Street Fight Daily: Facebook Reaches 3M Advertisers, Googler Explains AdWords Changes

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Facebook Just Passed 3 Million Advertisers — Here’s Why It’s Doubling Down on Small Businesses (Business Insider)
Facebook has announced that three million businesses now actively advertise with the social network, up 50 percent from last year, with small businesses representing the “vast majority” of that number. In the past year, Facebook revamped Pages to add and improve features like appointment booking and inventory listing, and let businesses start communicating with people via messaging.

Lessons Learned in the Email Marketing Wars About Selling to SMBs (Street Fight)
Eric Groves: Constant Contact’s recent announcement that it will be acquired by EIG has me reflecting on the past 15 years, and how much the industry’s evolution has taught me about what it takes to effectively sell to SMBs.

Google’s Take on the Recent Changes to the Results Page (Search Engine Land)
Matt Lawson: Over time, we’ve found that text ads on the right rail were simply less useful than we’d hoped. Users didn’t click on them as much as other ads. By showing fewer ads, our search experience matches how people actually engage with Google. And because ads above the results are generally more useful, we’re expanding them for highly commercial queries.

Unacast Partners with Opera to Let Marketers Retarget Consumers Using Beacon Data (Street Fight)
The partnership could represent a shift from the GPS data that advertisers have previously relied upon for recent location (which only works when users are outdoors and actively using their mobile devices) toward more granular beacon data in profile creation and retargeting.

The Inside Story of Uber’s Big Bet on Food (Business Insider)
For the first time, Uber has broken a product out into its own standalone app. The company has launched its long-awaited UberEats app in the U.S., kicking it off in Los Angeles. It will roll out in the rest of the country throughout the month. Uber might be a latecomer in the race to deliver food, but by watching other companies stumble, the team believes they’ve learned what it takes to be the winner.

Local Media Companies Tout Events for Revenue Diversification (Street Fight)
At the Borrell Associates event this week in New York, several speakers touted local live events — awards shows, beer tastings, road races — as a potentially lucrative revenue stream with sizable margins that local publishers could easily expand into.

Groupon Is Focus of IBM’s Latest Patent-Infringement Suit (Chicago Tribune)
IBM is suing Groupon over alleged patent infringement, the latest in a series of lawsuits the computing pioneer has filed against tech companies that it says rely on groundwork it laid.

6 Call Tracking Platforms for SMBs (Street Fight)
As SMBs explore new digital advertising opportunities, they’re becoming even more reliant on call tracking platforms to determine what’s working. Here are six examples that businesses are using right now.

Google Would Like You to Buy Products Using Voice Search (Search Engine Land)
According to Google engineer Behshad Behzadi, Google is working on conversational search, which would allow users to buy or locate products by talking to their devices. Behzadi gave examples of being able to find a product for a lower price, or finding nearby stores. After Google shows you search results, you would say “Purchase the one from BestBuy” and then get a receipt from BestBuy with your delivery information.

Tech Veterans Launch Location Recommendation Social Platform (Austin Business Journal)
A new Austin-based app called Placesbyme enables users to share and discover restaurants and other venues. It’s like Yelp, but with more familiar sources. “Our mission is to help people share places they love and easily discover the best places recommended by their friends,” said CEO Usman Tarren.

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