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As marketing technologies, channels, and platforms evolve, the skill sets of digital marketing professionals must evolve as well if businesses are to be able to successfully execute digital marketing strategies in 2017. Does your marketing team have the most important skills it needs for continued success and enhanced efforts? To identify potential talent gaps you'll need to hire for, check out the following top 5 digital marketing skills. 1. Data Analysis Arguably the most important skill in digital marketing in 2017 and beyond is data analysis. Thanks to the growing importance and the abundance of customer data (which will only grow more abundant as a result of the  Internet of Things ), digital marketing professionals must feel at home with measurement, metrics, and the analysis of data. Data-analysis skills allow marketers to answer the most important question: "Is this working?" Which results in more effective and targeted marketing campaigns, enhanced custo

Whether to improve relevancy with their content or to keep competitors from advertising on their pages, publishers want control over the types of ads that can run on their sites. Google  announced  Tuesday that it is expanding the capability for publishers to opt out of certain ad categories and has increased the number of categories and subcategories from 250 to 470. More detailed subcategories give publishers greater refinement in blocking ads on their sites. For example, instead of blocking the category “Apparel,” you can now pick any of the new subcategories, “Sunglasses,” “Handbags” or “Watches.” The feature is now available in all AdSense markets and supports Chinese (simplified), Dutch, Polish, Russian and Turkish, in addition to English.

Facebook's ad policies have been updated to increase opportunity and prohibit discrimination. Tamar Weinberg Late last year, Facebook committed to updating  its ad targeting  practices to prevent discrimination for housing, employment or credit-related ads. Today, the company is  putting  its ad discrimination policy into practice with policy updates, tools and further education. Policy updates Facebook is strengthening its stance with clearly defined prohibitions against ads with discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family status, disability or medical/genetic condition. Education Facebook has also updated its policy with a  section  about discriminatory practices. Advertisers are prohibited from wrongfully targeting or excluding audiences in their ads. This section expands to groups of individuals who are connected to the ACLU, Department of Justice — Civil Rights Division, Leadersh

Retailers that sell online and in-store need to balance where to send users in their paid search efforts. Columnist Andy Taylor explores when advertisers might want to rely on local inventory versus regular product listing ads. Andy Taylor  on February 3, 2017 at 10:30 am In response to the growing popularity of searches with local intent, Google released  Local Inventory Ads  (LIA) a few years ago as a variation of  Product Listing Ads  (PLA) that include information on when a product is available at a nearby store location. Taking into account the local intent of each search query in determining when LIAs should be featured, Google can serve these units in a similar format to traditional PLAs, as well as in other LIA-specific formats, such as beneath a Google Maps display. These units are steadily becoming an important part of paid search campaigns for brands with brick-and-mortar locations, and LIA traffic increased 60 percent Y/Y in Q3 2016 for the median Merkle retailer. How