Friday, December 26, 2014

2015 Predictions by Search Experts

Whether you’re a prognosticator or a prediction believer, visions of the future are spellbinding. In digital marketing, and paid search specifically, the experts can see the playing field for miles and tell the rest of us what they see coming our way. We interviewed a number of search marketing experts to get their take on what 2015 holds for us.

1. We’ll Finally Have a Different Mobile Conversation: More Mobile-Friendly Please

First, we can finally stop telling advertisers they need to be using mobile:
"I hope we move away from having to tell advertisers to invest in mobile. Those who aren’t providing a good mobile experience for their visitors will be left behind, plain and simple." - Melissa Mackey (@mel66), Gyro
"We’ll finally be moving away from the tired reminders of the importance of mobile. By now, I think we are aware that a lot of people use smartphones to search for things!" - Andrew Goodman (@andrew_goodman), PageZero Media
"In 2015, mobile PPC will go mainstream because advertisers will start to see mobile traffic increases and perhaps desktop decreases as the query shares continue to shift." - Lisa Raehsler (@lisarocksSEM), Big Click Co.
But…
"Advertisers will be playing catch-up to capitalize on the huge surge in mobile searches and traffic." - David Szetela (@Szetela), FMB Media
And…
"Obstacles will be removed for advertisers that don’t have the development resources or mobile-friendly sites through additional tools like Shopify, where the transaction and presentation of product info might happen off the main site domain." - Elizabeth Marsten (@ebkendo) , Portent
"Even if your IT department tells you your site is mobile-friendly, test out your homepage and a few internal pages to make sure it works well – you’ll often find surprises like the pop-over that is impossible to close or videos that autoplay." - Jen Slegg (@jenstar), The SEMPost

2. Focus on Audience: Across Devices and With New Ads

"One of the big trends is audience marketing and audience targeting. Everything we’re doing is about understanding intent. It’s all about audience – understanding more and more about them and delivering more relevant messages. The areas of display and search are going to become very gray and come together in terms of how you think about buying search and display, and retargeting across all those audiences." – Steve Sirich, general manager, Bing Ads Product Marketing
"Ads will continue to evolve to be more interactive and engaging. Ads aren’t just about the message anymore, but rather how much space they can occupy and how aesthetically pleasing they look. Additional features will be put in place to enhance the standard ad in order to garner more clicks and provide users with a more pleasing search experience." – Matt Umbro (@Matt_Umbro), Hanapin Marketing
"Cross-device tracking is going to be huge in 2015. Bing’s launch of University Event Tracking is a harbinger of the importance of tracking across multiple devices, delivering a user experience customized to the individual, rather than to a device or browser session." – Melissa Mackey (@mel66), Gyro
"The hot play going into 2015 is going to be video advertising, and specifically mobile video advertising. However, in order for content marketing to be effective it has to be customer-centric and data-driven." – Bryan Eisenberg (@TheGrok), writer and speaker
"We’ll see shopping directly in the SERP with Bing and Google, instead of going to a vendor site. Our crazy instant gratification needs will be met and we’re going to get strangely comfortable with buying through platforms that are not the vendor’s site, like SERPs, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest." – Elizabeth Marsten (@ebkendo), Portent

Source url : http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opinion/2387628/the-search-experts-have-spoken-2015-predictions