Digital Video Advertising is Set to Take A Bite Out of TV

Digital video advertising in the US is increasing at an eye-popping rate, but TV ad spending will still outpace digital video in dollar growth in 2014, according to new figures from eMarketer. Digital video ad spending will increase 41.9% this year, reaching $5.96 billion, while TV advertising in the US will grow 3.3% to hit $68.54 billion.

Due to the two media’s varied stages of maturity, growth rates between TV, a well-established market, and digital video—more recent on the scene, but becoming increasingly prominent—will trend in different directions. The uptick in usage on digital devices is an important contributor to growth in ad spending for these sectors, but by no means will carry enough momentum to overtake the TV market in the near future.

A more comparable statistic for the two markets is the amount of ad dollars each platform will add each year. Despite digital video’s astronomical rise percentagewise, eMarketer projects that TV will add more new dollars this year—$2.19 billion more than 2013, compared with a $1.76 billion increase in digital video ad spending. In addition, we estimate that TV will continue to outpace digital video in dollar growth through 2018. In 2016, for example, our projections show TV almost doubling the amount of new dollars going to digital video channels, due chiefly to advertising surrounding the upcoming US presidential election that year.

“The digital video audience is spread more thinly than a mass television audience, and that segmentation makes digital video ad buys more complex and less reliable than TV advertising,” said David Hallerman, principal analyst at eMarketer. “Time spent with digital video is growing significantly, and it’s taking away some TV time, but given the diversity of placements and platforms, digital video viewers are more difficult for advertisers to target.”

Furthermore, Hallerman added, “much of the time audiences spend with digital video is not useful for advertisers. Some of that is when they view clips that are either too short or not brand friendly. But it’s also because more and more digital video content is streamed through subscription services such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video—neither of which supports advertising.”

Similar to the reasons that TV is still outpacing digital video ad spending, online video remains well ahead of ad investments in video programming on smartphones and tablets—for the time being. Overall, eMarketer estimates that online video ad spending—that is, ad spending primarily on desktop-based ads—will total $4.52 billion in 2014, or 75.8% of digital video ad spending, vs. $1.44 billion for video ad spending on tablets and smartphones. By 2018, those figures will draw more closely together, when online will still slightly outspend mobile video—$6.64 billion to $6.07 billion.

Video ad spending on connected TVs—devices such as set-top boxes, smart TVs and gaming consoles, for example—is accounted for in the “online” portion of video ad spending in eMarketer’s definition, which partially accounts for the growth there in contrast to our mobile category. As desktop advertising declines in favor of tablet and smartphone advertising, connected TVs will help pick up slack in the “online” category. According to eMarketer’s latest forecast, 113.2 million US consumers, or nearly 60% of digital video viewers, will use connected TVs in 2014. By 2018, that figure is projected to reach 90.0% of digital video viewers.

“As audiences find it easier and easier to watch internet-sourced content on their TVs, and as more and more content compels them to watch, the connected TV universe will offer marketers a unique blend of digital interactivity and TV’s big-screen power,” said Hallerman.

eMarketer bases all of its forecasts on a multipronged approach that focuses on both worldwide and local trends in the economy, technology and population, along with company-, product-, country- and demographic-specific trends, and trends in specific consumer behaviors. We analyze quantitative and qualitative data from a variety of research firms, government agencies, media outlets and company reports, weighting each piece of information based on methodology and soundness.

In addition, every element of each eMarketer forecast fits within the larger matrix of all of its forecasts, with the same assumptions and general framework used to project figures in a wide variety of areas. Regular re-evaluation of each forecast means those assumptions and framework are constantly updated to reflect new market developments and other trends.

Data Sources:
emarketer.com

8 Things Your Doing Wrong In Google Adwords

1.  Choosing the Wrong Keywords

Many advertisers think there's no harm in having countless keywords in their campaigns just to cover their bases, but this is false logic. First of all, having too many non-performing keywords in your campaign can actually bring your overall campaign down, which in turn can lead to increased expenses to generate the same results.

Second of all, if you focus on only choosing keywords that generate clicks but no conversions, you're helping Google make a tidy sum off of you without helping yourself.

Lastly, certain words with multiple meanings might also bring down your campaign performance if the ad is served a lot but not clicked or could lead to wasted expense. Take for example the word "windows." In the example below, an ad for Microsoft Windows (software) appears among all other ads for glass windows for a building. Perhaps this ad is appropriately located (and if you have the advertising budget of Microsoft, you probably don't care), but also considering that Microsoft Windows has the No. 1 free organic search ranking on Google, perhaps it's an unnecessary placement.

2. Writing Bad or Boring Ad Copy

You might be surprised at how artful writing only 95 characters of ad copy can be. Unlike the below example, make sure you give the searcher a compelling reason to click your ad.

Some AdWords copywriting tips include:

• a headline with specific content, messaging or an offer
• use of your keyword somewhere in the ad copy
• a persuasive call to action like "Save now," "Buy our..." or "Register here"

3. Not Fully Understanding or Using All Campaign Set-up Options

Google makes basic campaign set-up easy, but they don't necessarily expose all the different ways you can configure and manipulate your campaign to help improve results. Educate yourself on the use of these features to get more results for the same or less money:

• AdGroups--the grouping of like or objective-related keywords into a group so you can impose campaign controls at the Group level
• Ad targeting--there are so many fabulous ways to target better through AdWords--by keyword (of course), by geography, by time of day ("day-parting"), by content, by mobile users--take time to become familiar with all of the targeting methods so you can optimize your campaign and maximize your budget
• Match types--match types tell Google under what conditions of a search query to serve your ad. There are five main types of match types: Broad, Broad Modifier, Phrase, Exact, and Negative. Get familiar with how each type works to improve your campaign.
• Keyword insertion--with keyword insertion, Google inserts your select keyword into your ad text on-the-fly to try to make it more relevant for the user. You typically see this with big box retailer ads, for example:

• Ad Extensions--Don't be limited by 95 characters any longer! With Ad Extensions you can get more links and expose more about your advertised product or service to your prospective buyer.

4. Not Implementing Conversion Tracking

 Without conversion tracking, you probably don't have a clear sense of which keywords are generating desired actions for campaign success. Google provides conversion tracking code for free. 

5. Not Tying Your Conversion Tracking Into Your Google Analytics

 Speaking of free, Google Analytics is one of the most powerful marketing tools out there, and it too is free. As a bonus, if you connect your AdWords conversion tracking to your Google Analytics, you can see all kinds of data your campaign is generating.

6. Unnecessarily Over-paying for Positioning

Most Google advertisers understand that AdWords is a live, 24/7 auction by keyword--the cost of your click is influenced by what all advertisers bidding on it are willing to pay. When you have a well-optimized campaign, chances are you don't have to pay top dollar to capture the first ad position...and nor does the number one position always suit you, the advertiser, best. You need to understand how the entire AdWords marketplace works, including Google's Quality Score, and how to best manage your campaign by keyword or goal.

7. Sending All the Traffic to Your Website's Homepage

Most campaigns benefit from driving traffic to unique "landing pages" where the searcher can more easily connect with the information they seek, rather than dumping them onto the homepage of your website and hoping they find what they came to your site for.

8. Not Conducting A/B Split Tests

Split testing allows you to serve two different versions of ad copy for the same keyword, or to take visitors to two different landing pages, all so you can test if one version of ad copy or landing page clearly outperforms another.

If you're managing your AdWords campaign yourself, it will be easier for you to tackle these fixes one at a time than all at once. Along the way, see how they improve your campaign performance...but don't forget to capture baseline performance metrics so you have something to judge against!

How Search Engines Work - Video Blog

Search engines have two major functions - crawling & building an index, and providing answers by calculating relevancy & serving results.

Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway system.

Each stop is its own unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG or other file). The search engines need a way to “crawl” the entire city and find all the stops along the way, so they use the best path available – links.

1. Crawling and IndexingCrawling and indexing the billions of documents, pages, files, news, videos and media on the world wide web.
2. Providing Answers Providing answers to user queries, most frequently through lists of relevant pages, through retrieval and rankings.

“The link structure of the web serves to bind all of the pages together.”

Through links, search engines’ automated robots, called “crawlers,” or “spiders” can reach the many billions of interconnected documents.
Once the engines find these pages, they next decipher the code from them and store selected pieces in massive hard drives, to be recalled later when needed for a search query. To accomplish the monumental task of holding billions of pages that can be accessed in a fraction of a second, the search engines have constructed datacenters all over the world.
These monstrous storage facilities hold thousands of machines processing large quantities of information. After all, when a person performs a search at any of the major engines, they demand results instantaneously – even a 1 or 2 second delay can cause dissatisfaction, so the engines work hard to provide answers as fast as possible.

Search engines are answer machines. When a person looks for something online, it requires the search engines to scour their corpus of billions of documents and do two things – first, return only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query, and second, rank those results in order of perceived usefulness. It is both “relevance” and “importance” that the process of SEO is meant to influence.

To a search engine, relevance means more than simply finding a page with the right words. In the early days of the web, search engines didn’t go much further than this simplistic step, and their results suffered as a consequence. Thus, through evolution, smart engineers at the engines devised better ways to find valuable results that searchers would appreciate and enjoy. Today, 100s of factors influence relevance, many of which we’ll discuss throughout this guide.

How Do Search Engines Determine Importance?

Currently, the major engines typically interpret importance as popularity – the more popular a site, page or document, the more valuable the information contained therein must be. This assumption has proven fairly successful in practice, as the engines have continued to increase users’ satisfaction by using metrics that interpret popularity.

Popularity and relevance aren’t determined manually. Instead, the engines craft careful, mathematical equations – algorithms – to sort the wheat from the chaff and to then rank the wheat in order of tastiness (or however it is that farmers determine wheat’s value).

These algorithms are often comprised of hundreds of components. In the search marketing field, we often refer to them as “ranking factors” Moz crafted a resource specifically on this subject – Search Engine Ranking Factors.

Source: Moz.com

What Is Link Building & Why Is It Important? - Video Blog

Click here to download or read the complete guide to link building

Whether you're brand new to link building or have been doing it for a while, we're sure you'll find something useful in this guide. The landscape of SEO and link building is always changing, and today, the importance of building high-quality links has never been higher. The need to understand and implement high-quality campaigns is essential if you're going to compete and thrive online, and that isn't going to change any time soon. This guide is designed to get you going quickly and in the right direction. There is a lot to take in, but we've broken everything up into easy-to-digest chapters and have included lots of examples along the way. We hope you enjoy The Beginner's Guide to Link Building!

Definition of link building:

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites. There are many techniques for building links, and while they vary in difficulty, SEOs tend to agree that link building is one of the hardest parts of their jobs. Many SEOs spend the majority of their time trying to do it well. For that reason, if you can master the art of building high-quality links, it can truly put you ahead of both other SEOs and your competition.

Why is link building important for SEO?

In order to understand the importance of link building, it's important to first understand the basics of how a link is created, how the search engines see links, and what they can interpret from them.

 Source:
Moz.com

Digital Fixed Ops Done Right - Video Blog

6290 Lehman Dr. Suite 100

Colorado Springs, CO 80918

(609)-712-3801

__________________________________________________________________________

Overview:

Recently we were commissioned by VW of America and Subaru of America to do a complete review of their SEO and SEM efforts. As a product of our research we've developed and launched our Digital Fixed Ops program. We tailored this package to fill in the gaps left by large website hosts.

Our Model is to create unique and custom content that makes your dealerships stand out from it’s cookie cutter mold. Google and Bing frown on conformity and reward originality, it’s that simple.

Digital Fixed Ops:

Currently 40% of all automotive searches are looking for service, parts, and maintenance services. As it stand now independent shops are corning the search market for these terms. Most of these people are searching for any number of services, but more importantly are searching for up-to-date offers and incentives. Don't let the independent shops take these lucrative searches and sales.

Our fixed ops package includes:

• Build and update up to 8 digital fixed op’s pages per month (including landing page [great for SEM and Google Places!])
• Custom images and specials/offers relative to your market or corporate focus
• Custom Headers
• Build includes images, descriptions, and links if website has product pages
• Thorough SEO on images (Title & Alt tags), Anchor text, unique meta data including title tag, Keyword meta tags, Description meta tags and link structure.
• Link building TO your website relative to service and parts
• Delivery of social media suitable content that agrees with and links to your service initiatives

We’re proud of our work and results, please feel free to see some example below:

6290 Lehman Dr. Suite 100

Colorado Springs, CO 80918

(609)-712-3801

__________________________________________________________________________

Subaru Digital Fixed Ops Examples:

Capitol Subaru:

Main Service Page

http://www.capitolsubaru.com/salem-subaru-parts-center-oregon.htm

Service Specials (Each special has its own page optimized for that service)

http://www.capitolsubaru.com/salem-subaru-service-specials-oregon.htm

Main Parts Page

http://www.capitolsubaru.com/salem-subaru-service-center-car-repair-keizer-oregon.htm

Parts Specials (Each special has its own page optimized for that service)

http://www.capitolsubaru.com/salem-subaru-parts-specials-oregon.htm

Service Schedule Page

http://www.capitolsubaru.com/service/schedules/salem-subaru-maintenance-schedules-oregon.htm

http://www.capitolsubaru.com/parts/products/genuine-subaru-parts-and-chemicals.htm

Kearny Mesa Subaru:

Main Service Page

http://www.kearnymesasubaru.com/san-diego-subaru-service-center.htm

Service Specials (Each special has its own page optimized for that service)

http://www.kearnymesasubaru.com/san-diego-subaru-service-specials.htm

Main Parts Page

http://www.kearnymesasubaru.com/san-diego-subaru-parts-center.htm

Parts Specials (Each special has its own page optimized for that service)

http://www.kearnymesasubaru.com/san-diego-subaru-parts-specials.htm

Byers Airport Subaru:

Main Service Page

http://www.columbussubaru.com/service/index.htm

Service Specials (Each special has its own page optimized for that service)

http://www.columbussubaru.com/specials/service/subaru-service-specials-columbus-oh.htm

Parts Specials (Each special has its own page optimized for that service)

http://www.columbussubaru.com/specials/columbus-subaru-parts-specials.htm

Service Schedule Page

http://www.columbussubaru.com/service/appointment.htm

Wentworth Subaru:

Main Service Page

http://www.wentworthsubaru.com/portland-subaru-service-center.htm

Service Specials (Each special has its own page optimized for that service)

http://www.wentworthsubaru.com/portland-subaru-service-specials.htm

Main Parts Page

http://www.wentworthsubaru.com/portland-subaru-parts-center.htm

Parts Specials (Each special has its own page optimized for that service)

http://www.wentworthsubaru.com/portland-subaru-parts-specials.htm

Nate Wade Subaru:

Main Service Page

http://www.natewade.com/salt-lake-city-subaru-service-center.htm

Service Specials (Each special has its own page optimized for that service)

http://www.natewade.com/salt-lake-city-subaru-service-specials.htm

Main Parts Page

http://www.natewade.com/salt-lake-city-subaru-parts-center.htm

Parts Specials (Each special has its own page optimized for that service)

http://www.natewade.com/salt-lake-city-subaru-parts-specials.htm

Need more examples? Click here to see more Fixed Ops Pages. Thank you for your time and consideration. Please contact Josh Martin for any further questions:

Joshua Martin C: 609-712-3801

SEM Director O: 719-424-7149
josh.martin@3GEngagement.com

The Perfect Butternut Squash

Ingredients:
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 butternut squash
2 heaping tablespoon brown sugar
2 tablespoons butter

Directions:

1) Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Using a large serrated bread knife, cut the squash in two. You can use a sawing motion, sea-saw motion, or both to cut clean through.
2) Use a spoon to remove the seeds. Scrape the the inside until you no longer see "strings".
3) Place 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, and 1 tablespoon brown sugar into each half. Rub the spice mixture onto all of the orange portion of the squash. By the time you are through the spices should look like a brown paste.

4) Place butter inside each half

5) Cover tightly with tin foil, bake for 50 minutes.




By: Josh Martin

Please Support My Sponsors:

Grandmothers Homemade Meatloaf

Ingredients: 1 egg
1 bottle of chili sauce
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
1 lbs ground beef
1 tablespoon ground pepper
1 tablespoon creole seasoning (Optional)
1/2 tablespoon parsley
1/2 tablespoon paprika

Directions:
 
1) Preheat oven to 350. Combine egg, breadcrumbs, ground pepper, creole seasoning, parsley, peaprika, and ground beef in a medium mixing bowl. Mix ingredients by hand (Actually use your hands). Mix until you can no longer find pockets of breadcrumbs or spice.


2) Place to meet into a well greased 5 x 9 glass pan. Flatten the beef into the pan then, make a 1 inch deep reservoir in the center of the meatloaf.

3) Pour entire bottle of chili sauce, into the reservoir.
 
4) Cover meatloaf with tinfoil and bake for 35-40 minutes. Typically I serve meatloaf with corn and mashed potatoes.
 
Note: for an old world taste add 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce to your meat mixture. By: Josh Martin