The digital marketing universe has exploded at an unprecedented rate — and whether you like it or not, it shows no signs of slowing down in the years ahead.
To help you stay up to date on what matters in digital marketing today, we’ve put our competitive intelligence platform to work to surface the week’s top marketing stories and trending topics.
Here are this week’s top stories!
The Death of Google+: Google has started extracting Google+ from itself
On July 27, 2015, Google announced that it will be un-bundling Google+ from the rest of its services. The key takeaway here: you won’t be forced to set up a Google+ account to comment on YouTube videos or use Google Photos. While Google+ only has 4-6 million users posting in January 2015 compared to Facebook’s 1.5 billion, forcing people to sign up for Google+ created an army of accounts for which Google now has search and web browsing information. Now that Google+ is on its way out, it can instead serve as a platform to test new ideas, similar to Facebook’s Creative Labs.
Read the complete story from Quartz here.
Malcolm Gladwell: the Snapchat problem, the Facebook problem, the Airbnb problem
As Malcom Gladwell puts it, “More data increases our confidence, not our accuracy.” Snapchat, Facebook, and AirBNB all portray the same point: that finding the truth in data far outweighs the data by itself. For instance, while the average person under 25 texts more each day than the average person over 55 text in a year, deciphering wether the nature of this behavior is developmental or generational plays a critical role in determining if SnapChat will exist in 10 years…
Read the complete story from VentureBeat here.
5 Engagement Metrics to Calculate Brand Health
In order to create a successful brand, it’s important to get people to know your brand, like your brand, and then eventually trust your brand enough to buy from you. Keeping tabs on your brand health enables you to measure how your digital audience feels about you. Brand health is centrally based on two key metrics: engagement and audience growth. This article from NewsCred focuses specifically on the engagement part of the brand health equation, which can be measured using the following: Time on Site, Repeat Visitors, Social Likes, Subscriptions, and Bounce Rate.
Read the complete story from NewsCred here.
Customization and Control: New Tools for Facebook Video Publishers
As Facebook continues to grow their video business line, 2 new updates have been announced that give publishers more control over how their videos are organized and shared. With improved video upload tools, Facebook has introduced new distribution options such as secret videos, the ability to prohibit embeds on third-party sites, as well as the ability to restrict audience by age and gender. Facebook also launched a new video library that makes it easier to organize and update their videos. With these changes, publishers can now search and filter videos by title and description, edit a video’s metadata after upload, and manage distribution options for videos.
Read the complete story from the Facebook Newsroom here
Lack of donations drives Wikipedia to test massive new ads
Less than 1% of Wikipedia’s total 450 million monthly viewers currently donate to the online encyclopedia, contributing an average of $15 per donation. According to Wikipedia, this lackluster donation rate has made ad testing a necessity in advance of the company’s December Campaign, their main revenue driver. As a result, Wikipedia has begun experimenting with bigger ads — some that are even full screen, which makes the visitor wonder if they’ve landed on the correct screen. This change makes marketers wonder whether more drastic measures — such as permanent ad banners — will be a possibility if future revenue targets are not met.
Read the complete story from VentureBeat here.
11 Charts that Predict the Future of Marketing
Thanks to the Internet of Things, people are inevitably becoming more connected to their devices. In this article, Percolate shows us 11 charts that predicts the future of marketing, such as the shift from ad agency spending to programmatic advertising. In fact, programmatic ad spending doubled last quarter!
Read the complete story from Percolate here.
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