News and Analysis
To Meet Consumer Demands, Automotive Marketing Goes Vertical
While customer feedback is coming in from every direction, the automotive industry has done a better job of funneling reviews into vertical-specific platforms than some other industries. Large auto retailers like AutoNation are making major data stack investments, while others are working to improve their online ratings and reviews by engaging more frequently on sites like Facebook and Yelp as well as on automotive-specific platforms like Cars.com and Edmunds.
Jump of 0.1 in Five-Star Review Averages Can Make the Difference on Conversion
When customers are looking for a quick fix and do not intimately know the shops around them, star-rating averages are crucial. A new report by location-based marketing firm Uberall indicates they are so influential in consumer decision-making processes that a mere 0.1-point jump in a store’s average rating can increase its conversion rate by 25%.
How Can Brands Capitalize on Google’s Latest Ads Update?
Almost a month has passed since Google officially killed its ‘average position’ metric. The metric was retired on September 30, and marketers using Google Ads have been encouraged to transition to using ‘prominence metrics’—made up of the search top impression rate and search absolute top impression rate—instead. Google’s announcement was designed to give brands the opportunity to update their strategies before the average position metric was axed to hopefully make the transition a seamless process.
To understand how that transition is actually working in the real world, and how brands are adapting to the change from one metric to another, we connected with Walker Sands Digital’s Ryan Sorrell. A digital marketing expert with experience deploying competitive content analysis for B2B clients, Sorrell shared his thoughts on how Google’s decision to axe the average position metric will impact brands going forward and which new opportunities are at play as Google shifts its sights toward automated bidding strategies.
Commentary
Making Sense of Posts in Google’s SMB Product Portfolio
“In local, most businesses do not have a transaction so Google wants to control the action,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm. “If they can sell an ad, great, and if not then they take credit for a click or a call, driving directions or response to a CTA (and gather the data of those activities).”
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Facebook Tracks Offline Commerce, Uber Seeks $2 Billion In Leveraged Loans
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Taps GPS, Square to Track Your In-Store Visits and Purchases… Uber to Raise Up To $2 Billion in Leveraged-Loan Market… Pinterest Takes a Page from Facebook’s Playbook and Steps Up Its Ad-Targeting Game…
Street Fight Daily: Apple Opens Up Siri and Maps to Developers, Snapchat Ad Expansion
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Apple is Opening Up Siri, Maps, and Messages to Outside Development… Snapchat Launches a Colossal Advertising Expansion, Ushering in a New Era for the App… Google Pairs Facial Recognition with Location Tracking, Potentially Boosting Available Location Data…



















































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