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Google announced that they are looking at a soaring figure on mobile searches, and for the first time it exceeds desktop searched. Although it’s true, but only applies to some prominent continents and countries. Now, the case applies to every country on the planet. It brings a clear message to digital marketers around the world – Go Mobile or Go Home.

On the whole, we still see steady growth with desktop searches, but in percentiles it has definitely fell against mobile searches. We are living in a flat world, where we are constantly stringed together with internet connection, and that makes internet searches so easy. Smartphones are slowly becoming a necessity, and they will always be at reach whenever needed. That is why the overall mobile search queries are growing so rapidly. On top of the impressive stats, Google has now indexed close to 100 billion links within the Google application for Android and IOS operating system. The app helps ease the search process, where it directs them to the results into the app version of a web page.

It was only May when the news first announced. In slightly more than a quarter, we see the exponential growth makes headline again. Who knows what other headlines they will be creating.

What does these lead us? It’s absolutely wrong to write off desktop searches right away, because it still has its prominence. Stats on desktop search in fact, has been climbing steadily on monthly basis. All we can say is, the growing prominence of mobile searches, overshadowed the traditional desktop searches.

On the whole, desktop search has grown. As a percentage, it has dropped. That’s because we’re living in what I’ve called an “always-on search world,” where we’re always able to search. Got a query? Your phone is always in reach, as opposed to the past when you’d have to get to wherever your computer was. So, the overall search queries happening have grown.

Related, last month we reported that despite the growth in apps, search remains strong. Google Search in mobile browsers is big, according to a Morgan Stanley report based on comScore data. Google Search within its app is even bigger. In fact, Google Search is rated as the fourth most popular app overall, in the US.

Google introduces new feature all the time, that’s what’s keeping them to lead the pack. As digital marketers ourselves, we need to be quick on our feet with the rapid random introductions of new features. We simply have to be early adopters, for the benefits of our clients. Recently, we learned that Google has added a brand new awesome feature on the Google Display Network – they now automatically convert text ads to rich texts. That’s so much better than the dull boring text ads!

Apparently there isn’t much of an announcement from Google, leaving us very little information to start with. After hours of researching ups and downs, well here’s the best that we could do.

Google calls them “Richer Text”. They are the most brand safe ad type within the text ads family according to Google, and it began only last month. “Rich Text” runs on a text + image. The logo will be extracted from your official Google + page, and paired with common ad dimensions to gain better exposure around the internet. However, the advertisers themselves cannot decide on the colors. Google will derive color choices from the primary and secondary color of your logo.  Who knows that in the future we could have manual control?

We fee that this is a fresh, and clever approach, as it elevates the ad viewing experience multiple folds. I personally adore such ideas. Here is how Google converts the ads:

• For richer text image ads, Google pulls the logo from a verified G+ account. If no verified G+ account is available, they will not run a richer text ad.
• For native, they first look at the G+ account and if that is not available, they use a third-party image repository to contextually pair a relevant image.
• Colors for the richer text ads are pulled from the primary and secondary colors of the logo. In the future, Google will allow customers to define their own colors.
• Google is also testing a new text creation process internally that will allow customers to upload their own image.

Has anyone of you spotted a richer ad texts? Let us know how you feel about it, over the old dull ad texts.

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We love numbers, metrics, data and all of those sorts relating to digital marketing. Sometimes too much is not always good. We handle new clients every now and then, look at their campaign history, data collected and analysis. You will be surprised on metrics they are still measuring, they are long overdue and makes zero sense in today’s marketing paradigm. For instance,

1. Facebook Likes

Seriously, do people still care about Facebook Likes? The abundant numbers make them nonsensical at times. Facebook Likes can be bought with pennies, why does it matter anymore? Take a look at their organic reach instead, some trends towards zero. Many brands are now reporting that their post engaged less than 1% of their total audience. So what’s the point of trying to measure something that is so indispensable, that doesn’t even look at what you have to offer.

2. Ad Banner Impressions

They use to matter, it’s important to know your ad’s reach and how many people actually saw your ads. However, by today’s standards, ads appear everywhere, pushed to every random possible person. Of course there are targeting methods but you and I know we are constantly annoyed by irrelevant ads.

3. Traffic Source

We understand at times companies launch big promotional events. They need to justify where their visits come from. True but are these reliable performance indicators? Not so. Are they dispensable? Depends. Don’t sabotage your own efforts by discrediting them with what is crappy segmentation reporting. Our point here is a diverse traffic source can only be good, nothing bad.

4. Page Rank

Page Rank is officially DEAD people, for a very very long time. The last time Google updated the page rank algorithm, it was in 2013. Oh did we forget to mention it was by accident? So yeah that should give you a clear indication how important this whole page rank thing is for Google. So for whatever reason you are still looking at page rank (most probably for SEO, backlink building etc.), STOP RIGHT NOW.

There are better places to spend your resources on. These digital marketing metrics are long over due. The more you focus on measurement that doesn’t matter, the less time you have for metrics that actually matter. Don’t improve the volume, improve on quality. Quality brings better business opportunity.

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