June Industry Update
Summer has arrived, which means the spring cleaning and New Year shakeups have all been swept under the doormat, giving us a little rest from updates and changes in the world of online marketing. However, this doesn’t mean we need to let our SEO game slow – if anything, now is the season to get into the swing of content campaigns, brand development and social loving!
Despite the lull in SEO news this month, there are a few things worth noting in the world of social plus a trial of medical-related searches rolling out on Google mobile in the US.
There are three new ways to target Pinterest users
Pinterest has been reluctant to jump on the advertising wagon, and until now, ad targeting on the network had been basic at best with options limited to location, language, device and gender. But no more. Pinterest is about to get some much needed features that have been available on Facebook and Twitter for some time now.
By the end of month, Pinterest have said that there will be three new ways to reach a Pinterest audience. The first of these will be Customer List Targeting, which is rather similar to Facebook’s Custom Audiences. When using this feature, you’ll need to upload a list of your customers email addresses and Pinterest will match your list to its own user database and let you serve ads to those users.
Visitor Retargeting is the second new feature, which will allow you to retarget people who have already visited your site, you’ll need to add a conversion tag to your site, but Pinterest have reported that visitor retargeting has increased CTR 3x for businesses who gained early access to the feature.
Lookalike Targeting is the third and final new ad feature to be added, which will help you reach people who already share the behaviours and traits of your already existing audience. It has been reported that, in early testing, this option increased CTRs by up to 63% and reach increased by 30x.
60% of links shared on Twitter get no clicks
In a world where we love to overshare, it comes as little surprise that the majority of the content we put out there never gets clicked on. The study, conducted by Columbia University and the French National Institute, looked at five popular news websites and their visits over a month. They discovered that there was a trend of “poor correlation between social shares and views.”
It boiled down to one basic fact: having a large number of Twitter shares doesn’t mean you’ll get loads of traffic. And it makes sense – how many Tweets have you ever absentminded clicked the Retweet button on without ever checking the content out in full?
But it’s not all bad news, it’s about upping the game, learning your audience and targeting them with precision – good content makes good CTR! Want to know how to up your social media game? Get in touch with us here.
Google begins to roll out symptom-related answers on mobile
According to Google, 1% of their search queries are symptom related, so in retaliation to this, a trial of symptom-related direct answers is being trialled on mobile in the US.
The announcement said that searches for specific symptoms will display a list of related conditions, while a search for a broader symptom, such as “headache” will return a description of the symptom, self-treatment options and any related health issues that may need a visit to the doctor’s.
Google said it “worked with a team of medical doctors, experts at Harvard Medical School and the Mayo Clinic when pulling together the information… and that its symptom-related information is curated from ‘high-quality medical information’ pulled from the Knowledge Graph.”
“By doing this, our goal is to help you to navigate and explore health conditions related to your symptoms, and quickly get to the point where you can do more in-depth research on the web or talk to a health professional.”
Right now, this feature is being rolled out exclusively on mobile, only in English and in the US, but there are plans to add more symptom-related searches and extend the feature globally and in other languages.
