In early 2013 Google announced ‘Enhanced Campaigns’ as the next iteration of campaigns in Google AdWords.  Alongside a preview of new features was notice that all existing campaigns would have to be manually updated, or they would be automatically updated by July 22nd. To assist you in preparation for upcoming changes and manual updates, we are be producing a blog series on news, features, and benefits relating to Google Enhanced Campaigns.

Like most other members of the online advertising community, we are excited by some of the new features and their respective benefits. On the other hand, we are wary of certain updates as they are making device-specific campaigns more challenging to set up.

One of the primary benefits is that Enhanced Campaigns require you update Sitelinks (something we advise running for most Search campaigns). This is a valuable update as Sitelinks can now be created at campaign and ad group levels.  Furthermore, reporting and performance can now be segmented by campaign, ad group, and link.  This depth of reporting provides users with more information to guide future ad copy.

Nevertheless, concerns exist and the most forefront is that Enhanced Campaigns don’t easily enable device-specific campaigns.  By limiting your ability to include or exclude specific devices, Google has jeopardized optimization capacities. The new bidding system has complicated Enhanced Campaigns by requiring all campaigns have a bid for traffic from Desktops and Tablets (though it can be set very low).  However, there are methods to counter this, such as setting a low Desktop/Tablet bid and boosting Mobile bids.

While Enhanced Campaigns are providing benefits, they also feel like another way for Google to push Mobile advertising. This motive has become increasingly apparent in the last 6 months from their updates and our communication with Google Reps. As an agency we recognize that each of our clients and their accounts (campaigns) are diverse, and as such Mobile advertising isn’t the account’s focus. At this point we are encouraged by the update, but cognizant that there are some concerns.

Ultimately its encouraging that Google AdWords continues to evolve, and set a very high standard for online advertising platforms. While there are issues at hand, the platform is still the most utilized, and as such it will continue to lead the industry.  We’re excited to continue working through the Enhanced Campaign update and encourage you to stay tune for future posts.

Part Three: The Next Steps

Create A Google+ Page
If you haven’t yet, use a Gmail account and create a Google+ Brand Page. Creating a Brand Page is easy and the first step in taking advantage of changes taking place in Google Search to reach more consumers. Completing the verification process, adding recommended links and utilizing keywords in the introduction and subtitles will optimize your page for SEO.

Create A Cover Photo Optimized For The New Layout
The new dimensions for the updated Google+ Cover photo are 2120 X 1192. Instead of using an image you already have, create a new image specifically for Google+ to help build your brand persona. And just in case you need it, profile image dimensions are 250 X 250.

Post Regularly
As with all social media outlets, it is best to update your Google+ Brand Page on a regular basis. Doing so on Google+ will get you more followers and encourage more users to add you to their circles. Incorporate customer service social media best practices like following up and responding to the community to help it grow and be authentic.

What Should Brands Post?
To get the most out of Google+, brands should be posting content that gives visitors a reason to come to the page that is different than what their other profiles already provide. Brands can use Google+ to create a source or inspiration for visitors or to ask for and receive feedback. Posting content from the brand blog is also a great source of content. Because many brands already have content calendars created in advance, repurposing this content for Google+ can be a good way to build a presence, but original and exclusive content is the best way to get the most out of a Google+ Community.

Feature Google+ Buttons On Web Properties
Adding a +1 button, +1 badge and Add to Circles button to all of your web properties makes it easy for Google+ users to promote your business. Also include the Google+ button in any promotional emails or blog posts that your brand publishes. The more +1 brand’s content gets, the greater the impact in search results.

Look At Traffic From Google+ In Google Analytics
Being able to view the traffic that comes from your Google+ Brand Page, as well as the demographic information from users who have given your site a +1 can provide tremendous value to brands.
You can use the information gathered through analytics to make more informed decisions about how you want to use Google+ in your overall social media marketing strategy

Google+ will continue to develop into a platform that will have a great impact on how brands interact with consumers. Paying close attention to the changes Google makes to any of their properties will help brands be more successful in creating valuable relationships with consumers. If you need advice on how to make Google+ work best for you or your brand, contact us.

This is the final installment of a three blog series on Google+ and all of it’s latest features.  Head back to read parts one and two. Make sure you head to our Google+ Brand Page and hop into the discussion on our Social Media and Digital Marketing community.

We are very excited to announce the release (and re-branding) of our quarterly social media trend reports. You still get the same insightful analysis and reporting on the latest digital marketing and social media trends, but now it comes under a much cooler name. With that being said, head here to download a free copy of The Path // Q1 2013!

We build these reports every quarter as a way to extend the work we do around the agency to our friends, clients and colleagues who run into the same struggles. Our hope is that we can support learning and growth in the industry and make some new friends along the way.

What’s in this issue of The Path?

Mobile Retail: The Rise of the Connected Shopper

Smartphones and tablets are changing the way consumers shop, both in-store and online. It isn’t uncommon for someone to head to a store to review a product and ultimately buy it for cheaper online. Retail locations must adapt to the new shopping mindset. How can you be ready?

A Guide To Facebook Advertising

Facebook updates its ad platform seemingly every week. Navigating the changes and getting the most out of your budget is an ongoing battle for any advertiser on Facebook. We created a guide to lead you through all of your options and teach you a few advanced tricks for targeting the right audience.

Advanced Twitter Analysis: The Hashtags of March Madness

As an experiment, we created our own Twitter API tool to collect every tweet on a certain group of hashtags. To demonstrate the power behind this data, we collected and analyzed over 5 million tweets about the nation’s most popular basketball tournament. We found proof that data and strategy should go hand in hand.

What topics are on your mind? We’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Have you been looking for ways to integrate your marketing efforts with social media, but don’t know where to start? Join us for an all day social media training workshop on June 18th at the Boulderado Hotel in downtown Boulder.

We’ve partnered with our friends at LOHAS to create a full-day social media intensive workshop as a pre-event to the opening of the 2013 LOHAS Forum. You’ll get a deep dive into the behaviors of today’s most conscious consumers and learn how best to engage with them on modern social platforms.

What’s on the agenda?

• Keynote: Creating Fierce Loyalty presented by Sarah Robinson
• “Speed Dating” Mini-Workshops – Five 20-minute sessions for learning to drive engagement on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and Google+
• Trends in Social Media presented by Room 214
• Round Table Forum from LOHAS brands on Social Media Best Practices
• Creating Engaging Content for Getting Found and Being Chosen presented by Dex Digital

After the training event, you’re also invited to the opening of the 2013 LOHAS Forum conference with some of the most forward-thinking minds in the lifestyle, health and sustainability industry.

We’d love to see you at our training workshop, and since you’re a friend of Room 214, you can use code “ROOM214” on the registration page to get $95 off your registration (remember to select pre-event in the registration process).

Understanding the Google+ platform and the changes being made from Part 1 in our series is the first step in creating a better Google+ experience for your brand and your audience. Now, we’ll take the next step by diving into what these changes mean for your job as a community manager.

Now You Can Get More Creative/Promotional With Your G+ Layout
Brands now have the opportunity to use the extra space provided in their cover photos to make a great first impression. With the increase in creative real estate, brands can now showcase what separates them from their competition and make it the first thing that people visiting the page see.

Google+ Can Improve Your Search Visibility
In the short run, users are going to see more personalized results in their Google Searches. Brands that are on Google+ will have an advantage over other brands because their content will rank higher in consumer search results due to having a Google+ Brand Page. In the long run, as Google+ becomes more popular, search results are going to become increasingly personalized and will show different results to different people, even if they are searching the same terms, based on their personal activity and the activity of their Google+ communities.

Strengthen Customer Relations
Greater search visibility also means greater opportunities to strengthen your relationships with customers. Beyond making it easy to find your location, store hours, and website, now you have a real opportunity to start providing customers with valuable information as they go through the purchasing process. Developing content that helps answer frequently asked questions or that provides insight on new industry trends and developments is a great way to get customers engaged.

You Need to Dedicate Time and Attention to Google+
After customers have started to engage with your content, you need to be prepared to commit the time to Google+ to respond to the community. If customers are asking questions or singing your praises, replying to them is the best way to keep them coming back.

Because taking time to manually post every new piece of content can be time consuming, there is way to give your Google+ the attention it needs without having to make every post yourself. With If This, Then That and Hootsuite you can actually start feeding RSS  or other social networks to your Google+ page. This isn’t going to cover you entirely, but it makes keeping your Google+ page content fresh a lot easier.

This is part two of a three blog series on Google+ and all of it’s latest features.  Look for part three in the coming days. Make sure you head to our Google+ Brand Page and hop into the discussion on our Social Media and Digital Marketing community.

Welcome to the sixth in our series highlighting the trends featured in 100 Trends: What’s Up In Business And Culture In 2013. This week we’re talking tech.

Some of the most interesting recent advancements in technology have come not from giant corporations, but from university labs and your neighbor’s garage. Rapid advancements in computing and prototyping have made small-scale electronics design and manufacturing a reality for the world’s geeks and tinkerers.

Personal computing has gotten even more personal with the likes of Raspberry Pi and Arduino, two platforms that give programmers control over real-world processes like home security, lighting timers, robotics, and anything else clever minds can come up with. We’ll see a host of DIY computing projects pop up online this year, paving the way for a whole new realm of computer-based home improvement.

At the same time, expect more rapid adoption of clean energy solutions that save on energy costs and reduce environmental impacts. From low-cost, high-efficiency LED light bulbs to free-to-install rooftop solar energy arrays, clean tech is finally going mainstream. Mitigating climate change and saving money shouldn’t seem like mutually exclusive aspirations anymore.

Finally, peer-to-peer support for entrepreneurs is going global. Cutting-edge microfinance platforms like Zidisha and Kiva Zip are transforming the way small-scale farmers, merchants and service providers raise funding for their businesses by connecting them directly with eager lenders. At the same time, we’ll continue to see growing support for tech designers on Kickstarter, the go-to platform for independent product funding. The next Apple may just get its start there.

This is only a glimpse of the latest innovations in the rapidly-evolving world of technology. Check out the complete 100 Trends: What’s Up In Business And Culture In 2013 for full analysis of these and dozens of other trends that will shape the way we communicate, do business and enjoy life this year.

It’s been a big week for social music discovery on the web. The biggest announcement of course comes with Twitter’s #music app which syncs your feed up with your Spotify or Rdio account to let you listen in out what your friends like.

We’ve rounded up some of our favorite music-related social apps from the past week to give you a look at how the music industry is evolving to become more social.

Twitter #music
Awww snap, Twitter is lettin’ dat beat DROP! Just last week Twitter launched it’s new service called “Twitter #music”. The service features a free desktop and iPhone application. It utilizes Twitter activity to detect and display the most popular tracks and emerging artists.

The service allows you to play the songs it displays but if you don’t have an Rdio or Spotify subscription prepare to listen to a bunch of 30 second iTunes preview clips. Twitter #music is intended to be a music discovery service and not a free streaming service but if you are anything like me, you discover music while listening to it and not by rifling through a bunch of 30 second clips.

Overall, I feel like Twitter #music is a good start and if you have a bunch of free time to be able to explore all those 30 second clips, more power to you. It’s nice to see some of the other social platforms stepping up on the music front and putting MySpace further into its grave.

VineTune

VineTune is a new website that picks a relatively unknown artist and song and then assembles a linear montage of Vine clips as the song’s music video. VineTune syncs up each Vine used in the song based on the hashtags used in both the song and the original Vines.

Currently, VineTune has only rolled out their technology for a single song (the band Masters in France and their song “Flexin”) but as the “About” page notes, they’re hoping to showcase a new song next month and are even looking for musicians willing to donate a song to the cause.

I’m not sure I’m a big fan of Vine on its own, but this type of musical mashup using hashtags starts to make the platform more compelling.

Brightly Preflight Nerves

This is a pretty sweet promo page for a song! It taps into the Twitter API and pulls up tweets that have pieces of the song lyrics within them. It then displays those tweets on top of a background video featuring old school travel footage. It’s a pretty cool experience and it definitely encourages fans to tweet lyrics from the song in order to get featured on the page.

Through the newly launched Partner Category targeting platform, marketers can run ads based on a user’s online and offline purchase behavior. The targeting tool makes it simple to target Facebook users in a variety of categories from lifestyle to household size.

For example, you are now able to target moms who are shopping enthusiasts or recent home buyers who are  also DIYers. You can even go as specific as finding people who are likely to buy a vehicle within the next 180 days. All of these powerful targeting options can now be accessed through Facebook’s Power Editor.

This puts Facebook one step closer to solving the riddle of ROI through Facebook advertising, while giving them a competitive advantage among other digital advertising players. Prior to partner category targeting, marketers were left to choose from broad interests which weren’t 100% accurate, or rely on targeting their current customers and users similar to them through custom and lookalike audiences.

Partner category targeting gives marketers access to accurate, invaluable data gathered from huge records of actual purchase history. The only downside to it is that is could stir up some controversy with Facebook users, as privacy is an ongoing issue.

However, Facebook has pledged to increase transparency for how data is collected and to introduce data access tools to allow users to exercise control over it. If you’re not sure where to start or where to go next with partner categories, you can always drop us a line. We’ll help craft a plan that will take advantage of the new tools Facebook advertising has to offer.

Welcome to the fifth in our series highlighting some of the trends featured in 100 Trends: What’s Up In Business And Culture In 2013. Our friends at WOMMA featured our marketing trends post on their All Things WOMM blog. Get a preview below, or go read the full post.

Growth Hacking: “Growth hackers” are emerging as a whole new class of marketer that take a programmer’s approach to driving brand engagement by continuously testing rapid iterations of all aspects of product design, functionality, and promotion. Look for this Silicon Valley mindset to spread from startups to established companies this year.

Niche Networks: Niche communities represent a growing part of the marketer’s toolkit for more targeted messaging to specific audiences. Reddit and Quora are a few of the biggest platforms that brands are just starting to grapple with, but there are additional sites dedicated to creating communities for just about every industry and interest.

Stunt Marketing: In the post-Stratos world, the line between marketing and product has blurred. One of Google’s top trending videos of 2012, the Red Bull-sponsored mega-skydiving event ushered in a new era of marketing for its own sake. Look for other brands to explore the bounds of marketing this year.

To learn more about Growth Hacking, Niche Networks and Stunt Marketing, check out All Things WOMM. And stay tuned to Capture the Conversation for more on the latest in trends shaping the way we live and work in 2013. You can get our full 100 Trends for 2013 report here.

Google+ has been making waves in the social space over the last several months. It was recently reported that Google+ has now passed Twitter and become the #2 social network. With more users packing the Google+ space, it is becoming more and more important for your brand to be where your audience is. But, taking the #2 spot in social isn’t the only change that has taken for Google+.

Overview
Google+ is a social network that let’s users categorize their community into Circles (family, friends, co-workers, brands, etc.) and communicate with other people via Google+ Hangouts or Google+ Communities. Google+ Brand Pages allow brands to reach a wider customer base and promote products and services, in addition to having the opportunity to strengthen customer relationships and brand loyalty. Google+ users can +1 a Brand Pages they like and also add them to their circles, where they will receive the updates from the Brand Page.
Google+ Changes

Google Search
Recently, Google made altered their search algorithm so that +1’s are incorporate into Google Search results in order provide users with more personalize search results based on users preferences and tendencies. These search results also take into consideration the activity and +1’s of people in their Circles on Google+. The reasoning for doing so is that, in a Nielsen study, it was found that 92% of consumers trust the recommendation of people they know, and 70% of people trust the online opinions of unknown users.

Layout Change
Google+ recently released a new look for profile pages that provides a more custom and personal look and feel. Most notably, Google+ now features large photos in the feed, as well as a much larger cover photo at the top of profile pages. The new cover photo dimensions are 2120 x 1192 pixels, giving brands a lot more room to work with. The “About” tab has also been changed and boasts an entirely new design that organizes information into different categories (Basic Information, Story, Places, Links, etc.) that make for a much cleaner design. For the personal users that fancy themselves critics, reviews have also been moved under one tab located on personal pages.

This is part one of a three blog series on Google+ and all of it’s latest features. Read parts two and three for the full story. Make sure you head to our Google+ Brand Page and hop into the discussion on our Social Media and Digital Marketing community.