LOCATION3 MEDIA NEWS:
After experiencing more than a 30% increase in year-over-year revenue, it’s no surprise that we’ve needed to add some fresh faces and top-notch talent to support our growing array of services and client offerings. We’re quite pleased to have added these incredible people to our roster recently, and look forward to expanding even more as 2014 rolls along.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEARCH?
Have you noticed the recent changes to search results pages as they pertain to ecommerce results? As of late, the Product Listing Ads (PLAs) are now on the top of the page, above the top organic result rather than to the right as they once were. It will be interesting to see how this change will impact results, not only for those top spots but particularly for organic listings which are now getting pushed even further down the page. One key recommendation: if you are an online merchant and don’t have a merchant account or PLA set up and optimized, we strongly recommend you do so immediately. Stay tuned because we will be monitoring this change and the corresponding data regularly.
In line with the above example, Shopping Campaigns on Google have now been fully rolled out. This is a new way to manage and promote your products on Google, allowing you to more easily browse inventory directly in AdWords, thus helping you organize, bid and report on PLAs. We recommend that you work with your partners to transition over to this new setup sooner rather than later.
Have you heard about the release of Search Network with Display Select? Read more on the Location3 Blog for some Spring Cleaning recommendations.
We haven’t reported on search market share for a while, mainly because there haven’t been any drastic changes. Google still leads the search marketplace with 67.5% market share, Microsoft with 18.4% (up 0.1%), followed by Yahoo at 10.3%. To read more, click here for the official comScore blog.
Google is introducing its own set of Consumer Ratings Annotations that will be rolling out over the next few days. This format provides detailed consumer opinion data, and will automatically show one or more strongly-rated aspects of your business as part of the ad. During beta testing these ads have shown an average of 10% increase in CTR. The data for the annotation is derived from surveys that Google has created and administered, and the ratings summarize consumer opinion only.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN DISPLAY?
Has the online cookie officially crumbled? According to a post by Ayyappan Sankaran, co-founder and CEO of YuMe, the answer is “yes”. We would have to agree with him, and over the next couple of years we expect cookie tracking to be an antiquated option of the past. With mobile usage taking over desktop on many levels, and the influx of connected TVs and non-browser apps, the challenges with tracking in mobile are very different. In order for the industry to progress in this multi-screen world we need to develop ways that transcend the cookie and browser environments. Another recent blog by Facebook executive Brian Boland also discusses how cookies just don’t cut it anymore for online ad measurement.
To align with the importance of the above statement about cookies: according to eMarketer, Facebook grew its revenue from mobile advertising from 11% of the company’s total in 2012 to 45.1% in 2013, and eMarketer forecasts that mobile ad spending will comprise 63.4% of Facebook’s digital ad revenue in 2014. Google garnered 23.1% of its total 2013 ad revenues from mobile and that’s expected to increase to 33.8% in 2014. Read more at 247WallSt.com.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN VIDEO?
TrueView in AdWords is changing. Previously Google/YouTube offered three different ad formats to choose from: In-Stream, In-Display and In-Search. On April 15th this will change to only two formats: In-Stream and In-Display. The In-Display and In-Search ad formats are now being combined. This new format will allow us to view how users interact, and deliver more relevant ads to the searcher. Visit the official Google blog to read more.
TubeMogul has introduced a new tool for the video space: a free video view-ability audit that allows you to verify exactly where your ads run and know whether they were seen by your intended audience right down to the site level. Receive in-depth insights on 14 different view-ability and delivery metrics on any of your pre-roll campaigns. Visit TubeMogul to run your audit.
According to the latest from comScore, the U.S. population viewed nearly 26.9 billion video ads in January, with SpotXchange Video Ad Marketplace capturing the #1 position with 3.5 billion ad impressions. AOL, Inc. and Google Sites tied in second with 2.9 billion ads, Live Rail with 2.4 billion and BrightRoll Platform with 2.3 billion. Time spent watching video ads totaled 10 billion minutes, with AOL, Inc. delivering the highest duration of video ads at nearly 1.3 billion minutes. Video ads reached 52.6% of the total U.S. population an average of 165 times during the month. Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 81. If you are interested in finding out more about Location3’s video offering please reach out to your account team for more details on how we can prepare plans for you based on GRP’s, views and view-ability.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MOBILE?
In line with the theme of this month’s posts, did you know that iOS strips third party cookies? This essentially means that you cannot track view-thru conversions for mobile display buys, making it a challenge for optimization particularly when you consider the latest from comScore on the Smartphone Market Share. Android ranked as the top smartphone platform in January with 51.7% market share, followed by Apple with 41.6% (up 1 percentage point). Based on this data we are missing out on 41.6% of view-thru conversions. This is something to monitor and consider when optimizing for mobile display until a cookie-less multi-screen tracking mechanism becomes a reality.
We also came across another great article on how mobile traffic will continue to rise as smart devices take over the world: “Cisco predicts that the number of mobile users will to rise to 4.9 billion in 2018 from 4.1 billion in 2013 as consumers in emerging markets come online. By 2018, mobile video will represent 69% of mobile traffic, up from 53% last year.”
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ANALYTICS?
Google Analytics released dynamic remarketing. If you track ecommerce data in Google Analytics, you can now use this ecommerce GA data to create dynamic ads.
Using storytelling to share data is really taking off as a concept. Google recently released two articles that go over some of these concepts and how to report on them. In short summary, storytelling helps to make data personable and identifiable to your audience, resulting in a higher chance that action will be taken on that data.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN LOCAL?
Google has recently made changes in regards to listing ownership in accounts. A location’s data can’t be managed within a brand’s bulk account if it has already been claimed individually by a franchise, location owner, or anyone else. Google’s intent is to prevent dual ownership of listings and is alerting users if the listing is already owned by someone. If this occurs, the listing owner must go through a series of steps in order to take control of the listing and would ultimately be removed from the brand’s bulk account.
Google also has a New Look for Google Local Search Results and has been testing a cleaner layout for the front page for both local and regular search results. This new look has removed the underlines from all links, applied a new and larger font which results in 55 characters visible for the title tags, the Knowledge Graph information panel is shown and greyed out when rolling over a listing, and the ads are now annotated to make them more obvious.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEO?
The big SEO news for March was the penalizing of MyBlogGuest, one of the most popular and commonly used guest blogging network tools. This has been the most public attack on guest blogging we’ve seen yet from Google, and definitely sent reverberations throughout the blogging and SEO communities. Our blog post provides our opinion on the penalty itself as well as what to do in the event that guest blogging has been a part of your SEO strategy up to this point.
Google has also announced that they are now including both http and https versions of URLs within webmaster tools, as well as verified subdomains. This will just allow webmasters a more detailed look of their websites from the data provided through GWT. In order to see this information, all existing variants much be verified in Webmaster Tools. Here is documentation from Google on completing this verification, and here is the supporting article from Search Engine Land.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SOCIAL?
Facebook Organic Reach Nears Zero
A recent report from Social@Ogilvy and statements from Facebook have indicated that organic Facebook reach is declining rapidly, almost to the point of zero. Current organic reach is just 6% (it was 16% in Sept 2012), and pages with 500K+ likes are seeing an even lower reach at just 2%. A rep from Facebook offered this comment: “We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.”
What does this mean for brands? Facebook is forcing brands to pay for reach, especially those large brands with huge fan bases. The reality is, we gotta pay to play.
Facebook Redesigns Newsfeed and Pages, Creates New Ad Campaign Structure
Facebook redesigned their newsfeed to include larger photos and larger CTA buttons, and added a white background to highlight articles versus comments. Facebook Pages were also redesigned to a two-column layout, with the timeline on the right and brand info (e.g., About, # of likes, “Invite Your Friends”) on the left. Page admins have been given a new insights section about ads, Likes and post reach. This data is not new, it is simply found in a different place, making it more easily accessible. Learn more about the redesigned Facebook Pages.
Facebook also made some changes to their ad campaigns. They added a new layer to campaign structure, making it easier to organize and manage ads. This structure aligns with Google AdWords, leading us to believe that they are setting the system up to more easily import/export with AdWords and other ad platforms. Learn more about the new Facebook ad structure.
Twitter Ad Rates Drop, Places Promoted Accounts in Search
Q4 2013 reports show that Twitter ad rates dropped 18%, making it the seventh straight quarter of ad rate declines for the social network. While advertisers are spending less per ad unit, they are spending more on Twitter overall because users are clicking more (up 74%); Twitter claims it’s due to a diversification of ad products and units. We view this as a positive for advertisers, as long as demand and user activity do not decline as well. Learn more about Twitter’s ad rate report.
Twitter is adding Promoted Accounts, not just Promoted Tweets, into search streams. Now, when a user searches for something on Twitter, they could see recommended people/brands to follow within that search results stream, if that person/brand is advertising on that keyword. Learn more about Promoted Accounts in search.
Google Phasing Out Wildfire
Wildfire, which Google bought in 2012, is limiting support for their social channel management tools and telling clients to find another provider. The company is changing direction, and will focus on integrating their technology and social data into DoubleClick, to help brands improve all digital marketing efforts by using social insights. Learn more about Wildfire’s new direction.
LinkedIn Launches Showcase Pages, Removes “Products & Services” Tab
LinkedIn announced that they will be launching a new addition to Company Pages, called Showcase Pages, which allow brands to create specific areas to highlight brands, products, services, etc. Cisco is already using Showcase Pages to highlight their Cisco Security, Cisco Business Insights and various other products and services. On April 14, LinkedIn will be removing the “Products & Services” tab from all Company Pages. Learn more about the new LinkedIn Showcase Pages.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CREATIVE?
The Marketer’s Pocket Guide to Using Images on Your Blog
Rule number one is to never use images for which you don’t have express permission, which could open you up to liability. However, there are a lot of inexpensive or free resources for finding images:
Photopin.com: An image search engine that helps you find Creative Commons images. Just be sure to click through to the Flickr page for each image you want to use and check the specific license its creator has granted. Some will specify only non-commercial use, in which case you shouldn’t use on a business blog. Be sure to follow Creative Commons attribution standards to give proper credit to image creators.
GettyImages.com: The image licensing giant has recently created functionality that allows you to embed their images for free, which automatically grants credit and a link back to their site. This may or may not be acceptable depending on your brand, but is a great resource for high quality images.
Unsplash.com: This site offers totally free, commercially-usable, high quality images.
Istockphoto.com: One of the industry giants, this site offers professional photos at a range of prices. If you have a specific image in mind, it can be much faster to find it on a professional image site such as Istockphoto. This is something important to weigh against your time searching for a free option. Sometimes it’s worth the small investment in a professional image if it saves you half an hour of searching (and protects you from liability).