Google and Deloitte combined forces to look at mobile load times for 30 days across four verticals: Retail Luxury Travel Lead generation (such as insurance or auto sites) The results, published in a Whitepaper titled “Milliseconds make Millions,” were clear: 1. Faster sites mean more customers will reach checkout 2. Faster sites encourage people to
Facebook’s facing a revolt among advertisers. Where will it end up and will it have a real impact? The campaign is asking businesses to stop advertising on Facebook in July to send a message. “We are asking all businesses to stand in solidarity with our most deeply held American values of freedom, equality and justice
SOURCE: News Release U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation and the Internet, and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), ranking member of the subcommittee, in introducing the Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency (PACT) Act, new bipartisan legislation to update Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The PACT Act would
BPA Worldwide is a not-for-profit organization that provides independent audits of audience claims for media publishers and media buyers. Today, they’re taking on the programmatic ad tech establishment along with a number of partner companies. The group is writing an open letter to the digital advertising agencies and asking for reform when it comes to
Call it the attack of the bots. The majority of tweets linking to the most popular websites are not handled by human beings, but bots that post content without human involvement. That’s the findings of a Pew Research Center random sampling of 1.2 million tweets last year to answer this question: “What proportion of tweeted
You can’t go online without bumping into an article about how the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has changed everything and how it’s all changed forever. When it comes to marketing, however, just 13% of marketers surveyed think COVID-19 has permanently changed branding, according to a study by Bynder. 57% agree that there will be a lasting
If you’re looking for hard data on what’s happened to brands that increased or decreased marketing during and after a crisis or recession, I’ve compiled the results of 11 studies into this article. Every single one shows the same thing: the companies that stayed the course or increased their marketing efforts grew at significant rates
“Local news is in a state of crisis,” said a letter written by a group of 19 Senators in a letter to Senate leadership. The senators warn that the widespread impact of the COVID-19 pandemic – including plummeting advertising revenue – could decimate local and regional news outlets even as communities have become increasingly reliant
Not surprisingly, when you don’t control the conversation, it happens without you. Brands that stop advertising and sending positive messages are seeing huge drops in brand sentiment because they only thing people hear about you is nothing or negative. Those that continued to market saw a drop (people are thinking about other things these days),
A new bill working its way through the NY state legislatures wants to tax companies that sell or make money from the use of consumer data. Assemblywoman Stacey Pheffer Amato wants to create a mutual fund from taxes that would pay a yearly dividend. New York State Assembly Bill A9112: Requires a five percent tax
Weeks before new privacy rules go into effect, California AG is asking for significant changes to CCPA California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra has proposed revisions to the regulations implementing the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The law itself went into effect on January 1, 2020 with an enforcement deadline of July 1st. As in any piece
When video streaming services offer free trials, there’s a lot of interest. When the trials run out, however, the customers run away. As Christopher Palmeri reported in Bloomberg Businessweek, two-thirds of these users leave when the free trial runs out. Another 10% of all streamers ditch the service every month. The churn is massive. That’s
January 2020 brings a new year and a new decade. It also brings new privacy laws for business. Have you made the changes you need to avoid being out of compliance? CCPA California’s CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) is one of the strictest laws in the U.S. and goes into effect in January 2020. Businesses
A new study of U.S. mobile consumers finds that 90% of consumers overpay for unlimited data plans. The report, which surveyed 400 U.S. consumers on major carrier unlimited plans, finds that 1 in 3 respondents use less than 5 GB per month, and 85% use less than 10 GB. The report was funded by Reach
Let’s say you were able to positively identify more than 15,000 fake social media accounts. You reported a significant number of them to social media platforms as fake. Nearly a month later, who many do you think would still be on the platform? If you said 95% of the fake accounts were remaining online, you’d
Once again, consumers cited traditional television advertising as having the strongest influence on their purchasing behavior, greater than the influence of all other media combined. That was the key takeaway from a research study, 2019 Purchase Funnel, conducted by GfK which measured the influence of media on consumers during their purchase decision-making process. Other key
5G is coming soon to a neighborhood near you. As telecoms build out their 5G networks and start to look at services, the Wall Street Journal reports that it will likely cost you more. The cost to build out 5G nationwide is enormous. Companies are spending billions. 5G waves don’t travel as far on their
You’ve probably never heard of it, but a new protocol called DOH could be a game-changer for online privacy. DOH stands for DNS-over-HTTPS. It would encrypt DNS traffic within your browser and hide requests and responses. When you enter a website’s URL into a web browser, it’s sent to the internet as a DNS request.
Nearly 90 organizations and experts from 30 countries are calling for a moratorium on further deployment of facial recognition technology. In making a public declaration, the group says that the tech has evolved from a collection of niche systems to a “powerful integrated network capable of mass surveillance and political control.” “Unlike other forms of
When you launch an advertising campaign, you want results. For B2C products, a digital ad with an incentive, such as a discount or limited-time sale, you can expect to track the ROI in short order. The sales cycle is short. For B2B businesses, the sales cycle is much longer. 74% of B2B sales to new
“With the latest advancements from our research team in the science of language understanding–made possible by machine learning–we’re making a significant improvement to how we understand queries, representing the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search,” said Pandy Nayak, VP of
If you’re hoping organic search is the way to increase conversions on Google, we’ve got some sobering news for you: organic search on Google is producing just 22% of site visits, according to the new 3Q 2019 Digital Marketing Report from Merkle. Here are a few of the others insights from the report. Paid Search
With the increased attention focused on OTT (Over-the-top) TV and streaming services, there are some interesting trends developing. 65% of US consumers say they stream content at least once a week. Two-thirds say they stream more video online than they watch of broadcast, cable, or satellite, according to Horowitz Research’s Focus OTT & SVOD 2019
“Personalized experiences are about delivering contextually relevant experiences to your prospects and customers, based on what you know about them, where they are in the purchase journey, and what they are looking to achieve. It is becoming more evident that marketers who consistently deliver personalized cross-channel experiences are seeing moderate to substantial conversion improvements.” –
Many D2C brands are moving digital dollars back to traditional marketing channels. Rising costs of digital mediums Need to build brand awareness, trust, and credibility They are finding out that the direct response type campaigns that can work on search and social media channels will only take you so far. “As you evolve,” Melanie Travis,
Every once in a while someone ask me what tools I use to write on my website. I’m using WordPress like just about everyone else. WordPress powers 34% of all websites worldwide in 2019 and accounts for 60% of Content Management Systems in use. One other thing I use is HubSpot to handle my workflow and keep track of
This could change a lot of things. If your website has Facebook’s like button on it for content or comments, you could be liable under the European Union’s privacy rules regardless of where you do business. The EU Court of Justice handed down the ruling this week in a case involving an online retailer. A
Cell phones, apps, connected TVs, tablets, streaming media devices: they all need broadband internet connections to be used to their full potential. Yet, according to the a study by The NPD Group, nearly a third of Americans don’t have that kind of internet connection. NPD defines broadband as having at least a 25Mbps download speed
You’re right in the middle of an online battle when suddenly someone starts threatening you. It goes way outside the bounds of any acceptable behavior. The harasser might target your ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or religion. They might spew hate speech or start rambling about extreme views. If you’ve done any multiplayer online gaming, no
“Facebook’s infringements of the 2011 consent decree and its pattern of violating user trusts have been both vast and brazen.” – Letter to FTC from Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) The Senators are reacting to word that’s leaked out that Facebook will by hit with a record $5