google does say it will have more details about everything once the release of Android M gets closer. In the meantime, I really can’t urge you enough to get your mobile apps indexed, and if you don’t have a mobile app, now is a better time than ever before to build one or have one built. It’s becoming a matter of visibility in Google, and that’s not even taking the Google Play Store into account, which is now doing paid search results like Google Search.
It’s actually possible that your business may be able to take advantage of Now on Tap in the future without having an app, as the company is reportedly considering including website content in the feature at some point, but that hasn’t been announced.
Does your business have a mobile app? Do you expect Google Now on Tap to make a significant difference? Share your thoughts in the comments.
If your business doesn’t have a mobile app yet, it might be time to change that…for SEO purposes. Now it’s an even better idea to have an app available for both Android and iOS users. Google is indexing app content across both platforms, and it’s using the implementation of app indexing as a ranking signal for search results.
Do mobile apps make sense for your business? Do you already have them? Planning to have them developed? Discuss.
First off, you should know that more Google searches are now taking place on mobile devices than on computers in ten countries. That includes the U.S. and Japan. That means on smartphones specifically. When Google announced this news, it shared a report about search ads getting better for app discovery, so that’s another thing to consider. One in four app users discovers an app through search, according to the report. And Google’s really only just getting started with this whole app indexing thing.
Google first began testing app indexing in the fall of 2013. Googlebot began indexing content in Android apps, and gave webmasters the ability to let Google know which app they’d like Google to index through their existing sitemaps file and through Webmaster Tools. Over time, they expanded the testing, and at Google I/O last year, they opened up app indexing to all Android developers. Here’s a session from the event, which you might want to take a look at if this is all still new to you.
Here’s a much shorter overview on getting your Android app in the Google index:
For more on getting your Android app set up, read this.
In December, Google said clicks on app deep links jumped by 10x the prior quarter, with 15% of signed-in Google searches on Android now returning deep links. These numbers have likely only increased since then.
As you probably know, Google announced two new mobile ranking signals in February. One was the famous mobile-friendly update, which looks at the mobile-friendliness of your mobile website. You probably heard it referred to as “mobilegeddon,” though ultimately, it so far hasn’t had a very big impact on rankings in general.
The other signal Google announced, which it said it had already implemented, was app indexing. That was only for signed in Google users who had the app installed on their Android devices at first, but last month, Google expanded the signal so that users no longer had to have the apps installed. That’s huge.
“You’ve invested time and effort into making your app an awesome experience, and we want to help people find the great content you’ve created,” said product manager Lawrence Chang in a blog post. “App Indexing has already been helping people engage with your Android app after they’ve installed it — we now have 30 billion links within apps indexed…people searching on Google can also discover your app if they haven’t installed it yet. If you’ve implemented App Indexing, when indexed content from your app is relevant to a search done on Google on Android devices, people may start to see app install buttons for your app in search results. Tapping these buttons will take them to the Google Play store where they can install your app, then continue straight on to the right content within it.”
“With the addition of these install links, we are starting to use App Indexing as a ranking signal for all users on Android, regardless of whether they have your app installed or not,” he added. “We hope that Search will now help you acquire new users, as well as re-engage your existing ones.”
This week, Google announced the expansion of app indexing to iOS apps, and there’s no reason to think that the ranking signal won’t apply there as well.
This isn’t available to all iOS developers just yet, but Google says indexed links from an initial group of apps it’s ben working with will begin appearing on iOS in search results both in the Google App and Chrome for signed-in users globally in the coming weeks.
In a separate announcement, Google also revealed that goo.gl short links will now function as a single link for you to use to all your content, whether it’s in your Android app, iOS app, or website.
“Once you’ve taken the necessary steps to set up App Indexing for Android and iOS, goo.gl URLs will send users straight to the right page in your app if they have it installed, and everyone else to your website. This will provide additional opportunities for your app users to re-engage with your app,” explained Google software engineer Fabian Schlup. “This feature works for both new short URLs and retroactively, so any existing goo.gl short links to your content will now also direct users to your app.”
You can integrate the URL shortener API into your app’s share flow to take advantage of the feature a well. This way, users will be able to share links that automatically redirect accordingly. Others will be able to embed links in their sites and apps which deep link directly to your app.
“Take Google Maps as an example,” said Schlup. “With the new cross-platform goo.gl links, the Maps share button generates one link that provides the best possible sharing experience for everyone. When opened, the link auto-detects the user’s platform and if they have Maps installed. If the user has the app installed, the short link opens the content directly in the Android or iOS Maps app. If the user doesn’t have the app installed or is on desktop, the short link opens the page on the Maps website.”
You can set up app deep linking on goo.gl by participating in app indexing for Android and iOS and using the API with your app’s share flow, email campaigns, etc. That part is optional.
Last week, Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) added new reports to show how Google understands and treats app content in search results. This should come in quite handy if you go down the app indexing path.
Google I/O is just getting underway, so keep an eye out for plenty of content from there that will help you optimize your mobile apps and get more out of app indexing. Here’s the Google Developers YouTube channel, which will likely see uploads of related sessions from the conference eventually.
Are Google’s app indexing efforts enough to make you get your own mobile apps out there? Let us know in the comments.
The appearance of Google’s Product Listing Ads (PLAs) in search results grew by 118% throughout last year, according to a new study by Searchmetrics. The study also found that video results are blended into 55% of keyword search results ‒ with four in five of the videos coming from YouTube.
“Overall a key takeaway is that Google’s own products (Google PLAs, YouTube videos and Google Maps) are becoming more prominent in Universal Search,” a spokesperson for Searchmetrics tells WebProNews.
The company looked at search results for “millions” of keywords and analyzed the appearance of Shopping, Video, Image, News and Map integrations. Overall, they found that four out of five keywords produced at least one Universal Search integration. Video was the most frequent, appearing in search results for 55% of keywords analyzed. Images appeared in 40%, while PLAs appeared in 16%. News results appeared in 13% and Maps results appeared in 7%.
Searchmetrics put out this infographic illustrating its findings:
“In the case of Google I am concerned that the company has given an unfair advantage to its own comparison shopping service, in breach of EU antitrust rules,” said EU Commissioner in charge of competition policy Margrethe Vestager last month. “Google now has the opportunity to convince the Commission to the contrary. However, if the investigation confirmed our concerns, Google would have to face the legal consequences and change the way it does business in Europe.”
According to Searchmetrics, “The share of Google Shopping PLA integrations more than doubled over the year, with the proportion of keywords for which at least one Google Shopping integration was displayed rising from 7.5% to 16% between January and December 2014 (there was a dip in the summer months, possibly because of the seasonal retail market slowdown). In total, Google Shopping PLA integrations account for 44% of all integrations shown across the millions of keywords analyzed – more than any other integration.”
“The growth in the proportion of keywords for which Google Shopping Integrations are displayed represent increasing opportunities for retailers to buy Product Listing Ads and for Google to generate income from the now paid for Google Shopping service,” said Marcus Tober, CTO and founder of Searchmetrics.
Video
The firm’s video findings continue to to validate an increased focus on the medium on the part of businesses and marketers. While the percentage of search results pages showing video results actually fell over the course of 2014, videos appear more often than anything else by far.
80% of videos displayed in Universal Search results came from YouTube. This certainly illustrates how important YouTube still is to marketing as Facebook has become a huge rival to the service.
We recently looked at a study from Visible Measures, which found that for brands posting video campaigns to both channels, Facebook dominates viewership in the short term, but YouTube continues do so over the course of the video lifecycle. Search is obviously a big part of that.
“If something is hot and of the moment, such as a newly released campaign, the Super Bowl, or even a cultural phenomenon like Fifty Shades of Grey, Facebook and similar social media sites are incredibly effective for driving the spread of timely content due to the trending nature of the News Feed,” said Visible Measures CEO Brian Shin. “But the strength of Facebook to promote trending content also highlights how powerful YouTube remains as a platform for continued viewership.”
“Content discovery on Facebook is very much dependent on the Facebook News Feed, which is a function of what a user’s friends are sharing, as well as recommendations based on trends and a user’s interests. Because discovery is so dependent on sharing, viewership soon after content gets hot’ is strongest on Facebook,” Visible Measures added. “Conversely, YouTube acts as a depository for video and millions of users go there first, or arrive via Google search, to find video content. This user paradigm enables videos to have a much longer shelf-life on YouTube.”
While the number of results returning maps content in Universal Search integrations is still much smaller than the numbers for videos, images, and PLAs, it’s worth noting that there’s significant growth here. In January 2014 only 2% of search terms delivered map integrations, but it was at 7% by December.
“The more frequent appearance of map integrations in search results may be due to the fact that Google is skewing search engine results pages in favor of localized results which are becoming more important as search results become increasingly individual and more searches are conducted on mobile devices,” said Tober.
Indeed, Google said in a blog post on Tuesday that more Google searches now take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.
What do you think about the direction Google’s search results pages are heading in? Discuss.
Pinterest launched Guided Search last April as a new way to help users discover content with some nudging in the right direction. It’s basically Pinterest’s way of suggesting search refinements as you browse. For example, if you search for “pasta,” you might be presented with options like: recipes, dishes, salad, packaging, one pot, shrimp, sauce, chicken, etc. If you click sauce, for example, you’ll get results that are pasta sauce-based, but also a new set of guides, such as: homemade, recipes, with fresh tomatoes, olive oil, healthy, easy, creamy, etc. And so on, and so on.
“Guided Search helps Pinners refine and discover more relevant results for the answers that differ from person to person,” a spokesperson for Pinterest tells WebProNews. “As we build a discovery engine, searching is a key way for Pinners to find and save ideas Pinned by others. Searches derived from clicking on guides is one of the major sources of our search traffic, with guide clicking up 3x over the last 6 months.”
Guided Search Ranking Factors
Pinterest is now sharing some information about how guides for Guided Search are generated and ranked. Again, this is guides, not pins. They use the following signals: interests to guides, quality of results of composed queries, location, gender, current trend, and spam detection.
Interests to guides looks at how users click each guide of a query. The more interest the user shows in a guide, the higher that guide is ranked. Quality of results of composed queries refers to how confident Pinterest is with the search results after the user clicks a guide. Confidence is calculated based on how users click the result pins and how often they add them to their boards. It also takes into account the quality of third-party web pages that the result pins link to. The more users like the results of a particular guide, the higher the guide ranks.
Location is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s effective. Pinterest started using it as a ranking signal last month, and says it has seen a 5% to 10% increase in guide clicks in some countries as a result. Guide location scores factor in how much interest users from various countries show in each guide.
Here’s a look at the same query in both the U.S. and U.K.
“In general, male Pinners have different interests in guides than females, and so we rank guides differently based on what’s trending for each group. Gender scores are orthogonal to location scores in ranking. For example, male users in Mexico see guides ranked specifically for their demographic,” says Pinterest software engineer Kevin Ma. “We built a time sensitive scoring function to detect the current trend of users’ interests in guides. This function applies a recency boost to guides that have a momentum in ranking. If a large number of Pinners are interested in a guide in a short amount of time, this guide becomes a popular guide. Popular guides can be boosted to a higher rank for days. Once they lose their momentum, meaning less people are engaged to this guide, the function quickly ranks the guide to a later position.”
The spam detection signal just means Pinterest removes any spammy Pins it finds from guide ranking.
How People Are Using Guided Search
On average, Pinners click 3.6 guides daily when using Guided Search, Pinterest says. Interestingly, men are more likely than women to click guides, and often do so on topics related to Art, Cars, Fitness, Health, Men’s Fashion, Outdoors and Shopping. This is good news for Pinterest, which recently shared some other stats about how it’s growing its male user base, which grew 73% year-over-year in the U.S.
Pinterest also recently announced additional search improvements aimed at better targeting of search results based on gender.
“We’ve already seen these improvements result in a double digit lift in engagement, similar to recent updates to the new user experience which show trending interests for each gender to choose from as they get started,” Pinterest told us.
Women Pinners apparently use guides most when they’re searching in categories like Food and Drink, Home Decor and Technology.
Pinterest says users outside of the U.S. use guides more often than U.S. users, with the highest click rate occurring in Mexico. Pinners in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Philippines and the U.K. are also more likely to click a search guide than those in the U.S., according to the company.
The company says fitness-related searches also get some of the highest click-throughs of guides.
“Guided Search launched on mobile first and was designed with a small screen in mind and optimized for tapping instead of typing, so it’s no surprise guides are clicked more often on mobile than web,” the spokesperson says. “Pinners on iPhone are 50% more likely to click a guide than those on web.”
Pinterest finds that users are more likely to click guides during weekend rather than weekdays.
Guided Search Helps Pinterest Understand Intent
PInterest revealed earlier this month that since adding Guided Search, the average number of searches per person grew by 25%. At the time, the company explained that it’s getting better at understanding search queries. For example, with guides in action, it learns more about intent, and can better deliver on something like turkey recipes vs. Turkey the country.
“The more people search, the better we can suggest results,” wrote Pinterest software engineer Dong Wang. “From the previous example, we can guess that the next person who issues the query ‘turkey’ may also be interested in the ‘turkey recipes.’ The information extracted from previous query log has shown to be effective in understanding the user’s search intent. Search context such as adjacent queries in the same search session and clicked Pins after submitting a search query can help us improve the discovery experience for future searches. To capture the information about a search query and make it available for other applications to process, derive signals and build features on top of it, we designed a data collection called QueryJoin.”
QueryJoin contains the search query (which is its identifier), demographic stats (gender, country, language), adjacent queries, and pins. Each pin comes with aggregated data from “PinJoin,” which is a data collection of a cluster of pins with the same image signature and info). It also looks at engagement stats like number of clicks, repins, and likes. More on QueryJoin here and PinJoin here.
“Guides change based on engagement, so the more people search and pin, the better the experience gets,” says Ma. Check out his blog post on the Pinterest engineering blog for a deeper dive into how guides are created on the back end.
In a recent article, we looked at some ways you can optimize your own content and pins for better performance in PInterest search. This includes tips directly from Pinterest, as well as some insight from an ebook written by Pinterest marketer Vincent Ng. In short, you need to optimize your pins as well as your website for Pinterest sharing.
We also interviewed Ng about how businesses can get more out of their PInterest marketing efforts. Among other things, he talked about Guided Search.
“Guided Search allows for businesses and marketers to see what other topics or products people may be interested in,” he said. “For example, you may be in the business of selling wedding dresses, but you’re not too sure what dresses are popular. When you use Guided Search, it tells us that people are looking for princess wedding dresses, vintage wedding dresses, and lace wedding dresses and so much more. Now you can create boards and pins around those specific topics and keywords. You don’t have to guess what people want. Guided Search will tell you what people want.”
Pinterest says it will continue to work on making Guided Search more personal and localized with additional updates planned for throughout the year.
As you may know, Facebook greatly expanded its search offerings last month when it launched the ability to search posts. You can now search keywords and get back results from people and pages you’re connected to. It instantly made Facebook a lot more useful as a search tool because it gives you access to content that’s not getting indexed by Google. This is often content that’s particularly relevant based on your personal connections to its creators.
For example, you can easily find your friends’ posts about soup to get some ideas for your next soup batch. If you have one friend in particular that you consider a soup whiz, you can easily find his or her soup posts.
There’s a lot of speculation about where Facebook might be headed with search. Facebook released its Q4 and full year 2014 earnings on Wednesday. During the conference call that followed, CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked a little bit about the company’s search efforts.
While Zuckerberg didn’t exactly drop any bombshells, he did offer his thoughts on the company’s search direction. From his prepared remarks (via SeekingAlpha’s transcript):
Search at Facebook is another important effort that we expect to create a lot of value over the next few years. In this quarter, we launched updates to Facebook search to make it easier to find content and posts on mobile and desktop. We’re going to continue listening the feedback from our community and commit time to build really valuable products here. We’re optimistic about our ability to deliver value that only Facebook is able to provide.
During the Q&A session, Zuckerberg was asked to talk more about Facebook’s approach to search. He said:
So, our view on this is that there is a lot of unique content that people have shared in Facebook, a lot of personal content, recommendations from friends that you can get that you just wouldn’t be able to get through a traditional web search service or other app. And we’re on this multiyear voyage to basically index all the content and make it available to people and rank it well. We started off by launching graph search which I think included more than a trillion different connections in the first system.
And the second round of the search progress that we just started rolling out at the end of last year was post search, which now has indexed more than I think a trillion posts, which I mean the sizes of these corpuses are bigger than anything in a traditional web search corpus that you would find. So it’s an interesting and fun challenge to make this work. We’re seeing that people immediately understand how they can use this and find content that they’ve seen in News Feed before or that they’ve posted with just a few keywords.
And we’re excited about that, but there is a lot more to do. So we’re not really thinking about advertising in it yet on the scale that our community operates, a billion searches per day is actually not that big compared to what we think the opportunity here should be. And we’re just continuing to keep on working on it because there is just a lot of unique value that people should be able to get [from] their friends on Facebook search.
Earlier this week, search marketing veteran Rand Fishkin shared his thoughts on the direction of Facebook search after predicting that the company will start to include web content in its search results this year (in a different way than it has done in the past with Bing).
“With Bing, Facebook was simply showing external results (like a metasearch engine),” he said. “I think if they use their own crawlers to gather data and a system to serve it, there will be a more holistic, cohesive experience, likely biased/filtered by some of the things Facebook knows about the user(s) doing the searching.”
On whether or not Facebook’s recent search improvements are having a significant impact on how people find information so far, and whether or not they will in the future, Fiskhin told us, “No, and I think in the next few years, the answer will continue to be mostly no (at least if we’re talking about websearch kinds of information vs. ‘where’s my friend’s party Friday night?’ or ‘What does so-and-so’s new boyfriend look like?’). But, long term, I think there’s a possibility. If their early efforts show promise and a direction, I think we can extrapolate from there. For now, I’m not sold.”
Facebook has been releasing a lot of standalone apps. Among these are dedicated apps for messaging, for managing Pages, and for Groups. Would they launch a dedicated search app? Should they?
“No and probably no,” Fishkin said. “I think Facebook’s castle is their social graph and the private postings of people to whom other people are connected. They should continue to release products and apps that help build that moat, but for right now, broad search doesn’t fit that world, IMO.”
Regardless of whether or not people are actively using it as such, Facebook search gives users new ways of obtaining information. This must mean that businesses, who have suffered drastic declines in organic reach in the News Feed, have some new opportunities to get in front of those actually searching. Fishkin’s advice is as follows.
“Do remarkable things that people on Facebook want to talk about and share,” Fishkin said. “And if that’s too much, at least make sure all your business details are as up-to-date and accurate as possible on Facebook, and that you’re sharing things your followers/fans on that network will actually care about (even if that’s only a few times a year). Just make sure you don’t make Facebook the center of your online promotional efforts – save that for your website and use Facebook to drive traffic to it. You should never build your castle in someone else’s walled garden.”
Video was a focal point of much of Facebook’s earnings call. We shared some highlights on that subject over here.
If Facebook search becomes as big as the company would like it to, that could be a very damaging thing for YouTube, as it currently rules video search. With more people opting to post videos directly to Facebook and watch them there, searching for videos could also become much more common on the social network.
Do you expect Facebook to make a significant impact on how people find information? Let us know in the comments.
Last month, Facebook launched an update to its search experience enabling users to search keywords and get actual posts as results. This is arguably the most significant search feature Facebook has ever added beyond he ability to find a person or Page. It enables you to see what others have said about any given topic.
When Facebook made its update, it also dropped Bing from the equation. Microsoft’s search engine used to supplement Facebook’s results with more from the web. Facebook no longer includes web results at all. Moz (formerly SEOmoz) co-founder Rand Fishkin thinks that may change, and that Facebook might just do it itself.
Might Facebook Take On The Web?
In his 10 Predictions for the Marketing World in 2015 post, Fishkin said, “2015 will be the year Facebook begins including some form of web content (not on Facebook’s site) in their search functionality. Facebook severed their search relationship with Bing in 2014, and I’m going to make a very risky prediction that in 2015, we’ll see Facebook’s new search emerge and use some form of non-Facebook web data. Whether they’ll actually build their own crawler or merely license certain data from outside their properties is another matter, but I think Facebook’s shown an interest in getting more sophisticated with their ad offerings, and any form of search data/history about their users would provide a powerful addition to what they can do today.”
We reached out to Fishkin, a thirteen-year veteran in search marketing, for some additional thoughts on Facebook’s search efforts.
“With Bing, Facebook was simply showing external results (like a metasearch engine),” he tells WebProNews. “I think if they use their own crawlers to gather data and a system to serve it, there will be a more holistic, cohesive experience, likely biased/filtered by some of the things Facebook knows about the user(s) doing the searching.”
Are Facebook’s Changes Having An Impact?
Facebook’s recent search improvements are certainly significant in functionality. But are they having a significant impact on how people find information so far? Will they more so in the future?
Fishkin says, “No, and I think in the next few years, the answer will continue to be mostly no (at least if we’re talking about websearch kinds of information vs. ‘where’s my friend’s party Friday night?’ or ‘What does so-and-so’s new boyfriend look like?’). But, long term, I think there’s a possibility. If their early efforts show promise and a direction, I think we can extrapolate from there. For now, I’m not sold.”
Facebook has been releasing a lot of standalone apps. Among these are dedicated apps for messaging, for managing Pages, and for Groups. Would they launch a dedicated search app? Should they?
“No and probably no,” Fishkin says. “I think Facebook’s castle is their social graph and the private postings of people to whom other people are connected. They should continue to release products and apps that help build that moat, but for right now, broad search doesn’t fit that world, IMO.”
Advice for businesses for increasing visibility in Facebook search
Regardless of whether or not people are actively using it as such, Facebook search gives users new ways of obtaining information. This must mean that businesses, who have suffered drastic declines in organic reach in the News Feed, have some new opportunities to get in front of those actually searching. Fishkin’s advice is as follows.
“Do remarkable things that people on Facebook want to talk about and share,” he says. “And if that’s too much, at least make sure all your business details are as up-to-date and accurate as possible on Facebook, and that you’re sharing things your followers/fans on that network will actually care about (even if that’s only a few times a year). Just make sure you don’t make Facebook the center of your online promotional efforts – save that for your website and use Facebook to drive traffic to it. You should never build your castle in someone else’s walled garden.”
I think a lot of people learned that lesson the hard way over the past year.
Last year, Pinterest launched Guided Search, a revamp to its search feature enabling users to find things they didn’t necessarily know they were looking for. You can start with a relatively vague keyword, and get additional options to add to help “guide” you in different directions. It’s essentially a nice way of presenting search recommendations.
The company has been hard at work on improving Guided Search, and on Friday, revealed some of what it has been working on.
Pinterest has famously been seen as a more female-oriented service. While there are plenty of men using it, there’s no question which way the gender needle slants. The number of men has been growing, however, and improvements to Guided Search are reflecting that.
“If you do a lot of searching on Pinterest, you may already have noticed the results you’re seeing are better than ever,” says Pinterest engineer Pei Yin in a blog post. “For example, say you’re looking for a new watch. Before when you searched Pinterest for ‘watches,’ your results would include mostly women’s timepieces. But now, men will see Pins and guides inspired by what other guys have Pinned, and everybody’s results should feel a lot closer to what they’re looking for. Of course if you ever want results for another gender, like if you’re shopping for a gift for someone else, you can always use the guides to fine-tune your search.”
“These customized search results appear for thousands of different search terms,” Yin adds. “The next time you’re on Pinterest, try searching for hair, shoes or health and see for yourself how spot on your results are.”
As the company notes, if you’re not getting content for your gender, you may want to check your settings and make sure you have the right one selected.
A Pinterest spokesperson tells WebProNews, “We’ve already seen these improvements result in a double digit lift in engagement, similar to recent updates to the new user experience which show trending interests for each gender to choose from as they get started.”
They also shared some new growth stats with us. For one, Pinterest’s male user base in the U.S. grew 73% year-over-year.
“We’re not only growing among males, but on the coasts, where monthly active usage is much higher than other parts of the country,” the spokesperson says. “For example, New York is growing 50% faster than Minnesota, and DC 78% faster than Utah. The fastest growing states are Hawaii, New Jersey, Maryland, New York and Rhode Island.”
On the gender note, the top interests followed by men include (in order): men’s apparel, technology, travel, gardening, recipes, gadgets, design, luxury cars, tattoos, and camping. Trending searches by men include: men’s short hair, cinema 4d, ham radio, cool watches for men, mens tattoo ideas, fixed gear, shoulder tattoo men, hifi, rat rod, and kayak fishing.
Pinterest also shared some high-growth categories (% from 2013-2014):
Pinterest says it has a lot more improvements to search coming soon, and now that Promoted Pins are out (and doing well apparently), it’s certainly in Pinterest’s best interest to improve its search feature as much as possible, now that it’s being monetized.
This week, the company announced that it has acquired the team and technology behind recommendation and commerce startup Kosei, which it will use to accelerate its discovery and monetization efforts.
“The team includes some of the best minds in machine learning, data science and recommendation engines, who’ve created a unique technology stack that drives commerce by making highly personalized and powerful product recommendations,” Pinterest told us. “Among Kosei’s accomplishments is building a graph that understands more than 400 million relationships between 30 million products.”
Asked about how the acquisition will affect Pinterest’s efforts in search and advertising, Pinterest said, “Over the years we’ve been building a system for helping people discover the most relevant Pins, and the Kosei team is a great complement to our existing technology (see how we’ve been using machine learning here). The acquisition of Kosei will enable us to move faster in our efforts to provide relevant recommendations across the service, as well as in ad targeting and measurement as we roll out Promoted Pins.”
As Pinterest continues to grow its user base, it opens up more marketing opportunities for businesses on both the paid and organic levels. Read this for some insight into optimizing your content for Pinterest’s search feature.
In November, Yahoo and Mozilla announced a new partnership, which would make Yahoo the default search experience in the Firefox browser beginning with version 34, which was released in early December.
On Thursday, Merkle | RKG released its Digital Marketing Report for Q4 2014 (download page) looking at performance data and trends for Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It looks at a variety of aspects of search, but a section in the middle deals specifically with the effects of the Yahoo/Mozilla deal on paid search.
“We’re now able to assess the impact of the deal on Yahoo’s share of Firefox paid search traffic, which grew from 12% at the beginning of December to 30% by the end of the year,” it says. “However, digging deeper reveals that Yahoo’s share of Firefox 34 paid clicks has been in decline ever since the first big wave of updates in the second week of December. While the initial rollout saw Yahoo’s share rise to a peak of 43% on December 10th, that figure was just 36% by December’s end.”
“This is primarily the result of users switching the default search engine of their browsers back to Google, as shown by the corresponding increase in Google’s share of Firefox 34 paid clicks throughout the month of December,” the report says. “All in all, it appears the deal will move about 2% or less of total paid search traffic from Google to Yahoo. This is far less than the 10%+ of paid traffic that stands to be on the table if Safari default search were to change hands, which news outlets have reported is a possibility in 2015.”
Google has been showing concern about users sticking with Yahoo. It’s been showing Firefox users who visit its homepage a message saying, “Get to Google faster. Make Google your default search engine.”
According to the Merkle | RKG report, Bing and Yahoo outpaced Google in paid search growth, not only because of the Yahoo Firefox deal, but also rapid growth from Bing Product Ads.
