10 Second Takeaway: It’s official: More advertising money is being spent on digital (online) advertising than on television advertising. And more than half of the money on digital is being spent on mobile advertising. Rising tides lift all boats, but Google and Facebook have the lion’s share of revenue. Facebook’s growth is still exploding–reaching a level in 2016 that was about the same as 2014 and 2015 combined. Online ad revenue is where the majority of money is now spent in the U.S.
Spotlight on Social Media
LinkedIn just crossed the 500 million member mark. About a quarter of those people are in the U.S. We know that there are fake profiles there and plenty of duplicates, but the milestone is significant. And now as a Microsoft unit, LinkedIn has the financial heft to make even bigger deals outside its traditional employment markets.
Look for more changes and more features to move to the paid section of LinkedIn now that Microsoft expects to recoup its $26 billion investment. This is an excellent time to check your profile now that the interface has changed.
Meanwhile, Facebook has announced that advertising sent to your site can now report back on actions on your website like “added to cart” or “purchased”. The enhanced reporting is in place now for new users and rolls out globally during May.
Spotlight on Digital Retail
Amazon’s earnings easily beat the Q1 forecast largely on the back of its cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which now generates more than one billion dollars in revenue per month. Amazon is continuing to cut prices on its consumer and small business products, which it can afford to do because the AWS margins are huge. And that’s how you get free two day shipping.
Amazon’s free Giveaways product for small businesses is an example of Amazon’s outreach. Organizations can create an online sweepstakes for free. They simply choose and pay for a prize that Amazon sells. They can require a video be watched, a tweet be made, or even that an individual follows an account on Twitter or Amazon. The company won’t give prize sponsors a list of names, but the solution is as turnkey as any we’ve ever seen.
We’re also very impressed with improvements in Facebook’s Advertising Insights and new data in Google Shopping Insights. Talk with us or your agency to discover how you can learn more about your organization’s customers and prospects.
Spotlight on How Search Works by Google
So you think that you do a lot of website and marketing testing at your place? That’s what we thought, too, but Google shared this week that they ran more than 150,000 tests last year and made 1,653 changes to search.
That last number is critical. We remember Google announcing with pride that they had made 300 changes to search one year.
What this means for your organization is that search will continue evolving all the time. The media and trade press pay attention to global changes, but a great search strategy for your organization begins with tracking how many people come to your website from search and what they do when they arrive.
As Google wrote in their newly updated search manual, “For a typical query, there are thousands, even millions, of webpages with potentially relevant information.”
Digital Citizen: Privacy Reminder
The Circle, a thriller about social networks connecting everything, stars Emma Watson and Tom Hanks. The film debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival this week and reminds us that plenty of third party companies likely have access to your email, social media accounts, or even services like Dropbox.
The best article we’ve seen in a long time for dealing with this problem is at Lifehacker this week: “How to Secure Your Online Accounts…” Visit the link for instructions on dealing with many different accounts in your spring cleaning, including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and many more!