April Online Marketing Roundup

Find out the latest news in the B2B world, how youtube is taking advantage over TV, changes in Facebook & Twitter, and maybe the last Penguin update.

Read our April Online Marketing Roundup!

1. Why Marketers Need to up Their Investment in YouTube for Better ROI

Marketers need to make more use of online video resources such as YouTube, whose ROI is rising compared to TV, according to new research.

In a meta analysis of 56 case studies across eight countries it was found that YouTube delivered a higher return on investment than TV in more than three-quarters (77%) of cases. The research was carried out with a range of partners that included BrandScience, Data2Decisions, GfK, Kantar Worldpanel, MarketingScan and MarketShare.

As part of the study a forecast was created for 17 of the campaigns to understand the impacts of shifting media spend into online video. In more than 80% of cases the recommend to spend on YouTube was more than double that of historic levels as a result.

Paul Dyson, founder of Data2Decisions, said the study produced the same findings as his company had achieved in the past. “Higher YouTube ROIs with optimisations across a range of clients suggesting spend should be two to six times higher,” he said.

2. Report: 74% of B2B Content Marketers Have a Strategy; Only 22% Rate it Effective

According to Content Marketing Institute’s latest B2B enterprise content marketing report, 74 percent of the content marketers surveyed said they have a content marketing strategy in place, but only 22 percent rated their content marketing efforts effective.

These are some of the most importants things that Amy Gesenhues have recap from the report:

The top three most used content marketing tactics included in-person events, videos and social media content.
At 94 percent, LinkedIn was the most popular social media platform for distributing content marketing among the B2B enterprise marketers surveyed. YouTube came in second, followed closely by Twitter.
Search engine marketing (SEM) was the most popular paid distribution method used by the survey respondents, followed by banner ads. Fifty-eight percent of respondents ranked SEM as their most effective paid distribution method for content marketing, followed by content discovery tools, promoted posts and social ads.

You can get the full report at: B2B Enterprise Content Marketing 2016 Report.

3. Only 23% of SEOs Currently Implementing AMP, 50% Believe it Will Affect Rankings

In an exclusive study conducted by SEO PowerSuite, some revealing findings were uncovered as to how SEOs are responding to Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project two months out.

The goal of the study was to identify SEOs’ awareness of the AMP launch, gauge the impact they believe it will have on mobile search results, and learn actions they plan to take as a result.

SEO PowerSuite surveyed 385 SEO professionals from both North America and Europe. The sample group represented a mix of in-house SEOs, SEOs who work for their own companies, agency SEOs, and outside consultants.

Do SEO’s Know About AMP?

As you may expect, most SEOs are at least aware of AMP, but surprisingly a quarter of those surveyed were not. According to the study, 75% of SEOs said they were aware of AMP, with 18% saying they had deeply researched it.

Learn more about SEO PowerSuite study here

4. Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Now Factors in Viewing Time

Facebook is going beyond the basic signals of liking, commenting, and sharing to now factor in viewing time as a ranking signal.

Previously, Facebook had factored in reading time as a ranking signal, as well as bounce rate, but this week’s viewing time update is a bit different.

Based on the data collected by individual users, Facebook will now make an attempt to predict how long people will spend viewing a piece of content.

This will be based on how long you have spent viewing other types of content in the past. Facebook will then rank the content, prioritizing the content it believes you will spend the most time looking at.

5. Google’s New Search Card Will Help Track Your Online Orders

A new Google search card has been spotted by Alex Chitu of Google Operating System, which allows searchers to track packages directly within the search results pages.

This is different from the previous search card that would trigger when you put an actual tracking link. Now, all you have to do is enter “track package” into the Google search bar, and search card will appear.

Next, you just enter in your tracking information; Google will even be able to match that number to a specific carrier without you having to enter it in yourself.

Chitu points out that other ways to track packages are be entering in the following commands:

“My packages”
“My purchases”
“My orders”

6. Twitter Introduces Better Targeting With Its New Ad Groups Tool

Twitter Ads have introduced a new Ad Groups feature in an attempt to improve advertising for big brands using customisation and segmentation.

Following Facebook’s path in trying to present a competitive advertising platform, Twitter is hoping to attract advertisers aiming for large-scale campaigns.

According to Twitter:

“Ad groups introduce a new level in our campaign hierarchy: one campaign can have many ad groups, and an ad group can have many targeting criteria and creatives. This level of granular control helps advertisers improve how they measure results, set promotion schedules, test different audiences, and identify which Tweets work best.”

This way it’s hoping to encourage more brands to join Twitter’s advertising options, as a way to reach a wider audience, increase leads, website traffic, or app downloads, while building, testing, optimising, and measuring all their different campaigns.

Different targeting criteria

Twitter offers many different criteria for targeting a specific audience and this may help advertisers measure (and improve) the effectiveness of their ads.

The segmentation of the audience may be performed in various ways, and the most popular options of targeting are:

Geo-location targeting
Gender Targeting
Device targeting
Language Targeting
Follower targeting
Interest category targeting
Keyword targeting
Television Targeting
Tailored Audiences
Behaviors and partner audience targeting

Learn more about twitter’s ad groups here.

7. Google: The Next Penguin Update May Be The Last

As we all wait for the next Google Penguin update, which should be named Penguin 4.0 and should be officially announced by Google - we may not experience a new one after this next version.

Gary Illyes from Google said on Twitter yesterday that this may be the last Penguin update.

He said "it's likely there won't be next one," referring to the next Penguin update.

We know the next Penguin algorithm should be the real time version and with real time algorithms, they don't get pushed out on occasion, instead, they run all the time. So new Penguin penalties and recoveries will happen all of the time.

This is similar to Google Panda updates where Google said we likely won't notice any more updates to them because it is more rolling.

But truth is, there were small updates, not the drastic ones from the past. The thing is, Panda is rolling, Penguin should be very very quick, based on how quickly Google indexes new and old links.