Highlights

• Wall Street Slams Snapchat Parent’s Stock
• Verified Local Reviews Showing on Google
• How Last Friday’s Cyberattack was Stopped… in English

 

Why would Silver Beacon keep touting Snapchat as a marketing channel when the news was full of the company missing estimates?

Ah, so glad that our newsletter friends asked. Financial markets always overhyped the company.  “Snapchat Stumbles” was the headline of its first-ever earnings call. The company missed its consensus user and revenue goalsduring Q1. But your organization should care because Snapchat has 166 million daily active users and 63% are younger than 35. Snapchat is making 90 cents per user. The company has been working on a self-serve ad platform this year. That service just launched, but this is not a place for neophytes. Advertising created by people who are unfamiliar with Snap-style will waste money on ads.

Facebook suffered a similar setback shortly after it went public in 2012. The company righted itself, however, and continues growing as the above chart shows. As Marketing Chart’s superb analysis points out, Facebook’s US ad revenue consistently expanded 10 times faster than its audience growth. Facebook’s revenue per user is $4.23 worldwide and pushed close to $20 per user in the US at the end of last year. 

The most impressive number is that Facebook controls 5% of global advertising spending.

We told you in March that Google’s Trusted Stores program was ending. In its place is Google’s Verified Customer Reviews program. You’ve undoubtedly already seen that Google reduces its liability because  this switch means that consumers, not Google, are the ones vouching for the business. The program’s terms call for 150 reviews before a badge can be earned. There is also a function to link your company’s reviews to your Google ads–a tactic that Google says can increase the click rate “up to 10%”.

Google is also testing a feature that shows how many businesses are advertising for specific home services businesses. The news comes via The SEM Post which also published screenshots of ads in California showing plumbing and locksmith services displays that include the notation “20+ [businesses] serving [city].”

This is a big test for Google because it can cause people to look at more ads. We know from analysis that overall ad revenue rises when more competitors enter a market, even if click costs per advertiser decrease. Google has always made its fortunes on nickels and dimes. This is potentially a scaled-up version of that idea.

You Should Know This:  The best article we’ve found about Friday’s cyberattack is “The massive, worldwide ransomware attack was stopped by a researcher ‘accidentally‘” published in Saturday’s Recode. It’s even written in English instead of tech. Reading time: a short 1 minute, 40 seconds.

Highlights

• Google wants all website pages encrypted
• The Chrome browser will flag unsecure websites
• Facebook hiring 3,000 to monitor live video
• Why you should stop using public Wifi

 

Google flags website pages without encryption as “NOT SECURE” when they are visited using the Chrome browser and have a password or credit card field. Google announced Thursday that they will expand the program and call any unencrypted site that requires data to be entered as not secure. All sites visited in Chrome’s incognito mode will also be marked as not secure. Those two changes take effect in October. 

 

Google also began testing an option for consumers to send a text message to advertising home services businesses according to an article in The SEM Post. Their testing and ours showed that the service was not available on computers. That makes sense–you’ll text a business from your mobile device, not your computer.

We told you last week that digital advertising revenue will beat out television advertising revenue this year. We also said that the growth was due to Facebook and Google. An analysis in Recode two days later agreed that Facebook and Google are driving “nearly all growth” in global advertising. Recode includes a great chart by digital agency Zenith showing how the top 30 advertising companies now account for 44% of all ad revenue.

 

Facebook is using a lot of that advertising money to hire 3,000 new employees to monitor Facebook Live videos for violent content. Since making live video available to all users, Facebook has dealt with people streaming suicides, rapes, and murder. Our back of the envelope calculations put the cost of this initiative at an extra $200 million annually.

Organizations that use fake profiles to manage their online Facebook page may also run afoul of the company’s attempts to keep hoaxes and propaganda off the site. Facebook made its Information Operations handbook public this week and “fake profiles” are one of the company’s big targets. We’re big fans of Facebook’s Business Manager, which lets people use their personal logins without mixing their personal accounts with the organization account.

Of course, many on social media seemed to care more about a red swim suit this week than others. Sue explained it all to George who was flabbergasted that Sunny Co Clothing would would give EVERYONE a swim suit if they reposted a photo and tagged Sunny Co. Here’s the suit.

This sort of thing was a bad idea 10 years ago because people would simply repost the image for the free suit, then delete the image, and stop following the company. Given that Instagram now has 700 million members, the idea was terrible. But here’s the rest of the story via The Arizona Republic: the creative and execution were bad because the company is run by two University of Arizona seniors. They’re only honoring the first 50,000 reposts which could mean future problems for the startup. Giveaways, online contests, and sweepstakes are hard to do online if you don’t have training or support. 

We also learned about the data behind this week’s other social media viral piece: the video of talk show host Jimmy Kimmel telling the story of his baby’s birth and immediate heart emergency. Newsletter publisher Axios reported Wednesday that Kimmel’s Facebook post jumped from 1 million views to 14 million views, his Instagram posts doubled and his Twitter post was retweeted 26,000 times instead of the more typical “couple hundred”. Oh, and the video on YouTube was watched 7 million times in the first day. Your lesson here: no one–not even those who go viral more than once–has a secret recipe for going viral. You just ride the wave if you’re lucky enough to have it happen to you.

The best thing that we read all week–maybe in many weeks–is “Why You Really Need to Stop Using Public Wi-Fi” in the May 3 issue of the Harvard Business Review. It’s written for anyone to understand and is a four minute read. 

 

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!