Tips for Tuesday: Zuck-Hashtags, Stock Images and Adwords Costs
The digital marketing world changes about thirty times a day – making it crucial to stay on top of the latest news in the industry. Here’s 3 recent stories you need to be paying attention to:
- Facebooks Latest Great Idea is a bit Twitteriffic (from All Things D)
Facebook recently jumped into the hashtag action, and with a suspected news reader most likely being announced during their June 20th event, this could be the next major change for the system. But after their last major push simply sputtered (know anyone using Facebook Home?) there’s a lot of pressure on them to ensure that Hashtags experience a more successful launch.
All Things D dives into the launch, with some speculation about the reasoning behind it – their best guess is to capture some of the second screen experience that Twitter has been dominating.
- Matt Cutts Finally States that Stock Images do not Affect Your Rankings(from Search Engine Land)
An often debated topic in the SEO World was finally settled (although surely the debates will still exist) concerning whether stock images hurt your rankings through normal search. After all, duplicating text content hurts rankings, so why wouldn’t images? But Matt Cutts assures webmasters that stock images won’t harm your rankings.
Of course, as Search Engine land points out, just because they don’t affect your normal search rankings, doesn’t mean that unique images wouldn’t help your image rankings.
- Paying for Adwords? Get Ready to Start Paying More (from Forbes)
Google’s “Do No Evil” attitude tends to be somewhat swayed by their need to satisfy shareholders, as most of those in the industry know. There have been a couple egregious decisions made where a flimsy excuse of helping consumers has been used to help the bottom line ([not provided] as a privacy issue is the biggest one.)
The latest change came several months ago, when Google announced that all Pay Per Click advertisers were going to be forced to change their campaigns into what they termed as “enhanced” campaigns, but should really be called “simplified and more expensive campaigns.” These new campaigns do not allow selling ads only for mobiles or tablets, a spot where advertisers could often get away with low PPCs. And no matter how Google wants to sell it, the truth is, by taking away this strategy, they’ve forced advertisers, particularly agencies smart enough to take advantage of the situation, to pay more.
As Forbes notes, the latest numbers show an increase in Adwords prices for the first time in 2 years during March to May, even though that period is typically lower due to a lack of e-commerce holidays. And those numbers are only going to go up as the months continue. It’s an important issue, that anyone doing PPC will have to keep paying attention to.
