Chart of the day: Just over half (56%) of European ads reached their desired age group of 25 to 54.
Nielsen investigated how many ads have reached their desired audience finding that ads aren't always reaching the desired audience. Yesterday we reported on the US figures, and today we are covering the results for Ads in Europe (UK, France, Germany, Italy).
In a world where targeting is everything, it doesn't mean ads are getting in front of the right customers every time.
Data: June 2016. Mobile insights are provided for directional purposes only.
Key findings from the Nilsen study and the chart indicated above include:
56% of ads were correctly served to 25-54 year olds and amongst those 40% were accurately shown to males compared to 34% for females.
27% of ads were accurately displayed to 25-34 year olds.
When it comes to industry 57% are…
How to develop a marketing strategy for expanding globally
Globalisation is no longer an obscure term reserved for academics: it is a very real and ever growing phenomenon affecting most people and businesses all over the world. In the digital arena, this means that a company's website also needs to be a part of the global mix. If you'd like to focus on trading and exporting your products and services worldwide, you need to have a solid international digital marketing strategy in place.
The aim of this post is to highlight a wide range of considerations that need to be addressed in order to tailor your strategy to a global target market. The areas that will be focused on are: website design, international SEO, international PPC and international social media marketing.
International Digital Marketing Considerations
Before looking into the international best practices of each of these areas, there are some important points to bear in…
As App Downloads fall and engagement stalls, PWAs look set to be the future of the mobile web experience.
Google has generated more than it's fair share of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) in its time. AMPs are still fairly new but have been enthusiastically taken up by many publishers for the faster mobile experiences they offer. But now Google are pushing new kind of web page, which comes with its own TLA and offers the possibility of radically changing the way many consumers use the internet. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
Progressive Web Apps are web pages that work more like an app (hence the name). Being web pages means they don't need to be downloaded from an App Store like Google play or Apple's App store. This removes friction from the user's journey (which Google is very keen on) and also keeps users within the Google ecosystem (If they're using a Chrome browser), which…
Chart of the day: Marketers are finding the difficulty of external/internal linking and web page load speed outstrips the effectiveness
In the November 2016 Search Engine Optimization Survey from Ascend2, they found that 57% of the 256 respondents understood that relevant content creation was the most effective tactics to boost their SEO traffic but at the same time it was also the most difficult. I'd suggest that this is mostly due it being time-consuming for marketers to create great content but also the competition to make it unique is high when it seems like everyone is doing inbound marketing.
Interestingly, the two tactics that were marked are more difficult than effective were external linking and web page load speed. Generating links to your site is hard and requires dedication from everyone in the marketing team to create high-quality engaging content that other site/bloggers will want…
With the news that social influencers being a big hit with hard-to-reach men online, recent research suggests that brand ambassadors and ongoing relationships with brand ambassadors are the most effective forms of influencer marketing.
The study was conducted online with 1,753 influencers and 102 marketers, by Tapinfluence and Altmeter and investigated marketers impressions of influencer marketing and discussed how they are using it.
Ongoing ambassadorships and product reviews are the most effective forms of influencer marketing, as ranked by marketers. Only Less than 11% believe affiliate marketing links are effective, whilst many marketers are also using brand ambassadors for mentions of event coverage, relationships are crucial to the long term success of this form of marketing.
The study also found that only 50% think sponsored content is the most effective form of influencer marketing, yet almost 82% use sponsored content, whilst 52.5% use brand…
'Rich Cards' to feature in SERPs for new verticals
Importance: [rating=4] For Marketers working for restaurants and e-learning sites
Recommended Source: Google Webmasters Blog
Back in May 2016, Google announced the launch of 'Rich Cards' - a new way Google displays content in certain SERPs that is a lot more visual and mobile-friendly than traditional text SERPs. These differ from the already common 'rich snippets' in that, well, they were 'richer'- that is they feature even more visual content.
Rich cards were only available to a select few verticals when they originally launched. Just two in fact: Recipes and Movies. But now Google have announced they will be expanding the new content medium to more verticals, these being local restaurants and online courses.
Non-specific local restaurant related SERPs, like 'Best Restaurants in Toronto' etc. now will feature rich cards which display the search results…
A detailed guide to scaling SERP rankings using competitor analysis
Every time search engine optimisation comes up in discussions with colleagues or clients, the first thing I do is place a mental bet on how quickly the chat is going down the rabbit hole. There is absolutely no denying the importance of SEO. No matter how much runway you think you have with PPC to fuel your business’ needs, sooner or later you’ll want to incrementally reduce the cost of acquiring users at the top of the funnel.
What’s that thing about rabbit hole again? There are numerous factors (some say over 200) that Google takes into account to decide where your page ranks for a given search query. If you go about optimising each of these factors, it is going to take you a whole lot of time before each piece of content goes out into the world. Either that, or…
A brand-building case study focusing on format length, branding and testing best practices
YouTube is becoming an increasingly important tool for digital marketers, both from an owned and paid media perspective. Over the last five years the platform has continued to grow and with over a billion users and many millions of views a day, Google can genuinely claim to have both the first and second largest search engines on the planet and a media platform to rival many mainstream broadcasting rivals.
From an advertising perspective, the reach YouTube offers marketers is phenomenal, however as with all forms of advertising, optimising the media alone will only get you so far. I’ve recently been involved in a multichannel equity campaign and due to the storytelling nature of the content we’ve had to really think about how best to recut the main TVC for the YouTube TrueView campaign (which is using skippable pre-roll ads).
The…
Time changes all things - Especially SEO!
You need not cast your mind back far to reminisce about a time when the principles of SEO were little more than a rhythmic check list, putting everything in its place to best support the client at hand.
Now, times are changing, not only has the landscape been forever altered by Penguin 4.0, but we now have a new concept on the rise in interest and popularity: Semantic SEO.
Saying Semantic SEO is going to change everything is inaccurate, yes, it is a different approach to SEO but not entirely unrecognizable. The most common current SEO tactic is to filter out a target phrase, use it throughout the URL and, with fortunes’ grace, rank for the phrase chosen. With semantic SEO, you target a topic, not just a phrase. This is due to Google being much more competent at understanding the intentions of the user and…
Don't fall foul of these common but expensive SEO mistakes
Google’s engineers have said there are at least 200 ‘ranking signals’ which affect whether you can rank above your competitors or not. To make SEO even more challenging, many of them change frequently in Google’s algorithm updates.
So, it can be really tough knowing what matters in SEO and what doesn’t. To help give you focus, here we show some really common mistakes we have seen again and again as we have worked on SEO consulting and training projects.
We think SEO isn’t just for SEO specialists, all ‘hands-on’ marketers need to understand the main factors so they can ask the tough questions of SEO specialists and agencies. Here we're giving you five of the top 10 most costly SEO mistakes. If you're interested to discover more common SEO mistakes you can sign up for free to download the guide to the top 10…