| This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world. | ||||||||
 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
| If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe. |
Author: Team Position Squared
-
Best of the Week | Google Rolls out Mobile Friendly Usability and App Indexing Factors, and much more…
-
Google Rolls Out Mobile Friendly Usability and App Indexing Factors
In case you still wonder about the relevancy of a mobile strategy, the search giant Google just announced two major changes to its search algorithm for ranking mobile sites. These factors will be rolled into mobile search results starting April 21, 2015.
Here’s what’s coming:
1. Mobile friendly sites to rank better on mobile search results
In a major algorithmic change impacting mobile search results across all languages, Google will now label mobile friendly sites and determine if websites should rank on top of search. The intent is to provide users with the best possible and most relevant search results. Google advises businesses to make their sites mobile-friendly.
Check out Google’s guidelines for mobile sites.
2. Google indexed mobile apps get prominence on mobile search
App indexing enables apps to rank on Google web search results just like websites. This will apply to Android apps and will work for signed-in users using the app. Content from indexed apps and deep links will begin surfacing on search results.
The major implications of this update for businesses are, 1. have mobile-friendly sites in the first place, and 2. develop user-friendly apps – all of which helps businesses better align with the mobile audience.
Here at Position2 we recommend that clients:
- Start with a Mobile-friendly test
- Adopt Responsive Site design – a single URL to access the site across all devices only needs a single Googlebot user agent to crawl rather than multiple user agents
- Deploy app store optimization techniques to get the highest visibility for apps
Be sure to check out our Website & App services
Time to Go Mobile!
-
Spike in Global Mobile Ad Spending
If you and your target customer aren’t occupying the same space when spend decisions are being made, how can you expect to do successful business? Global data suggests that shared space, more than ever before, can be found in the palm of your customer’s hand. We mentioned in a previous blog that today there are more mobile phones than toothbrushes. Click here and find out how digital advertisers have begun overhauling their core strategies to meet the challenge.
Worldwide mobile ad spending will cross the $100 billion line in 2016, and for the first time it will account for more than 50% of total digital ad spending.
We see this eruption of mobile advertising happening in the two largest digital advertising categories – Search and Display. Knowing how, when and why a target audience accesses the Internet is key to success. The strategy to solve that puzzle must be both holistic and device-agnostic.
You can expect to see global mobile ad spending reach a quarter of all media ad spending by 2019, four years hence.
Here is a breakdown of total worldwide media ad spending. It demonstrates the speed with which mobile ad spending is catching up.
Ad spending in 2014
The same in 2016 (Projected)
The US and China account for almost 62% of worldwide mobile ad spends.
This table shows mobile ad dollars eating into traditional media ad dollars, and even digital ad dollars.
So all you advertisers out there: it’s time to devote a major chunk of your advertising budget to the mobile form factor. That’s where all the action is today and at least for the foreseeable future.
-
Best of the Week | Get Your White Paper Noticed with EVA, and much more…
-
Get Your White Paper Noticed with EVA
If you are like most of the movie going population, you choose the movie you see. That is, you probably watch a trailer shared by a friend on social media. If you like what you see, you might read a review, or check out a film review site like Rotten Tomatoes. When you actually choose to watch the movie the choice you make is informed.
So what about your last IT purchase? Does the same informed choice analogy apply? The supplier went to a lot of trouble and great expense to provide a white paper extolling the virtues of the product and the company. Did you read the whole thing at one go before deciding to buy the package?
Probably not. Who has time to read anymore, especially white papers?
If you read the white paper that lead to your buy-in it was probably preceded by googling some work-related material and coming across an info graphic or a video summary that made the white paper seem worthwhile. The equivalent of a good movie review.
If this experience sounds familiar, congratulations, you’ve successfully encountered the amazing process called Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA).
So, what is EVA?
Your horde of white papers have terrific details about industry trends, the facts and figures, the company’s capabilities, all laid out in a way to make successful business happen. You could email a note to prospective buyers suggesting they give the document a look, but how many people would even notice? For your message to reach far and wide it needs to be more accessible than its white paper format, much more appealing to your target audience. You have your white paper on one side and the entire Internet on the other. The trick is pushing the two together for maximum impact, and then making it accessible and comfortable on the mobile phone platform.
Enter Enterprise Visibility Accelerator, or EVA. You might think of it as the lever in leverage. It is the process of breaking down a long and too often dreary corporate white paper into a succinct and easy to understand format, then sharing that on social media. If you make your white paper exciting in social media, you will reach the right people and they will in fact respond.
Here are the different ways you can leverage your content:
-
Video
At Position2, we use information visualization and story-telling techniques to produce white paper-based videos that act much like a ‘trailer’ for a feature film. The video focuses on the highlights of the technical white paper, or content from the white paper is summarized and told in a story format that grabs attention and creates awareness about the company and what it offers. It’s all about seeing is believing.
-
Infographic
Busy managers like their data served in bite-size chunks. So we pick valuable information buried in the white paper and put it in a graphical chart in eye-catching icons, text and numbers so the message gets communicated in a matter of seconds.
-
PPT
Well written and designed PPTs can be the graphical equivalent of story telling. We reduce the white paper to a single slide deck and post it on social media platforms like SlideShare, where the content is consumed and shared by the readers.
Each EVA asset is designed to provide enough data to pique the interest of your target audience. Every asset has the same CTA (Call to Action): ‘For more information, see the full white paper here’. Your target audience arrives at the white paper ready to read, or arrives at a landing page specially created for the white paper ready to learn more.
How can EVA broaden the reach of your content?
By its very nature EVA gets ‘shared’ on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, SlideShare etc. There’s no telling how far you will be able to reach, particularly if your content reaches and interests the “influencers” in a big way.
The impact of EVA is quantifiable::
- 33% increase in referral traffic in just 3 months
- 8X increase in search listings
- 40X increase in asset visibility
- 3X increase in visits to landing page
Still not sure of why EVA is important for you?
Click here to check out the EVA Infographic!
You have produced an elaborate white paper or a technical document or an industry leading report. You know you have a great story, but the trick is connecting with your target customers in a way that convinces them it’s a worthwhile expenditure of time to read your report. This is where EVA comes in to help you win the game. Those white papers gathering dust in your archive? Handled properly, leveraged appropriately, that’s all gold.
Contact Position² to make your B2B brand go places with Enterprise Visibility Accelerator!
-
-
F8 Facebook Developer Conference 2015
The recently concluded Facebook F8 Developer’s Conference had a little bit of everything: workshops, product demos, digital luminaries waxing eloquent on the main stage. Facebook’s product experts freely traded geek info with the technical community. The big shout out was all about Facebook’s determination to be a ‘mobile first’ platform for all its products.
Major Announcements and the Key Takeaways for Digital Marketers
Messenger as Platform
- Integrating features from Messenger into other apps: Content created in-app with dynamic conversations in Messenger folds brands into the conversation
- Users connect directly with businesses: With streamlined Messenger business users connect with brands, build relations and receive business value
- Express yourself with 40 new apps plus audio, video, GIF and photo: The tight integration of the Messenger UX with on-the-fly creation and deployment of app-created content within a message stream
Embedded videos
- Now embed Facebook videos across the web: Content creators can now upload videos directly to Facebook
- Mobile videos mark the way forward: Facebook users daily watch 3 billion videos, 65% on mobile devices.
- Upping the visibility of Facebook videos going forward: Embedded videos watched in more places with greater ease enhances brand visibility
360° videos
- Spherical 360 degree interactive videos coming soon
- Will also play on the Oculus VR platform
Security and Infrastructure Stability
- Security ranked high on Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote address
- “Move fast with stable infrastructure”
- Better security practices emphasized for all aspects of Facebook operations
-
How to Optimize Content for Conversions [Infographic]
Content marketing powers your online visibility and conversions. It is essential that you have your digital content across multiple channels in multiple formats. Asset creation, optimization, distribution, reporting, and tweaking are the important steps in your content marketing endeavor. Learn more in this incisive infographic now.
-
Best of the Week | Google Algorithm Update: Say Goodbye to Doorway Pages, and much more…
This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world. 
From the Position² Blog This Week: Google Algorithm Update: Say Goodbye to Doorway Pages!
Google abhors black hat SEO techniques is an understatement. The latest instance is the tweaking of Google doorway page penalty algorithm to make it more stringent. Go through this blog to ensure you are not caught on the wrong foot.
Best of the Week Video
Watch this YouTube video that gives you useful tips to choose the right keywords for your Google AdWords success.White Paper: The Rapidly Changing World of SEO Get a head start in your quest for search engine optimization by going through this insightful white paper. Download this White Paper to know: - How important SEO is & why it should concern you?
- Various ways in which you can deploy SEO
- How to combine Social Media with SEO?
- SEO best practices and a road map to getting there
If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe. -
Google Algorithm Update: Say Goodbye to Doorway Pages!
One of the most annoying search results will now be blocked by Google. We can all cheer a collective “hooray”!
What are Doorway pages? In short, they are web spam. Designed to game the system, these pages rank high in search results, click baiting the searcher to an irrelevant page or site. Google described examples of doorway pages on their blog for clarity:
- Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
- Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)
- Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy
Google has not officially announced a release date for the doorway page penalty algorithm update, but they did state they are “continually working on ways in which to minimize the impact of webspam on users”.
SEO Managers and/or Webmasters are advised to review the Google questionnaire to make sure your website does not qualify as a doorway page. Check them out below:
- Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?
- Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific?
- Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?
- Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
- Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?
If you find yourself answering “yes” to one or more of these questions, take action before Google penalizes your website.
If you have any questions about doorway pages, Contact Position².
-
Pinterest Launches A Shiney New Algorithm Called Pinnability
Pinterest is beginning to poise itself as a search engine, or what they call a “discovery engine”. Taking cues from Facebook, Pinterest is now serving up what they call a “home feed”. This feed is powered by Pinterest’s Smart Feed algorithm that was launched in 2014.
So what is Pinnability? It’s a collection of machine learning models that allows Pinterest to serve a smart feed on a Pinterest user’s homepage. Pins used to be in chronological order, but now it’s the job of Pinnability to order pins based on a relevance score, or more specifically, a personalized relevance score. Pinterest states that filtering by chronological order isn’t enough to help Pinterest users see pins they really want to see.
Pinterest has a Pinnability diagram on their blog to show the logic of this machine learning model.
Machine learning models have always played a significant role in the development of Pinterest. Pinnability is powered by smart feed, the technology that brings flexibility and control over the composition of the home feed. Pinnability and smart feed work together to estimate the probability of a Pinner interacting with a Pin, with pins receiving high relevance scores shown first. The personal relevance score includes all Pins that users follow as well as Pinterest’s ‘Picked for You‘ recommendations. The algorithm takes into account ‘training factors’ like Pin quality, historical popularity, authenticity, and relevance. The demographics and the activity levels of Pinners are carefully analysed and entered into the mix. And the result is a personal relevance score for each Pin. So in theory, pinner interaction improves because their feed is more interesting and useful due to the personalization.
Per Pinterest’s statement on the subject, “We continue to refine Pinnability and have released several improvements to-date. With each iteration, we’ve observed significant boosts in Pinner engagement, including an increase in the home feed repinner count by more than 20 percent. We’ve also observed significant gains in other metrics including total repins and clickthroughs.” Which means their accuracy of recommendation quality is still a work in progress.
For more information on Pinterest and social media marketing, Contact Position². We love giving free audits!
