Featured Article: Twitter Agree Massive Ad Deal – 24th April 2013 This week, Twitter announced a multi-year ad partnership with Publicis’ Starcom MediaVest to further enhance the commitment they have made to advertisements on their platform. Starcom MediaVest have committed, as part of this partnership, to a certain level of advertising spend, alongside ventures such as a joint "Social TV lab" to help understand the way users interact across screens. As part of this unique deal, Twitter will also be in a position to offer Starcom's clients some of the most desirable ad slots, as well as early access to new ad systems that Twitter launch in the future. Twitter has definitely made a statement with this partnership, as they look to finally be stepping up their game in the world of search advertising. Will major advertisers start jumping on the bandwagon? And will the new Twitter keyword targeting ad format be a success, and a rival the dominance of Google in the search market? Only time will tell, but Twitter and Facebook are both getting serious with search advertising! Advertisers should start paying attention and getting involved, as early as possible, to capture audiences where they are spending most of their time online.
Read more details about this ad deal below and the rise in social search advertising options: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100665024 http://www.tonyrocha.com/twitter-reaches-biggest-ad-deal-yet/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/24/how-the-search-giant-could-fall/
Google Enhanced with Google+ Annotations & Time Segmentation Updates – 24th April 2013 Google+ Annotations At the beginning of this week, Google announced yet more updates to enhanced campaigns, allowing users to highlight Google+ follower counts.
While advertisers have been able to add social extensions at a campaign level for some time now, this integration is automatic for all enhanced campaigns. In order to be eligible for these social annotations your Google+ page should have:
“recent, high-quality posts and a significant number of followers, meaning 100 for most businesses.” Are Google pushing Google+ on advertisers or are they just enticing them into using the platform? Time Segmentation Google have also this week, announced the launch of time segmentation within the user interface to make advertisers’ life even easier. Previously advertisers would have to download a report segmented by time metrics to analyse this data, or alternatively use the dimensions tab on an adgroup/campaigns level to see this data. Now though Adwords users can segment this data on a keyword/adgroup/campaign level directly in the interface and save valuable time. -
Kevin Ting
Read more about the increasing changes to google adwords: http://emarketed.net/adwords-feature-segment-search-query/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/22/google-adwords-enhanced-campaignsnow-let-advertisers-highlight-their-google-follower-count-get-improved-inapp-targeting/
Google Raids Images – 23rd April 2013 According to Define Media Group experts, January’s Google Image Search update was responsible for a drastic drop of traffic generated by users looking for pictures in Google. Image search traffic analysis of 87 domains shows 63% decrease in image search referrals after the new user interface was released. The old interface displayed image hosting pages right in the background of enlarged image and now all stays in ‘Google Gallery’ with full size high resolution image on the right-hand side. Just the URL of source page appears on the left now, in most cases with no real need for the user to click it.
The problem though is that optimising website images has much less sense in this situation because ranking high in Google Image Search no longer drives a significant amount of traffic to those who invested in image SEO. Obviously the most affected were fashion, entertainment, lifestyle and photo websites as performance hugely relies on images.
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Artur Kozdrowski
Read more: http://www.definemg.com/how-googles-image-search-update-killedimage-seo/
How to Get Over the One Hurdle Keeping You from Creating Awesome Content - 23rd April 2013 Over the past 12-18 months there have been several influences that have transformed content, both in terms of search and social: Changes to search algorithms which deemphasised thin content in the SERPS forced marketers to focus on quality content, and social becoming a legitimate content discovery platform for online users. So content can be thought of as the foundation of SEO and social- the ‘bread’ to SEO’s 'peanut butter' and Social’s 'jam'. Content is very much a central part of online marketing, and evidently, as can be seen from the graph below, improving content development strategy is the number one goal for online marketers in the next 12 months.
These changes can be summarised as “the brand as a publisher”, a phrase which has been repeated over the last few months, which according to Mike Volpe, the CMO of HubSpot (a marketing software company) means to: “Provide value to your customers. Be helpful and become the best publication and information source in your industry. This is the core of inbound marketing”; this relates to adding genuine value to your audience. To consistently produce great content, the content process needs to be thought of differently; most of the time more emphasis is placed on creating and promoting an idea, with less time spent on brainstorming but to consistently and repeatedly create great content, more emphasis needs to be placed on brain storming, and building and refining ideas. So, instead of launching straight in to a content task, spend just a little more time looking at how the content adds value to the audience and make sure it is content that your audience will want to engage with, link to and share; brainstorming is key. -
Helena Rosam
For more information visit: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2263239/How-to-Get-Over-the-OneHurdle-Keeping-You-From-Creating-Awesome-Content http://www.searchenginejournal.com/3-practical-tips-for-creating-magiccontent-flow/62298/