ScribbleLive Acquires Linkdex; Bridging the Content Marketing and SEO Gap
ScribbleLive, a content marketing company, announced that it has acquired Linkdex, the Enterprise SEO Platform, in what is the first big organic search and content marketing software tie-up. With this acquisition, ScribbleLive adds another integral piece to their platform, helping marketers manage the complete lifecycle of their content.
Organic search is a key channel for consumers with an estimated 3.5 billion Google searches a day. Businesses serious about digital marketing and sales need to create the best content for their audience, while optimizing for impression and clicks. By providing an all-in-one platform to operationalize strategy, create beautiful content, target audiences, and measure impact, marketers will own the complete customer journey while driving consistent ROI. The convergence of content marketing and SEO technology brings marketing teams one step closer to becoming the most effective revenue drivers in their organization.
ScribbleLive combines predictive analytics with content planning, creation, and distribution technologies. Together with the vast amount of Linkdex data, which includes organic search performance data on billions of pages, a unique author database, and reporting and productivity tools, marketers will be getting the most out of their content marketing efforts.
This acquisition expands ScribbleLive’s global presence. Linkdex, which has been backed by global technology investor, Amadeus Capital Partners, since 2009, has also developed strong relationships with some of the world’s largest brands and agencies – making the company a powerful addition to ScribbleLive’s partner network.
“A great content marketing strategy ensures you’re found throughout the consumer journey. Organic search plays a big part in the journey for most digital consumers. There’s never been a more complete product suite to manage the plan, create, engage, and measure cycle. This offers a huge opportunity to companies wanting a marketing advantage.” Vince Mifsud, ScribbleLive CEO (pictured top left).
“There’s no denying the power of content marketing when attempting to engage, inform, or entertain.” said Mark Smith, CEO of Linkdex. “But without great SEO, compelling content can fail to reach its intended audience, while great SEO without the right content to support it creates a whole different set of challenges. By joining ScribbleLive we’re overcoming that operational disconnect, bringing the two disciplines together, and helping our customers ensure marketing success.”
Mark Smith, Linkdex’s CEO, will continue to lead the division’s growth, and directly report to ScribbleLive CEO, Vince Mifsud in the role of Managing Director.
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Opera Mediawork’s Q2 Mobile First Insights Report Shows Retail and Automotive Brands Also Driving Growth and Consistent Spend in Brand Performance.
As the app stores grow by thousands of apps each day and consumers’ choices expand, many Fortune 1000 technology companies are turning to mobile performance campaigns in order to gain coveted space on consumers’ smartphones and tablets, Opera Mediaworks observes today in its quarterly mobile marketing report.
“Thanks to powerful attribution and return-on-ad-spend metrics now available, brands are not just comfortable, but eager, to spend at scale on mobile,” says Will Kassoy, CEO of Opera Mediaworks (pictured left). “We are seeing a trend of brands focusing more on attribution metrics using partners like us to complement their traditional media to drive incremental reach, engagement and actions on their mobile device.”
This quarter the global ad platform’s Mobile First Insights (MFI) report focuses on the growth of brand performance (i.e., direct response tactics for Fortune 1000 brands)/ It found that:
* Companies in the Technology/Gadgets vertical have invested the most heavily in mobile direct response (DR) over the past year, capturing 24.3% of ad dollars spent on performance campaigns.
Among those campaigns, the most successful have been for apps that offer daily utility to the user, such as those that increase photo storage or track stocks.
* While Technology and QSR captured the most annual spend, Retail and E-commerce was the top category in Q2, and both Retail and Automotive have shown the most consistent growth since the third quarter of 2015.
* Food Delivery and Quick Service Restaurants (QSR) was not far behind, with 23.4% of annual ad spend, and it has been the strongest vertical for the first half of 2016. These brands present a unique challenge for performance teams because they are often looking to optimize multiple KPIs at once, the company said.
“These top QSR brands are looking to do much more than drive app installs at their targeted CPI rate. They’re measuring post install engagements such as registrations and coupon downloads, with an ultimate goal of driving foot traffic to their brick-and-mortar locations,” said Jude O’Connor, Opera’s Vice President of Brand Performance. “By tracking those post-install events, we’ve been able to create audience profiles of their common customers, optimize to those audience and others who match their patterns of behaviors, and play a large role in them redeeming coupons within store — thus directly boosting the brand’s sales and revenue.”
Ad spend from travel brands has more than doubled from Q1 to Q2, due mostly to the summer travel season, but the company expects both Travel and Entertainment to grow tremendously, the latter as the United States heads into NFL season (fantasy sports apps) and fall television series (streaming media apps).
Other highlights from the report:
Nearly 10% increase in time spent in the Top 100 apps The amount of time that mobile users spend in the Top 100 apps that monetize on Opera’s platform is now 33.5 minutes a day, up from 30 minutes in the first quarter of 2016. Average session length also increased by 10.8% and is now 9.4 minutes.
Top performing publisher categories, impression share and revenue
News & Information is now no.1 for impression volume; more than 1 in 4 ad impressions were served in apps with daily utility to users, such as weather apps and a mobile reader for Reddit.
The highest engagement levels are seen on ads run in the Education and Travel categories, with performance of 1.9X and 1.7X the average platform CTR.
Games is still the top converter, followed by Sports, but Health & Fitness and Productivity have moved into the Top 5 for the first time.
Tracking post-install events to calculate LTV
The definition of a high-quality user is different for each industry, and each brand as well. While lifetime value (LTV) models for Gaming are fairly simple, based on retention and in-app purchases, those for brands are more complicated, Opera found. However, by tracking and optimizing to as many as 22 post-install events, such as registration/logins, social sharing, wishlist-add or initiated checkout, brands can calculate LTV and focus their spend on sources that deliver results.
“Targeting, tracking and optimizing is how you win in the world of performance, and that’s why having a mobile-ad SDK is so important — so that you can feed your algorithm with accurate data signals and feedback from campaigns,” said Kevin Teng, Senior Director, Performance Advertising, Opera Mediaworks. “But the people who work with that data are also important. As demand for top-tier performance advertising grows, I believe we’re going to see even more User Acquisition and Performance teams with incredible talent in analyzing KPIs and navigating complicated reporting and attribution structures.”
Overcoming obstacles in mobile creative
There are significant pain points that brands have when designing ads for performance campaigns, including hesitation to loosen brand guidelines and lacking the kinds of assets and storyline that will convert users. In the report, Opera’s creative team presents three best practices for mobile creative specifically built for performance campaigns.
To see these best practices, and to view the report in its entirety, visit http://operamediaworks.com/innovation-and-insights/mobile-first-insights/2016-q2.
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New study shows nearly 50% of users have never bought a product after watching a mobile video ad; LoopMe solves problem with AI brand optimization technology.
Mobile video platform LoopMe has announced new optimization and reporting technology, PurchaseLoop (patent pending) is a new self-learning technology that will use AI to continuously optimize mobile video campaigns towards brand metrics such as purchase intent, brand affinity or product recall. This will help deliver ads to the users most likely to change opinion and move along the path to purchase, enabling brands to increase revenues and loyalty.
While the performance of digital campaigns has traditionally been measured by views and clicks, the impact CTR has on brand metrics such as purchase intent, and subsequently on consumer purchase behavior and ultimately brand revenues, has been called into question. Research by Nielsen, which examined the link between clicks and offline purchase behavior, suggested there is no correlation between CTR and sales.
“The challenge many brands face is getting ROI from their digital campaigns and achieving the marketing goals” comments Stephen Upstone, CEO LoopMe (pictured left). “Clicks were used to judge the impact of campaigns simply because there was a lack of other reliable metrics to use for optimization or reporting. The implementation of this new technology allows advertisers to act on metrics which genuinely have an impact on revenue. It will also allow them to overcome the challenge of identifying users who are in market for their product, improving ROI and their understanding of what works for their brand”.
In a survey of 1,000 mobile users conducted this week, close to half (45%) said that they had never watched a mobile video ad and subsequently been driven to make an offline or online purchase. When asked why this was the case 51% stated they were not in market for the product at that time and 29% said the adverts were not relevant. These statistics show that advertising is often not being delivered at the correct point in the purchase funnel or to users who are likely to change their minds, ultimately wasting marketer’s budgets.
LoopMe’s AI has been used across a variety of campaigns, for brands including Samsung, Unilever, Mattel, Comcast, Macy’s, Renault, Oracle, Cartier and Verizon, delivering uplifts in brand consideration of 68% and purchase intent of 40%. “The results were hugely impressive” commented Matthew Dodd, Managing Director Global at On Device Research speaking about a recent LoopMe campaign “across all key campaign effectiveness measures LoopMe outperformed our normative scores”.
The new way of delivering campaigns is to combine LoopMe’s AI with third party brand research from Nielsen and On Device, to expressly target users who have shown the greatest likelihood of moving along the purchase funnel. Throughout each campaign a sample of users will be surveyed to determine its ongoing performance against brand metrics like brand awareness, favorability or purchase intent.
The results of these surveys are fed into the AI engine which undergoes a full update on its assumption set every 20 minutes to act based on survey learnings. This allows the campaign to be upweighted to users displaying a higher propensity to move along the brand consideration scale, reducing the number of ads shown to users who display little likelihood of being swayed by the ad and improving user experience.
This ground-breaking technology also means users can be targeted with campaigns which complement their point in their purchase funnel, with different messaging delivered to users who are moving from awareness to favorability to those who are brand loyalists.
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Marketing to Millennials 2016: A New Report from Fluent.
Fluent, a customer acquisition company, has conducted a nationwide survey of 1,769 millennials and 1,191 non-millennials to find out what really moves the needle for this dynamic generation.
Key findings include:
o While still the top network, Facebook is far less influential with millennials than it is with older generations. 43% of millennials say Facebook is the social media platform they use most often, compared with 61% of non-millennials.
o Millennials prefer email to receive promotional messages; over two-thirds of millennials said that promotional emails impacted their purchase decisions.
o Millennials own smartwatches at nearly twice the rate of the general population. 44% say they own smartwatches compared with only 23% of non-millennials. Despite the dominance of smartphones, computers remain an important purchase device for millennials.
o Nearly 1 in 3 (32%) millennials use computers to make purchases at least weekly.
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