Welcome to ‘What Happened in Search’.
Packed full of the week’s search marketing news each Friday, this week we launch Battleground, as well as discussing Facebook’s retargeting success, Silverpop’s email marketing study and iOS 9 adblocking.
BATTLEGROUND
What Happened in Search has a brand new feature: Each week addmustard’s SEO team will use searchmetrics to analyse which sites came out on top, and which didn’t fare so well, in last week’s natural search.
Written by our SEO Analyst, Tom Wilson, here’s the first of What Happened in Search’s Battleground.
Winner: gumtree.com | Loser: gumtree.co.uk
This movement has occurred due to an apparent cannibalisation between the .co.uk and .com sites that happened at the beginning of the month. Despite the .co.uk site 301 redirecting to .com, Google saw the sites as competitors and so as one dropped places, the other took them.
Loser: biography.com
Biography was initially reported as one of the major losers of Google’s 2014 Panda 4.0 update. The site has seen a steady reduction in overall visibility since then but this new, more severe drop could represent a failure to act on last year’s penalty.
Winner: putlocker.ms
With a continuing theme of controversy, illegal movie streaming site putlocker.ms saw a huge drop in rankings at the end of August. This recent win is a result of those dropped rankings returning to position.
Loser: thewatchseries.co
The indexing of illegal streaming sites is always a controversial subject and after first gaining visibilty in May, Google received an official complaint under the ‘US Digital Millenium Copyright Act’, since when watchseries has rapidly lost rankings.
Winner: hulu.com
With the coming of iOS 9, one of the major players optimising their services in order to incorporate the many new features was streaming service Hulu, whose update with iOS 9 will allow users to watch their favourite shows while carrying out other tasks on their device. This of course generated news stories which resulted in a boost in visibility. Good PR, Hulu.
BULLSEYE
According to a study from retargeting platform AdRoll, Facebook retargeting spend has increased 31% YoY.
Last year, cross-device retargeting was unleashed on Facebook when advertisers were enabled to use mobile retargeting through custom audiences.
Though Facebook does not take responsibility for the lion’s share of Display conversions, adding the platform to existing campaigns was found to result in a CPC drop of 28%, while CPAs were down by 33%.
Not surprising then, that investment in Facebook retargeting is on the rise.
TRAVEL TRIUMPHS
The Lodging, Travel Agencies & Service industry has been found to have the highest email open rate, at 56%.
An email marketing study, conducted by Silverpop, found that Consumer Products and Healthcare & Biotech also fared well, with open rates of over 50%.
In terms of click-through rates, the highest performing industry was Computer Hardware & Telecommunications, while Lodging & Travel came in at second place for this measure.
The study also broke data down by region, showing APAC to be the strongest performer in terms of open rates, and Canada the weakest.
iOS 9 ADBLOCKERS
This week Apple launched iOS 9 to its users globally.
For the first time, these users are able to block advertising, trackers and third-party scripts and adblocking apps have shot to the top of the App Store charts around the world as a result.
Peace, the paid adblocker app set up by former Tumblr CTO, has proved most popular.
One result of this update is that marketers may need to get far more creative with their advertising methods, as adblocking challenges current digital advertising models.
Look out for addmustard’s upcoming adblocking article, where we’ll explore the issue in depth.
TWITTER EXPANDS BUY BUTTONS
Twitter has announced that it is rolling out its ‘buy’ buttons so that all users of payment start up Stripe can sell their wares through the social platform.
Stripe has powered the Twitter buy buttons since they were launched last year, but has released Relay, a product that enables stores to offer “instant purchases in third-party mobile apps”, significantly expanding the offering.