It’s officially Autumn and the countdown to Christmas has begun! What are the latest digital marketing news stories to come out of this wet and windy week? Read on to find out.
A Quarter of Marketers Aren’t Tracking Their Spend
A recent study by digital agency Greenlight has found that just 36 per cent of digital marketers have confidence in the fact they’re targeting the right audience with their campaigns. Furthermore, of the surveyed 200 marketers, just 23 per cent were tracking their campaign spend at all.
36 per cent said they didn’t have confidence in their campaign tracking, 18 per cent said they didn’t think they were reaching the right people and 10 per cent admitted they weren’t sure which platform suited their goals best.
“It is clear that many in the industry are still struggling. This is down to some digital marketers not being able to identify their key audience and ensuring they take the next steps to target them through the right channels with the right messaging,”
Andreas Pouros, CEO and Co-founder of Greenlight.
Google Announces New YouTube Advertising Tools
This week Google revealed it will be releasing four new tools for YouTube. These new tools are aimed at capturing users’ attention in a day and age where we have fleeting attention spans and flick through things our mobiles several times a day.
These new tools include custom affinity audiences which will help to deliver more relevant, useful ads, a director mix to help simplify the process or making multiple versions of the same content for different audiences, and a video ad sequencing feature in AdWords Labs. Lastly, there will be a geo-based solution to measuring sales lift.
Twitter Trials New Longer Character Limit
Twitter is now trialling a new, longer 280-character limit on its tweets. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey said this is ‘a small change, but a big move for us’ since the key USP for the social site was originally its strict microblogging principles and that this decision was to address a ‘real problem people have when trying to tweet’.
There is no indication of whether this will be permanently rolled out for all users yet, so watch this space for updates.
Study Reveals 60 Per Cent of People Don’t Recognise Ads
A poll of 2,000 Brits by Ad-Rank Media has found that 60 per cent of people don’t know which search results are adverts and which are organic results. This is despite the fact regulation now requires bought placements to be marked as so.
Ad-Rank Media managing director, Chad Harwood–Jones, said:
“I find this statistic surprising, given the widespread usage of Google and how often they are featured in the press. Google used to highlight paid for results in highlighted boxes however in recent times the results look very much like non-paid for listings, apart from the small text box containing the abbreviation ‘Ad’”
For more news updates, guides and opinion pieces, take a look at a few more of our articles.
