Here’s our recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web. From Marketing Land: Google is testing variations of black links in search resultsMay 24, 2017 by Sergey Alakov Google frequently makes changes to its search results pages in order to improve the user experience….
As designers, we often use imagery that resonates with our audience. Yet, often we also end up with stock photos and generic icons that come across as mere decoration. Or we bypass imagery altogether. But custom images are a powerful design tool. They can tell a story and convey a distinct personality. Custom illustrations can…
Conventional wisdom within ad tech is that search is boring. In the display ecosystem, life is exciting: in the last decade alone, thousands of niche companies have emerged, nearly as many have folded, and major new technologies have come and gone. In contrast, search seems dull: it’s still the best-performing and highest-spending channel by far,…
Consider the video ads that Pinterest debuted last summer a pilot for the type it’s now premiering. Pinterest is rolling out Promoted Videos that will play automatically without sound and appear in people’s feeds, within search results and within the Related Pins galleries beneath individual pins, the company announced on Wednesday. As with the click-to-play…
Imagine that it’s a hot day. The sun is out, and the temperature is rising. Perhaps, every now and then, there’s a cool breeze. A good song is playing on the radio. At some point, you get up to get a glass of water, but the exact reason why you did that at that particular…
Voice analytics platform VoiceLabs recently launched audio ads, arguing that developers needed to get paid and Amazon wasn’t offering its own monetization. With ads only allowed in three categories — streaming radio, streaming music and news-flash briefings — how would that work? One way may be direct payments from Amazon. The company is currently paying…
Quora, the place to get answers to questions on just about any topic you can dream up from people who know about it, has now opened its self-serve ads platform to advertisers globally. More than 300 advertisers from a range of verticals have been using the platform while in beta. Shopify, Hubspot, Thinkific, Udacity and…
In 2008, I worked on Boots.com. They wanted a single-page checkout with the trendiest of techniques from that era, including accordions, AJAX and client-side validation. Each step (delivery address, delivery options and credit-card details) had an accordion panel. Each panel was submitted via AJAX. Upon successful submission, the panel collapsed and the next one opened,…
Ad copy is a very important element in online advertising, but it’s often “set and forget” — once written, advertisers move on to newer and/or sexier strategies and tactics. Ad copy is often one of the first areas I focus on to boost advertising efficiency. And, if I focus on iterating ads, I can often…
Of the growing set of new themes in the exceptional content at this year’s MarTech San Francisco conference, one stood out in particular: conversational interfaces. Conversational interfaces, or virtual assistants, are growing in popularity and use by marketers. Nick Pandolfi of Google’s Product Partnerships team closed out the Experience Track at MarTech SF 2017 with…
