Monday 15 June 2015

On Monday 15th June FORTUNE’s Heather Clancy published her views on the future of email marketing. In the post she discusses the fact that – despite Social Media’s popularity – email marketing remains a solid and consistently reliable method of finding and keeping customers.

“Email is the thoroughbred in many marketing portfolios” ‘Monitor’ CEO Alex Bard is quoted saying. (His company counts Coca-Cola, Disney and Fitbit among its 120,000 customers). “Newsletters are resurging, the death of email has been inaccurately reported.”

Clancy goes on to discuss how marketers should be using emails and the themes that will dominate developments in email innovation for the rest of 2015. She closes by addressing the issue of email for mobile and tells marketers what to be aware of and how to adjust.

Tuesday 16 June 2015

Bing has announced that it will soon start encrypting all search traffic by default. The search tool, in its struggle to make it out from under Google’s shadow, has introduced encrypted search as a default setting – just like Google and big brother Yahoo.

Digital Trends journalist, Kristofer Wouk tells us that Bing will “still pass along referrer strings in searches, which let webmasters see that the traffic to their sites came from Bing, but in order to protect users’ privacy, the actual query that led users to a site will no longer be included.” Marketers can still use Bing Webmaster Tools to get an overview of search terms and keyword rankings, but this will not expose users’ personal information.

In closing Wouk discusses what this means for Bing users and how it’s faring in the ongoing SE popularity contest.

Wednesday 17 June

On Wednesday the 17th of June Bloomberg broke the news that Google has released a tool to track ad effectiveness across devices. According to the article the DoubleClick unit measures customer responses that may occur days later and on different gadgets. This will make it easier to know when ads are effective, even if they spark sales days after they’re viewed and from different gadgets.

Google’s Neal Mohan said that the service can measure customer responses that, for example, start as an ad click on a mobile phone and end with a purchase from a personal computer.

“It’s not just one device—90% of consumers move from device to device throughout the course of the day,” Mohan said. “A consumer might see a video ad on a desktop at work, but they may not actually make a purchase until they’re at home on their laptop or tablet.”

Thursday 18 June 2015

Australian superannuation provider, BT Super has been fined $20,400 in penalties this week after the corporate regulator took action against the company’s online advertising.

SmartCompany’s Elois Keating takes us through the charges against BT Super’s AdWords infringements and discusses the fact that companies need to be aware that online advertisements must still adhere to the same industry rules and codes as traditional ads.

A spokesperson for BT issued a statement saying that “in each case, this was a result of internal administrative mistakes and process breakdowns between BT and a third party for which BT accepts full responsibility.”

Friday 19 June 2015

Chris Silver Smith shares his expert opinion on advanced technical SEO, with insights straight from industry specialists at SMX Advanced.

In this post he gives us a run-down of presentations by Jenny Halasz, the President and founder of JLH Marketing; Christine Smith the technical lead at IBM Search Marketing and Maile Ohye, an engineer with Google’s Senior Developer Programs.

Maile Ohye’s talk on HTTP/2, converting from HTTP to HTTPS and the rendering of webpages is recapped by Chris, who then goes on to discuss Jenny Halasz’s  demonstration (in which she takes the audience through elements that she has diagnosed in SEO performance issues for websites). In closing, Christine Smith’s presentation entitled “Tales of an SEO Detective,” is summarized, covering the three different issues that Smith has helped to investigate at IBM.