Gsbt

by Christian Neri This week's 'Skim is all about fighting for the next user: Why you should consider Facebook's low-bandwidth app, Facebook Lite; why Snapchat's fastest-growing demographic will surprise you; what you need to know about how the Super Bowl played out on social, and the brands and social networks that claimed victory; what big play Pinterest is making in search; how to convert Instagram users to buyers; how B2Bs tap into social; and much more... Skim to stay on top! 1. Facebook Lite hits 200 million users The social network's low-bandwidth world revenue  skyrocketed 52% in 2016  thanks to the lite version of Facebook's app, which makes it easier and more enjoyable for users with poorer data connections to sign up and spend more time on the platform. The social giant's revenue in "Rest of World" regions (those outside of US & Canada, Europe, and Asia-Pacific) ballooned to $839 million per quarter last year. Facebook Lite la

In its early days Pinterest was described as a “social scrapbooking” or photo sharing site. CEO Ben Silbermann has called it a “catalog of ideas.” But the company has generally shunned the “social network” label. Whatever else it is, Pinterest is increasingly becoming an image search engine. Accordingly, the company announced the hiring of Randy Keller, who until last month was a senior engineer working on Google image search. Keller was at Google for roughly a decade and was part of the Image Search Quality team. His Linkedin profile says he lead a team “of 40 engineers  . . . and was responsible for image search ranking, related images, guided search efforts and new emerging features like ‘Where to Buy’ and images appearing on web search.” Pinterest provided a quote from Keller about why he’s joining the company: Pinterest is the most exciting opportunity in visual discovery today, and I look forward to contributing my expertise in image search quality and ranking to the team r

Tamar Weinberg tanuha2001  /  Shutterstock.com With Twitter’s  rampant  abuse problem, the company has been aggressively trying to find the right way to handle its crippling problem. An announcement  today  addresses Twitter’s overall improvements toward a safer, more pleasant tweeting experience, with the addition of three primary changes: abusive account creation prevention, safer search results and collapsing low-quality (or abusive) tweets. New Accounts Twitter says it’s being proactive about identifying users whose accounts have been suspended, primarily as a result of abuse and harassment, to ensure that they will not recreate new accounts. Safer Search A “safe search” will be implemented to remove tweets that contain sensitive content or tweets that have been made by blocked/muted accounts. The objective is for search to be less cluttered with more relevant (and possibly more interesting) results. Collapsing low quality tweets While Twitter advocates toward free speech,

A new feature makes it easier to make sure the page you're seeing from an AMP search result is legit and lets you share the "real" URL with others. AMP pages are great . They are designed to help us find what we're looking for when we're mobile and point us towards search results that are easy to read because they were designed for a smaller screen and touch-based navigation. So many people use their phones to get on the internet and get the information they need that anything that makes the experience better is welcomed. On the web, trust is important. You need to know you're seeing results from a place you trust. But there are a few drawbacks to using AMP URLs, too. One is that they require a separate (and sometimes frequently changed) URL to be cached by Google, and this breaks the traditional way the web works. When something goes on the internet, it should be there forever, in the same place. Moving the URL we use from a mobile device around can mak

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

Last year, Google introduced  local search ads and promoted pins  to wring a few extra dollars out of Maps. By extra, I mean potentially an additional  $1.5 billion in 2017  alone. Maps inherently have local intent; local intent has a high likelihood for conversion. No surprises there. But ads run counter to a quality user experience. We as advertisers can perform all the mental gymnastics we want, but the truth is, ads are a nuisance. Especially on maps. When you’re looking for a location, the last thing you want to see is a map resembling a pincushion or a shotgun’s scatter pattern. Striking the right balance between organic and paid listings is critical. Unfortunately, as the screen size shrinks, the challenge of balancing paid and organic gets magnified on the map. On desktop, there aren’t so many paid ads that you can’t find organic listings. In fact, it’s almost a happy compromise. You get to use Google’s mapping services for free; Google gets to turn a profit. Fair deal. Wi