Digital Digest - Apple’s Earnings, Vine for Kids and the Super Bowl

 

Welcome to another edition of #DigitalDigest where we take a look at the top digital marketing stories from the past week. Today we take a look at Apple’s massive profits, Vine for Kids and of course the Super Bowl’s costly ad space.

Search

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet recently you’ll have at least heard that the Superbowl is on, with many sites and content creators rushing to capitalise on the search traffic around last weekend (see our offerings, Jersey Blitz and Big Game Quarterbacks).

Usually Google can be trusted to bring a content-packed search page on such an occasion, but it’s Bing who’ve made their mark this weekend with a search page with more content than you’d ever dream of (if that’s your thing anyway). Again, this is another move to highlight the fact that Bing, Google and their ilk aren’t just search engines, they’re media companies – this will only get larger into the future.

Reports that Apple made the biggest quarterly profit of a public company (ever!), beating ExxonMobil, showing that consumer electrics is BIG business when done right. It now seems that the internet at large is coming to grips with the extent of this profit made here. Following Google’s own reported 2014 earnings, many seemed to relish the fact that Apple generated more in one quarter than Google did in all of 2014! Google’s own $66 billion in sales is not to be sniffed at, but it looks rather paltry when compared to $74.6 billion in a quarter of the time.

Taking a minor trip down memory lane, in a Digital Digest two weeks ago I reported that Google released a new piece of interactive content in conjunction with the New York Times, using their awesome maps visualisation. For some time now if you wanted to produce these visualisations you’ve been limited to Google’s free feature set in map – whilst not to look a gift horse in the mouth, you couldn’t do a great deal there. Now Google has unveiled that Earth Pro is now completely free, rather than $399 a year as it was previously priced.

For the technical SEOs among you we see a lesser Google update this week, which highlights to users when Google has been blocked to certain parts of the site. For a while this was common practice to prevent duplication issues when you’re optimising for non-responsive design, Google have made it clear that they want to see more and more of your site – even stipulating this will be a negative ranking factor in some cases. The moral of the story, be careful what you block from Google, it may lead to much damage later!

Social

Video is winning at the moment, it is the social media darling, everyone is all about the moving image whether it’s a GIF or feature-length film. If the noughties were the years of micro-blogging, this decade is micro-video, and nothing could typify that more than Vine. Since their launch in 2012, Vine has grown in popularity with Kids in particular, but wasn’t the most ‘safe’ offering, content-wise. Out of a recent ‘hack week’, two of the development team devised a platform that you’d be happy letting your two year old on. Easier to use and ‘child friendly’ the new Vine Kids app is available on iOS now.

Whilst we’re on the subject of video, Twitter have also made more significant moves to push their offering towards video (having gotten a taste for it with Vine surely!) with the recent announcement of video sharing functionality, which lets you film and publish clips up to 30 seconds long. Off the back of this was also the news that Twitter are also allowing direct messaging to up to 20 people at once. These enhanced features mark a strong departure from the previously limited functionality of the platform and seen as a move to boost the amount of time people spend on Twitter – going head on with services like WhatsApp and even Snapchat.

Paid Search

Within the world of paid search, Product Listing Ads (PLAs – or Google shopping) has been growing in significance, especially to those looking to maximise exposure to their products online. On the High Poisition blog last week Mike Scanlon guided you through the process of becoming a “Google Certified Shop” and acquiring another all-important badge of trust. For those who don’t know “Google Certified Shop is Google’s way of helping customers identify websites that offer great customer service” – something that WILL help your online performance.

 

Advertising

There isn’t a blog within the digital marketing industry which isn’t going to be talking about the Super Bowl this morning, and the issue of the almost mythic half time ads and their cost is never far from headlines. Digiday last week covered this debate with a slightly different slant, instead suggesting where your digital marketing budget could be better spent.  Whether you’re looking for a week of Snapchat advertising, 3.5 billion display ads, or 50 million facebook video views, the $4.5m price tag leaves you with a lot of different options!

Think we’ve missed something here or have some news for next week’s Digest? Tweet@highpositionseo with the hashtag #DigitalDigest or let us know in the comments below!

 

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