Tag: google

Google Offers Better Targeting Options With “Customer Match”

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Announced during this week’s Ad Week event, Google now lets advertisers upload email lists to target customers and similar audiences with ads on Google search, Gmail, and YouTube. Dubbed Customer Match, this new program allows brands to match gmail addresses – be it from a newsletter subscription, membership sign-ups, or other means of email acquisition  – against Google’s own database of signed-in users and create a new audience list from the matches to target their ads with across Google’s services that support AdWords.

What Brands Need To Do
Customer Match marks the first time Google has allowed advertisers to target ads against customer-owned data in Adwords, which most advertisers and brands should take advantage of for more granular, accurate ad targeting. Facebook has offered similar features since 2012. If you’ve had good experiences on Facebook, you can now target those customers in more ways. With the increasing popularity of ad-blockers, which not only block out display ads but also tracking codes, cookies are no longer a reliable way to target. Email addresses and user sign-ins, on the other hand, are more stable across devices, and leveraging the customer emails that most brands are already collecting to utilize Customer Match would be a smart thing for brands to do.

 

Source: Re/code

 

Twitter And Google Team Up To Accelerate Mobile Web

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In response to Facebook’s “Instant Articles” initiative to natively host publishers’ content for quicker access, Google and Twitter are teaming up to accelerate the speed of mobile web. The joint effort, reportedly to be launched with a small group of publishers this fall, differs from Facebook’s Instant Articles or Apple’s upcoming News app, as it won’t host publishers’ content, but instead to show readers cached Web pages from publishers’ sites.

What Brands Should Do
With Facebook’s dominance of the mobile ad market, it makes perfect sense for Google and Twitter – its two biggest rivals – to work together. Google’s cached Web pages will reportedly display the original ads the publisher sold along with the content, which in a way, would make these ad units more appealing to advertisers and brands. For brands that are skeptical of giving up total control over content to the likes of Facebook’s and Apple’s platforms, this new initiative between Twitter and Google would likely be worth looking into.

 

Source: Re/code

Google Officially Started Rolling Out Android Pay

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google has officially started rolling out its Apple Pay-competitor Android Pay at over one million locations across the US. First announced in May, Android Pay supports NFC-enabled contactless payment, in addition to storing reward cards and gift cards. Just like Apple Pay, it will be integrated as a payment option in some Android apps, including Chipotle, Etsy, and Groupon. Google has also updated its Wallet app to focus on peer-to-peer payment transfers.

What Brands Should Do
Given Android’s over 1 billion active users worldwide, this may be just what Google needs to catch up with Apple in mobile payments. With more and more consumers starting to incorporate their mobile devices into their shopping experience, brands seeking stay ahead of the digital curve need to start developing a digital payment strategy and incorporating existing reward and loyalty programs into point of sale systems.

 

Source: Re/code

Google Debuts App For User-Generated Panoramic Street Views

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google has relaunched its old “Photo Sphere Camera” app as a new “Street View” app to further tap into user-generated 360-degree imagery to improve the overall Google Maps experience. The new app will allow users to create panoramic “photo spheres” and share them to Google Map as well as browsing through photo spheres shared by others.

What Brands Should Do
As Google continues to improves its Maps with more brand-friendly, hyperlocal features, brands would be smart to get on board so as to reach the consumers searching on mobile for local inquiries. One way that brands can use this new app, for instance, would be to create virtual tours of their storefronts to appeal to potential customers searching for store locations with an immersive experience.

 

Source: TechCrunch
Header image taken from Google Street View in App Store

Why Google Is Against Interstitial App Install Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Back in April, Google started prioritizing mobile-friendly websites in its mobile search results with a tweaked algorithm, which means sites without a mobile version got demoted in search ranking. Now, Google is gunning for sites with disruptive app-install interstitial ads, announcing its plan to start demoting those site in mobile search results starting November 1. It’s a curious choice on Google’s part to target only the app-install ads, presumably due to the fact that Google would prefer users to stay within mobile web, where it gets most of its ad revenue from and has more control over, instead of dispatching into various apps.

What Brands Should Do
Regardless of Google’s agenda, the fact stands that disruptive full-page pop-up or interstitial ads are annoying and detrimental to the user experience, especially so on the limited screen space of mobile devices. Therefore, brands need to make sure the app-install ads they serve are up to Google’s standard, so as not to be penalized in mobile search results. In the long run however, as mobile web continues to decline and users spending more and more time in apps, brands and digital publishers may need to consider alternative content distribution channels, such as Facebook’s Instant Articles or Snapchat Discover,  or even developing their own apps in order to reach and engage with consumers on mobile.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Google Suggests A Compromise To Handle App Transport Security in iOS 9

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In order to bypass an issue posed by a new privacy feature called App Transport Security (ATS) in iOS 9, Google has published a blog post suggesting iOS developers using its Google Mobile Ads SDK to add an exception in their coding to “allow HTTP requests to succeed and non-secure content to load successfully.” Essentially, Google is encouraging app owners to choose ad delivery over encryption.

What Brands Should Do
In light of this new information, brands that serve ads in their apps need to be mindful of the user data that may be sent unencrypted to ad exchanges, which neither Google nor Apple has control over. While the foregone revenue may hurt in the short run, reputational risk may be more important in the current environment.

 

Source: Google Ads Developer Blog

Brand Tweets To Appear In Desktop Google Search Results, Too

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Three months after incorporating tweets on search results for US users on mobile devices, Google has finally incorporated tweets into its search results on the desktop as well. Tweets from certified and active brand accounts are now showing up in a “carousel unit” fairly high on the first page of relevant search results, but reportedly there’s no advertising component to this new feature yet. Nevertheless, Twitter is best at real-time content, and Google stands to improve its search results by adding some borrowed timeliness to keep its results fresh.

What Brands Can Do
This move will no doubt further help expand the reach of branded tweets, and if your brand hasn’t been active on social media channels, now isthe time to get the self-serve PR machine started. With the recent rise of social commerce, complete with “buy buttons,” such incorporation also shows potential for extending such ecommerce opportunities into new digital contexts, something that all retail brands should explore.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Google Brings Interactive Watch Faces To Android Wear

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier this week, Google opened up Android Wear to allow developers to build more powerful interactive watch faces, which now allow users to launch apps directly or pull up more information. For example, Google worked with Under Armour to build a branded, interactive watch face that centers around fitness and activity tracking, powered by Under Armour’s Android app.

What Brands Can Do
As wearables, especially smartwatches, continue to gain momentum, brands that wish to stay ahead of the adoption curve would be wise to start experimenting with this nascent media platform now, and interactive watch face could potentially offer great brand presence as well as high engagement with smartwatch users.

It is also worth noting that Apple Watch currently does not support customizable interactive watch faces, but Watch OS2, set for release next month, will allow customizable “complications” on watch faces, which offer similar functionality for brands.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Header image courtesy of Google Play

Social Overtakes Search As Main Traffic Source For News

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
A recent report from web traffic analytics firm Parse.ly says its data shows Facebook now accounts for more of the traffic to news sites than Google. Traditionally, organic search dominated as the top traffic referrer online, but social media has been quickly catching up in recent years and has now seemingly overtaken search as the leading traffic referrer source for good. As of July 2015. social media, of which Facebook is the largest, accounted for 43% of the traffic to news sites tracked by Parse.ly, whereas Google Search only accounted for just 38%.

What Brands Can Do
As consumers increasingly switch from desktop access to mobile devices, time spent in apps is starting to eclipse time spent on the mobile web, which could explain why more people are getting their news and content from social media instead of web search. This means brands need to make a conscious effort in translating their web content onto social media platforms, if they wish to keep up with the changing user behaviors.

One bonus effect of this shift is that content that does well on social media can get exponentially more attention than something that does well in search. Studies have shown that consumers are more likely to buy a product if it is recommended by someone they know.

 

Source: Fortune

Google Takes On Amazon Echo With Smart Router OnHub

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, Google unveiled OnHub, a $200 Wi-Fi router that doubles as a smart home hub, Besides the standard wireless transmission protocols, OnHub also supports several smart home protocols, including Weave, Thread, as well as IEEE 802.15.4, the basis for Zigbee.

What Brands Should Do
While OnHub may seem like just a fancy router at first, it is without a doubt Google’s answer to the new wave of “communication hub” devices such as Amazon Echo and, reportedly, Apple TV. As more and more devices and appliances become connected, the need for a central control hub grow accordingly, which may provide brands with a new touch point to reach their audience and facilitate convenient interactions powered by voice command. Look for Google to go beyond the IoT protocols to make it easy to integrate your smart home devices and services soon.

 

Source: Ars Technica

Image courtesy of Google.com/hub