Drives More Valuable Traffic From Social Publishing
A number of major media companies are starting to implement tools for third-party authentication for consumers. We spoke with JanRain, which provides a tool called Engage that companies like Tribune Interactive, Meredith, E.W. Scripps, The Dallas Morning News, bizjournals, and the National Geographic Society are all using. With the solution, publishers can authenticate users via third-party logins using as many as 16 different providers, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo LinkedIn, etc.
"JanRain is helping these companies to garner traffic to their site via the social web," a representative for the company tells WebProNews. She also says Engage can let media companies "allow consumers to publish content back to the social networks, increasing the cycle of referral traffic, and capture important demographic data to improve the user experience."
"Traffic to your website from a social media platform is, by its very nature, more valuable than traffic from other sources," she adds. "People spend time on social networks for the purpose of sharing information with people they deem important. Trust is high among peers; recommendations and messages exchanged among friends are more likely to resonate than those directly from a company."
"A goal for any site is to have a visitor login or register, becoming an engaged user and interacting more - making a purchase, posting content, etc. Once a user is engaged, make it easy for them to communicate back to the social networks of their choice without leaving your site," she continues. "Activity-based social publishing tools enable the user to perform this action from within the flow of your website experience. A user finds something of interest on your website and then calls it out to their community."
"The engaged user is an effective filter both for their community and your website. When a user decides to share information back to a social network, it is a win for their contacts and your organization," she concludes. "The circle of referral traffic begins. As the user shares their activity or content from your site to friends on a social network, the post from the initial engaged user drives traffic back to your site, some of whom will login and publish their own activities back to their networks, and so on. Many organizations leveraging this functionality are experiencing 6-25 new referral visitors for each social action a user shares with friends. As this cycle repeats, these organizations create a direct link to the social web and a sustaining stream of new referred visitors."
In another article, we compared the value of social interactions with content through social networks to comments on the content themselves. There is no question that the social networks can provide additional value.
Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management explains the reasoning behin this on the Inside AdWords blog: "Over the past year, we’ve been focused on investing in display advertising, and we’ve seen great momentum from the increasing number of you running display campaigns with Google. We've rolled out new features and targeting options and more precise measurement tools. To provide more places for you to run display ads, we’ve added more publisher sites (through Google AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange) to our ad network of over one million sites. Meanwhile, many of you have continued to run ads on YouTube and our own properties."
"The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites (apart from search sites), where you can buy ads through Google, including YouTube, Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, Blogger as well as over one million Web, video, gaming, and mobile display partners (our display partners include all of our AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partner sites that allow text and/or display ads)," he continues. "The Google Display Network offers all ad formats - text, image, rich media, and video ads - enabling you to unleash your creativity and engage potential customers across the Web."
Nothing has changed about the way advertisers run ads. AdWords bidding and reservations for YouTube and Google Finance, for example, will be the same.
Google says that in the coming weeks, you'll see a change in the AdWords interface that reflects the new Google Display Network brand.
"JanRain is helping these companies to garner traffic to their site via the social web," a representative for the company tells WebProNews. She also says Engage can let media companies "allow consumers to publish content back to the social networks, increasing the cycle of referral traffic, and capture important demographic data to improve the user experience."
"Traffic to your website from a social media platform is, by its very nature, more valuable than traffic from other sources," she adds. "People spend time on social networks for the purpose of sharing information with people they deem important. Trust is high among peers; recommendations and messages exchanged among friends are more likely to resonate than those directly from a company."
"A goal for any site is to have a visitor login or register, becoming an engaged user and interacting more - making a purchase, posting content, etc. Once a user is engaged, make it easy for them to communicate back to the social networks of their choice without leaving your site," she continues. "Activity-based social publishing tools enable the user to perform this action from within the flow of your website experience. A user finds something of interest on your website and then calls it out to their community."
"The engaged user is an effective filter both for their community and your website. When a user decides to share information back to a social network, it is a win for their contacts and your organization," she concludes. "The circle of referral traffic begins. As the user shares their activity or content from your site to friends on a social network, the post from the initial engaged user drives traffic back to your site, some of whom will login and publish their own activities back to their networks, and so on. Many organizations leveraging this functionality are experiencing 6-25 new referral visitors for each social action a user shares with friends. As this cycle repeats, these organizations create a direct link to the social web and a sustaining stream of new referred visitors."
In another article, we compared the value of social interactions with content through social networks to comments on the content themselves. There is no question that the social networks can provide additional value.
Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management explains the reasoning behin this on the Inside AdWords blog: "Over the past year, we’ve been focused on investing in display advertising, and we’ve seen great momentum from the increasing number of you running display campaigns with Google. We've rolled out new features and targeting options and more precise measurement tools. To provide more places for you to run display ads, we’ve added more publisher sites (through Google AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange) to our ad network of over one million sites. Meanwhile, many of you have continued to run ads on YouTube and our own properties."
"The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites (apart from search sites), where you can buy ads through Google, including YouTube, Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, Blogger as well as over one million Web, video, gaming, and mobile display partners (our display partners include all of our AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partner sites that allow text and/or display ads)," he continues. "The Google Display Network offers all ad formats - text, image, rich media, and video ads - enabling you to unleash your creativity and engage potential customers across the Web."
Nothing has changed about the way advertisers run ads. AdWords bidding and reservations for YouTube and Google Finance, for example, will be the same.
Google says that in the coming weeks, you'll see a change in the AdWords interface that reflects the new Google Display Network brand.
