May 2, 20144 min read

Marketing Day: Instagram Tops User Engagement, Mobile App Ad CTRs & YouTube’s Intro Video

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:

Marketers Should Jump Into Instagram Before It’s Too Late It’s hard to believe that a social network with 200 million active users could be overlooked by marketers. But that seems to be the case with Instagram. Compelling data released this week by Nate Elliott of Forrester Research shows that brand posts on Instagram receive remarkably higher engagement than posts on Facebook, Twitter and other […]
Top eBay Affiliate Sentenced To 5 Months In Prison For Wire Fraud eBay’s top-earning affiliate, Shawn Hogan, has been sentenced to five months in federal prison after pleading guilty to one count of wire fraud, Business Insider reported this morning. Hogan must pay a fine of $25,000 and will remain on supervised release for three years after his prison term is completed. The case traces back to […]
Click-Through Rates On Mobile App Ads Reach New Heights, Lead To Record Downloads In March, click-through rates on ads for mobile adds on iOS devices reached new heights, increasing fivefold from the previous year. CTRs on Android were nearly three times higher than a year ago, reports mobile app marketer Fiksu in its latest pulse of the app market. All those clicks are driving record downloads. While […]
Why Google Plus Will Not Die (But May Change) Last week’s announcement that Google+ founding father Vic Gundotra has left Google opened the door to a rash of speculation about the future of Google’s biggest venture into social media. The idea that Google+ might be dying started with a TechCrunch post that included statements from a few anonymous sources declaring Google+ to be “walking dead” […]
YouTube Now Lets Channel Owners Add 3-Second Intros To Their Videos YouTube has made it possible for channel owners to add a three-second intro to their videos, helping them build a stronger brand presence on Google’s video platform. To automatically add an intro, users must first upload the video intro to their channel as an unlisted video. Once it’s uploaded, the intro can be selected by […]
How Playing Devil’s Advocate Will Improve Your Content When you finish writing something, it’s tempting to sit back in your desk chair and beam — but that won’t result in great content. What you really have to do is take a walk, come back with a fresh eye, and tear your content apart. This is the only way to make content that’s interesting, […]
LinkedIn Beats The Street With $473.2MM In Q1 Revenue Yesterday, professional networking site (and now content publishing platform) LinkedIn announced Q1 revenues of $473.2 million. That was up 46 percent from last year. Topline revenue and earnings per share slightly beat consensus analyst estimates. Its guidance disappointed some, however, and shares fell yesterday in after-hours trading. The company has three primary revenue streams: premium […]
Using Geo-Location To Turn Mobile Traffic Into Off-Line Gold Mobile traffic is on a steep upward climb, with people now looking at their mobile devices an average of 150 times per day. Businesses that aren’t selling an e-commerce-friendly products will need to get very creative if they are to transmute this increasing mobile traffic into more revenue. But even businesses that have the advantage of […]
Smartphones To Reach 90 Pct. In US, UK By 2016 — Forecast An analysis by The Guardian, relying on Kantar ComTech data, asserts that the UK market will reach 90 percent smartphone penetration in 2016. The publication cites a separate analysis by Horace Dediu arguing something very similar for the US market: smartphone adoption will reach 90 percent by the end of 2016. These now sound like […]
The New VW Site: It’s Like Tinder For Cars Acknowledging the fact that most car sites — including their own old VW.com site — are just glorified brochures that don’t do much in the way of helping buyers locate a car that is actually available, VW is out with a very Tinder-like site that makes choosing a car as easy as choosing a date. […]