As Facebook is gaining momentum as an advertising platform now, Nanigans, a Facebook advertising-software company, has conducted a research to figure out, which types of ads work best to drive sales. The researchers have analyzed over 975 million Facebook ad impressions to retailers’ ads in the U.S. in December 2012 and January 2013.
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Google has changed its search engine ranking algorithm to help fight with spam and make the results of users’ searches more organic and relevant to their query. The latest global 24th update of Google Panda algorithm was introduced in late January this year and affected 1.2% of the English-language queries. This generated much talk in the professional web optimization circles, so PM Digital has studied the new changes and released a report titled “30 Ways to Move Beyond Traditional Link Building,” which outlines the strategies to improve today’s SEO performance in the re-shaped world of Google search.
Super Bowl is considered to be one of the major events for advertisers in the ASA, but in fact some of the brands, who advertise during the Super Bowl XLVII game, won’t see real returns on their investments. The placement is quite expensive (it can cost over $126,000 per second to show an advert), so the effect also should to be big. But it doesn’t always happen. Brand Keys revealed in their 11th annual Super Bowl Engagement Survey that the money spent on the promotion will result in revenues (building the brand’s equity, driving positive behaviour, etc.) for just about 60% of advertisers.
Surprisingly enough, now the fastest growing social media platform is not Pinterest (as it used to be), but Twitter, as reported by GlobalWebIndex. According to the study conducted across the 31 markets, the micro blogging platform is gaining momentum now and getting more active users than other social media platforms—the site is followed by Facebook and Google+, respectively.
YouGov has released its BrandIndex Rankings for 2012, which compares BrandIndex Buzz scores of brands across major consumer categories in 10 countriest: the USA, the U.K., Denmark, Finland, France, Mexico, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Sweden and the UAE. Along with determining which brands generated the most buzz throughout the last year, the study also reveals the most improved brands of 2012. YouGov asked its respondents just one question, “If you’ve heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news or word of mouth, was it positive or negative?”. The score of each of the brands was calculated by subtracting negative feedback from positive feedback. View some highlights from the research below.
Facebook believes that analyzing the users’ activity on its platform can help determine who of the Facebookers might be thinking of committing a suicide. The social media giant has teamed up with Save.org (Suicide Awareness Voices of Education) to study activity of suicide victims on the platform in the days before their deaths.
Pinterest has served as a source of information about home décor colour preferences. For Turkish decorative paint brand Jotun, Danish designers Mie Frey Damgaard and Peter Ørntoft have developed a great infographics project, which is based on the colour trends spotted when looking through Pinterest interior décor boards.
More than a half (59% —against 58.3% in 2011) of the UK design and digital agency staff intend to change their job in 2013, and overall, feel less confident and more disappointed. Continuing the trend of the previous year’s gloomy findings, the annual report by Fairley & Associates, Gabriele Skelton and On Pointe Marketing again proves that the future of small firms in the UK, and the design industry on the whole, looks dim.