Online Marketing News: Brightest Millennials, Branded Content, Google Penalties

Infographic: How the Best and Brightest Millennials Live, Shop and Dream
Millennials are a popular demographic for marketers, but with that popularity can often times come stereotypes and shortcuts used to resonate with this audience without doing the legwork of truly understanding them. This infographic shows what the best and brightest of millennials do with in their day to day lives, from banking to world politics. One big takeaway is that remarkably more millennials are shopping online vs. in store, and using mobile banking apps rather than banking online or in-branch. AdWeek



Facebook Changes its Policies on Branded Content
Facebook defines branded content as content “that specifically mentions or features a third party product, brand, or sponsor.” Facebook is now giving marketers the ability to tag each other in their branded content, opening up the ability for the tagged marketers to view post insights and making it more clear to the consumer that the content is sponsored. There are, however, types of branded content that Facebook still won't accept, like persistent watermarks and pre-roll ads. Search Engine Journal

Google penalizes sites for unnatural outbound linking
Last weekend, Google issued penalties to sites implementing unnatural outbound linking. The letter from Google reads: "If you see this message on the Manual Actions page, it means that Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank is a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to the affected portions of your site." Moral of the story? Wear your white hat, and check your Google Search Console messages! Search Engine Land

Fluent: 8% of Americans Own an Apple Watch
According to a new study by Fluent, 8% of Americans own an Apple Watch, along with 8% that own a different brand of smartwatch. These consumers reportedly are using the Apple Watch to access notifications and monitor health and fitness. Mucic streaming, email and playing games were also popular among Apple Watch owners, 62% of whom said they are planning to upgrade when the newest edition is released. SocialTimes

From the @toprank Twitter Community


Google Analytics' new User Explorer report shows individual, anonymized website interactions
Google is rolling out a new feature in Analytics called User Explorer, which Google defines as a "new set of reporting in Google Analytics that allows customers to anonymously analyze individual interactions to their website." User Explorer uses existing Google Analytics data to deliver insights and help marketers uncover insights to help optimize their site. Marketing Land

Facebook users are sharing posts more frequently but liking and commenting less
A new report from Rival IQ shows that Facebook users are sharing posts more often than they are liking or commenting. Marketing Land speculates that this is due to initiatives to decrease spam engagements and the newsfeed trend toward users rather than brands. There's also a related theory new Messenger sharing features, giving users more options to share than before. Marketing Land

What was your top marketing news story this week?

I'll be back next week with more marketing news and delightful video content. Have something to say? Tweet me @Tiffani_Allen or @toprank!

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