Scroll down for the week’s most interesting developments and stories from the world of digital marketing – or catch up on last week’s round up, where we found out what millennials really want, how to make customer reviews work for you and took a look at Quora’s massive surge in popularity.
This week, however, we take a look at the following:
A growing audience and new products such as video mean that Pinterest is expected to hit $1 billion in ad revenue by 2020, which puts the company on a level with Snapchat and Instagram.
Monica Peart, senior forecasting director at eMarketer noted that,
“Pinterest has a significant and engaged user base that it is starting to monetise […] As it leverages its rich user data and develops its ad offerings and measurements, it has the potential to increase the amount of revenue per user to the levels of Instagram or Snapchat.”
Pinterest is on target for making $553.3 billion in 2018 from ad revenue, and the company is making changes that should see it hit its 2020 targets.
Making a deliberate move to monetise its audience through advertising – unlike many of its competitors and social networks – and the company is also expected to launch on the stock market at some point in the next year.
Pinterest has recently launched its Shopping Ad, which allow retailers to advertise their product catalogues, and they also launched video advertising, both of which were very attractive to brands looking to advertise.
Pinterest has a growing audience – thought to be around 250 million users – that is shifting from a primarily female demographic, and the site is also offering better measurement tools, all of which are making it a success with its advertisers.
Amazon is the internet giant that keeps on expanding and growing. The company has increased their net sales by 39% year-on-year, with a 12x jump in earnings per share (EPS) and more than 100m Prime subscribers as of Q2 2018.
Amazon made $2.2billion in ad revenue in Q2 2018, which puts it up there with Google and Facebook. Although Amazon has offered ads since 2014, it was in 2017 that they launched their retailer-built application programming interfaces (APIs) for both Amazon Media Group and Amazon Marketing Services, which meant that marketers could automate their campaigns and campaign reporting.
Amazon offers its advertisers a consumer base that is much further into their sales journey, and the platform gathers the late-stage buyer intent and conversion data, offering it in a transparent way to their advertisers.
Compared to Google and Facebook, Amazon operates deeper into the sales funnel, and it could provide first movers with a great advantage – as it is much more competitive to reach an audience on Google and Facebook.
There are several ways to advertise with Amazon, the first being sponsorship.
Sponsored brands are given a very prominent placement, and users only notice subtle differences between the ‘sponsored’ content and organic search results – meaning that sponsored brands are less distracting thanks to the highly targeted and relevant search results.
Sponsored product ads look almost identical to Amazon’s organic search results, however these do have a subtle ‘sponsored’ tag. Sponsored product ads are keyword targeted and they are triggered when a user types into the Amazon search bar.
Product Display Ads work in a similar way to sponsored product ads, but these offer a bigger range of ad sizes and formats with which to display products to Amazon users. Most importantly, Product Display Ads do not require that the advertiser is an Amazon vendor, as the ads can link out to the advertiser’s own site.
Amazon recently announced that it would introduce a pixel-based attribution solution that is intended to track conversions across Amazon’s properties. This is a step towards better attribution and campaign ROI measurements, as there have been questions around the accuracy of Amazon’s Advertising tools (especially when compared to the industry leaders, Google and Facebook).
Google has collaborated with both the IPTC, the global technical standards body for the news media, and the CEPIC, a photo industry consortium, in order to give access to information about image rights within the metadata in Google Images.
The collaboration aims to clarify information about the image creator, and the image rights, as it has traditionally been difficult to find this information online.
Google’s solution has been to add ‘Creditor’ and ‘Credit’ metadata to their images whenever possible – and in order to find this information, users simply click on the ‘Image Credits’ link to see the metadata fields. Also forthcoming is a ‘Copyright Notice’ link…
The marketing platform, Mailchimp, has undergone a rebrand thanks to Collins and R/GA, with the aim of becoming more unified as a brand whilst also allowing space for creativity. The playful redesign includes an updated logo, wordmark, colour palette and typeface, as well as new imagery and illustrations.
The new design framework has been made in order to allow for creativity and expression within it; by keeping the typography, logo and colour palette consistent throughout allows space for playful and flexible imagery and illustrations.
Other changes include simplifying the chimp logo so that it works at any size and scale; the wordmark is now a bold sans-serif font in all lowercase; and the ‘c’ in Mailchimp has been made lowercase in order to emphasise the idea that Mailchimp is not just an email service anymore…
Mailchimp brought on several illustrators that they have commissioned to, “communicate complex tools and marketing practices in a simpler and more human way”.
The company used photography to show their customers at work in an authentic way, and overall, Mailchimp hoped to keep all of the elements that endeared them to their current users, whilst growing and developing in order to accommodate a wider audience.
Richard Ting, EVP, Global Chief Design Officer, R/GA adds:
“We tapped into the insight that, no matter how long Mailchimp customers have been at it, users are never quite sure if they’re doing marketing right. The new customer experience positions the brand as both a tool and a resource that is here to help them succeed.”
When Google was created 20 years ago its competition included AltaVista, Infoseek and Lycos. However, Google prevailed for two reasons. Firstly, Google did not turn its home page into a ‘portal’ for the internet – like many search engines of the time, instead, Google focused on its core function of providing the best search experience.
Secondly, Google was a pioneer in using links as a way of evaluating the quality of a web page, through its PageRank algorithm.
Links work in a way that is similar to the citations that are used in academic literature; it is a way that one web page can endorse another. Pages with lots of links, especially ones from authoritative pages, were assumed to be better than those with fewer links – and through this ranking system, Google was able to provide high quality search results.
The process of link building was born, and SEOs began focussing on getting the best quality links for their sites. Early on, link builders would simply ask for another website to link to them, which was normally accepted in return for a reciprocal link. However, thanks to content skeptics, corporate policies and fake news, link building has become a more complex task.
Today, link builders focus on making high quality content that stands out from the sea of online content, as good content will get placed, attract links and drive people back to the client’s business. This process can be broken down into four steps, as follows:
Use business goals to identify opportunities for content themes and types, don’t just ‘hope’ that your content will be relevant and popular.
Prioritise content that will help to achieve the business’s goals whilst also being relevant and resonant with the target audience. Keyword research tools can help to identify and segment topics based on user interest, which can be used to create a data-backed strategy to guide content/link building efforts that are guided by the business objectives and keywords.
Content gap analysis on larger link opportunities will identify what content is already on the site, what is a success, what is missing and where you can improve.
Aim to have your content shared by others, not just get placed. The content must be worthy of links and shares, which often means including a strong hook, original research, compelling visuals and inherent resources.
We push these out weekly. Subscribe to keep updated.
