Welcome to ‘What Happened in Search’.
Packed full of the week’s digital search news each Friday, our Easter issue edition features mobile conversions, Google’s EU charges and Twitter promotions.
MOBILE CONVERSIONS SPIKE
Using the same set of email marketers to compare mobile email conversion rates between Q4 2013 and Q4 2014, Yesmail released some eye-opening email-generated revenue growth stats.
According to its recent mobile email benchmark report, not only did mobile email conversion rates jump 70 percent, but mobile revenue accounted for 20 percent of all email-generated revenue.
During the same time period, desktop conversion rates declined four percent. Overall, mobile accounted for nearly 40 percent of all email clicks in Q4 2014, a 10 percent increase over the same quarter in 2013.
NEGOTIATIONS CONTINUE
According to a report from Reuters, Microsoft and Yahoo are extending the deadline to renegotiate the terms of their search partnership by another 30 days.
Yahoo’s current CEO has been a vocal critic of the partnership which can either companies could either be amended or terminated.
GOOGLE FACES EU CHARGES
The Wall Street Journal has reported that EU regulators may impose antitrust charges on Google, based on complaints similar to those levelled against it in the United States.
In the US, the search giant managed to dodge antitrust charges that could have threatened the company’s dominance, despite the FTC’s conclusion that Google harmed “innovation in online search and ad markets”.
TWITTER PROMOTIONS
Twitter has confirmed that it has begun testing to display promoted tweets in users’ profiles, which is now live. A Twitter spokesperson told Recode:
“We’re experimenting with this feature, as we do with all our ad features, in order to create great experiences for our users, advertisers and partners”.
GOODBYE, ALGORITHM UPDATES?
Google’s algorithm updates may largely be a thing of the past. In a post on Search Engine Land, Nate Dame, observes that:
“Since a dramatic peak in 2012, the number of update announcements has been dropping”.
This year, Dame predicts that we’ll see very few.
