Monthly Industry Roundup: October 2016

Location3 News: Good news came early in the month when Street Fight Magazine named Location3 a finalist for Best New Solution for Managing Local Data as part of its Local Visionary Awards. The winners were announced October 25th at Street Fight Summit 2016 in New York City. While we didn’t come home with the hardware, we were honored and proud to be recognized again as an innovator in the local marketing arena.

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As always, we enjoy taking the opportunity to celebrate the holidays with our Location3 team, especially Halloween. This year, the festivities included a costume contest, chili cook-off and the second edition of our Digital Marketing Tricks and Treats podcast.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEARCH?

Bing Update Makes Setting Daily Budgets Easier

A recent update to Bing Ads is making it easier for advertisers to set daily campaign budgets. All Bing Ads applications now include Shared Budgets, a feature that allows advertisers to assign single-day budgets across multiple campaigns. The new feature will first and foremost, save time for advertisers. But maybe more importantly, Shared Budgets could help advertisers optimize their ad spend.

How to Do Local PPC on a Budget: Part 1

Location3 PPC specialist Boyd Hathaway has been leading the way with his insights into how franchisees can take advantage of its local PPC strategy, even if they don’t have the biggest budget. This blog post gives franchisees a step-by-step guide to setting up a Google PPC campaign.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN LOCAL?

Study: Indoor Location Growing, Multiple Technologies Being Deployed

The indoor marketing and indoor positioning system space continues to grow as technology matures. In a recent study, marketers concluded the major benefits of this location-based targeting were as follows: Attracting customers (55%), increasing sales (55%), usability of venues (48%) and the customer experience (47%) were the top reasons for deploying IPS, with brand awareness (42%) and customer loyalty (41%) rounding out the list. While this space is still new and growing, most agree the future is bright for hyper- local, location-based marketing.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN DISPLAY?

Research Shows Internet Usage is Stalling

For the first time, the amount of time internet users spends online has slowed to a single digit percent increase (8% – Q2 2016 compared to Q2 2015). Mobile app and mobile web saw small gains, but desktop was down. Due to this, they are predicting that CPM increase may soon be the primary drive of revenue growth in the market. Companies who are best positioned with this change in mind are Google and Facebook (no surprises there), and Apple, Amazon, Pandora, Snapchat, and Pinterest as they are all in the top 15 used apps.

For Millennials, their mobile device is still their preferred choice to consume media spending over 14 hours per week with the device. But surprisingly, adults 35-49 are actually the heaviest mobile users at 14 hours and 48 minutes per week.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN VIDEO?

Live Sports Streaming Making Gains

One thing I always felt linear TV had going for it was live sports and news. Now it seems even live sports is adapting to our want-it-now, want-it-anywhere society. Streaming of live sports has seen significant gains over the last year. It’s not quite making up for the difference in declines that linear TV is seeing in total viewing, but it’s definitely filling a little of the gap.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SOCIAL?

360 Videos to Load Immediately in Facebook

Facebook is adding the 360 videos and photos to its Instant Articles program. The addition of 360 content to the program aims to further meet the increasing demands of users who expect minimal to no loading time.  This program is facing increasing competition from Apple News and Google AMP pages.

Pinterest Expands Ad Targeting Options

Pinterest has increased their targeting capabilities. You can now target based on how users interact with your pins – clicks, comments, saves, likes, and “closeups”. They also are developing their pixel technology, so advertisers will be able to target based on on-site activity.

 WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEO?

News Publishers Having Issues with AMP

Accelerated Mobile Pages were designed to help users, but it may be coming at the cost of news publishers. The Wall Street Journal reported that some major publishers are less than pleased with the feature because the quick-loading pages don’t offer the same advertising potential as their full mobile sites. Google is adamant that AMP will offer similar value to the publishers’ current mobile sites. The skeptical publishers were not named, but CNN and the Washington Post were mentioned as examples of AMP performing at similar rates when it comes to producing revenue.