Instagram is a free photo and video sharing social network, created in 2010 and acquired in 2012 by Facebook. Since its inception, Instagram has been through various – minor or major – transformations, and is now one of the most popular and used social networks. Anyone can sign up for it for free. While it […]
Why Pinterest moved beyond CTR to understand ad engagement Relying on a straight click-through rate metric to understand how ads are resonating has its shortcomings, explained Pinterest engineers in a blog post. Those shortcomings include not accounting for ad position bias, users’ Save or Hide actions and brand awareness objectives. Instead, Pinterest explains, it developed […]
They say, “it’s the little things in life.” In the context of content, little things like microbrowser optimization pay off in huge ways.
But Bing looks at these signals in a holistic manner for ranking purposes.
The Wikipedia-sourced info boxes mean users may not have to leave the platform to look up entities.
The pandemic is helping the company repair its public image.
There are limitless actions you can track to improve data gathering. Here is a step-by-step guide with website actions important to digital marketing measurement.
But no, this doesn't confirm Google is using engagement metrics in rankings.
New, visually rich mobile content format is designed to generate more engagement from users.
Replacing the "hotspots" previously listed atop the image of the day is a graduation cap icon that leads to a three-question quiz.
Aside from technical metrics related to web page authority, what factors should be used to inform your link building efforts? Columnist Andrew Dennis shares his ideas and those of other industry experts.
Does Google use click data for local rankings? A new post by a Googler said so, but it was then quickly edited to remove those details.
When a client loses its featured snippet, columnist Glenn Gabe does some competitive analysis to try to determine why. His findings may shed light on what it takes to get a featured snippet in Google search results.
Etsy has more than 30 million items for sale from more than one million sellers globally. There are no SKUs, and most of the data is unstructured, creating a messy and massive discovery challenge for both Etsy and its users. Accordingly the company is today rolling out more sophisticated search functionality, after a month-long beta test […]
Local search provider YP has been investing in its mobile app, doing brand advertising and generally seeking ways to better compete with rivals such as Google, Foursquare and Yelp. It doesn’t have the reach of Google or the content of Yelp but with its mybook feature the company may have found a way. MyBook was soft-launched […]
A newly released report from Shareaholic claims the top five search engines — Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com and AOL — have all experienced a decline in search traffic since December of 2013. Using data from December 2013 through May 2014, Shareaholic evaluated aggregate organic search traffic numbers from more than 300,000 publishers reaching an audience […]
Google has confirmed that there’s a hidden benefit to having authorship status: If a user returns to the search results after reading an author-tagged search result for a certain period of time, Google will add three additional links to similar articles from the same author below the originally clicked link. Say what? A couple visuals […]
Earlier this week Facebook announced features and functionality that were mainly geared toward pages and ads. One of the newest metrics released is the “people are talking about this” for pages. The goal of this number is to track conversations happening around specific pages. However, we have seen more users becoming confused as to what the […]
I’m sitting in the large hall in the SF Concourse awaiting the F8 keynote from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, now a wealthier man (on paper) than Google co-founders Brin and Page. We expect a series of announcements around music and movies but there will be a ton of stats about Facebook usage and growth. If […]
100 million active users. 1 billion tweets every seven days. Plans to grow the ad business. These stats and facts are part of a “State Of The Twitter” talk Twitter CEO Dick Costolo gave to the press today. Live blogging below! Dick arrives. Nothing big, he says. “I just wanted to give you a state […]
A Bloomberg-YouGov survey of 1,003 online adults found that Google+ is on a trajectory to surpass other social networks, including Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. YouGov projects that Google+ will become the number two network after Facebook, “in the next year.” The survey also suggests that Google+ will likely chip away at Facebook usage and engagement: […]
Fast Company has a fascinating article on Bing’s background images and how they are used to market the Bing service. While Google updates their logos to be fun and creative on special birthdays or occasions, Bing revamps their background with an image that stands out and leaves users asking for more. If you haven’t noticed, […]
Whether on purpose or not, Google and Twitter are having a little back-and-forth this week about the size of their social networks — or, maybe more accurately, about the activity levels on their social networks. Google+ has X amount of users and the +1 button gets served Y times per day. Twitter delivers N tweets […]
Google News announced you can now earn badges for reading news on Google News. The badges are awarded by topic, such as stock market, Apple, Harry Potter, U.S. Politics and so on. The more you read about a specific topic through Google News, the higher the badge reaches. It starts at Bronze and goes to […]
In a bid to increase its presence across the Web, Twitter today announced the “follow button,” a snippet of code that can be placed on any Web site that allows readers logged into Twitter to click and follow instantly. Previously, a Twitter user would have to click-through to the Web site’s Twitter.com page and click […]
When Facebook rolled out its Send button last week, I laughed. I even mocked on Twitter that Facebook wouldn’t be happy until our pages were full of buttons. But the Send button, as well as integrating other aspects of Facebook into websites, does make a lot of sense. In fact, it’s beginning to make so […]
In a bid to continue momentum and broaden utility and engagement Foursquare released a new version of its iPhone app. The new app contains two big new features: photos and comments. (Android and BlackBerry are coming shortly.) Both have been on the white board for some time according to Alex Rainert, head of product for […]
Feeling Foursquare fatigue and perhaps wondering what’s the point of checking in at times? Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley sometimes feels it too — but he’s got plans to keep you interested. More on that as well as turning Foursquare into a “product building machine,” from my interview with him last week. Why Check In? I’ve […]
Yesterday morning Citi analyst Mark Mahaney put out a research note with comScore data that showed Facebook had passed Google in terms of time spent online. Mahaney observed: Looking at % of Total Time Spent by the top 5 sites in August, Facebook, for the first time took the top spot with 41.1B minutes followed […]
Yahoo has shared a sneak preview of a new content module that some users will see below individual stories on Yahoo News. The module shows related Yahoo content — news articles, photos, and videos — and also includes a handful of related search query links. The module is currently only being shown to a “fraction” […]
Earlier this week, Hitwise put out stats suggesting that Facebook is beating Google and Twitter when it comes to driving traffic to news sites. I dug a little deeper, and I beg to differ. Along the way, some pokes at the need to more digging into stats in general. The Hitwise blog post reported that […]
Last year, I wrote an article, Using Infographics in Social Media to Promote Content and Visualize Data; it discussed taking data and visualizing it in an aesthetic manner to attract more votes, bookmarks, and links from the social media sphere. This year, I want to discuss taking it a step further. “Engagement objects“, as defined by […]
Social Media is still a fresh concept for many companies and the resources allocated to these efforts are usually a slim as possible. However, cutting corners to save time could end up hurting you and your accounts down the road. One of the biggest time-saving items that can cause disunity and confusion when speaking to […]
In social news and social bookmarking sites, many users tend to get caught up in how many votes or bookmarks it will take for their submitted content to be promoted to the frontpage or “popular” sections of the site. What is often overlooked by users is the quality and naturalism of those votes that trigger […]
For all its faults, Wikipedia has a lot to teach us about usability. Here are three things that Wikipedia does right that I think websites should emulate to better engage users, boost time on site, and hopefully lead to more conversions. Summary sections Wikipedia offers summaries at the top of its feature-length articles. While I […]
When optimizing a website for search, it is critical to target the right keywords as they play an important role in its overall success. Given that, it’s not surprising that when a page on a website has a subpar performance in search, many marketers jump to change its keywords. But doing so could be a […]
Barely two weeks after its launch, Hunch is already taking stock of its progress. “How well do we think Hunch is working?,” asks co-founder Chris Dixon. “Pretty well, although we still have a ways to go.” Writing on the Hunch blog, Dixon explains that the decision engine is using what it calls “success rate” as […]
Since their infancy, social news sites have been trying to stay one step ahead of social media users trying to artificially promote content to their front page. Digg.com has been the center focus for spamming and gaming in social media because a front-page promoted story equates to thousands of visitors and hundreds, or even thousands […]
There’s already been considerable discussion of the passing of the maps traffic crown from MapQuest to Google Maps. Hitwise, comScore and Compete all show Google Maps as the traffic leader in the category. One could argue with relative confidence that the long-anticipated development is a consequence of two things: Google’s ability to refer traffic to […]
I was casually chatting with a super-savvy Web 2.0 friend – we’ll call him Mac – about a website I work closely with. We’d spent the last year overhauling the strategy and the design of the site, though there are still several features waiting to be built, and the content growth is just at the […]