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BuzzFeed Tasty has set the record for the most video views in a single month, generating three billion total video views across YouTube, Facebook, Vine & Instagram in January.According to Tubular Labs, the most views garnered by a video creator in one month’s time prior to January was a billion views – a record reached by BuzzFeed Tasty in both October and December of last year. (The Ellen Show also reached one billion views when it ranked No. 1 in November 2015.)More than doubling its previous one billion views in December, BuzzFeed Tasty took the No. 1 spot on Tubular’s top ten list of most watched video creators for the second month in a row. Justin Bieber ranked No. 2 – also for the second consecutive month – with 972 million views.Tubular says video creators saw a 12 percent jump in views last month compared to December’s numbers, with a combined 42 billion total cross-platform video views in January.New creators to the top ten list since last month include Tastemade, Ryan To…

Facebook has renewed its “Pub in Pub” interview show with a focus on Instagram. Facebook has renewed “Pub in Pub,” the series it premiered in October 2014 that interviewed marketing and agency execs about their creative strategies. But unlike the first season that spanned Facebook and Instagram campaigns, the second season will focus solely on the photo-sharing service that Facebook bought in 2012.Timing played a big part in the decision to focus the follow-up season on Instagram. Since the series’ first season premiered, Instagram officially introduced video ads, added the slideshow-like carousel and takeover-style marquee formats and opened up to advertisers of any size. With more brands able to buy more types of ads to get in front of Instagram’s audience of 400 million people, “we get lots of questions and interest around Instagram and how to use Instagram using APIs [that make it easier to do things like upload posts and buy ads] and videos and carousel,” said Ji Lee, creative lea…

Pinterest has launched updates to its movie and recipe Rich Pins, extrapolating more rich data to enhance the user experience on the platform. With recipes being one of Pinterest’s top pinned categories, and with millions of ideas being shared across both food and entertainment, it was a natural fit for Pinterest to go a step further to add helpful data within each pin.Recipe Pins will be enhanced with rich data that includes ingredients, cooking times and serving sizes. This will increase the number of pins in the system to 4 billion as well. Pinterest reports that nearly 90% of pinners are saving food and drink recipes on their mobile devices and appetizer pinning for the Oscars has increased 15% in February alone; it’s also 3x more popular than last year.Movie Pins will add information like rating, cast members and movie reviews. An example can be seen on the Must-watch Movies board.With this release, Pinterest is focused on helping users discover everyday ideas through its catalog…

Needle operates on the principle that the best marketers for a product are other happy owners of the same thing.Today, the Salt Lake City-based company is expanding on that principle, with the launch of its Advocate Marketing Cloud for shopping sites.Founded in 2010, Needle previously offered a real-time chat with advocates, selected customers who are fans of the product line. Needle recruits top customers online — it currently manages between 350 and 500 advocates — screens and certifies them, provides them with information, and rewards them with points that can be exchanged for products and with cash.President and COO Scott Pulsipher told me that the chat was designed to assist customers at the bottom end of the sales funnel, when they were close to making a purchase decision. Over last Black Friday weekend, Needle says it generated more than 56,000 chats that contributed to $3.6 million in sales.The new Cloud, he said, adds mid-funnel attention as it provides info, advice, and assi…

In the first part of this series, which focused on SEM and Social, I made the case that search marketers should be leading the charge in pushing their (or their client’s) organization towards a cross-channel marketing approach.After all, search is the ultimate net for all of the other channels, right? What channel interacts more with the rest of the marketing plan than SEM?When consumers learn about an interesting new product or service, one of the first places they go for research is a search engine. Banners drive searches. Tweets drive searches. Videos drive searches. Even billboards and newspaper ads drive searches, eventually.Because of this unique position that search engines have in consumers’ lives, it makes sense that search marketers could have the most influence to help move the needle when it comes to cross-channel media planning and buying.What have you been doing to push the envelope?[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

via Marketing Land

Keywords and search queries can mean different things to different people. That’s where intent comes in. You might, for example, have one keyword that serves multiple personas.So the work that you need to do to qualify those leads in a PPC environment typically happens at the ad creative and landing page level, not necessarily with the PPC campaign structure.My agency recently inherited a PPC account that was building campaigns based on personas, and the strategy didn’t prove itself. (By the way, if you’re interested in the cabinet of curiosities we discovered when we got into the account, check out my column from last month.)Using this account as a case study, I’ll share with you some important lessons on understanding keywords, what to do when they serve more than one audience type in PPC and what results you can see when you reorganize based on the moneymakers.[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

via Marketing Land

In honor of Leap Day this month, Litmus (my employer) asked 20 email experts about their vision for the channel in the year 2020, which is when the next Leap Day will be.Their “Email Marketing in 2020” predictions covered everything from inbox functionality to email service provider functionality and from legislation to personalization.Of course, I have my own vision for what the channel will look like in four years. So here are my predictions, along with info on whether I’m out on a limb by myself or if some of our contributors are out there with me:1. Hyper-PersonalizationDynamic content, personalization and real-time content will be much more prevalent in 2020, along with the next generation of triggered emails that are sent in response to a much wider and more diverse range of behaviors.Traditional data mining and analytics will be paired with machine learning, which will turn the complex patterns in Big Data into actionable insights.While marketers will still send a lot of broadc…

Sales automation! Podcasting! New advertising opportunities? Are you out there exploring yet?

via Entrepreneur: Latest Online Marketing Articles

Welcome to a speedier mobile web.It’s been a massive week for the Google SERPs this week and it’s only Tuesday. As well as Google killing Right Hand Side Ads and shutting down its own comparison service, it seems that Google has also launched its Accelerated Mobile Pages project.Although we had been expecting it around next weekend, as Google stated it would be here “late February”, it seems some people have been seeing results with a little AMP icon today (Tues 23 Feb).@sewatch Sure, try this one http://pic.twitter.com/HVjCg1CEPA— Mark Chalcraft (@markchalcraft) February 23, 2016The AMP project is an open source initiative which aims to improve the performance of the mobile web. As our own Rebecca Sentance explained in her article on Google’s AMP only yesterday, AMP pages are a “stripped-down version of the mobile web which runs on a reinvented version of HTML.”Google has stated that a page created with AMP HTML can load anywhere from 15 to 85% faster than the non-AMP version of that…

With the rise of mobile media consumption, ad-dependent publishers need to remodel their monetization strategies to account for and adapt to the shifting tide in how users are accessing content on the web.Just how prevalent is mobile media consumption becoming? A 2015 Pew Research Center study on US smartphone use found that “64 percent of American adults now own a smartphone of some kind.”The study showed that smartphone use was higher in younger Americans and those with higher income and education levels. A more remarkable assertion made within the study was that “10 percent of Americans own a smartphone but do not have any other form of high-speed internet access at home beyond their phone’s data plan.”According to a 2014 report by comScore, mobile apps account for approximately seven out of every eight minutes spent consuming media on mobile devices. The report asserted that we spend 60 percent of our digital media consumption time on mobile, with apps accounting for the lion’s sh…

via Marketing Land

Sponsored content in collaboration with Marchex. Views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect Search Engine Watch’s opinions.If you answer your phone or want your phone to ring as a result of your marketing, in particular search engine marketing, then you’ll want to read the following interview.I had the privilege of sitting down with Adarsh Nair, Senior Director, Search Product and Engineering at Marchex. Adarsh filled me in on the latest advances in call tracking and marketing automation that have been baked into their Call Analytics platform and specifically Marchex Search Analytics.Kevin Lee: Why is tracking and 100% attribution at the keyword level important?Adarsh: We hear a lot about big data and the power of data. Search is a very sophisticated media channel with hundreds of millions of keywords to bid from leading to trillions of dollars in sales. This is a big data problem. If you break it down to the basics, each keyword is a …

According to SimilarWeb’s State of Mobile Web U.S 2015 report, roughly 56 percent of consumer traffic to the leading US websites is now from mobile devices vs. 49 percent from the desktop. Traffic from mobile devices in Q4 was roughly 49 percent on average for the top sites.The report is based on the company’s analysis of the top 10,000 US websites in 24 categories. It does not include app usage. The following are the top ten mobile traffic site categories, with the top five are receiving at least 60 percent of their traffic from mobile devices.Beauty and FitnessHome and GardenHealthPets and AnimalsPeople and SocietyShoppingGamblingAutoRecreation and HobbiesSportsWhile mobile drove more traffic, engagement remains higher on desktop overall with more time on site and more pages per visit on average. Mobile bounce rates were higher as well. As mentioned, app usage is not part of this data.
SimilarWeb also observed a discrepancy between some of the top mobile-traffic sites and their enga…

Here’s our daily recap of what happened in marketing technology, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web.From Marketing Land:Marketers: Here’s A Free, No-Programming Toolkit For Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality
Feb 22, 2016 by Barry Levine
Startup WakingApp is officially launching its platform today in an open beta, following six months of testing and hundreds of demo projects by agencies and others.Boomtrain Launches Simplified Editor For Emails Tuned By Machine Learning
Feb 22, 2016 by Barry Levine
It’s the same machine learning as before, the company says, but now a marketer can employ it without using developers.App Indexing & The New Frontier Of SEO: App Packs & App Store Search
Feb 22, 2016 by Emily Grossman
In this third and final installment of a series on app indexing and how it impacts search engine optimization, contributor Emily Grossman discusses how to rank apps in Google search results, as well as in Google Play and the iTunes App St…

2016 might be the year when we finally get some substantial improvements in the battery technology and as it turns out, today at the Mobile World Congress, Oppo showcased their new SuperVOOC quick-charging technology which is capable of charging a standard smartphone in about 15 minutes and 45% in just 5 minutes.Oppo claims those figures stand true for charging an absolutely dead 2500mAh battery pack to 100% which is still quite astonishing given it won’t take much longer to charge something a bit bigger. The new technology will work through traditional MicroUSB as well as USB Type-C cables, however, it will require the Super VOOC Flash Charger adapter and cable that Oppo says are made from high-quality military-grade materials. Sadly, the company will be limiting this for now on their own branded smartphones, meaning not all the handsets out there will be able to make use of it. Although, it doesn’t take long nowadays for manufacturers to imitate a feature on their own products. Super…

As we reported over the weekend, Google has removed all PPC ads from the right-hand side of the search engine results page with immediate global effect. There’s been a great deal of speculation on what this means for businesses, advertisers and users alike, with many postulating that the top-of-the-page paid search is going to become even more cutthroat (and expensive), organic listings will be pushed even further off the first SERP (Google will start to show four ads at the top instead of three for “highly commercial” search terms) and that Product Listing Ads will gradually take over the SERP (PLAs are still allowed on the right-hand side).The change has already happened.Here’s a search for ‘london hotel’ carried out two days ago…And here is the same search today…There are now four paid search results at the top, with nothing on the right. It looks oddly blank now, and worryingly the entire above the fold space is entirely filled with ads.However there is one slightly positive chang…

Most of us have been using the Google Maps for navigating thanks to its simplicity and the fact that most of the landmarks and businesses have registered themselves on Google. As it happens quiet a lot of times we are forced to take deviations from the routes owning to many reasons and it is at this point that the Google Maps would go berserk, now the company wants to fix this shortcoming with a new update which will not only accept deviations but also help you make decisions based on the reason of your deviations.The latest update will let you search for and also add an extra stop to your route without the need to exit the navigation. In essence, this feature will give you the liberty to add pit stops and detours without the need to disturb the ongoing navigation. Further, Google Map will also tell you how much more time will a stop add to your trip while you are on the route.Choosing the Detour on Google MapsA use case for the same would help us understand the feature better, assume…

Foursquare began as a “check-in app” and later evolved into a Yelp competitor. More recently it has introduced location intelligence and become an ad platform for brands, relying on its first-party data for targeting.Now the company is introducing a formal product to measure the offline impact of online or traditional media advertising. Foursquare is calling its new product “Attribution.” The beginnings of that offering were on display last fall in the company’s prediction of iPhone sales, based on foot traffic volumes to Apple Stores:With all eyes on the brand new iPhones launching tomorrow, we were wondering if our foot traffic data could indicate how sales would do this weekend. So our Place Insights team looked into foot traffic at Apple stores leading up to the launch of the iPhone 5, 5S, and 6 and analyzed it alongside Apple’s public sales data . . .Based on these early indicators, Foursquare predicts that launch day foot traffic will be about 360% of a typical Friday. This like…

Google is to shut down Google Compare, its insurance comparison service, from March 23. The service will be closed in both the UK and US. On the face of it, the news will have competitor comparison sites jumping for joy, as Google Compare constituted a major threat to their own business models.When Google introduced the service, there was plenty of concern from existing players in the market that it was a conflict of interest.This was understandable, given the prominence Google affords it in some very high value searches.According to a letter obtained by Search Engine Land, Google told Compare Partners that “the Google Compare service itself hasn’t driven the success we hoped for.”In addition:“…we’ve decided that focusing more intently on AdWords and future innovations will enable us to provide fresh, comprehensive answers to Google users, and to provide our financial services partners with the best return on investment.”I asked Digital Consultant Carl Hendy for his thoughts on the ne…

When people talk about content marketing, they often focus only on the end result. However, research is key to good content. Don’t overlook this important aspect of marketing.According to Zemanta,44 percent of business marketers are using research as part of their overall marketing strategy.This reveals a growing trend that solid research is the basis for developing an effective, results-oriented content marketing strategy.Research is the first and most vital step when developing and executing a content strategy. Without complete research, the steps of Ideation/Planning, Creation, Connection, and Measurement will be based on insufficient data.Three reasons why research is crucial for your strategy’s effectivenessIt’s how you will get to understand your audience and their pain points.Once you achieve this you have a proper guideline as to what content to generate to reach your business objectives, when and how to distribute it, and how to measure its effectiveness.It’s how you will dis…