What were marketers reading to stay on top of their business game in 2017? Because we at Google like numbers, we decided to take a data-driven approach to answering that question. So here are the results: the 10 most-read articles on Think with Google this past year.
1. In a mobile world, time is money. Here’s how to get more of both
It takes on average 22 seconds for a mobile landing page to fully load. By that point, most people have given up. In fact, 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load.
What’s slowing down these pages? And more importantly, can they be better optimized? Those are the questions we sought to answer when we analyzed 900,000 mobile ad landing pages from across 126 countries.
Read the full piece.
2. It’s time to get to know Generation Z
Move over millennials, marketers have a new sweetheart: Generation Z.
In one of our most-read pieces of the year, we partnered with Ipsos to find out more about this generation’s behaviors, tastes, and wants.
Read the full piece.
3. Four things you need to know about the future of marketing
What forces, trends, and technologies are transforming the world of marketing? At this year’s Google Marketing Next event, industry leaders shared four predictions based on the changes they’re seeing today.
According to these experts, the future of marketing is voice-assisted, mobile-first, omnichannel, and hyper-personalized.
Read the full piece.
4. Three new consumer behaviors playing out in Google search data
Every year there are trillions of searches on Google, and this data can teach us a lot about consumer behavior.
Here are three things we learned from it in 2017: Customers are turning to their mobile phones for advice before making purchase decisions (even more than in the past); they increasingly expect contextually relevant search responses; and they won’t wait for answers.
Read the full piece.
5. Marketing to millennial parents? Here’s what you need to know
Throw out all the millennial stereotypes. As the eldest of this much-misunderstood generation approach 40, and many of them now have children, we thought it was time to debunk some commonly held myths.
Read the full piece.
6. Creativity in constraint: telling your brand’s story in six seconds
How do you take everything you want to say about your brand and condense it into one six-second ad? More importantly, how do you do that in a way that grabs people’s attention and leaves them desperate to find out more?
We spoke with eight marketers to get their tips for handling creativity in constraint.
Read the full piece.
7. What your brand can learn from L’Oréal’s digital transformation
When you’ve been around for over 100 years, it can be tough staying ahead of the competition. Not so for L’Oréal, which reinvented the way it does marketing for the digital age.
The CMO of the world’s largest cosmetic company explains how they did it.
Read the full piece.
8. Why every marketer needs a quarterly failure report
Creating a culture of growth should rank at the top of all good marketers’ list of priorities. But what’s the best way of going about it?
Casey Carey, director of Google Analytics Marketing, recommends a slightly counterintuitive approach: celebrating failure.
Read the full piece.
9. Ad effectiveness is about much more than reach
Big numbers are one thing. But what marketers really want to know is if those big numbers translate into results.
That’s why we worked with Ipsos to figure out how many people who view ads actually pay attention to them.
Read the full piece.
10. Why expectations for ‘right now’ are on the rise
Search interest in ”open now” has tripled in the past two years—proof that the impatient consumer is making decisions faster than ever before and expecting to act on those decisions instantly.
Searches for ‘open now’ are on the rise
We dug into the data to better understand how marketers can adapt to this changing consumer behavior.
Read the full piece.
