Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Dive Brief:

•  Kitewheel took stock of more than one billion brand and customer interactions on its platform, which revealed that marketers are in fact taking advantage of omnichannel campaigns.
• Social media led the way in interactions at 48%, while mobile apps were the fastest growing channel for interactions, and email (23%) is up 270% year-over-year.
• Even though social media accounted for the most interactions, the research also found that 70% of marketers are still using the channel for broadcast messaging rather than more tailored and targeted campaigns....

Google is widely expected to soon rollout a major update to its ranking algorithm that will impact results for searches carried out on mobile devices.

This guide will take you step by step, through all of the actions necessary to become fully compliant with all of Google’s Mobile SEO and Mobile Usability requirements.

According to Stat Counter, in December 2014, mobile searches accounted for 32% of all searches made globally.

This update is therefore likely to have a major impact on most websites and on the search engine landscape....

Philipp Schindler was Google's ad chief for years, but few would know it. Having hailed from Germany, Schindler spent a good portion of his 11 years at Google running its European business before quietly ascending to global chief business officer 13 months ago. Now, for the first time in this role, he sat down with Adweek as he prepares to take the stage on Monday to address the industry at Advertising Week.

Schindler predicts his three favorite "revolutions"—mobile, video and programmatic—will be so common that by 2020 "we will actually look back and laugh that we called them revolutions."
Per Google, two-thirds of smartphone users say they turn to their devices to learn about a product or service after seeing a television commercial.

With that in mind, the 45-year-old exec and his team will unveil to the Advertising Week audience a platform that allows brands to see how YouTube ads compare to TV spots for smartphone searches. Google data will show how its YouTube videos outperform linear TV by two times. "We're the prime time for the mobile world," Schindler proclaimed....

Following years of speculation about the demise of desktop-based search, Google is officially announcing today that for the first time, more searches come from smartphones and tablets than from laptops and desktops.

Smartphones account for more than half of searches in 10 countries—including the U.S. and Japan—according to Google, which didn't release exact percentages or a full list of countries. But it is playing up mobile at its annual AdWords Performance Summit, being live-streamed this afternoon.

"The purchase funnel is officially dead," proclaimed Jerry Dischler, vp of product management at Google. "What we're seeing are these short bursts of activity that we're calling micro-moments. We see the new challenge for marketers is to be there at those moments anytime, anywhere....

Mobile coupons are on the rise, which should come as no surprise.

This is hardly to say paper coupons are dying, though the economics would imply they should be.

A mailed coupon costs a brand or retailer 25 cents, a printed newspaper coupon costs about 5 cents and a coupon that a consumer prints at home costs a retailer pretty much nothing, based on a recent study by Juniper Research.

Only about one percent of paper coupons are redeemed, fueling the natural migration to digital.

But a coupon delivered to a mobile phone can be much more relevant than one to a PC, causing a major move to mobile coupons....