A Year In Review: Top Tweets and Facebook Posts from NTENT in 2013

 

1. The Click Fraud Debate was on Fire in 2013! 

Click fraud is a problem that is common to all stakeholders including ad networks, advertisers, brands, and publishers. Our CEO, Colin Jeavons, joined the debate about the costly and pervasive problem with byline that packed a punch in MediaPost.

 

 

 

 

 

2. Social Shines a Light on Small Businesses

Our Small Business Saturday Showcase was a big hit in 2013. Our special promotion helped shine a light on our clients by featuring their business on our social profile pages.

 

 

 

3. NTENT Took Deer Valley by Storm at Media Post’s Search Insider Summit

Hundreds of top digital marketing execs gathered from across the country for panels, roundtable discussions to discuss the top innovations and challenges facing the digital industry. NTENT’s CEO Colin Jeavons participated in an expert panel entitled “Can You Hear Me Now?”.

 

 

 

4. We Spread the Word from Digital Industry Experts

Educational social shares from industry experts are well received as they help our clients improve their ability to reach their target audiences.

 

 

5. Semantic Technology Shakes up the Search Scene in 2013!

Search Engine Journal spreads the word about the Stealthy Rise of Semantics.

 

 

6. 2014 Online Video Predictions

As online video heats up, NTENT’s SVP, Bill Drolet shares his thoughts on future trends in online video. 

 

 

 

7. Automotive is Added to our Vertical Content Network

We expand into the automotive industry by partnering with Source Interlink, a leading integrated media and merchandising company focused on enthusiasts of automotive, action sports and other niche activities, to launch its first-ever automotive vertical content network.

 

 

 

 

 

8. Meet Uvidi: A New Online Video Destination 

This new video destination gives users access to premium short form video content in sports, entertainment, food, beauty, style and more!

 

 

 

 

 

9.  NTENT Opens Across the Pond

We enter into the European marketplace with the opening of our London office supported by a dynamic team that will help give publishers and advertisers access to new and innovative solutions to reach consumers in more meaningful ways. 

 

 

10. NTENT Hits the Streets of NYC to Give Back

Over twenty-five NTENT employees participate in the JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes.

6 Essential Tips to Creating a Stellar Search Strategy in 2014

In 2013, the big world of “search” went through a seismic shift with the widespread adoption of semantic search technology. Google’s “Hummingbird”, Facebook’s “Social Graph” and Bing’s “Satori” underscored an exciting year for search and new challenges for online marketers.  These announcements, the continuous changes in search and the evolving behaviors of consumers across devices and channels have provided clues to what marketers and business owners can expect in 2014.

1) Start Thinking About Consumers - Stop Thinking About the Machines

Search engines have evolved into answer engines.  People are typing sentences and paragraphs into search instead of keyword queries, in fact, 20 percent of Google searches are new.  Google’s Hummingbird update began its transition away from keyword-based queries to better understanding intent, which allows users to search more in natural language.

As, a marketer your goal is to provide answers to the questions that consumers are asking.

Ask yourself:

Who are my prospective consumers?
How will they search for information that relates to my business or product?
What answers will they be seeking?

2) Focus on Content Creation

The information that you display on your webpages is what draws consumers in, keeps them coming back and drives conversions.  Therefore, producing quality content that consumers want is crucial to operating an effective SEO strategy.

Shooting for SERP ranking will get you nowhere in 2014.  Work to create stronger associations to the content that relates to your products and services.  Don’t just write descriptions about your products/services and don’t just think about keywords.  Optimize for content instead of keywords to avoid getting punished.

Focus on creating an organized content program, providing helpful information and, most importantly, think about what consumers will be looking for.

3) Optimize for Entity Search, Not Keywords

Goodbye SEO gaming!  Throw your keyword manipulation practices out the window and start focusing on producing better results.  Ensure your site pages are optimized for entity search by using tools like Google’s Structured Markup Helper to map vocabulary to relevant semantics, taxonomies and ontologies.  Google and Facebook are counting on things like semantic search, social rank and trust rank to give better results for consumers.

4) Provide Immediate and Actionable Results

Your ability to deliver high quality results, faster and better than your competitors will be the “search game changer” in 2014.  SERPs are being reconstructed to give users instant access to what they want by taking into account: ‘real time’ data from social networks, product listing ads, geo-location, entity cards, consumer reviews, etc.  This transforms the way people search for and access stuff online.

5) Build Smarter Ads

As traditional display and search ads are being displaced by Google’s Knowledge Graph, ensure online visibility by integrating your products into the Google Store, stay active on your Google+ for business pages and other social business pages like Facebook and LinkedIn.  With entity search, you can explore creative ads that are based on both the sentiment of an article and a consumers' perception of its content in real-time.

6) Embrace Mobile Search

The number of searches performed on mobile devices continues to rise.  Entity search is much more authoritative than traditional keyword search as it’s equipped with natural language processors and predictive capabilities.  Take advantage of the mobile search by:

Understanding how and why your consumers search for your business on mobile
Designing a mobile site to meet your users’ needs using responsive design, adaptive design or building a dedicated mobile site
Verifying with Google Webmaster Tools and running the mobile crawl errors report

As consumer behavior morphs and technology continues to adapt, marketers will be met by new challenges in 2014.  SEO strategies based on keywords will become increasingly obsolete.  The number of users who end up on a content creator’s site or see a marketers paid search ad on a SERP will decrease as the nature of search changes.  Search engines and social networks are using semantic search technology to make it easier to make connections, learn and explore interests faster than ever before.  As a marketer, you’ll need to adapt quickly if you want to soar past the competition in the search world.

Want to know about Google's new humming bird? Read into it here on the  4 Tips That'll Keep Your Business Humming Along in a Post-Hummingbird World.

The Big Debate: How to Measure Video Ad Effectiveness

Uvidi Presents a Framework for Evaluating Video Effectiveness

 

We have built Uvidi into a growing and compelling video destination, and are committed to delivering premium video content, user verification through proprietary technology and third party validation, as well as world-class distribution.  Uvidi provides a great experience for users, a brand safe environment for our partners and maximum ROI for our advertisers.

 

At Uvidi, we recognize that brands need a way to evaluate video effectiveness. In fact, an industrywide debate is underway. Organizations such as the IAB, Nielsen and Adap.tv have established the 3MS Council and the Video Viewablity Consortium to address this issue. Some constituents propose that “viewablity” should be the defining metric to evaluate ad effectiveness. However, viewablity as it’s been defined for TV and display cannot be applied to digital video, which is a unique format with distinct differences. Similar to search, digital video is a responsive product that should be measured based on campaign effectiveness and completion of an action.

 

We caution against using viewability as the determining factor of measurement as it is limited in scope and fails to take the unique attributes of digital video into account. While the practice of measuring viewability delivers a form of measurement, it’s just a starting point.

 

We believe that there are far more relevant measurements that should be considered. As such, we’ve created a layered framework to help brands evaluate video effectiveness.

 

Audience Verification: Uvidi’s audience is validated according to our parent company, NTENT, Security Integrity Process (SIP). SIP utilizes data and human verification technologies to form a hybrid approach that provides a more comprehensive and fair evaluation of user verification than what is possible when the decisions are solely left to computers to select. SIP strongly differentiates Uvidi from sites that are reliant on random clicks.

 

Exposure: To conduct a proper effectiveness assessment brands need to consider exposure. Exposure includes: video player visibility, audience reach and video completion rates. Comscore’s recent research on this subject shows that ad views and hover time strongly relate to conversion. Furthermore, Econsultancy’s study finds that there is a positive correlation between brand recall and video completion rates.

 

Campaign performance: Brands must go beyond clicks and impressions and look at post-view data such as site visits, request for information and purchases from users that were exposed to videos ads but didn’t click at the time of viewing.

 

Uvidi is built upon the above framework and is committed to providing a superior standard of measurement and a best in class experience for consumers.

Improve your digital marketing efforts with the  4 Essential Tips to Digital Marketing Success.

Making Sense of Semantic Search for Advertisers and Publishers

How does NTENT do it?  NTENT CTO, Gerald Burnand, was invited by Search Engine Land journalist, Barbra Starr to present to members of Lotico San Diego Semantic Web group to give a behind the scenes look at NTENT’s secret semantic sauce.  The presentation highlighted how sematic technology is making life easier for both advertisers and publishers by letting computers do the work of deciding which ads are the most relevant.  Some of the topics discussed:

 

• Discovering how semantic technology helps thousands of advertisers reach their audience in a meaningful way, and helps hundreds of online publishers monetize their content.



• Learning how semantic technology can reduce errors and time spent by marketers when defining their campaigns and yield better overall results.



• Understanding some of the challenges that come with semantic technologies and how to address them ahead of time.



• Going behind the scenes with semantic and linguistic processing of web pages.



•  

The presentation was held at UCSD and attended by industry thought leaders, CEO’s, marketers, technologists and even some graduate students.  One interesting question that arose was:

 

Q) How long does it take from the time a new article is published by a website, before ads can be matched?

 

A) When the first person views a newly published article, our platform will get a copy of the page.  This typically takes half a second.  The semantic engine will extract concepts and determines what are the most important concepts; much like a human.  This second step takes a fraction of a second.  With those concepts, our system can select which ads are relevant and place them adjacent to the article.

 

You can view the full presentation on Slideshare.

Also take a look at  How Can Semantic Search Technology Help You Advertise More Efficiently?

The Stealthy Rise of Semantic Search

The evolution of search technology actually resembles aviation history.  Consider this – Boolean is equivalent to Clement Ader’s inaugural flight across open water, keyword is the Spitfire fighter aircraft that won the Battle of Britain, and semantic technology is a leap ahead to the arrival of the stealth bombers.  Read More

Email Marketing (Still) Works

A recent study from DMA reported that 75.8% of marketers are using more promotional emails to market their business than they were just three years prior. In fact, Forrester Research predicts that “email marketing spending will balloon to $2 billion in 2014 with retention email, services, and ad-sponsored.  Read More

Also take a look at the related article  Part 1: Time to Fall Back in Love with Email.

Online Video Will Remake Advertising In 2014

Video marketing has evolved well beyond brands posting videos on YouTube and expecting results. Native advertising, social media, and semantic search technology have coalesced to transform video into a more targeted channel to engage consumers where they are online.  Read More