News and Analysis
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.
Report: Text Messages, Online Chat Essential Channels for Businesses
More than 70% of US consumers polled in a survey commissioned by business messaging platform Quiq had engaged with businesses via text messaging or online chat two or more times in the previous month.
That should be a signal to businesses that email and phone are no longer sufficient; messaging will be key to survival for consumer-facing businesses of the future.
Amazon is Making Meaningful Gains in Search Ad Market
It will be key to see if the pace of Amazon’s overall and search ad revenue slows down in the next few years as it exhausts. For now, its ad success is just one more sign, like the news that it will likely sell its Go tech to retailers, that Amazon can find and dominate new businesses beyond its core identity as the Everything Store.
Commentary
When Breaking Google’s Guidelines Is Almost Necessary with GMB
A couple of months ago I was helping a physical therapy business on the Google My Business Forum that was filtered out of the local results on Google because of the Possum algorithm update in 2016. In this case, the culprit was a completely different physical therapy business down the street (about a two minute walk away).
The Usability Gap: Designing the Right Products for SMBs
Surely small business owners belong to the class of ordinary users. Expecting them to invest the time and energy to become power users is a good way to guarantee that your user base will remain small. This realization could lead to a very different and more fruitful approach to product design for SMBs.
Could Chipotle Have Saved Millions of Dollars By Taking Online Reviews More Seriously?
If done right, online reputation management can act as an early warning system for multi-location businesses, and can ultimately prevent long-term brand damage and reduce the risk of decreasing profits.
Latest Posts
Street Culture: Collective Employee Mindset = Shuffleboard at Nextdoor
“One hundred and eighteen people is not a lot, but corralling those opinions is a more difficult task,” said Margie Mader-Clark, the company’s VP of human resources. “It’s about a stewardship of culture, taking care of it, making sure the negative aspects go away as early as possible.”
Belly’s LaHive: Beacon Tech ‘A Little Bit Overhyped’
The company’s CEO says that he considers beacons “an additional channel of communication so that businesses can identify when customers are inside a store and target them with special offers,” but he doesn’t see location-based tech and loyalty programs going hand-in-hand.
Street Fight Daily: Uber Gets Merchants to Pay for Rides, Shopify Teams Up with Postmates
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Uber Offers Gets Merchants to Pay for Rides… More Than 21,000 Businesses Can Now Add Same-Day Delivery Through Postmates… Vacation Rental Startups Attract $100 Million in Funding So Far This Year…
Will Phone Calls Survive the Chatbot Apocalypse?
The trillion dollar question is if this emerging chatbot technology will annihilate the phone call. Though I’m bullish on messaging and chatbots, the answer to that question is likely no.
6 Customer Analytics Solutions for Restaurants
The restaurant industry may be better positioned to take advantage of big data than almost any other vertical. Here are six examples of data platforms that restaurants can use for both sales and service optimization.
Sponsored Post: 9 Mobile Apps That Are Transforming Local Commerce
There is no shortage of business tools and apps available to entrepreneurs today. Technology, now more than ever before, is discovering new ways of solving old problems and enabling retailers and service providers as well as the mighty consumer to reach, share, save, buy, bid, deal, message, post and even make a phone call, anytime and from almost anywhere. …
Street Fight Daily: Co-op Marketing Battles Facebook/Google/Amazon, Lead Generation’s Future
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facing Facebook, Google, and Amazon, Brands Pool Their Data (Marketing Land)… The Future of Digital Lead Generation (TechCrunch)… Publishers ‘Feeding On Scraps from Facebook’, Says Bloomberg Media Boss (The Guardian)…
Understanding the Local Search Marketing Funnel
According to the funnel metaphor, customers travel in stages from awareness to purchase, the funnel getting narrower at each stage as some customers drop off and do not move to the next stage.
LiveIntent President: Local Publishers Need to Leverage ‘Gold Mine’ of Email Newsletters
Advertising network LiveIntent has 1,300 publisher clients, including Hearst, New York Times, Washington Post and ESPN. Through these relationships, it can target 130 million unique visitors. We caught up with the company’s president, Jason Kelly, to talk about how local publishers can compete with social-media platforms for ad revenue.
What Designing an ‘OS for Restaurants’ Really Requires
When you look at the restaurant tech stack, there are clearly solutions, software, applications that should play nicely with each other, but the larger players have purposefully walled off their gardens. The next multi-billion-dollar company in this space will identify the mission-critical pieces of technology in the stack, and own them.
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem