Author: Team Position Squared

Improved Ad Campaign Tracking Tools on Twitter
For Internet advertisers of all kinds, Twitter is fast becoming the place to be. Consider the numbers:
- 288 million active users tweeting monthly
- 500 million tweets sent daily
- 80% of active tweeters using mobile (Twitter)
With this in mind, advertisers will need a better way to manage their Twitter ads. Fortunately the micro-blogging site has just launched two new ad conversion tracking tools, both of which will help advertisers gain better insight into ad campaigns run on Twitter.

The two new tools are:
- Transaction Values
- Key Conversion Tags
Transaction Values

While advertisers may have previously used website tag for remarketing, now they can use it to track their sales figures as well. By making some simple changes begin collecting order quantities and conversion values for each conversion. Twitter Ads analytics dashboard will then display the aggregated value and reporting.

Advertisers will be able to see their ROI from their Promoted Tweet Campaigns. If not already using conversion tracking, now would be a good time to start. Simply create a tag in Twitter Ads UI and begin implementing it within a website. This new feature allows digital marketers to measure sales that were directly driven by Promoted Tweets.

LiveNation, a Beverly Hills, California-based company that promotes concerts and live-events, finds Twitter’s real-time platform a natural fit for its business model. Live Nation beta tested the Transaction Values feature on Twitter for over a month with Promoted Tweet campaigns using the Website Card to increase ticket sales, and the results they logged were impressive. The analytics of @LiveNation reveal that the company earned a ROAS of 819% in the test phase.

Key Conversion Tags

With the key conversion tag feature advertisers can select the single conversion event that is most important to them and optimize for it. They then receive gleaned analytics within their Twitter Ads UI that show only that conversion type. And they can still get all their conversion type reporting for their campaigns within their analytics dashboard at any time.

As an example, a boutique bakery might turn to Twitter to drive more sales of its cakes for a specific holiday. All it needs to do is place a website tag on the final conversion page of the cake sale and then select this tag as the key campaign tag. Twitter will then optimize the bakery’s campaign to generate more conversions on the cake sale page. The bakery will be able to view all the cake purchases within the Twitter Ads analytics dashboard, all in real time.

Contact Position² to deploy B2B advertising campaigns on Twitter now!
March 3, 2015
IoT: What You Need to Know as a Digital Marketer [Infographic]

The Internet of things (IoT) will play a major role in the way we conduct business and assimilate information in a more interconnected world. But do we have the right infrastructure to let IoT reach its full potential? And are we fully disposed to explore its immense benefits to digital marketing? Go through this incisive infographic to learn more about it.

February 27, 2015

Best of the Week | Web Design Trends for 2015, 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:

Web Design Trends for 2015
Web design trends is seeing a lot of importance thanks to web users demanding a richer and immersive experience. We have compiled a list of trends that we think will make it big in 2015. Go through this blog and find out more.

A Universal SEO Strategy Audit in 5 Steps - Whiteboard Friday

Best of the Week Video
How to effectively increase Facebook traffic to your website? Watch this Whiteboard Friday video hosted by Rand Fishkin to find out.

White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x

Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn:

SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
How EVA benefits businesses.

Download the complimentary EVA White Paper now

If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe.

February 27, 2015

An App to Manage Your Facebook Ads
Facebook has come a long way. What started as a university dorm room project has become the go-to social networking platform for one sixth of humanity. Today Facebook boasts an ad community two million strong, and counting. To address the needs of this advertising community, Facebook has rolled out an app which is sure to make life more flexible.

This mobile app, currently available only on the iOS platform for the US market, helps advertisers create new ads or monitor current ads, and makes managing Facebook ads much easier than ever before. It’s called Ads Manager App.

App-to-Manage-Facebook-Ads

Tasks that you can perform with the Ads Manager App while on the go include:
- Monitor your ad performance
- Tweak your live ads
- Increase or decrease budgets
- Change ad schedules on the fly
- Receive push notifications
- Start a new ad campaigns
Two Million Strong Indeed!

Facebook recognized all the small- and medium-size business enterprises that have ad campaigns on their platform, and paid homage to them with a thoughtful and inspiring ad that ends with two big words from Mark Zuckerberg: “Thank You”.

Facebook illustrated an international mix of entrepreneurs who actively contribute to the global economy in their own ways while at the same time providing useful services and jobs in their own communities. The Ads Manager App is sure to be of benefit to all those entrepreneurs and, Facebook hopes, to the 1.3 billion strong Facebook user community as well.

Let us know what you think of this new Facebook app for advertisers!

Contact Position² to deploy B2B advertising campaigns on Facebook!
February 27, 2015
LinkedIn Targets Users Off-platform

LinkedIn is all set to monetize its users’ data outside its own platform. The business-oriented social networking site has come to realize that it is sitting on a mother lode of user data on the Internet. It has a precise database of corporate world professionals that is much sought-after by B2B advertisers worldwide. With LinkedIn, the user identity is authenticated which is critical for business transactions. It is also a budding platform for reputation and authority ranking. Targeting B2B professional services could be a real opportunity on this platform.

For LinkedIn it all started with the Bizo acquisition. Bizo offers multichannel nurturing and is a leader in business audience marketing. It offers targeting and analytics for display and direct response ads. With the launch of Network Display global ad network, marketers can sift large amounts of LinkedIn user profiles and target only those users that make sense to them. It could be as granular as targeting HR professionals in Lower Manhattan with a delightful, modern payroll solution!

LinkedIn has made significant advancement towards a strategic roadmap for its marketing solutions business with this new launch. It provides a full-funnel, end-to-end product suite offering for marketers to reach, nurture and acquire professional customers both on and off the platform. LinkedIn Lead Accelerator is the core offering here that connects brands to the right professionals with the right content while they go through the purchase funnel.

This is a new frontier for LinkedIn wherein its quality audience and content marketing solutions can be embedded into Bizo’s unique targeting and nurturing solutions. All this can lead to better targeting, higher relevance and accurate measurement of advertising campaigns.

LinkedIn is not the first social media site to target users outside its platform. Both Facebook and Twitter have been there and done that. But B2B digital marketers are particularly intrigued by LinkedIn’s entry into this domain since it offers the most precise B2B targeting group of any social media site.

The business networking site can precisely target the type of professionals it wants to, from its vast pool of a few hundred million users. It has exclusive deals with a number of publishers and also with the ad exchange AppNexus, thus providing it access to a huge inventory over which it can conveniently layer its own data.

Contact Position² to accurately target your audience on or off social media platforms now!

February 23, 2015
Facebook Introduces Product Ads

The numero uno social networking site is giving the numero uno search engine a run for its money. Case in point is the latest launch of Facebook “Product Ads” which will compete directly with Google “Product Listing Ads”. The Facebook Product Ads was created specifically to help businesses sell their products on the platform.

With this new feature from Facebook, advertisers can now target people who visited their website or app courtesy of Custom Audiences. They can also target people based on their interests or location. Businesses can promote single product or their entire line of products catalogue across the desktop and mobile platform as single or multi-product ad units.

There are various ways in which advertisers can deploy ads like manually uploading their product catalogs or create campaigns that target a specific audience with certain products. Alternately, they may use the Facebook Custom Audience so as to automatically deliver the most relevant products to the target group.

Brands that have already used the new ad feature from Facebook are quite excited about the benefits that it offers. Retail giant Target has recorded 20 percent rise in conversions with Product Ads over other Facebook ads. With this new feature Facebook is slowly but surely making the transition towards becoming a publisher too as opposed to merely being a social network.

Content is a big part of Facebook’s offerings going forward as it tries to create ‘full-funnel’ media experiences. The social media behemoth would like to convert content into community and community into commerce.

Let us know what you think about the Facebook Product Ads.

Contact Position² to get 360° visibility for your brand on the social media!

February 20, 2015

Best of the Week | Locale Adaptive Web-pages now Get Support from Google, 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:

Locale Adaptive Web-pages now Get Support from Google
If you are targeting users in multiple languages & multiple geographies without deploying locale-adaptive web pages now would be a good time to start. Google will henceforth crawl and index your locale-adaptive web pages. Find out what you need to do in order to stay ahead of the curve.

Wait, Paid Media Investments Can Yield SEO Value?! - Whiteboard Friday

Best of the Week Video
Can advertising boost your SEO efforts? Watch this Whiteboard Friday video hosted by Rand Fishkin to find out now!

White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x

Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn:

SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
How EVA benefits businesses.

Download the complimentary EVA White Paper now

Know more about Enterprise Visibilty Accelerator(EVA)

If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe.

February 20, 2015

Locale Adaptive Web-pages now Get Support from Google
Google recently introduced the Googlebot Crawl configurations for local-aware pages and provided insights on how locale adaptive web pages are crawled and indexed.

What are Locale-Adaptive pages?

Web-pages which dynamically change content depending on the user’s origin country or language settings are called locale-adaptive pages.

Barry Schwartz says Google will now be able to handle such content by sending Googlebot from different IPs across the world, as well as let it set language settings.

Google will use two methods of crawling and indexing:
1. Geo-distributed crawling: When Googlebot uses IP addresses coming from outside the USA in addition to the current IP addresses Googlebot uses that appear to be from the USA.
2. Language-dependent crawling: When Googlebot starts to crawl with an Accept-Language HTTP header in the request.
It is important to understand how Googlebot currently recognizes whether a website has locale-specific content and uses different crawl settings.

There are 3 approaches:
1. Serving different content on the same URL—based on the user’s perceived country (geolocation)
2. Serving different content on the same URL—based on the Accept-Language field set by the user’s browser in the HTTP request header
3. Completely blocking access to requests from specific countries
This update from Google solves the problem that Google crawlers have understanding sites that have utilized locale-adaptive techniques. On Webmaster support Google said that “new crawling configurations are enabled automatically for pages we detect to be locale-adaptive, you may notice changes in how we crawl and show your site in Google search results without you altering your CMS or server settings”.

What does this mean to Webmasters?
- Usage of different URLs or TLDs is important for sites having content specific for different countries or languages.
- Usage of ‘rel=”alternate” hreflang’ annotations with separate URLs needs to be continued
- Verification of Googlebot geo-distributed crawls can be done using reverse DNS lookup
- Robot exclusion protocol needs to be consistent across the site; robots meta-tags and the robots.txt file should specify the same directives in each locale.
Conclusion

With the latest announcement by Google on support to locale-specific pages, it now becomes easier to get these dynamically changing content pages indexed on Search.

Be ready to witness changes in crawl rates and appearances of web-pages on SERP’s over the next few weeks. Contact Position² to deploy locale-adaptive techniques for your website now!
February 18, 2015
Pinterest Bans Affiliate Links

Pinterest announced some bad news for Bloggers and active power pinners who drive leads and earn revenue via affiliate marketing. Pinterest is set to ban affiliate networks on their site. Currently, affiliates are able to monetize pins by using a trackable link. These affiliates earn commissions from pins that produce conversions and/or drive traffic to their retail partners’ sites.

Why is this happening now? Pinterest does not earn any revenue from these affiliate links even though it has become a platform to facilitate them. The social network has not confirmed this, but the writing has been on the wall that Pinterest wants to leverage their network of pinners for their own monetization plans. First there was their “promoted pins”, and then partnership announcements with Apple and Stripe.

This really should not come as too much of a shock to the affiliate networks. Pinterest has banned affiliates before. Back in 2012, Pinterest cracked down on Amazon affiliate programs by removing the tracking tag from links directed to Amazon’s site. At the time, there were hundreds of other affiliates, but Pinterest selectively picked their battles instead of taking on the futile task of going after every affiliate network. Now, Pinterest will still be picking battles by going after larger networks, but the announcement has made it official, stating that they will “automatically remove all affiliate links, redirects and trackers on Pins.”

So Pinterest power users partnered with affiliate networks, you have been warned. Although as per Pinterest, the ban will not be a drastic rollout. Pinterest stated, “…all your past Pins will show up normally and still be clickable.” Sounds like a kind and gentle transition to being cut off, but forget about being able to track those pins. Pinterest also stated that affiliates are still welcome to get paid by curating boards or by working on paid social media marketing for their network partners.

Let us know how you feel about this latest Pinterest development.

Contact Position² to discuss how to kick off a social media B2B strategy.

February 17, 2015

Best of the Week | UI and UX Trends in 2015, 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:

UI and UX Trends in 2015
Today mobile has eclipsed desktop as the most important form factor for browsing the Internet. This calls for newer types of user experiences and user interfaces to meet the user requirements. Read this blog to find out what is trending in this space in 2015.

tips on how to structure your content better for SEO.

Best of the Week Video
Watch this Whiteboard Friday video hosted by Rand Fishkin, where he gives tips on how to structure your content better for SEO.

White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x

Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn:

SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
How EVA benefits businesses.

Download the complimentary EVA White Paper now

If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe.

February 13, 2015

Author: Team Position Squared

Transaction Values

Key Conversion Tags

Two Million Strong Indeed!

What are Locale-Adaptive pages?

What does this mean to Webmasters?

Conclusion