Are LinkedIn's new features the most effective B2B ad product on the market?

This week has seen the launch of two powerful new B2B advertising products from LinkedIn. Both have the potential to help B2B advertisers get far more benefit from the business-focused social network.

LinkedIn Matched Audiences

Matching audiences to email addresses is one way to re-target people who you know are interested in your product (because they've given you their address). Facebook, Twitter and Google already have options to re-target audiences based on email address. The idea is you upload the list of your customer's email addresses, and then the ad network matches these addresses to the people on its database, so you can serve ads to those exact people. This is a great tactic for B2B because the long, complex selling process for big ticket purchases often involves signing up to research and white papers and then comparing several different providers. Advertising to…

Facebook is at the forefront of marketing technology innovation

Mark Zuckerberg was on stage yesterday at this year's Facebook for developers conference, showing off some nifty new software and coming out with some rather clever ideas for augmented reality products. Here we ask which innovations do marketers need to be aware of and plan for? Perhaps most important of all isn't the new innovations he announced, but what he re-iterated. He made it clear he is sticking to Facebook's 10-year road map, which was launched last year and again given prominence in this year's conference. The roadmap looks deceptively simple, but it reveals a whole host of different strategies and new technologies that Facebook will be investing in. You can click on the image below to see a higher resolution version. There are a few extremely interesting things worth noting from…

AdWords promises new update will save time, boost CRO and reduce CPA

Google have announced a series of new features for AdWords aimed at making dynamic search ads more effective. Dynamic search ads are the AdWords product which creates ads dynamically based on website content, rather than manually setting up keywords on which to bid. The idea is this allows businesses to not miss opportunities they wouldn't have known to bid on with a manually set up keyword-based campaign. It also means when the website content is updated the search ads automatically update, so there is no risk of having out of date ad copy after site updates. Google has pressed ahead with the announcement despite the hurricane of negative PR whipped up by the revelations regarding ads being placed by YouTube and Google Display Network on unacceptable content, such as terrorist propaganda or far right groups. Because search ads don't appear on sites (only…

Roundup of the 3 big AdWords changes announced in the past week

In the midst of the fallout of last month's exposé in the Times that ads on Google Display Network (GDN) were appearing on terrorist or pornographic websites, Google has been busy making announcements about how they're helping brands and being transparent with their metrics. In a brilliant move to increase the data at users fingertips, or a desperate ploy to detract from the fallout from the revelations about GDN (delete according to your take on the Google ads debacle), Google have just announced two new metrics they'll be providing to AdWords users. They've also introduced a close variants feature which changes how exact match keywords work.

Unique Reach Metric

To show users how many people are really seeing their ad content, they've created the new 'unique reach' metric. This allows you to see the number of unique users and average impressions-per-user across…

A round up of the latest platform updates from the main social networks, AdWords and Wordpress

Last week was a busy one for many of the marketing, advertising and social media platforms, while there wasn't anything earth-shattering, I'm going to give to you a round up of all the changes that gave you, even more, options for you marketing effort in the weeks ahead.

Facebook Ad 'stories' like feature to Messenger, called 'Messenger Day'

Facebook have continued with their approach 'to defeat Snapchat we must become Snapchat', and have launched a new clone of the Snapchat stories feature, this time for Facebook Messenger. It's called 'Messenger Day' and works like 'stories'- the content is live for 24 hours, can be seen by any of your friends on the platform, and automatically deletes after the 24 hour period ends. They've integrated it effectively into the app, without adding much additional friction. It is likely it…

Facebook changes the way its algorithm ranks content, weighting reactions higher than likes

Since Facebook introduced new ways to react to posts, with emotions like 'Love, wow and angry' as opposed to the traditional 'like', we've been interested how they affect the way Facebook's algorithm ranks content. Now Facebook has confirmed that it will be weighting the importance of reactions more than 'likes' when it comes to deciding what posts will be shown to users. Facebook's newsfeed algorithm is extremely important deciding what content gets seen, and generally is far more likely to show a post that is highly engaged with to a large majority of a page's followers compared to one that is failing to drive engagement. This means many brands are trapped in negative cycles, where posts are shown to only a tiny percentage of followers (1% is common), and then they fail to get engagement from that 1%,…

Those using automated bid strategies should expect an increase in campaign spend and bids

We've spoken time and time again about how the shift to mobile is impacting ecommerce purchase behavior. Google has been banging the 'Mobile First' drum for some time now, but we still see the vast majority of conversions taking place on desktop despite the fact mobile now makes up a majority of ecommerce traffic. What is happening is that consumers are browsing on mobile devices, making crucial decisions about their purchase, and then switching to desktop to convert. This makes perfect sense. Mobile browsing is great for getting ideas, but when you find something you want, you need something with a proper keyboard to input fiddly payment details rather than attempting to do it on a small screen. Now that discovering and researching products on mobile and converting on desktop has become an extremely common purchase journey, cross-device journey…

Be alert to the danger of new government Digital Economy bill

Its hard to believe, but digital marketing may be at its most critical point to date. Day-to-day it continues selling services and products, and maintaining purchasing loyalty while many of those involved are unaware of why a government bill could change everything forever.

The act is nearing its final phase of Westminster consideration before Royal Assent is the Digital Economy Bill, and the element of danger in what is wide and far reaching legislation is a section that instructs the Information Commissioners Office to produce new direct marketing guidelines, which incorporates anything to do with consumer data relating to digital marketing.

This in itself may seem fairly innocuous until the background is considered. The ICO will be instructed to produce new recommendations for ministers to consider. But it knows and understands acutely that the…

Google home, Amazon Echo and other virtual personal assistants will transform ecommerce marketing

2016 saw the rise of connected home voice assistants, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, but 2017 is the year they mature. Last week, Google announced that its Google Home product would be able to place orders of essential items for consumers in the US. A user can place orders just by asking Google Home to do it, with the only interface being natural speech. This is the ultimate UX experience. Now it's as easy to get Google to pick up some shopping for you as it is to ask your better half if there is any milk left. Google home will send your order to participating retailers, who can then fulfil it. Google has announced it is partnering with major retailers such as Costco, Whole Foods Market, Walgreens, PetSmart, Bed Bath…

Facebook announced the US launch of a new 'Jobs tab' and will let users apply to jobs via Facebook

At $247 dollars per user, LinkedIn makes almost double what Facebook does from each of its members. Facebook is a much larger player because it has many times the number of users, but Facebook still probably looks enviously at LinkedIn's value per user. A large part of why LinkedIn users are so much more valuable is because LinkedIn is built around applying for jobs. Many industries are having to compete fiercely for talent at the moment with unemployment at or near historic lows in the US and UK. This makes the ability to search for and hire talent highly desirable for companies of all sizes, and Facebook's latest move shows they clearly are wanting to capitalize on this.

Job posting and application directly on Facebook.

As of February 15th businesses pages on Facebook in the…