My Five: Five things worth sharing from the last week (or so), brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Ashleigh.
1. Are you careful about what you post on Facebook?
There has been loads of coverage in the news recently about how Facebook status updates have been getting people in trouble with their employers and how prospective employers use social media as a way to research their interviewees.
There was one story covered on Mashable about a woman from Phoenix who updated her Facebook status to “I wish I could get fired some days, it would be easier to be at home than to have to go through this.” Needless to say the woman’s employer found out about this comment and it resulted in her losing her job.
This may be a rather extreme example but it shows the power of social media and how users should be very careful about what they say online, especially if they are not using the privacy settings correctly.
2. New tool launched that predicts the success of marketing videos
Earlier this week a company called Unruly Media launched a tool that allows video creators to predict the “shareability” of their social video ads before they expose them to the world.
The tool has been created to help those creating video content to predict how successful the video is likely to be and therefore help them decide how much budget to put behind promoting it.
Unruly has spent the last six months creating the tool with a team of statisticians, who have combined academic research, consumer data and proprietary technology to develop the algorithm.
It will be extremely interesting to see how accurate this tool is. I wonder if it would have predicted the success of PSY’s Gangam Style Video…
3. The rise of the (not provided)
Anyone that uses Google Analytics to track the traffic to their website will have noticed that more and more visits are being attributed to (not provided) keyword data.
Google first introduced the (not provided) referrer back in 2011, which meant that marketers and website owners could not see the keyphrases searched upon by a user before visiting their website, if that user was signed in to Google. And since 2011 the percentage of visits falling under the (not provided) umbrella has steadily grown.
Subsequently this is making it more and more difficult to measure SEO success and we are therefore having to adapt the way in which we do so.
4. Safari browser users start legal proceedings against Google
It would seem that Google is in trouble yet again for ignoring Safari’s security settings to track people’s internet journeys by installing cookies.
Google has protested that this is not the case and has ensured them that Safari’s settings are secure, however one person has already started legal proceedings and there are predicted to me more to come.
Last year Google was fined $22.5m (£14m) for using cookies to collect data about web users online activities in order to provide more targeted advertising – the same offence.
For more information visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21229980
5. PLAs see increase in clicks and impressions in 2012
On 13th February 2013 Google’s free shopping listings will no longer exist and listings will only be available to merchants with paid Product Listing Ads.
The paid model has been live in the US since October and research has been carried out to see the effect. Research was carried out by Marin Software that shows that PLAs click share rose from 2.1% in January 2012 to 6.6% in December 2012. Impression share also increased from 3.9% to 6.1% when comparing the data from one month before the changeover and that at the end of December.
However in addition to an increase in click and impression shares, the Product Listing Ads also had a higher click-through rate and lower average cost than text ads by the end of 2012.
