Aug 27, 20135 min read

Marketing Day: August 27, 2013

Here’s our daily recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on

Marketing Land and other places across the Web.

From Marketing Land:

Facebook Says Run Your Promotions From Your Page, No Contest App Required In an about-face, Facebook announced it is doing away with the requirement that contest and promotions be run through apps. Up to now, page administrators were required to run all promotions through an app. However, “illegal” contests run from page timelines were fairly rampant. Starting today, page administrators can opt to run a promotion from […]
Smartphones Driving Nearly Twice The Commerce Of Tablets — comScore Every report I’ve seen comparing conversions on PCs, smartphones and tablets shows tablets as having much higher conversion rates than smartphones. Part of the reason is that people rarely complete transactions on their smartphones — they tend to buy later on PCs or tablets or offline. That’s why it’s both interesting and curious that comScore […]
Twitter Hires Its First Head Of Commerce To Make Shopping In 140 Characters A Reality Twitter has hired Nathan Hubbard, formerly the CEO of Ticketmaster, as its first Head of Commerce. Hubbard reportedly began his new position yesterday, and will be tasked primarily with helping to grow Twitter’s revenue by making it more friendly to the retail shopping experience. Hubbard’s hire was announced this morning via a tweet from Twitter’s […]
Facebook Govt Data Requests Dominated By US Facebook released its Government Data Requests report, covering the first half of 2013. The country with the most requests by far is the US. India is next in line and then several European countries follow: Germany, France, UK and Italy. Yet none of the volume of these “next in order” countries even begins to approach […]
HomeAdvisor.com Rebrand Efforts Include Switching More Than 10 Million URLs After thoroughly researching the strength of its brand, home improvement company HomeAdvisor.com rebranded itself last year after 13 years as ServiceMagic. Narrowing the brand’s focus on home improvement, repair and maintenance, the rebranding effort was a massive undertaking that included a broad set of corporate measures along with the decision to switch the company’s URL […]
Amazon Launches Mobile Associates API For Game & App Developers The new Amazon Mobile Associates API allows developers to sell products available at Amazon from within their apps and games. The API is an extension of the Amazon’s long-standing affiliate program, Amazon Associates, which launched in 1996. After initiating the API, developers can select a specific set of products, search terms when choosing what […]
Yahoo Updates Verticals, Injects More Native “Stream Ads” Into Content This morning, Yahoo announced that it had updated seven properties, making them more personalized and adding “stream ads” into the content flow. The redesigned properties are Sports, Movies, Music, TV, omg!, Games and Weather. The properties employ responsive design and will work across platforms, according to the company. Yahoo is aiming for the same thing […]
Facebook Settles “Sponsored Stories” Litigation For $20 Million Yesterday, a court in San Francisco approved settlement of potential class action litigation against Facebook over its Sponsored Stories program. Sponsored Stores are ads that include identification of users’ friends who’ve “liked” the advertiser. Facebook has agreed to pay $20 million to end the case. The settlement was approved over various objections including the argument […]
5 Ways To Turn Number Vomit Reporting Into Valuable Business Action Number vomit. Ugh. It wastes more of my time than anything else during the work week. (With the recent exception of Candy Crush. I mean, are you kidding me with that game?) It appears in many different forms: weekly search reporting, dashboards created to make C-level folks feel like they know what is going on, […]
Facebook Driving More Than 2x Twitter Traffic To Parse.ly’s News Clients Facebook is far and away the top social network driving traffic to some of the biggest online news and media websites, sending them more than twice as much traffic as second-place Twitter. That’s according to the Authority Report from Parse.ly, a company that counts the likes of Reuters, The Atlantic, Mashable, The Next Web, US […]
Infographic: How Retargeting Through Facebook Exchange Works They’ve been to your site and left. Chances are, those prospects will head to Facebook, at some point. If so, you have the ability to reach out and encourage them to come back. How? Through Facebook Exchange, a method that allows for advertisers to “retarget” or show messages on Facebook to people who’ve been to […]
Yelp CEO Initially Didn’t Like Name “Yelp,” Sounded Like “Cry For Help” Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman was interviewed by Charlie Rose earlier this month on August 15. AllThingsD, which called our attention to the interview, focuses in on Stoppelman’s criticism of Google’s local efforts (17:35 below). However, Rose asked Stoppelman about a wide range of subjects, extending beyond Yelp to tech generally and international competition. Rose, in his introduction, says that […]