Growth Hacking – The New Buzz Word in the Online Marketing Industry
While everybody in the online marketing industry seems to be talking about growth hackers, not many seem to understand who or what exactly they are.
While everybody in the online marketing industry seems to be talking about growth hackers, not many seem to understand who or what exactly they are.
The United States Federal Trade Commission or FTC decided to drop its plans of slapping Google with an antitrust lawsuit in the beginning of this month. Google is wasting no time and is taking this as a green signal to aggressively pursue the development of Google 2.0. Google 2.0 will transform the Google search engine into an answer engine being able to answer users’ questions instead of just returning results that match the typed keywords.
Facebook users have come to expect changes in the social networking site whether they like it or not. Even though Facebook has received immense backlash for most of their changes, they continue to tweak the website to enhance the user experience of the website. Most of us have barely gotten used to the Facebook Timeline, but be prepared to encounter further changes to the Timeline.
The digital era has completely revolutionized advertising. People nowadays have access to so much information so easily that they are very well informed and very opinionated. Discriminatory and false advertising techniques that used to be so effective in the 1960s cannot be used these days. Backlash against controversial advertising is so common that Creative Directors have to be very cautious.
Seth Godin, famed entrepreneur and public speaker, answers this question – What do we do every day? According to Seth, individuals try to change things in their lives. Regardless of the fact that every person is different, most of us try to change something that bothers us or we think needs to be changed. We try to take necessary steps towards a permanent change. As Seth says, this fact has not been acknowledged and has gone unnoticed.
It’s no surprise that Google is closing in on 70% of all searches conducted in America. Last month, reports indicated that Google had broken its previous record and had managed to capture more than 66.9% of all US searches. This December, the numbers have moved up by 0.1%, which now means that 67% of all searches conducted in the US were via Google. Most experts agree that in no time the market share captured by the search engine will reach 70%.
We can upload and search for information so easily on the internet that we barely take the time to stop and think how search engines have changed the world. Do you remember a time when you had to go to the public library if you wanted to know something? Knowledge and information can be found at the click of the button. We can even access information on websites through cell phones. Never before have we been so connected.
Google’s tremendous advertising revenues have left a bitter taste in the mouths of its competitors. The strong hold that it has on the Internet may have inspired various dictionary publications to legitimize the word “google” as a verb but this monopoly that the search engine giant enjoys is not only worrying but angering other companies.
You may have heard that the Google search engine favors web pages that are updated regularly. So is it true that the search engine giant increases the search result rankings of pages that have “fresh” content? Company pages do not need updated content and there are some topics on which people cannot create new content without repeating old information. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, explains why you should not worry about the freshness factor and how this factor only affects the ranking only for some queries.
In the hopes of becoming the number one search engine in developing countries, Google is slowly launching its service across various countries allowing people to access its web pages even with low bandwidths. Developing countries like the Philippines, Brazil, India, etc. have huge populations with most of the people being very tech savvy. However, these countries lack advanced network infrastructures, limiting the internet bandwidths available to the masses. Google just launched a service known as Free Zone that allows people to access the Web, including Google Ads, from basic hand-held devices. This service aims to capture the burgeoning market in these developing countries amounting to billions of people.
Google has redesigned the search results page and officially announced this change on their blog earlier today. After extensive changes to its website ranking algorithms, which changed the search results, this new change transforms the way these results are displayed. The new design has only been rolled out to the U.S. version of the website and the search giant is planning on releasing this new design to all its localized web pages in a few months.
This may sound shocking but may soon become reality. The French government is considering bringing a new bill into action that will force the search engine giant to pay for the links of newspapers that it displays in online searches. Google has claimed that if this new bill is passed, it could threaten the very existence of the company.