The changes will allow marketing teams to target keywords and tweet users based on intent. This will be on top of geo-tagging and simpler interest based filters.

Analysing recent tweets, a snack company would have the potential to target those who had tweeted “I’m hungry”. This can then be supplemented with Twitter’s other tools designed for targeting users and suddenly marketers are reaching a much more specific user group.

Several major brands have already used the keyword targeting tool on a trial basis and results have been promising. Some brands saw engagement rates of nearly 11% on promoted tweets. This figure is significantly bigger than Twitter’s best existing engagement rate, which was around 2%.

Speaking about the development, Twitter’s Kevin Weil said:

“We think this will be a big step for us and we are super excited to launch keyword targeting in timelines. More relevant, actionable promoted tweets are better for users and ultimately brands.”

Twitter hasn’t confirmed how far into the history of users’ timelines it would look with its keyword targeting. Instead it claimed that this would be considered continually and the company would be working with user and advertiser feedback.

Twitter will continue to allow users the option to dismiss any promoted tweet that they don’t consider relevant.

Experts believe this introduction of keyword targeting will appeal to more recognised brands as marketing campaigns become more successful.

Twitter is predicted to bring in over $580m in global advertising revenue this year, with twice that amount expected in 2014.

The post Twitter launches keyword targeting appeared first on PushON Ltd.

The major social networks dominate with 61 per cent posting to Facebook, 24 per cent sharing on YouTube and 25 per cent choosing Twitter.

The research was carried out for Electrify and immediate future, a social media consultancy, which is seeking to identify the relevant links between live brand experiences and social media. The firm has even devised a tagline for the link-up: ‘Live Brand Social.’

Of those surveyed, nearly half felt the combination of a live brand experience and social media made an event more successful.

According to Katy Howell of immediate future, the survey highlights the value of social media to brands:

“It isn’t just a case of snapping, linking and chatting about a live branded experience. The survey shows…people want to interact with the brand too.”

She went on to explain that half of Facebook’s users will enter competitions related to brands and 50 per cent will follow a brand’s Facebook page. Additionally, 25 per cent are likely to interact with a company over a brand experience.

Live Brand Social also has an impact on income for businesses. More than 50 per cent of attendees are likely buy something because of the interaction. Furthermore, 54 per cent will seek to find more brand information online, and nearly half will go to a store.

The post UK consumers share experiences with social media appeared first on PushON Ltd.

This week, Blackberry’s challenge to Android and iOS continued as the firm announced the introduction of Flurry Analytics for its latest operating system. It also announced that its popular messaging service, BBM, will be made available to Android and iOS users by summer 2013.

Developers of apps can use Flurry Analytics to access user data. It provides developers with information about users that includes demographics, engagement and buying patterns. Flurry Analytics has been available for rival mobile operating systems and this addition to Blackberry gives it parity for developers and marketers and could see an increase in apps for the platform, something it has often received criticism for.

Flurry Analytics will allow developers of apps for Blackberry 10 to gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviour and will prove invaluable in terms of monitoring spend and income streams.

According to Martyn Mallick:

“We’re excited to work with Flurry to provide developers with Flurry Analytics, which will help enable them to bring high quality apps on the BlackBerry 10 platform.”

Whether the addition will see Blackberry challenging iOS and Android is yet to be seen. Certainly, it seems likely that Blackberry users will see a range of new apps and apps are often seen as key to sales in the smartphone market.

The post Blackberry introduces Flurry Analytics appeared first on PushON Ltd.

“This one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0 and we expect it to go a little bit deeper and have a little bit more of an impact than the original version of Penguin.”

For better or worse, Penguin happened. Some link spam networks were rendered inert overnight, and Google have evidently continued to improve their link spam detection, as more and more website have found themselves caught in the crossfire.

But it is still all too common to find examples of shambolic websites that rank highly for competitive keywords based purely on a backlink profile consisting largely of optimised anchor text links from questionable sources. These nefarious practices have allowed these websites to cheat death and gorge themselves on the benefits of taking the place of websites that have lost visibility due to link building often performed years ago by people they no longer have any relationship with.

Damnit Google, you’ve made zombie websites!

SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM…

But it’s OK! Matt Cutts and his trusty crossbow/algorithm update have been taking this sort of website down for quite a while now. And they seem to be getting better at it.

Fearsome

Cutts clearly recognises that they have to kill the head zombie to defeat the horde (or is that vampires? Vampires are a type of zombie, right? Shut up), saying “We’re also looking at some ways to go upstream to deny the value to link spammers. We’ve got some nice ideas on trying to make sure that that becomes less effective and so we expect that that will roll out over the next few months as well.”

So when he says they’re planning on clamping down on link spammers “advertorials, native advertising and those sorts of things that violate our quality guidelines”, I wonder if he finally means it? The webspam team at Google have been tackling the issue for years and it still seems that every time they deal with one source, the epidemic moves elsewhere. But there’s no denying the effect that the first Penguin updates have stemmed the tide significantly, so it’s not so hard to believe that they are getting closer and closer to their goal of eliminating webspam as a viable long term strategy, if not entirely.

Better yet, Cutts tells us that “We hope in the next few months to roll out a next generation of hacked sites detection that is even more comprehensive and also try to communicate better to webmasters”. What’s more useful in a zombie epidemic than early detection and a robust communication system? Besides a pump action shotgun, obviously.

“Try to make sure you make a great site that users love, that they’ll want to tell their friends about, bookmark, come back to, visit over and over again” says Cutts. “As long as you’re working hard to show great content to your users, we’re working hard to try to show your high quality content to users as well”.

So the message, as ever, is simple – Google want to include lively, healthy websites in their results pages, not a useless, unintelligent mess that serves only to gobble up as much traffic as it can. If you can only succeed by spamming, then Cutts warns of an “eventful Summer” ahead.

The post The Ranking Dead: Could Google Penguin 2.0 End The Zombie Website Epidemic? appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Of those businesses surveyed, 26 per cent are spending only 10 per cent of their marketing budget on traditional, non-digital, marketing activities, with 22 per cent claiming they spend nothing at all on traditional marketing.

Small businesses appear to have embraced digital marketing the most, with 54 per cent claiming they prefer online and mobile marketing as ways to develop their business.

Traditional strategies are suffering at the hands of digital marketing. Printed advertising has been hit the hardest, with only 28 per cent of SMEs planning to use this again in 2013. In contrast, direct mailing is still popular, with 20 per cent of SMEs seeking to employ this in the coming year.

Whilst confidence in traditional marketing is on the wane, mobile marketing is attracting more spend. Optimised websites, mcommerce and payments and QR codes are all proving of interest to SMEs. It is expected that mobile marketing will see an increase in investment from SMEs this year.

According to Ryan Higginson of Pitney Bowes:

“Many SMEs success, and even survival, can depend on targeted, effective and easy to implement marketing that covers a multitude of channels. Offline will always play a very important role in any strategy but online has really come to the fore.”

It is clear that the future of marketing for SMEs is digital. Whilst some elements of traditional marketing will continue to exist, the main driving force is likely to be mobile.

The post UK based SMEs leave traditional marketing behind in favour of digital appeared first on PushON Ltd.

In the UK, around 66% of smartphone users are using mcommerce apps. In comparison, approximately 57% of German smartphone owners, and 55% of American smartphone owners, use mcommerce apps.

UK smartphone owners are also spending 50% more time with mcommerce apps than all of the markets Arbitron surveyed. This is in addition to the overall number of sessions undertaken by UK smartphone users.

In the UK, smartphone owners are averaging around 135 minutes a month using the apps, equating to nearly 55 sessions. Across the Atlantic, American smartphone users are spending, on average, just over 90 minutes per month whilst German and French users also log significantly less mcommerce use than UK users.

The most used mcommerce app in the UK is eBay, with nearly 44% of those surveyed using it for more than 144 minutes per month. The next most popular is Amazon mobile. However, Amazon is used considerably less than eBay, with barely more than 29 minutes per month usage.

Andreas Piani, European Arbiton Mobile’s general manager, said:

“If they haven’t already, merchants should be taking advantage of… the mobile medium and ensure that they have a diversified strategy to engage consumers… mcommerce isn’t just an appendix to ecommerce, and apps aren’t just a downloadable declination of mobile-optimized sites.”

He went on to explain that businesses should ensure they have mobile-optimised sites to ensure mcommerce opportunities are maximised.

The post UK leads the way in mcommerce appeared first on PushON Ltd.

#UnitedWelcome – Manchester United’s Social Faux Pas

With news of Sir Alex Ferguson retiring on Tuesday we were shown social media at its most powerful with reports of David Moyes taking over. To our surprise on Thursday we managed to find a link that was to a tab on the Manchester United Facebook page and the text read – ‘#UnitedWelcome – Send your personal welcome to our new manager David Moyes’. This was up on the site before any confirmation of the appointment of David Moyes and news confirming the reports didn’t come for a couple of hours after this was leaked. The leak was caused by United’s only official Twitter (@Manutd_PO).

The power of social media strikes again, showing how sometimes preparation for announcements can go wrong and lead to the unveiling of a whole campaign before its actually live. The app is still yet to be published on the Facebook page, so our guesses are… Who did they fire for leaking the information too early? After they spent so long searching for a Social Media Campaign Manager in December. 

Tuesday’s announcement led to unprecedented interest in Sir Alex Ferguson and his retirement, the Guardian via Twitter said they received the biggest ever day of traffic, even bigger than the Pope’s retirement!

The power of football. Biggest day ever for traffic on @guardian website yesterday (bigger than the Pope)

— Daniel Taylor (@DTguardian) May 9, 2013

YouTube Trends 

This week YouTube launched its Trends Map, which provides a statistical breakdown of the different kinds of content that are popular in the United States. The dashboard allows you to view statistics based on shares, views, city region, gender, and age. Lets hope they make this a worldwide feature at some point soon!

Solaborate – Social Network for Tech Professionals

This week saw a new social platform being released into beta, targeted at tech professional to interact with other tech professionals. Based on the early previews and videos/pictures we can see it allows professionals to share documents and presentations, publish questions, conference, chat, video and best practices.

Solaborate even allows for collaboration on the other social platforms such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn.

If you’re interested in signing up to Solaborate you can request a Beta Invite here.

Viber Desktop

Viber is to challenge Skype’s dominance by launching a desktop app which would enable calls, texts and video calls.

Dubbed Viber 3.0 the desktop release is coinciding with major updates for Android, iOS and Blackberry versions.

Viber chief executive  Talmon Marco said;

People spend a substantial amount of time on their smartphones. However, a lot of that usage takes place at home or in the office, where they have laptops or desktops close by.

Bing using Klout as ranking factor

Klout has expanded its partnership with Microsoft by bringing its search results to the top of bing.

Questions that are put on Bing that have long been unanswered will be answered by ‘experts’ who are appointed by Klout ‘influencers’.

CEO of Klout Joe Fernandez said

People are starting to be interested not only in finding information, but also knowing where that information is coming from. When getting advice on how to take care of your garden, for instance, you’d probably much rather get advice from an influencer in the subject rather than someone who was just getting started gardening.

We know what questions people are asking, so we’ve curated the best questions and tied them back to the topics where people are influential.

Users could then +K with the answer if the answer was useful, adding to the experts Klout score.

SAScon

The keynote speakers for the upcoming SAScon have been announced. They are Clancy Childs and John Veichmanis.

Clancy Childs is a Google Analytics’ product manager and is in the know regarding the most crucial tool for marketers. John Veichmanis is Expedia’s VP for Global Paid Search.

SAScon co-founder Simon Wharton said

SAScon is about the accountable modern marketer, digital is at the heart of any modern organisation. Bringing together speakers not only of this notoriety but of this extreme calibre in such a high level conference. It is a real statement of intent from SAScon. 

SAScon is the perfect conference for both the client side agent and the in house marketer.

SAScon takes place on the 6th/7^th of June 2013 and tickets can be bought here.

That’s the end of the roundUP this week we will leave you with this funny VIne that we saw.  You can see more here

The post Digital RoundUP 13/05/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

As SEO has evolved, there has been a trend to choose or purchase domain names that contain keywords in an attempt to increase click through rates and climb up the rankings of Yahoo and Google, as well as other search engines.

A significant number of SEO managers will ensure companies secure domain names that exactly match their targeted keywords. For instance, a company selling electric bikes may purchase something like ‘buyelectricbikes.co.uk’.

Despite the existing approach to domain name choice, recent changes to Google have revealed that matching targeting keywords within a domain name is no longer as important to ranking success as previously thought. This doesn’t mean that businesses should completely forego domains that include keywords but they do need to understand there are other factors to consider when choosing.

Domain names which include keywords offer good ranking and increased click through rates but as digital marketing evolves, a brand-friendly domain name is becoming increasingly important. Google’s Eric Schmidt explained:

“Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away.”

In social media, and within search engines, a domain name is the initial way in which a user will identify a business. A strong brand is likely to demand higher click through rates.

The post Domain names vital to online success appeared first on PushON Ltd.

The increased spend in mobile advertising accounts for more than 50% of the total increase in digital advertising spend for the period. The increased ad spend was as a result of the explosion in smartphone sales. Mobile advertising accounts for nearly 10% of digital advertising spend in the UK – nearly ten times the 1.1% it accounted for in 2009.

According to Tim Elkington of IAB:

“Mobile has reached this milestone because marketers are becoming more attuned to the ‘always on’ nature of consumers.”

Elkington went on to explain that, in light of the excitement surrounding mobile, over the past half year another 20 of the top advertisers in the UK have developed websites optimised for mobile devices.

With 4G’s bandwidth allowing for more data intensive content and the success of the tablet device, it seems mobile’s growth is likely to continue. Investment in mobile optimisation will see more and more consumer interaction.

Despite the relative newness of 4G in the UK, there has been significant growth in video advertising for mobile. Indeed, there has been a 1,601% growth in video advertising, with spend rising from less than £1m in 2011 to £13m last year.

The biggest spenders within mobile advertising were entertainment and media companies; retail and consumer goods closely followed.

Advertisers seeking to ride the mobile wave will need to ensure ads are relevant and must engage customers to bring improved results for brands.

The post UK mobile ad spend increases appeared first on PushON Ltd.

The Google Grants programme has just celebrated its 10th birthday. Launched in April 2003, this scheme has evolved over the years and Google works with registered charities, providing them with grants to spend in Adwords. However, the number of charities that are actively using this suggests that the majority of UK charities are either overlooking the benefits of this, or are simply not aware of the scheme’s existence. This additional resource of up to $10,000 per month can make a huge difference to a charity’s marketing budgets and so although it can take several months for a grant application to be approved by Google, if you have not yet applied, it is definitely worth doing so here.

This grant does come with a number of restrictions, such as that the ads must only run on Google UK, links in the ads must only be to the pre-approved domain, the ads must be text only and not commercial, there must be no adverts on your own site such as Adsense and each bid must cost no more than $2.

The last criterion is a reasonably new update as Google increased this limit from $1 per click at the end of January. However, this increase in bids came with the announcement that all Grant funded adverts would now be featured underneath any self-funded company or charity adverts. So while this change may open your organisation up to being able to target keywords that were previously outside of this bid limit, sites are likely to have seen a decrease in traffic due to featuring lower down the listings.

However, with the changes that were announced to Adwords just a couple of weeks after this, PPC account managers have been given the opportunity to better manage these adverts. By upgrading to enhanced campaigns, you are now able to manage all devices in one campaign, manually adjust the bid for mobile ads and show call extensions on these mobile ads. This shift from legacy to enhanced campaigns is going to be enforced automatically by the end of June for any accounts that have not made the change themselves. Google have since released a tool that allows you to change campaigns in an account in bulk.

Beyond that, Grant accounts should largely be run in the same way as normal Adwords campaigns. These accounts should be maintained (if you do not work on your account over a 3 month period then Google will stop your funding), the accounts should be well structured and you will need to optimise the account to ensure that you are getting the most out of your spend. Ensure that the keywords that you target are relevant to your organisation and the pages that you are sending visitors to are also relevant and contain a call to action in order to get the best return from your spend.

If you are running a Google Grant account, we would love to know what impact have you noticed since these changes were implemented.

In conjunction with the launch of FocusON for PPC month, we are giving away a Google Chromebook to one lucky reader. Simply visit the PushON Prizes app over at the PushON Facebook page and follow the three simple steps to be in with a chance of winning. HINT: You may want to read FocusON: An Introduction to PPC Marketing first!

The post Are You Making The Most Out Of Your Google Grants Account? appeared first on PushON Ltd.