The Year Rolling by- Digital Marketing Highlights and Lessons from the Past year

•  Google gets smarter with Hummingbird update ( September 2013)

Google has constantly been making changes to its algorithm with ‘Caffeine Update’ back in 2010, ‘Penguin’ in May 2013 and ‘Panda’ in 2012. However, this time Google has tried to make a huge change in its algorithm by launching humming bird. With an intention to make it more sentient, Google has rewritten its entire search algorithm for the first time in last 12 years and have named it as Hummingbird.

•  Algorithm update like Penguin 2.0(May 2013) & Panda (Multiple updates in 2013)

Google rolled out 25 Panda updates apart from Panda dance and Panda Recovery of which two were announced in 2013. Google also announced five Penguin updates of which two were rolled out this year. According to these updates you will be penalized if following the wrong practices to attain a better ranking even with low quality content on your website.

•  Ads get personal with retargeting on social and search

Usually, only 2% of visitors who come to your website get converted to customers and rests are just the window shopper. Retargeting is an attempt to bring the remaining 98% of visitors to your site. In retargeting you keep a track of people who visited your site and display your retargeted ads to them while they visit other sites online.

•  Remarketing gained ground

It is clear by its name that what exactly is remarketing. It is the tactic through which you market your product again to those who have already become your customers. Remarketing is typically used when email is involved.

•  Mobile prevalence and need for more responsive websites

So many people call 2013 the year of Responsive Web Design the way the need for a responsive website has increased in such a small span of time. I hope you all know what a responsive website is. Still to brush up your knowledge let me explain it to you, it is the website elements on which automatically will be resized and the layout reconfigured according to the size of the screen it’s displayed on.

•  Facebook launched Auto-play Video ads( December 2013)

These ads run without sound unless users tap it and users can also expand them to full screen in this case. A carousel appears at the end of auto-play video where you can click on two additional videos.

•  Google rolled out a new feature called ‘ Quick Actions’( November 2013)

This feature will allow users to act on emails without even opening them. Some of the actions that users can take according to this new feature are viewing folder on cloud services, start writing a restaurant review with a click, RSVPing for events and so on.

•  Twitter introduced Lead Generation Cards( May 2013)

It is a new type of twitter cards that will let the marketers to gather leads directly within the tweet. The best thing about these cards is that they themselves pull out the users’ information like their names, email address and user names and the users need not fill the form , they just need to hit the submit button on the card’s call-to-action. Although it is a paid feature of twitter ads but still we can have tons of ways to get the most out of it.