Mobile was the keyword at Google’s Performance Summit this year. “The shift to mobile is no longer a change on the horizon. It’s here. Mobiles are the first thing we pick up in the morning and the last thing we put down at night,” says Sridhar Ramaswamy, senior vice-president, Ads and Commerce, Google. To further its push for mobile, Google “redesigned Adwords from ground up” to introduce new features such as responsive display ad units, new ways to advertise on Google Maps, expanded text formats and bidding separately for desktop and mobile.
Every year, there are trillions of searches on Google and over half of those searches are on mobile. Google’s data also highlights that for the millions of websites using Google Analytics today, more than half of all web traffic now comes from smartphones and tablets.
“It is critical for marketers to know which moments matter and which don’t. There are moments when we turn to our smartphones for making a decision or accomplishing a task. At Google, we call these ‘micro-moments’. With location-related mobile searches growing 50 per cent faster than all mobile searches, it’s clear that consumers are moving seamlessly between online and offline experiences,” says Ramaswamy.
According to Google, nearly one third of all mobile searches are related to location which led the company to launch new local search ads across Google.com and Google Maps. The new features which are still in experimental stage will allow advertisers to add promoted pins, a new business page, product inventory and special offers.
Limit EasedTwitter users will now be able to say more in the 140 character limit as Twitter is doing away with certain rules. In the coming months, adding videos, GIFs and images will no longer count against the character limit. Naming @handles when replying to a tweet will also not count in the limit. “We are focused on making Twitter a whole lot easier and faster. This is what Twitter is great at — what’s happening now, live conversation and the simplicity that we started the service with,” said Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO and cofounder.
The Real UnicornIn the tech world, unicorns are private startups that reach at least a $1 billion valuation. E-commerce has the most unicorns, with 25 per cent of the total pool, while 18 per cent are in Internet software and services and just 5 per cent are in social media. No social media unicorn seems to get more attention than Snapchat, which was recently valued at $16 billion.
Sharing Stats According to Fractl that surveyed 2,000 Facebook users, more than half log in multiple times per day and share content from third-party publishers at least once a week. Men and women both share funny videos and news content, but men are more likely to post political content.
LEADERHarsh Goenka
@hvgoenka
Chairman, RPG Enterprises
“In 2008, all pharma companies had combined market cap less than DLF. Today, all real estate companies combined market cap less than Sun.”
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
CEO, Tesla
“Just heard that Norway will ban new sales of fuel cars in 2025. What an amazingly awesome country. You guys rock!!
