Welcome to ‘What Happened in Search’.
Packed full of the week’s digital search news each Friday, this week’s edition features Snapchat’s valuation, Facebook’s product ads and YouTube’s growth.
COMPETITIVE BIDS ARRIVE ON BING
Over the past six months, Bing has helped advertisers spend more effectively by adding better competitive tools. Last week, Bing launched Auction Insights globally, and this week it simplified the
functionality with new “Competitive Bid Opportunities”.
Advertisers will now be able to see exactly which keywords have opportunities with a direct comparison to other advertisers. Previous functionality was sweeping and not overly detailed, but the new features will allow for a granular comparison between a company and their competition.
YOUTUBE CLAIMS STRONG GROWTH
YouTube isn’t concerned about being pushed aside, despite its competitors’ aims to capitalise on video’s rising popularity.
In fact, Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s head of content, said the competition is actually helpful to YouTube.
Kyncl said there’s room for many large players in what he believes to be a $200-$400 billion market and said YouTube is thriving, with YOY growth in video views at 50% for the last three years.
FACEBOOK LAUNCHES PRODUCT ADS
Facebook is giving retailers a new way to market to its 1.4 billion users through product ads, which is yet another ad format. Facebook says this sets it apart from rivals such as Google because it can harness consumers’ behavioural and location data.
The company announced the marketing offering this week, calling product ads “a solution designed to help businesses promote multiple products, or their entire catalogues, across all the devices their customers use: Phones, tablets and desktop computers”.
Businesses will be able to upload their product catalogues and let Facebook generate ads for items while targeting them to users. These product ads could rival Google’s shopping ads, which have evidently performed well for retailers in search.
In a blog post, Facebook explained further: “Advertisers can curate ads as they see fit. For instance, they can highlight products that were viewed on their website/mobile app or showcase best-selling products. Or they can create a multi-product ad that highlights the different benefits of a single product”.
SNAPCHAT’S $19BN VALUATION
This time last year came the news that Facebook had spent $19 billion on messaging service WhatsApp. Now the same remarkable valuation is being pinned on Snapchat, which is looking to raise approximately $500 million at a valuation of between $16 billion and $19 billion, according to a report in Bloomberg.
Such a valuation would be an extraordinary turn of events given that Snapchat once controversially declined a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook. Just over a year later and the app’s fast-growing, young user base has proved the snub may have been wise.
If equity changes hands at a $19 billion price tag, Snapchat will become one of the most valuable privately-held companies in the world.
SEO MYTHS DEBUNKED
SEO is constantly evolving, with many previous tactics no longer valid.
Over the years, we have learned that is not all about just ranking number one, and that there are many other contributing and influencing factors to consider.
There are plenty of myths still circulating, and it’s high time we started dismantling a few with help from some hard data.
WEEKLY VIDEO
Driving Traffic from Facebook
Facebook sends a remarkable amount of traffic, but there’s a lot of confusion around both just how much and (perhaps more importantly for our work) how we can optimize our work to take advantage of it.
