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Pedro Gonçalves

"Google Now" Knows More About You Than Your Family Does - Are You OK With That? - ReadW... - 0 views

  • Google Now aggregates the information Google already collects about you on a daily basis: accessing your email, your calendar, your contacts, your text messages, your location, your shopping habits, your payment history, as well as your choices in music, movies and books. It can even scan your photos and automatically identify them based on their subject, not just the file name
  • Google already knows where you live, for example, and constantly plots out the time it will take to return home. Google even knows your favorite routes to work and can suggest alternatives based on congestion. And it will figure out your favorite sports teams by the number of times you ask about them, without you ever having to explicitly identify them. Google’s recommendation engine, meanwhile, uses the information to suggest new content to purchase.
  • Google Now tries to proactively provide information via “cards,” or vertical tabs, that present information it thinks you might want. For example, if you’ve entered a home location via Google Maps, a card will constantly update with the estimated time to drive home.
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  • At present, Google Now’s cards are actually quite limited, covering only: Local weather - for both your current location and your work location Local traffic information - including to your “next likely destination” Public transit information - when you’re near a transit stop, it tells you what bus or train will come next Your next appointment - and how long it will take you to get there Airline flight information - including delays and how long it will take you to get to the airport Sports results - for your favorite teams in real time Information about nearby places - bars, restaurants and other attractions Translation services and currency conversion rates - when it nows you’re in a foreign country Time at home - when you’re in a different time zone
  • The advantages of the Google ecosystem boil down to one term: convenience. Are the results and help you get from Google Now worth sharing the deeply personal information involved? That’s a personal question for each user of devices with Android 4.1, but it’s important to remember that Google still collects all this information whether or not you use Google Now. It’s just that the new service makes it impossible to ignore just how much the company knows about you.
Pedro Gonçalves

STUDY: YouTube Pummels Facebook In Post-Click Engagement - AllFacebook - 0 views

  • a recent study by Shareaholic found that post-click engagement with Facebook posts trailed far behind the results delivered by YouTube, and also lagged behind Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Shareaholic examined six months’ worth of data from more than 200,000 websites reaching more than 250 million unique monthly visitors
  • YouTube drives the most engaged traffic. These referrals have the lowest average bounce rate (43.19 percent), the highest pages per visit (2.99), and the longest visit duration (227.82 seconds).
  • video watchers are especially receptive to links within video descriptions that complement the audio and visual content they just consumed.
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  • Although Google Plus and LinkedIn drive the fewest social referrals, they bring in some of the best visitors: Google Plus users, on average, find themselves spending north of three minutes diving into things shared by connections in their circles. They also visit 2.45 pages during each visit, and bounce only 50.63 percent of the time. LinkedIn users generally spend 2 minutes and 13 seconds on each link they click, viewing 2.23 pages with each visit and bouncing 51.28 percent of the time. Although many sites see minimal traffic from both Google Plus and LinkedIn, now may be the time to invest in building communities within those networks if engagement really matters to your business.
  • A referral from Twitter is as good as a referral from Facebook — at least, in terms of bounce rate, pages per visit, and time on site
  • Pinterest isn’t exactly the social media golden child we all play it up to be: Coming in sixth, pinners bounce as often as Facebook users and tweeps do, but view fewer pages per visit (1.71), and they spend considerably less time on site (64.67 seconds) than almost all of its counterparts, with the exception of StumbleUpon.
  • StumbleUpon drives the least engaged referrals: Post-click, users view a meager 1.5 pages per visit and spend 54.09 seconds on site. It would appear that StumbleUpon’s click-heavy — to “stumble,” “like,” or “dislike” — focus makes users trigger-happy to a fault. Users stumble onto the next thing rather than immersing themselves in the webpage StumbleUpon recommends.
Pedro Gonçalves

Dropbox vs. Google Drive vs. Amazon vs. Skydrive: Which One Is Fastest? - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • Dropbox ended up being fastest 56% of the time. Even more importantly, it was slowest only 4% of the time.
  • Dropbox and Amazon appear to be the most reliable solutions with only occasional delays. Google isn't far behind, and I can't imagine that Microsoft won't work hard to improve Skydrive - the company's subscription model depends on it.
Pedro Gonçalves

Mobile To Drive 50 Percent Of Google Paid Search Clicks By End Of 2015 [Study] - 0 views

  • In 2013, 19 percent of Google’s ad revenue came from mobile search ads, and it’s expected to rise to 30 percent over the next 3 years, according to eMarketer.
  • the company projects that mobile devices will account for 50 percent of all paid search clicks on Google in the United States by December 2015. Last year in the US, the share of paid search clicks from mobile devices rose from 21.8 percent in January to 34.2 percent in December. Paid search clicks from smartphones almost doubled throughout 2013.
  • In the US, conversion rates on tablets rose above desktop for the first time. Smartphone conversion rate still lags at 4.4% compared to 5.3 percent on desktop and 5.5 percent on tablets.
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  • On average, mobile click-through rates (CTR) are higher than on tablets and desktops.
  • The average CTR on smartphones was 3.75 percent in 2013, compared to 2.70 percent on tablets and 2.29 percent on computers.
  • Across all devices, however, average CTR is fairly stable when looking at ad positions 1 to 5. Click-through rates plummet nearly 50 percent on every device after position 2.
Pedro Gonçalves

Where Did All The Search Traffic Go - 0 views

  • Search traffic to publishers has taken a dive in the last eight months, with traffic from Google dropping more than 30% from August 2012 through March 2013, according to research done by BuzzFeed. While Google makes up the bulk of search traffic to publishers, traffic from all search engines has dropped by 20% in the same period.
  • Of the three major search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — only Yahoo saw growth in this period. While Yahoo grew search traffic in this period, it sent 21M referrals to publishers in March, less than half of the 48M referrals sent by Google. Traffic from Bing dropped 12%.
  • In the past, we've reported how referrals from social platforms like Facebook to the BuzzFeed Network were growing, and at times sending more traffic than search. While that difference was at times marginal — 5 to 10M referrals — its now sustained and significant. In March, Facebook sent 1.5x more traffic than Google, the greatest difference we've ever measured between the platforms. At the same time, we've watched traffic from other social platforms — Twitter and Pinterest -—continue to grow an audience and drive traffic traffic to publishers. "Dark social," that netherland of direct traffic, is also accelerating on the network, growing referral traffic to publishers by 52% over the past twelve months. By comparison, referrals from social platforms, i.e. the Facebooks, Twitters, Pinterests and Reddits of the world, grew by 25%. It begs the question, could direct traffic be taking the place of search?
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  • user behavior is changing, and we are seeing a shift in the way readers discover their content.
  • We know that most of direct/dark social traffic is from mobile and apps. Could it be that social apps that aggregate content like Pulse or Flipboard are growing in importance?
  • When SEO was king, publishers sought to program their content to be discovered by Google. Now that content requires human muscle to be shared on social platforms, publishers need to expend a different kind of energy focused on creating content that's emotional, funny and discoverable — i.e. the stuff you might want to share. And this may be what's killing search traffic too.
Pedro Gonçalves

Content Marketing is More Important than Ever | Experts' Corner | Big Think - 0 views

  • The major takeaways from Google Panda and update (in no particular order) are as follows: Focus on original content – you will get hammered for “stealing” or repurposing on too high a scale (for example, lifting content from Wikipedia) Over-optimization kills – Google can sniff out sites that are designed solely to exploit certain key words (for example, repeating the same keyword, or variations thereof to drive traffic) Link to high quality/authoritative sites – while Panda focused more on a more systematic sweep of SEO, Penguin is focused on the processes around linking. Don’t over-link, and when you do create links, link to high quality sources Excessive Ads are Bad – If it looks like you are running too many ads against your content, you will face the consequences SEO is a “Bad Word” – The rise of the term “content marketing” effectively means that high quality content trumps low quality link bait.
  • Write Guest Blog Posts for Authoritative SitesContent marketing does not just refer to content you write for your own site, but content you write for other sites.
  • content marketing also improves SEO rankings and traffic.  Link building is a common SEO strategy that is always difficult to grow through a paid channel.  The best way to get organic and quality links is by creating interesting content that drives people to link and share your content.  Whether or not it’s directly related to your line of business, driving free traffic is always a victory.
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  • The whole purpose of your own blog is to drive the highest quality, most targeted traffic to your conversion funnel – if you are not doing that, you might as well not have a blog.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Rise And Rise Of Influence | Fast Company - 0 views

  • A new survey by Initiative questioned some 8,000 web users age 16-54 in Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, U.S., and U.K. to find out how they were influenced in purchase decisions by social media interactions. The results are kind of amazing: A huge 99% of the "top 10%" of influencers reported that their friends quiz them before making a big purchase. This top 10% has a disproportionate influence on the opinions of others--because 72% of them access content in print, online and mobile form more than once a day, compared to just 18% of the bottom 10% of influencers. 
  • A different study, by Market Force, underscored the fact that brands are leveraging social media to promote themselves. Embedded in the study were stats on the power of the average user to spread brand-related messages: 81% of U.S. respondents said posts from their friends directly impacted their decision on purchasing something, and 80% or respondents said they'd tried new things based on suggestions of friends.
  • This is a big departure from the static print ads and traditional TV spots of the past. Initiative's study even included advice for brands to move well beyond the thinking of a traditional 30-second ad spot, and push out additional material like behind-the-scenes footage...all to drive discussion and lead to more online chatter that will lead to brand discovery. It also suggests that brands build a team of "relevant social influencers" to spread new ad campaigns and stimulate dialog.
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  • Appinions, a company that analyzes data from five million sources to determine the influence of a brand, topic or person and promises to hook up companies with the most relevant influencers, earlier this month raised an extra $3 million in funding.
  • the "importance" of someone in a social network isn't simply how active or how many other people they're linked to--it's also a question of how well-connected and active each of these others are too.
  • Companies of all stripes are becoming aware of the power of high-value social media influencers, which is why they're signing up to campaigns like Klout's Perks. The idea is that via Klout, high-scoring individuals are "rewarded" with a physical gift or perhaps a discount voucher if they're influential in topics connected to the brand in question.
  • Klout is contentious to say the least, however, and its algorithm (not unlike Google's) is both mysterious and controversial--leading to debates like this extended thread on Google Plus.
Pedro Gonçalves

Study: Personality Plays a Role in Why You Spend Too Much Time on Facebook - 0 views

  • A new study says the need to be entertained may be the biggest driver of activity on the social network
  • The desire to be entertained predicts the amount of time users spend on Facebook, according to an academic study published this month in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. The study also suggests that the reasons for using Facebook change over time: You sign up for interpersonal communications, but you end up staying for the boredom-busting factors.
  • Researchers have long known that five broad categories drive online activity: information seeking, interpersonal communication, self-expression, passing time and entertainment.
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  • The study confirmed that, with the exception of information seeking, all of the other behavioral factors that drive online activity hold true for Facebook, with entertainment and time passing being two of the biggest drivers of Facebook activity.
  • “The entertainment motive was shown to be the most powerful predictor of how much time participants spent on Facebook,” the researchers wrote
  • People, and particularly young adults, use Facebook as a form of self-expression.
Pedro Gonçalves

Twitter Drives New Insights in the Social Sciences - 0 views

  • a landmark 2009 study by Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard and James H. Fowler of the University of California, San Diego. The results suggested that a person’s decision to vote can influence hundreds of people linked through their social network to head to the polls. 
  • While highly regarded by social scientists, that study, as well as similar research by the same researchers concluding that obese people influence their friends to put on weight, faced the homophily question. Do your friends vote because you vote, or do people who have an interest in politics tend to associate with one another?
  • Did your obese friends cause you to become overweight, or did you choose obese friends because they're similar to you?
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    • Pedro Gonçalves
       
      Nervermind the fact that looking only at the universe of twitter users inherently skews the results...
  • In his own study, Macy analyzed words expressing mood in 500 million tweets sent between February 2008 and January 2010. He found that people’s mood, as measured by their tweets, tended to be elevated in the morning and to decline as the day progressed. Weekends tended to be “happier” days, although mood peak started later in the morning, possibly reflecting twitterers' tendency to sleep in. Most remarkable, Macy said in an interview with Science magazine, was that the tweets showed a similar pattern across the 84 countries where the tweets originated, suggesting that the daily mood curve is fundamentally human rather than cultural.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Engagement Project: Connecting with Your Consumer in the Participation Age - Think ... - 0 views

  • the brands that win will prioritize engagement over exposure. They will flip the traditional approach of using mass reach to connect with the subset of people who matter on its head. They will super-serve the most important people for their brand first and use the resulting insights and advocacy to then broaden their reach and make the entire media and marketing plan work harder.
  • This generation has grown up living digital lives. This has fundamentally changed their relationship with media and technology — and with brands. They don’t want to be talked at, but they do want to be invited in to the discussion. They thrive on creation, curation, connection and community. As a result, we call them Gen C. The behaviors of Gen C have less to do with the year they were born and more to do with their attitude and mindset. For example, while 80% of people under 35 are Gen C, only 65% of Gen C is under 35 [1].
  • Gen C cares more about expressing themselves than any generation before.
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  • More than half of Gen C use the internet as their main source of entertainment, and 66% spend the same or more time watching online video as watching television [2].
  • Conversation drives Gen C, especially when it’s aligned with their interests. They are hungry for content that they can share and spread, no matter where it comes from: other people, content providers, brands.
  • The majority -- 85% -- of Gen C relies on peer approval for their buying decisions [2]. The under 35 set will be 40% of the population by 2020. But more importantly, by then, we’ll all likely be Gen C.
  • Gen C has a camera in their pockets, so the stuff they capture and curate looks more common, ordinary, even pointless at times. But the ordinary-ness of it all is what is extraordinary. Pictures of the everyday-ness around them allow them to find new meaning, as if they are seeing things for the first time.
  • They record every detail and then curate that content to reflect their personal values and how they see the world. In fact, 1 in 4 upload a video every week and nearly half upload a photo every week [2]. It’s their way of controlling how they want to be perceived by others
  • Giving them a way to add their own uniqueness to an experience gives them a reason to add it to the collage of their lives.
  • Giving them content that matches their definition of quality has become their expectation, not a nice to have.
  • Well-thought-out, useful and interesting branded content has more opportunity than ever to contribute meaning to people’s everyday lives. But there is also greater risk than ever from messaging that doesn’t feel authentic, relevant, personalized, and participatory.
  • Gen C wants to give us signals of their interest. They are looking to connect directly with brands that create experiences that offer something relevant and valuable, and they expect that we’ll be ready and willing to act on those signals and continuously improve the quality of our interactions with them.
  • Rather than starting by thinking about how to reach or broadcast to as many people as possible to get to those who matter, what if we began with engaging those who matter the most. We could prioritize surfacing the 5% — and make our entire plan better by learning from their interactions and leaning on their advocacy to expand our reach in a smarter way. We wouldn’t be abandoning “reach”; we’d be reorienting our thinking towards greater “engaged reach”?
  • By turning the reach-driven funnel upside down, we’re in effect creating an ‘engagement pyramid’. The engagement pyramid isn’t just about retention and growth of our existing customer base. It’s about starting with the 5% who will be most interested in what we have to say and most willing to speak for us. This group not only includes current customers, but also those most likely to influence others toward your brand.
  • you need to be “always on” because Gen C is “always on”.
  • Prioritize content, beyond commercials
  • Some of today’s most successful brands realize the power of their fans to help generate content that they in turn surface to a broader group.
Pedro Gonçalves

They Work! Facebook Mobile Ads Are Clicked 13X More, Earn 11X More Money Than Its Deskt... - 0 views

  • TBG Digital’s CEO Simon Mansell tells me “this is huge news that show mobile is potentially going to be the big revenue driver that Facebook needs, especially because the usage in there.”
  • According to a new study by TBG Digital on 278,389,453 Sponsored Story ad impressions across 17 clients, mobile news feed Sponsored Stories (the only ads Facebook shows on mobile) have a stunning click-through rate of 1.14% at a $0.86 CPC. That means Facebook earns $9.86 per 1000 impressions (eCPM), and that could actually rise as more advertisers realize the power of mobile Sponsored Stories and compete for impressions there.
  • Compare those numbers to the desktop news feed Sponsored Stories that get a 0.588% CTR at $0.63 CPC and earn Facebook an eCPM of $3.72, and Facebook is getting 1.93x the CTR and earning 2.65x as much on mobile sponsored stories compared to what it makes on the web.
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  • And look at Facebook’s desktop ads as a whole, including both Sponsored Stories and the traditional sidebars ads. They’re getting just 0.083% CTR at a $0.88 CPC earning Facebook an eCPM of only $0.74, so mobile Sponsored Stories have 13.7X the CTR and earn Facebook 11.2x as much as its combined desktop ad offering.
  • Meanwhile, a quick look at a campaign in the tens of thousands of dollars by AdParlor showed that mobile ads have a CTR of 0.821% while traditional Facebook ad campaigns that mostly show up in the web sidebar with some presence in the web and mobile news feed had a CTR of regular ads have a CTR of just 0.032%. That’s a 25x better CTR on mobile. The campaign at gaining new fans for a Facebook page, and while the click-to-fan conversion rate on mobile was slightly worse – 55% on mobile versus 72% across placements – the improved in CTR makes up for it many times over.
  • Another Ads API giant Spruce Media told MediaPost that its tests with Facebook mobile sponsored stories have seen click-through rates from .8% to 1.7%, the same range as TBG Digital and AdParlor.
  • This all doesn’t seem like users are just clicking the relatively new, three month old ad units out of curiosity. It looks like users are actually perceiving them as content, and are clicking through to learn more about the Pages and apps their friends interact with.
  • Attaining such a high click-through rate for mobile Sponsored Stories is game-changing for Facebook, because there’s simply not as much room for it or any service to advertise on mobile. There’s no space for an ads sidebar and if far too many ads are injected into the content feed, users could get angry and stop browsing. But the impressively high CTR and eCPM mean Facebook doesn’t have to show too many Sponsored Stories to make a ton of money off of them.
  • Other social sites like Google+ and Twitter don’t have the scale, social graph, or on-site activity to serve Sponsored Stories that are as effective as Facebook’s. While Twitter and G+’s interest graph can power accurate ad targeting, only Facebook know who your closest friends are thanks to photo tags, wall posts, messages, and more. Its massive time-on-site also produces lots of interactions with brands and local businesses that can be turned into Sponsored Stories ads.
  • Facebook is just getting started. Sources say it’s working on a hyper-local mobile ad targeting product that could serve extremely relevant local business ads to users within a few hundred feet of a brick and mortar store. Thanks to the new Facebook Exchange real-time bidding system, Facebook could drive up CPC or CPM prices by getting advertisers to compete to reach specific mobile users, including ones who’ve been retargeted after visiting sites that indicate purchase intent.
  • High mobile Sponsored Story CTRs indicate at least some users don’t hate the ads, and wouldn’t rebel if they see more.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Social Commerce Attribution Problem: IBM Says Twitter Referred 0% Of Black Friday T... - 0 views

  • Twitter and Facebook usually aren’t the last click before an ecommerce buy, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t inspire or influence the purchase. Yet IBM’s Black Friday report says Twitter delivered 0 percent of referral traffic and Facebook sent just 0.68 percent. To lure advertisers and ecommerce integrations, they have to show its not Google driving every sale.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Folly of Stretch Goals - Daniel Markovitz - Harvard Business Review - 0 views

  • In his classic article, "Small Wins," psychologist Karl Weick argued that people often become overwhelmed and discouraged when faced with massive and complex problems. He advocated recasting larger problems into smaller, tractable challenges that produce visible results, and maintained that the strategy of "small wins" can often generate more action and more complete solutions to major problems because it enables people to make slow, steady progress.
  • Ever wonder why people will so often write down an item they've already completed on their to-do list? It's so that they can have the satisfaction of immediately crossing it off and experiencing the sense of progress.
  • Stretch goals have a dangerous tendency to foster unethical behavior. In the early 1990s, Sears gave a sales quota of $147 per hour to its auto repair staff. Faced with this target, the staff overcharged for work and performed unnecessary repairs. Sears' Chairman at the time, Ed Brennan, acknowledged that the stretch goal gave employees a powerful incentive to deceive customers.
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  • Focusing on small wins in combination with process improvement will drive your organization forward without the negative consequences of stretch goals. However, this approach requires a willingness to abandon the "ready, fire, aim" approach to problem solving. The heavy lifting has to be done at the outset — a deep understanding of the current condition is a prerequisite for true improvement. This approach also requires a subtle — but critical — shift in focus from improving outcome metrics to improving the process by which those outcomes are achieved.
Pedro Gonçalves

This is Your Brain On Boarding: How to Turn Visitors Into Users | Nir and Far - 0 views

  • Since a user’s first awareness of a product depends on an external trigger, such as a call-to-action in an email, a link on a social media site, paid advertising, or a word-of-mouth recommendation, the message must be consistent. “People need to talk about your product the same way, each and every time,” Elman says.
  • To be most effective, the articulation of what the product is for should connect to when the product should be used. In other words, inception is about attaching your product to a moment in the user’s life.
  • The best triggers are those that attach to frequent behaviors. Attaching a new action to a current behavior is much easier than attempting to create a new set of actions from thin air. Habits are like the layers of a pearl. The grain of sand at the center is the pre-existing behavior, which provides the base for new routines to attach to.
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  • Research by Dr. BJ Fogg at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab indicates that reducing the effort involved in completing an action increases the likelihood of that behavior. Simplifying the experience is key.
  • Among the most powerful methods for increasing the probability of a behavior is providing rewards on a variable ratio. In other words, when the behavior produces varying amounts of benefit, the user increases the action. Variable rewards can be found at the core of all sorts of addictive behaviors.
  • Many companies are afraid to ask the user to do work. They follow the mantra that good design should get out of the user’s way, but they often take it too far and forget that asking the user to do some work can be a very good thing. In fact, exerting effort makes people value outcomes more highly
Pedro Gonçalves

Referrals to Facebook Spike 1000% After Twitter Cuts Off LinkedIn [CHART] - 0 views

  • PageLever also says LinkedIn drives more referral traffic to Facebook Pages than Google and Bing combined
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