If you are using Facebook’s Ads Manager, campaign budget optimization (CBO) will become mandatory for all ad campaigns as of September 1, 2019. 

If you are using an API tool like AdRules, you have until September 2020 before it is mandatory.

If you do any advertising on Facebook, you will be affected by this change. It will apply to both new and existing ad campaigns.

If you don’t want a rude awakening on September 1 when CBO activates in Ads Manager and your Facebook campaigns start to behave very differently, you need to start testing campaign budget optimization now.

While nobody likes mandatory, sudden changes, this is not all doom and gloom. There are some considerable upsides to CBO. You will have to give up some control over your campaigns after September first, but with CBO:

1. You’ll have less to manage

If you spend hours adjusting bids every week, or if you pay someone else to adjust bids every week, much of that bid optimization work will be over.

When campaign budget optimization is activated in Ads Manager, Facebook automatically shifts the ad budget to whichever ad set in a campaign is most effective. You get to control the definition of what “effective” means by specifying a goal for each campaign. Goals that are fairly late in your sales funnel, like a purchase or a download, tend to work best with CBO.

Because all that bid management work will be done by the Facebook algorithm, you may be able to hire less expensive people to manage your campaigns or have your team members work on more networks or accounts. Or, if you’ve been doing those bid edits yourself, you may find you suddenly have extra hours free every week. We recommend using those free hours to develop better creative, to study your competitors’ creative, or to set up a more efficient creative testing machine.

2. You’ll get a better return on ad spend (ROAS)

While there were some early reports of CBO not working as well as human-managed campaigns, the algorithm has gotten considerably smarter than when it first launched.

We’ve found that if a campaign is set up properly and the bids are high enough, CBO generally can get better results than a human can get.

CBO will also reduce how often your campaigns are put into “learning mode”. That means you won’t get penalized when Facebook’s algorithm reassesses your campaigns.

But you do need to give campaign budget optimization time to work. The algorithm needs about 50 conversions per ad set, per week, before it accrues enough data to ramp up your campaigns. And speaking of ramping up campaigns if you want to scale your campaigns, CBO is extremely effective. Especially if you keep feeding it new, high-quality audiences.

3. You will still be able to control spending (to an extent) with ad set spending limits

If you set a minimum spend for an ad set, Facebook will dutifully spend at least that amount. And if you set a maximum ad set spending limit, Facebook will not go over that limit.

This is a way to set a “governor” of sorts on your spending. It will force Facebook to run ad sets perhaps longer than it might otherwise have, but if you’re not quite ready to relinquish control, ad set spending limits are a way to ease into this new campaign management approach.

Those of you who also advertise with Google’s App Campaigns may have an edge already. Facebook is in some ways following Google’s lead by requiring advertisers to shift over to automated budget optimization.

You could, potentially, get around CBO by creating dozens or even hundreds of campaigns, each with on single ad set. But that would be working against the algorithm. And besides, CBO works well. There aren’t many good reasons to try to circumvent it. Especially when you use it along with other Facebook best practices and Facebook’s simplified campaign structure recommendation.

Start testing campaign budget optimization now

The benefits of CBO are proven, but you need to start testing now to see how to make it work well for your accounts. We still have a couple of months until the change in Ads Manager, but you may need to run multiple week-long tests to get the hang of this new budgeting strategy.

You may also need to shift how you’ve been defining goals. Using CBO for clicks is a waste of potential. Instead, look towards the end of the buyers’ journey. We like to optimize not just for app installs, but for specific app events like purchases. And not for just two-dollar purchases, we target people who are likely to spend $20 or more.

As you begin to test and measure CBO, don’t get too attached to the results of individual ad sets. Look at the campaign level, as this graphic illustrates:

Also, get ready to bump up your creatives. For CBO to work, it often needs several creative assets for each ad set. Including a few videos and elements for dynamic creatives helps too.

Pay close attention to your audiences, too. Many advertisers have found that CBO works best for them if they create separate campaigns for different audiences like one campaign for cold audiences and another campaign for a “warm” audience, like a retargeting audience.

Get ready for things like “The Breakdown Effect” to make your reporting look a little strange at first. “The Breakdown Effect” occurs when discount pacing (how frequently your ads show) intersects with discount bidding and makes it look like the system is overcharging you for conversions. What’s actually happening is the system is trying to find the most affordable conversions first, then it tries to find more expensive conversions.

If you do a lot of testing, this breakdown effect pattern may be familiar. It’s similar to how one cell of a test can look like a winner at first but as the data accrue, that early winner falls away and another cell is shown to perform better in the long-term.

Closing thoughts

Facebook is evolving. Everyone knows this, but the CBO change in September for Ads Manager is yet one more example of it happening again. And because Facebook’s advertising platform is evolving, advertisers have to evolve with it, too. If you’re still doing Facebook advertising like you were a year ago, you’re losing money and missing out on better ROAS.

Brian Bowman is the CEO of ConsumerAcquisition.com.

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It’s widely accepted by marketers that consumers want increasingly personalized digital experiences. And while there’s considerable survey data that appears to support that general proposition, the truth is more situational and nuanced.

Resisting personalization. A new survey of 1,100 U.S. adults in March, conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) appears to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom about personalization. It found that “telling people that sharing their data will allow for a more personalized experience does not result in a greater willingness to share data.”

Overall, the survey found that consumers were using their PCs less and mobile apps more for daily and routine tasks, such as email, social media, music, content discovery and e-commerce.

But the findings about personalization are the most interesting and significant. In most instances, people seemed less willing to share information in exchange “for a personalized experience.”

Personalization offer didn’t impact openness to data sharing

Compared with 2018, people demonstrated somewhat more resistance to sharing personal data. According to ARF, “The biggest changes in respondents’ willingness to share their data from 2018 to 2019 were seen in their home address (-10 percentage points), spouse’s first and last name (-8 percentage points), personal email address (-7 percentage points), and first and last names (-6 percentage points).”

Better understanding of terms, declining trust. As evidence that audiences are becoming more sophisticated, the survey found somewhat greater understanding of terms that might appear in a hypothetical privacy policy. Overall, respondents found marketing terms such as “first party data” or “third party data” less confusing than in 2018. This slightly improved comprehension of terminology was true across groups, with Hispanics demonstrating the “clearest understanding.”

The survey also explored consumer trust in various media and institutions. Consistent with other surveys, ARF found declining levels of trust generally, though not radically so.

Americans’ trust in media and institutions

Putting aside Congress, social media and advertising are the least trusted among the various choices presented. For regular social media users, there is only a 1 point decline from 2018. However, occasional social media users’ trust was down 3 points, which is the same for general advertising.

The survey found the highest trust in “people like me.” Where might people encounter others like themselves online — social media or reviews.

Why should we care. Any single survey shouldn’t change our worldview. And this one asked relatively general questions about trust and personalization. Highly specific personal data scenarios could and likely would yield different answers.

It’s fairly clear that a kind of privacy-personalization paradox exists. So generalizations must always be qualified. People are increasingly sensitive to privacy issues but will share information when there are clear, defined benefits. Consumers also want retailers, platforms and brands to ask permission for use of their data. And, for some people, “personalization” may now be a dirty word, implying “tracking” or “surveillance.”

With the impeding implementation of CCPA and other data privacy bills making their way through state legislatures, we’re rapidly moving toward an opt-in data framework where marketers will need to ask permission to use personal data — and convincingly sell consumers on the benefits.

If you have any experience with social media monitoring platforms, you know that getting precise results may be tricky at times: Apps can show a lot of noise for brands with common names or, quite the contrary, miss some valuable data behind due to the restrictive filters.

That’s when Boolean search fits in perfectly.

Boolean search definition

In a broad sense, a Boolean search is a type of search that combines terms with operators. It’s used in social listening tools, search engines, and other apps. It lets you find precisely what you’re searching for, and exclude what you’re not. I have to mention that not all social listening tools provide Boolean capabilities, but some platforms such as Awario, SproutSocial, or Google Alerts do let you test it before starting your subscription.

Dealing with those Boolean queries may look intimidating at first if you aren’t familiar with programming. But the good news is that first of all, not everyone needs Boolean: If you’re monitoring unique keywords, you’ll be alright with a regular search mode. And secondly, mastering the basics of creating Boolean queries doesn’t require any technical background at all.

Boolean terms explained

Before creating your first query, you should get comfortable with major Boolean operators, such as “AND”, “OR”, “AND NOT” (which is sometimes used as “NOT” or just “-”).

AND

This one narrows your search to find results of both keywords or groups of keywords within one post, so the query like “Prince William” AND “Duchess Kate” will show us results where both names are mentioned:

OR

OR broadens the search to find results where any term is mentioned. This can be good for misspellings, typos, and alternatives of the same term. For example “Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge” OR “Duchess Kate” will show mentions with any version of her name:

AND NOT

AND NOT lets you exclude terms you don’t want to appear in your search results. If you don’t want to get mentions about Prince William’s 37th birthday, (“Prince William” AND NOT birthday) will help you get relevant mentions:

The list of Boolean operators and their logic varies on different tools: some of them, such as Google Alerts, has a pretty basic set (which is enough in most cases though) which includes “OR”, “-”, “site”, quotation marks, and an asterisk. Others, like Brandwatch, offer advanced operators, such as “NEAR/n”, “raw”, “country”, and more.

Where and how to use Boolean?

Boolean search is applicable in multiple scenarios, but I’d love to focus more on the cases where this mode is indispensable. So below you can find the cases when a few lines of code can save you tons of time on cutting through the noise.

Save time on inputting all brand name alternatives

This is a time-saving tactic that lets you create a query using just a few lines of code instead of entering all possible brand name alternatives. Works best for three-word names or more.

Let’s say there’s a brand that’s called C.S. Johnson & Sons. This brand name can be spelled in a number of ways:

But if you have access to Boolean search, you can create the following query:

Gain control over acronyms or brands with common names

As in the previous case, you can apply the power of grouping words for searching brands with common or ambiguous names. And there are two ways of treating those cases.

First of all, you can exclude irrelevant results by adding a group of negative keywords, which are terms you don’t want to be used in your results:

Secondly, you can add some terms to be used with the brand name to ensure you find results that matter to your business.

On the screenshot above, at the top, you can find a social media handle and a website that will bring relevant results per se. They’re followed by the brand name that can be used in multiple cases, but we narrow it down to the relevant case only.

And finally, sometimes it makes perfect sense to use both “AND” and “AND NOT” operators:

This query shows only relevant results since the whole query is supported by negative terms.

Find linkless pages for link-building purposes

Boolean search lets you easily create queries that contain only mentions of a particular brand or industry and don’t have links to this brand. It works best for news articles and other web pages, so note that you’ll need a tool that monitors those sources as well:

This query will deliver all webpages that mention JIRA on the web and don’t have links to their website. So our job here is to reach out to website owners to turn those pages into backlinks.

Monitor mentions from specific regions

This technique is useful for international companies. You can set up an alert that will deliver relevant mentions to a person in charge of the company unit from a particular geographical area.

You can use the country operator to limit the search to a specific location that’s provided by social networks. And in addition to that, you can create another group of keywords that will provide search results for your keywords with location names. This way, the tool will cover mentions where people use the names of relevant locations in the text of a post.

The example above searches for mentions posted in the US as well as all the mentions where location keywords are used within a post.

Uncover dissatisfied customers

This one is great for crisis managers in a company. Boolean search lets you create queries that search for posts containing problematic terms.

To use this, you’ll need the proximity operator near/n that will let you specify the maximum distance between the name of a company and a word or phrase typically used to complain about something online:

Generate new leads

The other case where Boolean search comes in handy is lead generation. To set up a search, you’ll need to come up with a few phrases that people typically use to ask about services online, such as “I’m looking for”, “I need”, “recommend me”, and similar search queries.

By using the near/n proximity operator, you can define the distance of those phrases from your target keywords:

This query will monitor social platforms for all new posts where people search for web designers. All you need to do is interact with those posts internally from the tool (if it has the capability to do so) or externally from a social media platform.

Check texts for plagiarism

And the last one I’d like to tell you about is checking texts for copyright infringement. All you need to do is add a few pieces of content to the alert (don’t forget to quote it to search for the exact match).

The app will search for matches of those pieces on social media platforms and the web and notify you each time someone’s taking advantage of your work without permission.

Final words

Using Boolean for social media monitoring is a great way to cut through countless mentions to find those gems that let you understand your audience better and reach your social media marketing goals.

So when you shop for a social media monitoring tool, make sure it’s equipped with a Boolean search mode.

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Spotify for Podcasters, a discovery and analytics dashboard, has come out of beta, the music streaming service announced Tuesday. The platform allows podcast creators to submit their shows and view listener demographic and engagement data, such as where people start and stop playback as well as average listening time.

Building out a comprehensive platform. Earlier this year, Spotify spent $400 million to acquire podcast companies Gimlet, Anchor and Parcast. The music streaming service also inked deals for exclusive podcast content with high-profile figures such as the Obamas and comedian Amy Schumer. It was only a matter of time before the company announced strategies to monetize its podcast content, and it did so in June by allowing advertisers to target podcast listeners specifically.

Now, Spotify’s analytics dashboard enables podcast creators — and the advertisers that work with them — to access more data, such as age, gender and location of listeners, the types of music they tune into, how long they listen to particular podcast episodes and where they start and stop playback.

One of podcast advertising’s biggest criticisms — solved? “In my experience, while podcast ads can result in direct conversions, more often than not, it’s a top-of-funnel broad awareness thing,” Rebekah Bek, marketing manager at Ahrefs, told Marketing Land in our quick-start guide to podcast advertising. A lack of data, difficulties in tracking conversions and attribution have prevented podcast ads from being more widely adopted.

Some podcast networks, ad agencies and other third parties, such as Nielsen, offer listener data sourced through surveys, but that information is self-reported and not available in real time. Spotify, on the other hand, requires users to sign up for an account and can provide data on demographics and listening habits for potentially all of its users, which may yield more reliable information.

Why we should care. For marketers and advertisers, having access to a podcast audience’s demographic data may enable more precise targeting, which may make for more successful ad campaigns. Knowing an audience’s listening habits, such as average listening time, may also give advertisers a better idea of whether their ads are actually getting listened to or if they should adjust their ad placements to make the most of their budgets.

For podcast creators and brands looking into podcasts as a content marketing initiative, this audience data can offer an idea of who is listening so that they can develop content for that audience. And, because Spotify is available on iOS, Android, as a desktop app, through a browser and built into many smart speakers, there is potential for Spotify to provide even more audience segmentation data or allow advertisers to dynamically insert ads for listeners tuning in at home or on the go.

For the time being, attribution and tracking conversions for podcast ad campaigns still presents significant challenges — more audience demographics and listening data should not drown out those concerns, but they do represent a big step forward for the industry, which is forecasted to exceed $1 billion in domestic revenue in 2021.

Technology has helped businesses in endless ways. But one of the most important benefits it offers to companies is the ability to monitor and measure success, and sequentially, plan for the future.

In the past, reporting on important metrics was a rather tricky and time-consuming task that required lots of work and careful calculations. Thanks to modern business technology and advances like AI and machine learning, it is now easier than ever to gather these data points and gauge progress.

However, this rapid advancement has led to a whole new set of problems. Although technology has made it easier to collect data, it has left us with an overwhelming amount of information, making it quite difficult to pinpoint what exactly is relevant.

Of course, the only way to determine success in any business matter is by first setting goals.

• What is most important to your business?
• Do you only care about the bottom line and increasing conversions?
• What are the components needed to make this happen – such as generating more leads and website traffic or cutting internal costs by boosting productivity?

No matter what your ultimate business goals are, the key to strategizing properly is understanding where you currently stand and how to make improvements. This can only be done with precise metric measurements and reporting.

Here are four tools that can help your company measure these important metrics easily and accurately.

1. Traffic analytics for audience identification

The only way that any marketing/promotional strategy will ever be successful is by connecting with a relevant audience. If you have no idea who you are trying to reach or have an inaccurate description of your target customers, then there is no way your methods will reach their fullest potential.

Your website is one of the best resources for audience identification and segmentation, and it can also help when it comes to determining the strategy ROI for various groups. While Google Analytics can provide general information on your website traffic’s demographics, it is better to use an analytical program that can go even deeper and provide details on your audience’s behaviors and preferences.

Finteza is a great option here because its in-depth traffic analytics software gets down to the nitty-gritty details of audience segmentation. Each link is tracked and the traffic is analyzed and categorized into understandable reports. Marketers can also use this program to track marketing links to see which audience segments are responding best to various content.
Source: Finteza

By understanding these types of behavioral metrics, marketers will have a much more stable foundation to build their strategies upon and base their targeting methods.

2. Site performance for digital monitoring

Tracking and reporting marketing campaign returns is often viewed as a tedious task, as there are many different factors that come into play.

Most marketers dread this process because it can be super time-consuming and meticulous. Furthermore, if the results are not as great as expected, it can be quite a disappointment. 55% of marketing teams agreed that determining campaign ROI was their top challenge.

Tools like Raven can be extremely helpful for measuring the performance of digital campaigns, specifically when it comes to SEO and PPC.

Source: Raven

This platform analyzes your entire website’s collection of links to track their performance and keeps the platform free from errors. It also correlates to how external link building campaigns have improved your own website’s performance in terms of backlinks, domain authority, and other KPIs.

3. Event marketing tracking for instant results

If you think tracking digital marketing metrics is tricky, what about measuring the results of real-life marketing events?

If you host webinars or attend business conferences and meetups, it can be quite difficult to track the exact results of these efforts. However, it is important to know whether these strategies are truly paying off.

You need a tool that is keeping track in real-time to see how well your efforts are going during live events or digital live streams. For example, Splash is designed to be integrated with multiple event tools and provides real-time custom data dashboards to measure ROI, evaluate progress, and assess performance.

Source: Splash

It even offers a check-in app so that you can capture attendee data, update profiles, and sync all of this information as it happens. All of this data is analyzed during and after the event, so leaders can watch the metrics change and grow.

4. Performance management for employee engagement

When you think of the key indicators of business success, you might lean towards metrics that measure external factors – like conversion rates. However, internal metrics can be quite reflective of the success of the company, too.

For example, employee engagement and productivity will have an influence on the business’s growth trajectory. If your team’s levels are slipping, the quality of their work will likely go down. This can quickly slow down sales cycles and affect customer service, and therefore, hurt the bottom line.

Tools like Trakstar can be used to streamline performance reviews and track objective feedback. This can help leaders understand which areas need improvement and support in real-time.

This program is also designed to improve productivity by offering peer-to-peer communication tools. Managers can also use the platform to remind team members of deadlines, set goals and objectives, and even recognize progress to keep engagement and morale high.

Source: Trakstar

Knowing metrics related to employee satisfaction and engagement is extremely important for effective management (and retention).

Conclusion

Thanks to emerging technology and digital tools, gathering the exact data to gauge growth and success is easier than ever before. This information can be extremely powerful and can help you maintain the trajectory for continuous growth.

Manish Dudharejia is the President and Founder of E2M Solutions Inc.

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Perhaps you’ve seen digital out-of-home (OOH) media platform Firefly’s “taxi-top” screens in San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles and wondered, “how can they measure a moving target?” That was my question until I spoke with Firefly Chief Analytics Officer (and former Googler) Taylan Yildiz.

Yildiz says that not only are Firefly’s screens are measurable but that the company’s targeting and attribution are highly precise and reliable. He also talked to me about the dynamic geo-targeting capabilities of the moving digital screen that neither traditional OOH nor digital (but stationary) OOH screens can match.

Helping drivers earn more money

Firefly, which launched at the end of last year and has raised more than $50 million to date (with Google parent, Alphabet, as an investor), aims to put its digital screens on top of every cab, Uber or Lyft in America. (There are more than 2 million Uber and Lyft drivers in the U.S., not accounting for overlap.) The pitch to drivers is that they can make 20% more income, passively, by mounting the screen on top of their vehicles as they drive.

One of the tactics that has greatly aided traditional billboards and other OOH advertising has been the pairing of these fixed placements with mobile-location data to match media exposures with offline consumer behaviors. Location intelligence companies can determine the mobile ad IDs that were exposed to the OOH placement and then whether those devices showed up in a store, for example, a week later.

Better control groups

In other to determine actual visitation lift, there must be both a control and exposed group. Yildiz asserts it’s almost impossible with traditional (or digital) OOH to find an unbiased control group. It’s difficult to find a control group that is close enough to the exposed group, he argues; because you have to find other commuters or pedestrians on another highway or alternative, comparable location to validate that the media exposure was truly responsible for the later consumer action.

We can debate this assertion, but Firefly says its control groups have zero bias and are identical to the exposed groups. They’re drivers or pedestrians present in the same locations immediately before and after the appearance of the vehicle with Firefly screen.

Using the control-exposed methodology, the people (ad IDs) exposed to the 8-second ad on top of the car, which cannot be skipped, can then be tracked to a store during a trailing attribution window. But they can also be tracked to a subsequent website visit or an app-store download or an online, e-commerce transaction. In other words, Firefly advertisers can run a brand awareness campaign and then measure site traffic lift as a result of that campaign.

Customers exposed to Firefly can also be retargeted on other digital media.

Targeting: commute patterns and geozones

I asked Yildiz about audience targeting. How can the company be confident about reaching specific audiences given the dynamic nature of the media? Everyone in the immediate area is going to see the ad.

He said the company uses third party data that offers predictive insights into location-based audiences and commute patterns. In addition, he says, Firefly can predict available impressions. The company says it currently serves roughly 430 million impressions per month in the cities in which it operates. That will grow as it adds new cities and more drivers.

A retailer or brand can advertise within a precise radius of its own locations or stores where its product can be purchased (like geofencing on mobile). Marketers can do conquesting in the same way by advertising around competitor stores. Firefly will turn ads on and off as cars enter or leave designated geozones.

Branding, direct response or both

Firefly is making its inventory available to the programmatic ecosystem but also sells direct to brands and marketers. Yildiz also explains Firefly will ultimately be able to target and measure ads in real-time.

As a final point, I raised to question of whether marketers should regard the platform as a direct response or branding medium? Traditional OOH is generally about branding or awareness. But the dynamic creative, retargeting and measurement capabilities Firefly offers make it potentially very appealing as a performance channel.

Of course, the answer is “both,” according to Yildiz, who says the company has the ability to sell ads on a CPA basis. However, it currently sells on CPM.

Taxi-top ads date from the 1970s. And digital ads on busses, trains and taxis have been around for some time as well. But the combination of digital OOH, programmatic inventory, dynamic geotargeting and precise measurement capabilities are something new.

Location-based ad platform inMarket is buying Thinknear from owner Telenav. Thinknear is a location-based ads and analytics provider that competes with numerous other companies in the segment.

Todd Dipaola, CEO and Founder of inMarket said in an email that the acquisition will provide inMarket clients with “best-in-class managed as well as self-service platforms.” He added, “they’ll gain access to all of Thinknear’s products such as Geotype and Geolink, as well as their location score performance tech. Notably, inMarket clients will gain access to the Thinknear self-service platform. InMarket previously did not offer self-service.

Thinknear a non-core asset. Telenav is a connected car, navigation and fleet management platform. The transfer of Telenav to inMarket received a quick mention in Telenav’s earnings release yesterday and zero discussion on the company’s earnings call, suggesting its ads business was a tiny fraction of revenue. Telenav is thus likely shedding the ads unit to focus on its core, connected cars business.

Telenav said, however, it plans to work with inMarket to offer in-car advertising to consumers through its relationships with car manufacturers. As part of the deal, the value of which was not disclosed, Telenav will gain a minority equity stake in inMarket.

The acquisition follows Foursquare’s purchase of Placed from Snap in May. InMarket told me the deal was not a response to Foursquare-Placed. However, it still suggests more consolidation may be ahead for the segment.

Too many companies that sound the same. Many companies in the location intelligence segment began life selling media but later moved into selling data and analytics exclusively. Telenav and inMarket continue to sell location-targeted media. Early on, inMarket emphasized digital-to-store analytics and in-store marketing but has broadened its offering considerably in the past five years. The company says it only works with first party location data from its SDK integrations.

There are at least 20 companies that make similar-sounding claims about using mobile-location data to target audiences and measure the offline impact of media (digital and traditional), store visitation and sometimes sales. A partial list includes Foursquare/Placed, PlaceIQ, Factual, Ubimo, Cuebiq, Blis, Skyhook, GroundTruth, Verve, Unacast, Reveal Mobile, NinthDecimal, HERE, Spatially, Pitney Bowes, Gravy, X-Mode, UberMedia and others.

Google and Facebook offer similar targeting and analytics capabilities.

A potential data reckoning ahead. The coming of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) next year may put pressure on some of these companies as third party location data becomes potentially less available and mobile operating systems give consumers more control over who can access location and how often. However, the precise impact of CCPA on location data throughout the broader programmatic ecosystem remains to be seen.

There are also wild cards such as New York’s proposed law substantially banning the transfer of location data collected within the city to third parties. Other municipalities may follow and introduce similar legislation.

Therefore, expect companies that have their own “first-party data” (via developer SDKs) to be near-term acquisition targets.

Why we should care. Putting aside the issue of data privacy (a major one), all brands and enterprise marketers should be working with location data for audience segmentation, business intelligence insights and media measurement. Unless you’re a pure e-commerce company this data is the only way to get a clear and complete picture of media efficacy and the buyer’s journey. Location data can also be utilized as the centerpiece of multi-touch attribution.

For questions to ask location intelligence companies before deciding how to proceed see How to choose a location data provider.

The world of content seems to have shifted from classic blog articles into video marketing, evident in the rise of YouTube as the second largest search engine in the world (behind Google). In this article, we’ll go over video marketing tips and some tools to get started.

YouTube started in 2005 with only a few dozen uploads and has since grown into the largest video platform with over 30 million visitors and five billion videos watched every day. On top of that, the emergence of live streaming platforms like Instagram Story, Instagram TV, Facebook Live, Periscope, and Snapchat further prove the case.

A survey conducted by HubSpot in 2017 suggested that consumers prefer videos over any other form of content marketing. As a result of this, more and more brands are shifting their attention to video marketing. In 2019, the number of companies that use video as a marketing tool reached 87%, a significant increase from 63% in 2017, and 81% in 2018.

Source: HubSpot

What makes video marketing effective?

So, what triggers this change? For starters, we’re visual creatures. We naturally understand and connect faster while watching videos rather than reading posts. Our brains remember 95% of the information that we see in a video, while we only remember 10% of the information that we read.

Source: Wyzowl

The second reason is the popularity of smartphones. Over the last decade, people have become inseparable from this electronic device. The thing is, 75% of all video viewers on the internet are on mobile devices. More importantly, 92% of those mobile video watchers are willing to share the video with their friends. That means, if you create the right content for the right audience, your videos have a chance to go viral!

Video marketing tips to increase traffic

1.   Create an engaging thumbnail

A video’s title and thumbnail are the first things the viewers see when browsing on Google, YouTube and other websites across the internet. It represents what your video is about and the content inside it. The more interested the viewers are in your title and thumbnail, the more likely they’ll click the video.

Tips:

• Make sure that the thumbnail is a shot from your own video, don’t try to fool the audience with fake images.
• Use interesting images from later on your video as a teaser to keep the audience watching.
• Having human interaction or close up faces as thumbnails will more likely affect the viewers’ emotions.

2.   Create buzz on social media

When you’re doing a video marketing campaign, your focus should be on video sharing platforms like YouTube, as well as social media like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. On average, people spend almost two hours of their time on those platforms every single day. Sounds like a good goldmine to promote your brand, doesn’t it?

Tips:

• Post high-quality videos regularly and engage with your audience to build your brand presence.
• Optimize the use of tags on YouTube and hashtags on social media, so that your content becomes searchable.
• Reach out to influencers and other more popular brands to promote your content, in exchange for something in return.

3.   Optimize it to be SEO friendly

Social media are platforms to build your brand awareness and presence. The end goal remains to bring the audience to your website, so you can convert them into loyal paying customers. Thus, it’s important that the videos on your website are search engine friendly.

Tips:

• Provide transcription to your video, so it will appear on general Google searches.
• Optimize your video file metadata with related and user intent keywords on the video’s title and description.
• Create a video sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console.

4.   Make sure it’s mobile-friendly

As we mentioned before, most videos are watched on mobile devices. A survey conducted by Facebook found that people are 1.5x more likely to watch videos on a smartphone than on a computer.

Tips:

• Use responsive video players like YouTube, Vimeo, or Brightcove. Those platforms will automatically increase or reduce video quality according to the viewers’ bandwidth.
• Watch out for the text size, because a text that appears big on a TV screen will look small on a smartphone screen.
• Adjust the video playing time according to your purpose. An hour-long behind-the-scenes video is suited for YouTube, while a 60 seconds teaser is best for Instagram.

5.   Create a clear call-to-action

Make sure to include a clear call-to-action in every video that you post. Without a clear CTA, viewers will be confused and not sure of what to do next. If you want more traffic to your site, it’s your duty to make it easier for the audience to find your site.

Tips:

• Use YouTube End Screens (the last 5-20 seconds of a video) to include up to four clickable elements, you can send people to your website, your other videos, channels, or particular landing page.
• When posting on social media, include a CTA and a link that leads to your website or landing pages.

Based on the audience’s demand for more video-based content and the emergence of YouTube as the second largest website in the world, video marketing seems to be the future of content marketing.

If you want to get started with more video marketing, we made a list of 100+ video making and marketing tools, including:

• DIY Animation Tools
• Video Marketing Platforms
• Live Streaming Platforms
• Video Editing Tools
• Interactive Videos
• Sound Effects Library
• Stock Video Library
• Sound Recording Tools
• Scriptwriting Utilities

Nat McNeely is Digital Marketing Manager of Breadnbeyond, an award winning explainer video company. 

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