Rachel Balik says, “In its earliest days, advertising meant putting up a billboard or taking out an ad in a newspaper. If sales increased, it was generally declared that an advertising campaign was working. Although remedial and inexact, this type of measurement embodied the true purpose of an ad campaign: drive revenue. The downside is there were lots of X factors, and at the end of the day, you couldn’t really be 100% sure that the advertising had caused the uptick (or that poor sales were the result of poor advertising.) As technology advanced, things like Nielsen ratings gave us more... [...]

Martin Beck says, “U.S. adults will spend 21 minutes a day, 6% of their total time with digital media, on Facebook in 2014, but the social network pulls in 10% of U.S. digital advertising spending, according to figures released this week by eMarketer. That over-indexing stands in direct contrast to all other digital media that eMarketer tracks. For instance, daily time spent on digital devices makes up nearly half of major media consumption, yet only 30.5% of total major media ad spending is on digital channels. Video takes up 15.9% of users’ time and gets 11.7% of spending. Online radio... [...]

Martin Beck says, “Pinterest continued the slow process of pinning down its advertising plans today by announcing updates to its privacy policy, effective Oct. 19. Yes, one month from today. “Our plan now,” wrote Pinterest’s Julie Park in a blog post, “is to make Promoted Pins more relevant to Pinners, and help advertisers understand how their ads impact their business. On October 19, 2014, we’ll make a few updates to our Privacy Policy to explain those plans.” The popular social bookmarking has been testing Promoted Pins since last October, but has been accelerating its work... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Online display advertising had a strong showing in the second quarter of 2014. The sector grew 6.2 percent in Q2, outperforming the overall U.S. ad market according to a new report from Kantar Media. Total U.S. advertising expenditures increased just 0.7% in the second quarter of 2014 to $35.6 billion. Kantar points to budget increases by financial, retail and local service marketers as the drivers of online display’s strong performance. For the first six months of the year, online display grew 9.7 percent year-over-year, compared to the overall market which had growth... [...]

Amy Gesenhues says, “Facebook has released a new app insights analytics tool for developers that helps track an app’s performance and retention by groups. Using the new “Label cohorts” within the updated analytics tool, developers can segment app users to measure factors like revenue or the time spent within the app by different groups. The label cohorts also make it possible for developers to perform A/B tests – trying out various strategies on different groups of app users. Facebook offered a list of ways the label cohorts could be segmented, using examples like “install source”... [...]

Jason Bowden says, “Cloud based business intelligence is a game changer in the digital business. All types of businesses, from small to large enterprises are equally adapting to the emergence of cloud based tools to enhance business intelligence. Small to medium business enterprises are now embracing cloud based applications to make their marketing strategies highly competitive. Large firms, on the other hand, are using cloud business intelligence solutions in further expanding their market and using it for experimentation in furtherance of building a more productive market environment“. The... [...]

David Kirkpatrick says, “Data handling and analytics can sometimes offer shocking results, as global B2B company National Instruments discovered after a surprising decrease in an email campaign’s conversion rate. Key Obstacle: Concern about the new numbers “When I first saw the number change, I was a bit freaked out,” said Stephanie Logerot, Database Marketing Specialist, National Instruments. Stephanie, as a strategist, felt her greatest challenge was communicating the new way of looking at the data to National Instruments’ stakeholders outside of the database marketing team. This... [...]

Danny Chadburn says, “In early 2011 I put together a simple video for a friend’s band for a song they made referencing a certain (lonely) dictator. It was uploaded to YouTube and had been seen by a handful of people; however on December 17 that year the viewing figures suddenly skyrocketed. The despot in question had died, and I was the unexpected beneficiary of some web traffic. Something I had long forgotten about was suddenly being watched by thousands of people!”. How to breathe new life into old content ‘Econsultancy’ Blog  [...]

Juliet Stott says, “Mobile first is not a luxury but a necessity if your ecommerce business is to keep pace with the rapid growth in mobile use.   One in five people in the world own a smartphone and one in 17 own a tablet, according to BI Intelligence. Revenues from mobile sales in Europe and the US continue to grow dramatically too. In the last four years they are up from 2.2% in 2010 and predicted to grow to 23% by the end of 2014, meaning transactions made on the go will be worth $101bn. Research from Intelligent Positioning showed that mobile and tablet traffic is also set to overtake... [...]

Jo Hill says, “Earlier this year I wrote about how to start formulating a digital marketing strategy. Getting the strategy right is of course paramount. But even when the strategy is right, if it’s not understood, supported, and turned into action then it’s barely more than an academic exercise. Ella Fitzgerald was on the money when she sang “tain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it… that’s what gets results”. Here are some actions to take when creating your digital marketing strategy that will also help to build the foundation for its success”. How... [...]