Welcome to ‘What Happened in Search’.
Packed full of the week’s search marketing news each Friday, this week we’re proud to introduce hoppa, as well as bringing you Flash news and Facebook’s immersive ads.
OUT WITH THE OLD
This Wednesday saw Resorthoppa launch hoppa, its new, global B2C brand. addmustard oversaw the migration to the new site, hoppa.com, which followed a significant amount of hard work and planning; from initial conception to the final switch-over.
The new, fully responsive site has been built from scratch with completely new information architecture and is a technical beauty. The new site is leaps and bounds over anything else in the market, leaving us confident that the site will dominate the SERPs.
We are proud to say that the migration went without a hitch, with conversion on its first full day of trading way above expectations.
FLASH CANNED
In the latest blow to Adobe’s little-loved Flash graphics format, Google has begun nudging customers of its AdWords ad network to wean themselves off Flash by offering automatic conversion of Flash ads to HTML5.
The Google Ads team said there is a, ” tremendous opportunity for marketers to reach their customers… Whenever they may be browsing. But there is an all-too-common barrier: many mobile devices and some browsers do not currently support Flash”.
NEXT GEN
Facebook is showing mockups of an immersive ad product to marketing industry executives this week at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. It’s a work in progress, which Facebook chief product officer, Chris Cox, emphasized on Tuesday.
Facebook’s vision is an ad that opens full screen and gives people the ability to manipulate the content. Advertisers would, in effect, be able to create an alternate, interactive version of their websites on Facebook.
HEY, BIG SPENDERS
The internet remains the fastest growing medium for advertising globally and is expected to surpass traditional television by 2020, according to a new report.
The report shows that online already dominated ad spend in Australia, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK in 2014, and will do so in another five markets by 2017.
Together, these 12 markets account for 28 percent of global ad spend across all mediums.
PLAYING CATCH UP
YouTube has a near decade-long head start over Facebook in the online video race, but the social network is catching up quickly.
According to a recent survey and market research by Ampere Analysis, Facebook is primed to rack up two thirds as many video views as Google’s network in 2015 — two trillion views compared to three trillion on YouTube.