Online Marketing News: Death Of A Directory, Are Social Ads As Effective?, Search Getting Smarter

Friday, November 27, 2015

Online Marketing News: Death Of A Directory, Are Social Ads As Effective?, Search Getting Smarter

Google Reveals Black Friday In-Store Traffic Data to Help Improve Focus of Online Ads

Google Reveals Black Friday In-Store Traffic Data to Help Improve Focus of Online Ads [Infographic] – Google has created a new infographic which looks at in-store traffic patterns over the holiday season, using anonymized Location History records. The stats offer some great insight and highlight where offline metrics are headed – and how they can be used to better target and focus online marketing content. Google

Snapchat Launches Story Explorer, A Swipeable Way To Get Different Visual Perspectives – With a quick swipe up, Snapchat users can now view a different angle on specific stories for a more robust story experience. Marketing Land

Study: Brands Finding Social Ads as Effective as Traditional Advertising – It appears the tide is changing. According to a recent study by IZEA, 52 percent of companies surveyed have a sponsored social budget and they find social ads to be in the top three most effective marketing investments they’ve made. SocialTimes

The Yahoo Directory Is Finally Absolutely Dead – We knew it was coming: the Yahoo Directory is now officially offline. Going to dir.yahoo.com now redirects you to aabacosmallbusiness.com. Search Engine Land

Facebook’s Audience Network: 80% of Impressions Now Native – Facebook offered another rare peek into the performance of its Audience Network, saying that 6 percent of all time spent on mobile applications is spent on apps running Audience Network. Facebook

Google Analytics Adds Calculated Metrics – New tool allows the creation of custom metrics that are calculated from traditional metrics, such as Revenue Per User and more. Marketing Land

Report: Social Media Platforms Are Becoming Too Complicated – There is power in simplicity — at least that’s the premise behind the Siegel+Gale simplicity index. The study uses survey data from more than 12,000 consumers in eight countries about the perceived simplicity or complexity of their interactions with more than 500 brands, and why simplicity pays off. SocialTimes

Google’s Natural Language Search Gets Smarter – Google is now smarter at understanding queries that include superlatives and times, as well as more complicated questions. Search Engine Land

Third-Party Apps Losing Access to Instagram’s Feed – Instagram is overhauling its platform for developers, and one of its changes is the elimination of the feed application-programming interface, which allows third-party apps to access its feed. Instagram

Google Updates The Search Quality Rating Guidelines – In 2013, we published our human rating guidelines to provide transparency on how Google works and to help webmasters understand what Google looks for in web pages. Since that time, a lot has changed: notably, more people have smartphones than ever before and more searches are done on mobile devices today than on computers. Here are the updated guidelines. Google

Google Announces New Advertising Support For AMP Pages – Fast-loading pages may also mean fast-loading ads, with advertising platform support for AMP that’s been announced. Marketing Land

Google To Penalize Sites Using Deceptive Mobile Traffic Networks – Google tells us they are actively working on detecting and penalizing sneaky mobile traffic networks. Search Engine Land

From our Online Marketing Community:

In response to Want to Add More Participation to You Content? Follow These 5 Keys to Success [Guide], Tom Southern said, “Great ideas Ashley, thanks for sharing. I love the Halloween-theme content marketing pics. They’re great. I can see these ideas working well on Pinterest, Facebook and other image strong platforms, as well as blogs. Thanks for the ideas and inspiration. You’ve got me thinking.”

What were the top online and digital marketing news stories for you this week?

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Infographic: Google

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