Social Media
How Social Media Influencers Can Impact Your Customers’ Purchase Decisions
If you haven’t heard, social media influencers now play a pivotal role in marketing for a wide range of brands. Whether it’s endorsing a skincare product, a luxurious handbag, a new model SUV or even the latest knitting accessory, there’s a digital influencer for every product, and increasingly, more businesses are joining the influencer marketing bandwagon as a means to improve their marketing and outreach strategies. But how do influencers actually ‘influence’, and subsequently guide people’s purchase behavior?
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Twitter Officially Launches It’s ‘Promoted Trend Spotlight’ Ad Option
After months of testing, Twitter is now officially launching its new ‘Promoted Trend Spotlight’ ad unit, which will enable brands to take up to top section of its Explore tab, a prime placement opportunity for major brand awareness campaigns. It’s taken some time for Twitter to roll the option out beyond its initial test group (selected advertisers in the US, UK and Japan), but now, the Promoted Trend Spotlight option will be made available to brands in the US, the UK, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, and Thailand. The option, which Twitter says is a compliment to its Promoted Trend ads, will support 6-second videos and GIFs, as well as static images.
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Marketing
Google’s Hogging Half Your Traffic: How to Get It Back
Google. One of the most powerful tech companies in the world. One we depend on for traffic, revenue, and leads. Competing with us little search marketers. It used to be a give-and-take. We provide the content – Google provides the traffic. But for the first time in history, that relationship has become lopsided, favoring Google. For the first time in history, more searches end on Google – without a click – than with one. These are the so-called “zero-click searches.” Already, more than 50% of Google searches end without a click. And that’s a huge threat to our websites.
For the full article click here
How to Track Offline Conversions in Microsoft Advertising
Previously, I wrote about how to track offline conversions from Google Ads. Importing data from outside sources, such as phone calls and CRM records, helps to complete the picture of revenue attributable beyond immediate website activity. Chances are, as a digital marketer, you don’t solely work with Google Ads. Many of us are also actively managing Microsoft Advertising accounts. In this article, I’ll walk through importing offline conversion data into Microsoft Advertising.
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Daily Minute Master Series – January 20, 2020.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
LinkedIn Brings 3 New Features to LinkedIn Pages
LinkedIn pages are gaining three new features designed to facilitate more community engagement and form stronger relationships with followers. According to LinkedIn, there are now more than 50 million organizations around the world utilizing pages to connect with customers, prospects, and employees. To assist these organizations, LinkedIn rolls out regular updates every quarter. With this quarter’s update, new features include invite to follow, LinkedIn Live integration, and new posting options.
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Twitter Confirms That It Won’t Be Adding an Edit Option Anytime Soon
Tweet editing advocates, brace yourselves. This week, in an interview with Wired, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that an edit button is not on the cards for the platform, and likely never will be. Dorsey’s statement pours cold water on previous indications he’s made in regards to a possible edit option. In late 2016, Dorsey gave users hope by suggesting that tweet editing could be made available within a confined window, like a 5-minute gap after posting a tweet, within which you would be able to fix up any errors as required.
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Marketing
How to Grow Your Organic Traffic with Amazing Content & Collaboration
Even if a site does not sell similar products or services as you, but they compete for the same real estate in the search results, they are a search competitor and someone you need to pay attention to as you conduct keyword research. As you analyze your site and competitor sites, you should be looking for the best opportunities to start ranking quickly. Your best opportunities will be keywords and phrases that have relatively low competition – based on backlink numbers and the authority of ranking domains – and high search volumes.
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The Latest Data on the January 2020 Google Core Update
Now that the Google January 2020 core update is mostly rolled out, we have asked several data providers to send us what they found with this Google search update. All of the data providers agree that this core update was a big one and impacted a large number of web sites. What we know from Google, as we previously reported, is that the January 2020 core update started to roll out around 12:00 PM ET on Monday, January 13th. That rollout was “mostly done” by Thursday morning, on January 16th. We also know that this was a global update, and was not specific to any region, language or category of web sites. It is a classic “broad core update.”
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Daily Minute Master Series – January 17, 2020.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Facebook Backs Off on Plan to Bring Ads to WhatsApp
According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook is re-thinking it’s approach to WhatsApp as a revenue-generating tool: “WhatsApp in recent months disbanded a team that had been established to find the best ways to integrate ads into the service, according to people familiar with the matter. The team’s work was then deleted from WhatsApp’s code, the people said.” That would mean that while WhatsApp has more than 1.5 billion users, it won’t be contributing significantly to Facebook’s overall revenues anytime soon.
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YouTube Shows Users’ Comment History in New Profile Cards
Perhaps even more telling than a user’s comment history is what channels they subscribe to, which will be on full display in their profile card. You can learn a lot about someone from the types of YouTube creators they subscribe to. However, users can change what information is displayed in their profile card from the settings menu. So that may be worth looking into if you value your privacy on YouTube.
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Marketing
Google January 2020 Core Update Almost Done Rolling Out
Google has confirmed that its January 2020 core update, which began Monday at noon, is now mostly done rolling out as of Thursday morning. Google said on the @searchliaison account “the update is mostly done, though as with any core update, it may take to two weeks to fully complete.” This Google search algorithm update was announced on Monday and began rolling out Monday at 12pm ET. The rollout is global and impacting all Google search regions and languages. This update is just about done rolling out but you may see fluctuations throughout the next two weeks, Google said.
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Google Expands Domain Name and Icon Listings in Search Results to Web Queries
You can find a more in-depth explanation of the process here – and given the prominence of these new icons in the search display, especially on desktop, where they’re larger and stand out even more, it’s worth looking into, either by yourself or your tech team. In itself, the update is not a major, functional change, but definitely, those icons stand out in desktop search queries. And given that around 90% of searches conducted on desktop PCs come via Google, it’s worth taking note, and optimizing your listings wherever possible.
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Daily Minute Master Series – January 16, 2020.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Instagram Officially Begins Testing of DMs in Its Desktop Version
The addition will make Instagram’s messaging tools more widely accessible, as not all users are able to access the platform via the app. People in regions where network access is limited, or where data plans are restrictive, could benefit from being able to connect to their DMs on an alternate platform. And given the popularity of direct messaging on Instagram – as demonstrated by the launch of its ‘Threads’ messaging app last year – it makes sense for the platform to look for more ways to facilitate direct interaction. For brands, the addition could have specific benefits for those looking to use Instagram Direct for customer service queries, enabling easier integration into your broader social media workflow.
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LinkedIn Adds Live-Streaming for Company Pages and New ‘Invite to Follow’ Options
While none of these updates is ground-breaking, as such – there are no major functional leaps or big system improvements – each of these changes could have significant impacts, and could make it easier for you to build your LinkedIn presence. LinkedIn says that all of these updates are rolling out from this week, so if you’re not seeing them yet, you will shortly (except in the case of LinkedIn Live, for which you need to apply for access).
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Marketing
Google Ads Enables Bid Simulator for Target ROAS, Budget Simulator for Maximize Clicks, Conversions
The bid simulator has been available only for manual and Target CPA bidding. It’s now available for Target ROAS campaigns. The screenshot below shows a bid simulator for Target ROAS portfolio strategy, but you can also see the simulator icon at the ad group level in Target ROAS campaigns that aren’t using a portfolio strategy. The simulator works the same way it does in manual and Target CPA bidding campaigns. The projected impact of a change is based on your auction data from the past seven days and assumes all other influencers, such as your ads, landing pages, your competitors’ ads and bids, all stayed the same.
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Google Introduces a New Shopping Section in Search Results
In order for merchants to have products surfaced in the popular products section, they’re encouraged to set up product feeds in Google Merchant Center and/or apply the appropriate structured data markup to product pages. According to Google, this new feature will help drive organic traffic to merchants. It will be interesting to see if that ends up being the case, considering this feature allows users to do a considerable amount of browsing without ever leaving Google.
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Daily Minute Master Series – January 15, 2020.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Instagram is Working on a New ‘Maps’ Sticker for Instagram Stories
The additions keep on coming for Instagram Stories. This week, reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong has discovered that Instagram is working on a new map sticker for Stories which would display your location on a world map. As you can see in this example, the map sticker would show a section of a world map image, including a marker for your location. You would imagine, due to privacy concerns, that you wouldn’t be able to zoom in too far on that map, giving viewers a precise location, but it could be another way to easily share where you are, and what you’re up to at any given time.
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Facebook Dominates Most Downloaded Apps of 2019 Listing, Covering Both Android and iOS
Last month, Apple released its listing of the most downloaded apps on the App Store for 2019, which showed that Facebook and Google held six of the top ten spots, underlining the dominance of the digital giants. Recently, app analytics provider Sensor Tower published its latest data report, which includes, among other elements, its own listing of the most downloaded apps of 2019, covering both Android and iOS activity. And while the results are slightly different to Apple’s rankings, the end picture is largely the same.
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Marketing
Google Ads Makes Parallel Tracking Mandatory for Video Campaigns
Google Ads is making parallel tracking available for video campaigns, which is optional for now but will soon become mandatory. Parallel tracking is designed to improve mobile site speed by bringing visitors directly to the landing page while measuring the ad click in the background. Due to the importance Google places on site speed, parallel tracking is already mandatory for Search, Shopping, and Display campaigns. As of March 30th it will also be mandatory for all video campaign
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How to Optimize Your Videos for YouTube & Google This Year
When Searchmetrics presented Slide #14 in their “2019 SEO Year-End Review” presentation, you could have knocked me over with a feather. That’s when I discovered that YouTube has steadily (and stealthily) increased its organic visibility in Google’s SERPs over the past two years and recently surpassed Wikipedia for the #1 spot.
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Daily Minute Master Series – January 14, 2020.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Facebook’s Adding More Detail to It’s User Controls Over Advertisers’ Custom Audience List Targeting
“You can choose whether an advertiser can include or exclude you from their target audience at a business account level. That means any advertiser using any list from that business will also not be able to include, or exclude, you in an audience. Or you could make yourself eligible for seeing the ad, if they are using a list to exclude you. In this example, a gym might exclude you from ads to sign up because you’re already a member.” It’s a relatively small addition, but it does serve an important purpose, and it gives users more control over their data, and more understanding as to why they might be seeing certain ads in their Facebook feed. The new option, rolling out later this month, will be available in your ‘Advertisers & Businesses’ listing in ‘Ads Preferences’.
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TikTok is Developing a Feed of Curated Content, Similar to Snapchat’s Discover Stream
As it works to address advertiser concerns around ad placement alongside controversial content, rising video app TikTok is investigating the possibility of a curated content stream, similar to Snapchat’s Discover surface. The Financial Times reports that TikTok is looking at adding in a new highlights stream, which would display selected, original videos from popular TikTok creators, alongside content from professional publishers. The added curation would give TikTok’s moderators more control over the viewing experience, ensuring that advertisers don’t end up having their ads wedged in-between controversial posts.
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Marketing
Why Hyper-Personalization is Key for Marketers in 2020
In the words of Malcolm Gladwell, marketers in 2020 have finally reached the ‘tipping point’ where scalable hyper-personalization of marketing activities is not only possible, but is rapidly becoming a requirement in order to stay up with evolving consumer trends. The shift to more towards personalized, targeted shopping experiences is largely due to the advancements in marketing technology, with elements of machine learning, artificial intelligence and biometric identification all becoming more integrated with one another in order to deliver customized promotional opportunities.
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Google January 2020 Core Update Rolling Out Later Today
Whenever Google updates its search ranking algorithms, it means that your site can do better or worse in the search results. Knowing when Google makes these updates gives us something to point to in order to understand if it was something you changed on your web site or something Google changed with its ranking algorithm. Today, we know Google will be releasing a core ranking update, so keep an eye on your analytics and rankings.
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Daily Minute Master Series – January 13, 2020.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Social Media 2020: The Top Features, Formats, And Trends To Get Familiar With This Year
Last year saw continued growth and innovation in social media opportunities for brands with new features, content formats and dynamic creative capabilities designed to bring brands closer to their customers. For social marketers, a successful strategy involves tapping into audiences in compelling ways that can grab attention in passing moments. Facebook and Snapchat launched new immersive formats, including augmented reality. Pinterest and Instagram ramped up shoppable post capabilities. Machine learning powers an ever-growing slate of platform functions. Here’s the rundown of top features and formats social marketers should explore in 2020.
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Facebook’s Updated Desktop Layout is Now Appearing for More Users
In what feels a little like deja-vu, Facebook has this week confirmed that more users will now start seeing its new-look desktop layout, which includes tabs along the top of the screen, and a more compressed view. We actually reported back in September that more people were getting access to this new desktop presentation style, which Facebook first announced in May last year. It seems odd that it’s taking such a long time to make its way through the implementation pipeline, but Facebook is taking a slow and cautious approach, which includes asking those who have been granted access to the new format for their feedback on possible improvements as they go.
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Marketing
Google Ads Testing Custom Dimensions to Enable Reporting Based on Your Business Structure
Not to be confused with custom dimensions in Google Analytics, custom dimensions in Google Ads allow you to append annotations to your campaigns to report on categories and subcategories aligned with your business structure and goals. For example, you could set up and run custom dimensions to see aggregated campaign performance by product line and department. It’s in beta now and accessible from the “Tools” dropdown in Google Ads when enabled.
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Are Your Acquisition Efforts The Root of Your Retention Issue?
The issue of customer retention comes up in nearly every conversation with colleagues in a service business or software company. As companies aspire to transition to an ongoing customer relationship and recurring revenue model (versus traditional transactional relationships with customers), retaining high-value customers is more important than ever. After all, depending on what industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer can cost your company up to five times more than retaining an existing one. Moreover, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits from 25 to 95%. These factors have helped to give rise to major investments in optimizing customer journeys and customer base marketing, as well as establishing new roles such as “customer success managers.” With so much at stake and so much focus on retention, why then, on average does the typical American business have a yearly churn rate of 15%? Why are so many companies losing customers?
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Daily Minute Master Series – January 10, 2020.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Facebook Adds New ‘Page Management History’ Tab in Page Tools
Pages have always been able to see who’s publishing content on their Page via the Activity Log, but this new addition provides visibility into actions taken by other admins. That could be handy for those looking to better understand specific actions, or just keep better tabs on such changes. The option is being rolled out to all Pages, so if you’re not seeing it yet, you will shortly.
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Twitter Provides a First Look at Coming Feature Which Will Enable Users to Limit Who Can Reply to Their Tweets
As part of a broader discussion about the rise of ephemeral messaging, and its potential for Twitter, Beykpour, noted that: “I’m very interested in exploring how we might give customers more control. Where ephemerality is just one of those dimensions, I think there are other dimensions that, while we can get excited and talk about ephemerality because there’s lots of other standards of how other apps do this, I think other dimensions, like control around who can see or control around who can participate, is really critical.”
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Marketing
Facebook Will Let Users Hide Ads Targeted Via Custom Audience Lists
Custom Audiences are often comprised of a company’s active and best customers. Not being able to show ads to a critical mass of those users could potentially hurt campaign performance. However, this kind of control could be a net positive for advertisers as well as users. When users have the ability to opt-out, marketers have greater incentive to think carefully about the relationships they have with the customers on their lists and the messaging they’re serving them.
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With Bing Pages, Brands Can Manage Their Profiles Across Microsoft Products, Including Bing Search
Bing Pages show in Bing search results similar to a knowledge panel and give brands one more way to manage their online presence. They can use it to aggregate their social media links, publish contact details as well as customize their Outlook profiles with images and content. Bing Page owners can also promote their social media posts for free. Promoted posts will appear in relevant search results for 24 hours and page owners can designate up to three categories as well as a geographic region to target their audiences.
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Daily Minute Master Series – January 9, 2020.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Instagram Creators are Building Huge Audiences from Viral Stories Effects
So it’s not necessarily a simple path to Insta-fame, but depending on how much you want to build your audience, and how much faith you have in your idea for an effect, it could be worth the effort. Again, Arno Partissimo went from 6k to 630k followers as a result of his effects. The next risk to consider here is that Instagram could quickly be inundated by ‘Which character are you?’ type features as a result of this new trend, but again, if you have a good idea, it could be still cut through. It won’t be for everyone, but given the numbers, it may be something to consider.
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Facebook Outlines New ‘Video Traffic Source Insights’ and Provides Video Tips
Back in November, Facebook announced a coming new addition for its Creator Studio dashboard called ‘Traffic Source Insights’ which would provide a more direct overview of video watch time and retention metrics within four separate audience categories – ‘Followers’, ‘Shares’, ‘Recommended’ and ‘Paid’. These new insights provide more specific perspective into who, exactly, is watching your Facebook video content, thereby giving you more guidance as to where you should be focusing in order to improve your performance, dependent on your goal/s.
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Marketing
Mailchimp Claims Over 60% Share of Email Industry in Latest Report
Mailchimp — along with a number of other email providers built to serve small businesses — added more marketing features to its platform last year, but the report indicate that email continues to be the platform’s strongest feature. Email isn’t dead, it’s evolving. The volume of emails sent from Mailchimp in 2019 — over 340 billion — draws attention to the strength of the channel and the email market as a whole. The company’s reporting on its Thanksgiving weekend performance offers a glimpse at just how powerful the channel is. Nearly 9 billion emails were sent from the platform, generating $4.5 billion in orders.
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Facebook Will Crackdown on Fake Review Sellers Following Push from UK Regulators
Facebook has vowed to take more action in removing fake reviews and fake review sellers from its platform after the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued a warning to both Facebook and eBay over the impacts of allowing the online fake review marketplace to thrive. As reported by TechCrunch, last June, the CMA warned both companies that they needed to take more action to prevent the sale of fake reviews on their platforms.
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Daily Minute Master Series – January 8, 2020.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
Twitter is Removing the Audience Insights Element from Twitter Analytics
Twitter has confirmed that it is indeed removing its Audience Insights tab from Twitter Analytics at the end of this month. Initially launched back in 2015, Audience Insights provides more in-depth data on your profile followers, including demographic profiles, purchase behavior insights, mobile device usage stats and more. These data points can be helpful in mapping out more effective tweet and Twitter ads strategies, giving you more perspective on who, exactly, you need to reach. Now, when you head to Insights in your tweet analytics, you’ll see a notification like this at the top of the screen.
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Facebook Sets Deadlines for Advertisers to Comply with New Requirements for Housing, Credit, and Employment Ads
After initially announcing its coming changes to its ad targeting options for housing, credit and employment ads back in March last year, then re-iterating those updates and requirements in December, Facebook has this week set two definitive deadlines for advertisers to comply with its new requirements, particularly related to those utilizing Facebook’s Marketing API – i.e. those buying Facebook ads through third-party platforms and tools.
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Marketing
Brands Can Now Buy Walmart Sponsored Search Ads via API Partners
Walmart made another move in building out its e-commerce advertising offering Friday with the launch of Walmart Advertising Partners. The company named four initial ads API partners: Flywheel Digital, Kenshoo, Pacvue, and Teikametrics.
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IBM Launches New Predictive Ad Solution for Campaign Creative Elements
IBM’s latest AI-powered solution, built on the Watson platform, has been designed to deliver hyper-personalized ad creative. Having the ability to deliver creative that resonates with specific audiences based on a predictive model could eliminate much of the guess work and testing that comes with determining which creative elements will drive the most engagement. “Matching creative iteration with audience segment is the next step in campaign optimization,” said Lending Tree’s Senior Director of Marketing Josh Eldridge. Lending Tree and Potential Energy Coalition are two brands that have confirmed they will be implementing a beta of IBM’s Advertising Accelerator.
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Daily Minute Master Series – January 7, 2020.
/by Samantha ShapiroSocial Media
How Social Media Influencers Can Impact Your Customers’ Purchase Decisions
If you haven’t heard, social media influencers now play a pivotal role in marketing for a wide range of brands. Whether it’s endorsing a skincare product, a luxurious handbag, a new model SUV or even the latest knitting accessory, there’s a digital influencer for every product, and increasingly, more businesses are joining the influencer marketing bandwagon as a means to improve their marketing and outreach strategies. But how do influencers actually ‘influence’, and subsequently guide people’s purchase behavior?
For the full article click here
Twitter Officially Launches It’s ‘Promoted Trend Spotlight’ Ad Option
After months of testing, Twitter is now officially launching its new ‘Promoted Trend Spotlight’ ad unit, which will enable brands to take up to top section of its Explore tab, a prime placement opportunity for major brand awareness campaigns. It’s taken some time for Twitter to roll the option out beyond its initial test group (selected advertisers in the US, UK and Japan), but now, the Promoted Trend Spotlight option will be made available to brands in the US, the UK, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, and Thailand. The option, which Twitter says is a compliment to its Promoted Trend ads, will support 6-second videos and GIFs, as well as static images.
For the full article click here
Marketing
Google’s Hogging Half Your Traffic: How to Get It Back
Google. One of the most powerful tech companies in the world. One we depend on for traffic, revenue, and leads. Competing with us little search marketers. It used to be a give-and-take. We provide the content – Google provides the traffic. But for the first time in history, that relationship has become lopsided, favoring Google. For the first time in history, more searches end on Google – without a click – than with one. These are the so-called “zero-click searches.” Already, more than 50% of Google searches end without a click. And that’s a huge threat to our websites.
For the full article click here
How to Track Offline Conversions in Microsoft Advertising
Previously, I wrote about how to track offline conversions from Google Ads. Importing data from outside sources, such as phone calls and CRM records, helps to complete the picture of revenue attributable beyond immediate website activity. Chances are, as a digital marketer, you don’t solely work with Google Ads. Many of us are also actively managing Microsoft Advertising accounts. In this article, I’ll walk through importing offline conversion data into Microsoft Advertising.
For the full article click here