News and Analysis
Visual Search Moves Beyond Experimentation and Into Prime Time
After years of experimentation and broad discussions about how visual search would someday take hold, it’s clear that the future has arrived. Visual search has moved into the mainstream, and companies like Pinterest, Instagram, and even Google are paving the way for consumers to engage more deeply with the products they find online.
As visual search moves into the mainstream, questions are intensifying over what impact the medium will have on SEO and traditional search metrics.
Google Integrates Food Delivery into Search, Maps, Assistant
More or less following the model of Reserve with Google, which has seamlessly integrated the process of reserving a table at a nearby restaurant into SERPs, Google is now integrating food delivery into search, Maps, and Assistant, keeping consumers on Google properties for the entire journey as they make transactions via third-party couriers.
As GDPR’s One-Year Anniversary Approaches, Where Are We Now?
One year in, it’s clear that the full impact of GDPR still hasn’t been felt. The regulation is structured in a way that puts less pressure on large companies than smaller businesses, and that’s something that regulators will have to continue sorting out. But the changes Europe’s law portends are undeniable: Privacy legislation is coming to the United States, and the data collection practices that made many Silicon Valley pioneers rich will never be quite so unbridled again.
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Mobile Marketing and the YouTube Cookie Shift
Google recently announced that YouTube will turn to logged-in user data to verify views and ensure that relevant advertising reaches the right consumers. This will allow publishers, brands, and marketing to draw on all the highly contextual demographic and behavioral data that Google gathers from mobile consumers.
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Airbnb Plans to Expand Service Offerings, On-Demand Assistant App GoButler Pivots
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Airbnb Plans to Offer Add-On Travel Services This Year (Bloomberg)… GoButler Pivots to Fully-Automated Service, Starting with Flight Search and Discovery (TechCrunch)… Can LifePost’s Digital Obits Provide Clues for Sustainable Local Publishing? (Street Fight)…
Brands, Meet the Data Amplifiers
Data amplifiers distribute and publish your data to a broader audience than you could ever do on your own — what I call the “network effect.” Your brand becomes more visible because your business data becomes more open and accessible to the influencers who are in a position to help customers find your business.
Retailers Shift Focus to Offline Affiliate Marketing
Location analytics represent the new battleground in retail, but imagine if you could apply the same analytics for online attribution to offline purchases. Offline affiliate marketing does just that, giving retailers the tools to analyze data from in-store purchases similar to what they can do for online purchases.
Street Fight Daily: Google to Further Penalize Mobile-Unfriendly Websites, More Layoffs at LivingSocial
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google’s Latest Mobile Search Algorithm Update Makes Having a Mobile-Friendly Site Even More Important (TechCrunch)… LivingSocial Is Laying Off More Than 50 Percent of Its Staff (Recode)… Uber Debuts Family Profiles to Let You Pay for Others’ Rides (TechCrunch)…
Yodle Weighs in on How Google’s SERP Change Has Affected Online Ads for SMBs
With a few weeks of empirical data, we now have a much clearer sense of how or if this change has affected local AdWords campaigns. At Yodle, we have seen a negligible effect on the performance metrics of the search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns we run on behalf of our local small business clients.
Street Fight Daily: Groupon’s New Merchant App, Google Announces ‘Analytics 360’ Ad Products
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Groupon Launches New Merchant App That Puts the Daily Deal Front and Center (TechCrunch)… Google Introduces Products That Will Sharpen Its Ad Focus (New York Times)… Yelp’s Founder Once Thought No One Would Want to Post Opinions on the Internet (Chicago Tribune)…
5 Online-to-Offline Attribution Tools for Merchants
Seventy-nine percent of consumers say they research prices online before making purchases in person. Without the ability to identify which digital channels are most effective, merchants have no opportunity to optimize their strategies or understand the growth opportunities within online channels.
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