Six of the most interesting SEM news stories of the week

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.

This week we have a couple of updates from Facebook, an emphatic ’no we’re not going to take on Google’ from Wikipedia, what times of day you can bug the support team at AdWords and swearing.

Facebook adds new video metrics to Page Insight

From this week, Facebook’s Page Insights has been redesigned and now includes new video metrics much demanded from publishers.

These include:

• Minutes Viewed: The total minutes of watch time spent on the video. This is one of the most requested video metrics from publishers, and we’re excited to make it available today.
• 10-Second Views: The number of times the video was viewed to 10 seconds. If the video is shorter than 10 seconds, this metric refers to the number of times people viewed at least 97 percent of the video.
• Sound-on vs. Sound-off: A breakdown between views with sound and views without sound is available for both Views and 10-Second Views.

According to the announcement, “the updated design also makes it easy for publishers to access more granular video performance data by clicking through individual metrics on the updated Insights view.”

Facebook’s Instant Articles will be opening up to all publishers

Instant Articles allow publishers to upload full articles to Facebook, with various interactive features, high quality video and images and 10 times faster loading speed than standard mobile web.

Previously this had only been available to a select few hundred (Buzzfeed, Slate, National Geographic) but as of April 12th this feature will be available to every publisher big or small.

Wikipedia is NOT building a global web-crawling search engine. Honest!

Although reports earlier in the week seemed to suggest that a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation for something known as the ‘Knowledge Engine Project’ would lead to “the world’s first transparent search engine”, Wikipedia has now stated that’s not the case…

“What are we not doing? We’re not building a global crawler search engine… Despite headlines, we are not trying to compete with other platforms, including Google. As a non-profit we are noncommercial and support open knowledge. Our focus is on the knowledge contributed on the Wikimedia projects.”

Instead Wikimedia will use the grant to research how exactly people use, interact and find information on Wikipedia and use this to make “improvements to discovery.”

Google AdWords support now available 24 hours

We’re now offering support through our English AdWords Twitter, G+, Facebook, and YouTube pages 24 hours a day, Monday – Friday! #AskAdWords

— Google AdWords (@adwords) February 11, 2016

But no, you can’t ring them at 3am and ask why your advert for cheap sheds isn’t appearing properly. It will instead be available through social channels from Monday to Friday on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and YouTube.

Rich media achieves the highest completion rates on mobile

As reported by WARC, a new benchmark has found that the most effective way of reaching mobile consumers is through mobile rich media and interactive in-stream, as these achieve the highest completion rates.

This is according to RhythmOne’s 2015 Mobile Advertising Benchmarks Report which also found the following from its study of US-based mobile programs, spanning 20 advertiser categories and encompassing five ad formats:

• Mobile Rich Media (93.7%) and Interactive In-Stream Video (87.4%) garner the highest video completion and engagement rates with consumers.
• Mobile Full Page ads are ideal for driving engagement on tablets (14.2%), and
• Mobile Rich Media units are ideal for driving engagement on smartphones (10.7%).
• Adding an interactive element to :15 second In-Stream Video can significantly decrease consumer drop-off.
• Increased video length (:30 seconds versus :15 seconds) negatively impacts VCR for a number of advertiser categories.

Swear words in email subject lines increases open rates by 28.6%

Have you wondered how swearing can affect whether a recipient opens your email or not. Well, wonder no flipping more…

New research from Mailjet has found that British people are almost 30% more likely to open an email if the subject line includes a swear word.

However, the same cannot be said for American recipients.

• British people responded well to swearing in the subject line opening 27% of emails, compared to only 17% being opened in America
• British people responded best to ‘old fashioned’ swear words, such as ‘numpty’ which increased open rates by 26%
• Even ‘soft’ swear words had a negative effect on an American audience with a 30% decrease in open rates when the subject line included a curse word

Heck yeah!

The article Six of the most interesting SEM news stories of the week was first seen from https://searchenginewatch.com