Going (Creatively) Digital
Google Accelerated Mobile Pages Places Emphasis On Speed For Rankings
The latest salvo in the app versus mobile web publishing wars comes courtesy of Google, which is preparing to roll out Accelerated Mobile Pages to deliver publisher content with faster load times. Other combatants include Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat’s Discover. Advertising Age reports that among other things, big publishers like Hearst are looking forward to delivering video via AMP, which will be accessible from Google search, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn or, potentially, anywhere online. Content is delivered quickly via AMP because it’s cached in the cloud (Google doesn’t have to grab it from websites). For search results, will Google favor AMP sites? Ad Age quotes Richard Gingras, senior director, news and social products at Google, as saying that faster sites with the same search scores as slower sites will win out.
What eBay Plans To Do To Take On Amazon
FORTUNE magazine does a deep dive on eBay’s plans to take on Amazon for e-commerce supremacy now that the traditional online auction house is on its own following the spinoff of PayPal. What are eBay’s challenges? Consider this: eBay offers some 800 million items. But people on mobile devices don’t want to scroll through a list of, say, every android device in the world when searching eBay. This detracts mightily from the company’s frictionless user experience that people have come to expect. One answer is to give eBay searchers a choice of categories for smartphones that might include “best value or brand new.” FORTUNE also notes that eBay is still on the Google rankings mend after being penalized in. SearchEngineLand has a recap of the problem with Google that impacted eBay’s bottom line significantly.
Latest Gallup Data Show Impact Of Social Media On Brand Sales
If you are a skeptic of the impact social media is said to have on brand marketing sales, you’ll probably enjoy the latest research from Gallup. The research firm surveyed 18,000 people who were asked about the impact social media has on their spending decisions, with 62% indicating none at all. Just 5% said social media has a great deal of influence. One school of thought is that the billions of users of sites like Facebook, Twitter and others aren’t interested in the mass of marketing messages coming at them on these platforms and that it’s become easy to ignore them. Fully 94% of the respondents said they use social media sites to connect with friends and family, compared to 29% who are looking for information, product reviews and trends. To view the information from Gallup, check it out via The Wall Street Journal.
Mobile Devices And Apple iOS Dominate Email Openings
Desktop computers represented about one-third of email opens in 2015 while Apple iOS devices dominated at 56%, according to an analysis of Movable Ink data by MarketingLand. While Android OS tablets and smartphones represented about 53% of all U.S. devices, they combined for a mere 11% of email opens. The data were derived from analysis of some 6 billion emails. The 2015 report covers how the holiday season compared to the rest of the year; a slowing trend in mobile and tablet email opens; conversions by device and vertical; when emails are opened during the day by device type; and time spent in email based on device. The full report can be downloaded here.
Instagram Adding Video Views To Site User Metrics
Marketers not satisfied with accumulating Likes on Instagram can soon begin adding video views to their profiles. According to VentureBeat, Video view counts give creators a tally of the impressions a video has received, whereas likes could be viewed as an engagement metric. With this feature, users will not only see the number of views but also how many people have liked and commented on a video. In a blog post, Instagram says: “As a widely expected industry metric for video, we believe video views are the best measure of viewer intent. And we often hear from our community they’d like to better understand how people are engaging with their videos.”
