Business Critical: Flexible Conversions, Algorithm Changes, Same-Day Delivery
By Ryan Parlee
Business Critical is our weekly collection of what’s new, exciting, and insightful for business leaders from the world of the web, marketing, social media, and more.
AdWords Makes Conversion Count More Flexible
This week, Google AdWords reconfigured their conversion counting process to allow more flexibility in how you track and attribute conversions from CPC ads.
The new system allows you to see both a total count of all conversions from ad clicks, plus a one-time count of converted clicks which allows you to group all conversions generated by a single click.
How it works is probably best explained by this video:
Learn more about this change on the AdWords blog.
Bitcoin Site Goes Bust (on one Site)
No one is quite sure what happened to Mt.Gox, one of the world’s largest bitcoin sites, this week. But, the site was taken offline. And, that’s made some people pretty scared and angry as speculation has swirled that the site may have been victim to a major hack. The site housed some $300 million worth of the virtual currency for their members.
While this may not be a death blow to Bitcoin all together, it does raise major concerns about the stability of anonymous, online crypto-currency. After the digital dollars exploded in popularity over the last few months, they may prove to be just a short-term investment if they continue to be mired with such explosive technical issues.
CNN Money reported on the Mt.Gox meltdown.
Facebook’s Algorithm Fans Out
Ready for the wave of coattail riding?
Facebook made a change to their post algorithm this week that makes it possible for pages to post content that will be shown to audiences that are not their fans on the site. Tagging other pages in a post will lead to some of the other page’s fans seeing the post in their timeline.
The social media site says this isn’t a free for all and who sees these post-throughs will be based on how similar the audiences are between the two pages involved. While this is a great way for brands to interact with audiences that have a clear overlap, be wary of abuse that will appear like spam and erode consumer trust.
Marketing Land explained how the change can be used by marketers.
Same-day Drones Imminent
There was quite a bit of scoffing when Amazon’s Jeff Bezos first laid the vision for air drone delivery. But, it’s not just some pipe dream.
Inc profiled three companies this week that are competing to bring same-day drone delivery to retailers around the world. Their businesses aren’t a work of science fiction either; advances in technology have made this not only feasible, but much more attainable and cheaper than previously expected.
This creates a number of potential opportunities for all types of retails, but it also poses major threats to existing business models. Should we expect to see drones dropping off packages next week? Probably not. But, don’t be surprised if it’s a common occurrence in the not-too-distant future.
Inc’s write up on same-day delivery biz.
