Marketing Google

I remember the days when you could only run Page Like campaigns within Facebook advertising. Brands and advertisers poured tens, often hundreds, of thousands of dollars collecting Likes, and Facebook had us convinced there was value in doing so. Today, there are various advertising opportunities and objectives, but Likes are still widely considered an indicator of brand loyalty and growth opportunity.The question remains, however: What is the value of these Likes? This is the million-dollar question, and it’s one that few marketers dare to dive into. We’ve been accustomed to avoiding it, only going so far as to concede that “there’s gotta be some value there.”In my opinion, there is value in a Like, but maybe not in the way you might think. Without further ado, let’s dive in.Correlation vs. causationIt can certainly be stated that there is relationship between a follower Liking a brand on a social platform and that follower spending more on the brand than non-followers. But is that re…

This week, Oracle is livening up its Clouds with chatbots and other kinds of intelligent apps.First, it is bringing chatbot creation, management and hosting for the first time to its Customer Experience Cloud Suite.The Suite is the uber-brand for the constituent Clouds of Marketing, Sales, Commerce, Configure/Price/Quote, Service and Social. (Plus Oracle has announced a new Content and Experience Cloud, which centralizes the tools for content production, management and delivery.)The chatbot introduction means that marketers now have Oracle tools for specifying responses in an Oracle-connected chatbot conversation on Facebook Messenger or Amazon Alexa.An on-board conversational engine will help determine the human’s intent and context, or it will automatically hand off to a live agent if the back-and-forth becomes too complex. Chatbots include specialized ones for customer self-service and assistance with such sales tasks as account search.Second, Oracle is introducing something called…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is more than a stylish trend. It goes beyond rules, providing the ability to understand content or language, find patterns that can be applied to the future, digest all kinds of information and make reasoned decisions.One by one, B2B vendors are rolling out their AI chops — targeting platform Demandbase, CRM and marketing platform Salesforce, account engagement platform YesPath, conversational platform Conversica, and B2B predictive marketer CaliberMind, among a growing list of others.To get some insight into what this means for businesses selling to businesses, we talked with Raviv Turner, CEO and co-founder of CaliberMind. (Turner will be co-presenting “A Scientific Look at B2B Buying in the Age of AI” at our MarTech Conference next month in San Francisco.)At the top level, he said, AI helps to solve key challenges that are particular to B2B.First of all, selling to a business is complicated.[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

via Marketing Land

Facebook has made no secret of its aggressive plans for broadening the market for its Audience Network. In a bid to attract publishers, the company officially adopted header bidding in March, and it has tweaked some of its stances on transparency to better court brand-oriented advertising dollars.But for many direct response advertisers, Audience Network is already a major piece of their advertising strategy — a development that stands to continue. In the latest quarterly Facebook benchmark report (registration required) I drafted for Nanigans, my employer, it’s clear Facebook is also increasing the amount of ad spend going to off-Facebook sources.This expansion has impacted long-term Facebook ad pricing trends, helping flatten cost increases thanks to increased supply, and it has created additional opportunities for direct response advertisers to gain particular advantages.The statsExamining an identical set of advertisers that chose to activate Audience Network over both Q4 2016 and…

Recently, we took a nostalgic, infographic-based look back at the history of Google search results pages.In the past 20 years, Google has gone from a university project called Backrub to a global powerhouse that continues to shape how we search for, and discover, new information.And yet, these are still early days for Google. In fact, the rate of change is only increasing, with driverless cars and augmented reality on the horizon.Some of Google’s core business focuses, like hyperlocal targeting and personalization, remain largely untapped opportunities and, with heightening competition from Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, the pace of progress will continue to accelerate.In 2017 alone, for example, we are about to see an ad-blocker built into Chrome, a mobile-first index, and the increased uptake of voice search.Google defines itself as “machine-learning first” in its approach, so we are entering an era of unprecedented – and mildly unpredictable – possibilities. If Google can integrate i…

Quora, the Q&A platform that’s been around since 2009, has quietly grown into a business now valued at nearly $1.8 billion. In the past week, the company announced an injection of $85 million in funding and said monthly active users grew from 100 million to 195 million in the past year. It’s also prepped to put a lot more investment into its fledgling ad business that’s still in beta.As far as scale and reach go, the major ad-supported platforms — Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn — are significantly bigger than Quora is now. But its slow and steady, under-the-radar approach may be starting to pay off. Quora says it has seen growing advertiser interest despite almost no marketing for the ads beta that launched in April 2016.People go to Quora to ask questions, or to search questions others have already asked, and get answers from subject-matter experts. Businesses have been engaging organically on Quora for years, answering questions related to their pro…

tanuha2001 / Shutterstock.com Here’s why, after the next time you check flights online, an ad flagging a seat on a specific flight might land in your Facebook or Instagram feed.Facebook has begun retargeting people looking to travel with airfare-promoting ads, the company announced on Thursday. Called Dynamic Ads for Travel for Flights, the program extends to airlines the same industry-specific retargeted ads that Facebook introduced for hotel marketers last year.After testing the flight-specific ads with Cathay Pacific and Delta, now all airline advertisers and online travel booking firms, like Kayak and Orbitz, can run Dynamic Ads for Travel for Flights globally across Facebook, Instagram and Facebook’s Audience Network ad network.The ads can be bought through Facebook’s advertising API or its Ads Manager and Power Editor self-serve ad-buying tools. Advertisers can pay based on the number of clicks or impressions their ads receive, with the option of using Facebook’s optimized CPM (o…

Successful lead nurturing builds customer loyalty and increases revenue. By anticipating the needs of the buyer and providing them with the most relevant content they need to make a smart decision even before they’re ready to purchase. According to a recent Ascend2 study, the most important objectives of a lead nurturing strategy are to increase conversion rates and sales opportunities. However, 59% of B2B companies say creating relevant content is their biggest obstacle to lead nurturing success.Read this white paper from Oracle to discover even ways to improve lead nurturing and increase revenue. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “Lead Nurturing: Guide for Modern Marketers.”

via Marketing Land

Real-time TV ad data company iSpot has launched real-time conversion analytics to help advertisers tie TV ads to digital actions — and challenge the traditional methodologies of Nielsen.The Bellevue, Wash.-based company has partnerships with TV manufacturers and connects to some 10 million smart TVs. Unlike Nielsen, which uses program watching as a proxy for ad watching, iSpot’s attribution platform tracks tune-in and performance metrics at the ad level. The conversion measurement piece of the platform has been in beta for about six months with 20 advertisers representing a variety of industries.Sean Muller, iSpot’s CEO and former CTO at Demand Media, says it can now provide digital-like attribution for TV.“Every brand has digital attribution and a media mix model, but there’s been a gaping hole in TV attribution. With smart TVs attached to home IP addresses, we can provide multi-touch attribution to connect first-party data and track actions users take on advertisers’ sites” after vi…

Here’s our recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web.From Marketing Land:TapClicks buys Raven Tools
Apr 26, 2017 by Barry Levine The combined firms say they are now the only reporting platform for multiple marketing tools that covers all company sizes.The connected audience: Content and creative needs for each stage of the customer journey
Apr 26, 2017 by Thomas Stern In the second part of his series on the connected marketing approach, contributor Thomas Stern explains how the connected audience is built on keyword insights, segmentation and a focus on the customer’s needs.Content and links: It really does take a village
Apr 26, 2017 by Julie Joyce Columnist Julie Joyce explains how clients’ and other stakeholders’ involvement can greatly improve the success of your link-building campaign.Facebook Spaces & the risky virtualization of retail
Apr 26, 2017 by Blaise Lucey As Facebook pushes into VR with Spaces, c…