AusAustralia's digial ad spend may be where the rest of the world is headed.
Australia currently has the highest digital ad spend per user in the world and by 2018 projections saw that more than 50% of their total advertising budgets will be dedicated to both online and mobile. As Australian marketers have increased spending in digital advertising, they have struggled to engage their consumers. Why is this you might ask? Studies show that 81% of all Australian consumers currently use ad blocking software so that as much as one in five consumers will not see any digital ads over a 30 day span. On top of all that Australia has the lowest click-through rates for banner ads throughout the world.
So you might ask yourself why exactly Australian marketers still continue to spend when their consumers are not engage through the digital medium. Australian consumers are buying more connected devices to suit…
What Google AMP Means & How You As A Content Marketer Can Adapt
If you’re a web marketer, chances are you’ve heard about Google’s recent AMP project. If not, here’s the rundown: AMP stands for “accelerated mobile pages,” and it’s Google’s most recent attempt to streamline mobile content for marketers and users everywhere.
While most marketers are greeting AMP with enthusiasm, there’s no doubt that it will change web marketing in a big way.
Here’s what you need to know about the major Google shift, and what it means for your web content. First, I’ll go more into defining, and then give you a how-to of sorts.
What is AMP?
According to industry experts analysing the launch like Search Engine Journal and Smart Insights, AMP is Google’s response to the launch of Facebook Instant Articles – an innovative feature that went live in 2014 and allowed users to access a selection of…
We talked to Lee Evans about how he sees ad-blocking affecting digital marketers
It's hardly surprising that digital marketers are no fans of ad-blockers. For many online publishers who make their revenue that way, it can feel like people are basically making off with their content without contributing to their revenue. As you'll know Ad blocking is on the rise as these latest stats on the popularity of ad blockers show. It's an imporant issues since in some countries, in younger age groups over one third of audiences used ad blockers.
For digital marketers who work it other areas like ecommerce or marketing a SaaS product, the problem is more around missing out on large segments of their potential audience when they run ad campaigns online.
But marketers need not despair, there are ways to circumvent ad-blockers,…
The next best thing to an SEO crystal ball
Calculating return on SEO activity is a bit of a headache if we’re honest. With so many variables, how on earth do you confidently forecast what will happen? Forecasting anything is never going to be a simple black and white process, but compared to forecasting PPC, organic traffic is a real tough one to predict.
As SEO continues to establish itself as a credible marketing channel, forecasting is going to be a requirement that at some point we’re all going to face.
If you’re looking to sell big investments in SEO or gain new budget for your activity, I think it’s a pretty fair request to provide an understanding of what returns are available. That’s just good business sense / due diligence.
If you’ve never had to work on a forecast before but have suddenly been asked to do one (typically these requests come last…
The anatomy of a successful website in 2016 and beyond
Digital marketing is such a fluid industry that many changes have taken place this past year alone.
Consider:
The Mobilegeddon threatened lots of website owners, only for it to produce less dramatic ramifications to most sites, at the very least.
The latest Google search engine guidelines emphasized high-quality standards for Your Life or Your Page (YLYP) and placed more value on Expertise/Authoritativeness/Trustworthiness (E-A-T), among other changes.
The emergence of personalized content such as Facebook’s Instant Articles, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
There are probably more changes that went under the radar and developments that are about to take place soon in this field. This goes to show that digital marketing is an ever-evolving industry that requires marketers to stay abreast with the latest news to keep themselves informed about its best practices.
Throughout the years, there are digital marketing practices…
It’s been known for a little while that Mr Zuckerberg is incredibly excited about live video on Facebook and the newest update “Facebook Live” is a clear indication of this.
Importance: [rating=3] (If you use or manage Social Media Accounts)
Recommended source: Social Media Management Checklist
He sees it as the next step in social media and clearly isn’t the only one, Twitter have also dabbled by developing their own Standalone streaming service, whilst Snapchat have recently updated their software to include a live chat function.
Zuckerberg began pooling a lot of his internal resources to help build this new feature and has clearly put a lot of effort behind this. So what will stop this feature becoming an overhyped, semi-flop, much like Meerkat and Periscope?
And what does it mean for us marketers?
What is Facebook Live?
It's likely you've already seen a Facebook live broadcast,…
3 SEO techniques not to use and 3 recommended techniques to take advantage of Google's RankBrain
Ever since Google unveiled RankBrain as the latest leap in their search algorithm’s efficiency just a day after Christmas last year, the ripples it created in the SEO universe have refused to settle down. That’s saying a lot. because RankBrain isn’t really even an algorithm update, it is actually a part of the current version of the algorithm named “Hummingbird” which dates back to a 2013 launch.
With Hummingbird, Google started paying a lot more attention to an entire search query rather than just the keywords. The mission of Hummingbird is to understand the overall context of a sentence and not just specific words. RankBrain takes this effort several steps forward.
Why is RankBrain creating such a noise? The answer is partly because…
Google have released a revised version of their Search Quality Raters Guidelines, 5 months after their first (official) incarnation.
Importance [rating=5] (Webmasters & SEO Consultants)
Recommended Source: Google Quality Rater Guidelines
Google released the very first "official" Search Quality Raters Guidelines back in November 2015 and they have just updated it again. To find out a little more about the first official release, check out the post we wrote.
It was suggested that Google would continue to update this document periodically, as Mimi Underwood, Senior Programme Manager for Search Growth & Analysis (which is quite the mouthful) stated...
“The guidelines will continue to evolve as search, and how people use it, changes. We won’t be updating the public document with every change, but we will try to publish big changes to the guidelines periodically.”
However, I don't think it was expected to…
The best time to send depends on the content as well as the audience
As a product and/or service provider, one way of reaching your customers is through email. It is one of the least expensive methods of connecting with your clients. You create a well-crafted message and simply send them to your recipients. Then, you sit tight and wait for your recipients to respond back.
Sounds easy right?
Well, it’s not that simple. People get bombarded by a lot of emails every single day and most of them get overlooked. Your email message can be one of them.
Think about this; you’re not the only business sending emails to your clients. You might be competing with thousands of other businesses for a single person’s attention. Plus, you might be competing with your recipient’s family and friends for attention.
Then, how will you place…
The last AdWords re-design was in 2008. Now Google is re-building it for our mobile-first world
Importance: [rating=5] (If you use or manage Google AdWords)
Recommended source: Google Blog
AdWords is now over 15 years old. Not a lot of platforms survive that well in the fast-moving digital landscape. 15 years ago computers were big boxes that stayed in one place and had less computing power than we all have in our pockets now. It's easy to see why some platforms have died away and others have taken their place. Yet stoically AdWords has remained, and in many ways thrived. It is Google's main source of revenue, and given that Alphabet (Google's parent company) is now the most valuable company in the world, it's probably the single most successful web application in the history of the internet.
The last time the AdWords interface was updated was back in 2008, when the smart-phone had only…
