Super Bowl Ads Were Short This Year: Here’s Why That Worked

Super Bowl Ads Were Short This Year: Here’s Why That Worked

Each year, it seems like most of the Super Bowl is consumed by ads. But this year, when the Super Bowl ended before 10:30 PM EST, some big-game party-goers wondered, “Were there fewer ads this year?” In reality, the game ended at a decent hour because the Kansas City Chiefs smoothly took down the San Francisco 49ers without entering overtime. Additionally, with over 50 commercials, this year’s Super Bowl aired more ads than the 2019 game — which only hosted 42 ads. However, in recent years, ads of 30-seconds or less have become the norm. So, although there were more ads this year, many of them were on the extremely-short […]

500 Atlassians Worked Remotely for a Week — Here’s What We Learned

500 Atlassians Worked Remotely for a Week — Here’s What We Learned

Like most companies, Atlassian has a mixture of people who are working from home full-time (like me) and those who grab an ad-hoc day when the plumber is coming or they can’t stop sneezing. But our collective WFH muscles got a major workout recently when 500 of us went remote during the week-long gap between moving out of one office space and into another. I talked to colleagues in several departments at Atlassian and dug into my own bag of tricks to bring you this collection of tips for working from home. And because working from home came with a few surprises, I’ll also share some little-known facts and a […]

The Power of “Is”: A Featured Snippet Case Study

The Power of “Is”: A Featured Snippet Case Study

I’m not a literary scholar, but I believe it was Hamlet that said “to have a featured snippet or not to have a featured snippet?” Ever since featured snippets came onto the scene, sites have been trying to secure them. My team and I wanted in on this craze. Throughout our journey of research, testing, failure, and success, we found some interesting pieces of information that we wanted to share with the community. I’ll walk you through what we did and show you some of our results (though can’t share traffic numbers). It was Britney Muller’s webinar on Feature Snippet Essentials and the release of the featured snippets cheat sheet […]

Video: Chris Elwell, CEO behind Search Engine Land and SMX, talks business — and that time Sergey Brin skated on stage

Video: Chris Elwell, CEO behind Search Engine Land and SMX, talks business — and that time Sergey Brin skated on stage

I thought it would be fun to sit down with the man who has helped form this industry. Chris Elwell made it financially feasible to run SEO and SEM events in our space. In 1999, he had the vision, along with Danny Sullivan (who will be the keynote at SMX Advanced in June) to try to put together a conference with like-minded search engine marketers, even before the space had a real name. Guess which tiny company had a table at that first event? Chris Elwell has a rich history in the publishing world, and he is the CEO of Third Door Media, the company behind Search Engine Land and […]

How Michael Bloomberg is Using Post-Click Automation to Try and Win the 2020 Election

How Michael Bloomberg is Using Post-Click Automation to Try and Win the 2020 Election

Political ads have been in full swing — both on TV and across the web — as candidates are vying for votes, hoping to make an impression, and inspire action that could change the course of future events. To be successful online, politicians’ campaigns must convey the same narrative from ad to post-click experience. That way, user expectations are met, and candidates establish trust and credibility with voters — two essential goals in politics. Since last week’s State of the Union address, you probably noticed candidates running ads in response and how they would solve each topic. Michael Bloomberg has been doing just that. How Michael Bloomberg uses segmented ads […]

Event Invitation Emails: How to Create One that Rocks

Event Invitation Emails: How to Create One that Rocks

Running a successful event can be stressful, especially when you have so much to coordinate, including the agenda, the venue, and the speakers Email event invitations, however, shouldn’t be stressful. If you’re struggling when deciding what to include in your email event invitation, consider what you’d like to see in an invite — probably information about the agenda, venue, and speakers, right? Answering the questions your audience will have about your event is a great place to start when writing an email invitation. The rest comes easily, as long as you consider good look at design, inclusive language, and personalization depending on your recipients. Event invitation emails are helpful because […]

Automatically manage exclusions with this bad placement cleaner script

Automatically manage exclusions with this bad placement cleaner script

Fighting bad placements in Google’s display network can be a daunting task for many. Especially when performance reviews and placement exclusions are done manually. But this account level script can lessen some of the pain points and help advertisers save money by automatically excluding bad placements. These are the problems the script is trying to solve: Exclusions of bad placements based on domain endings Exclusions of bad placements in standard display campaigns Exclusions of bad placements in video campaigns Exclusions of bad placements in mobile apps It sounds like a perfect script, right? Well, there are some limitations you should be aware of: Google Ads scripts cannot really modify any […]

Instagram is Testing a New Trimming Tool for Instagram Stories Clips

Instagram is Testing a New Trimming Tool for Instagram Stories Clips

Instagram is working on a new video trimming feature for Instagram Stories, which would make it easier to edit and upload your Stories clips within the app. As you can see in this example, uncovered by reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong, the new option would provide a video slider trimming tool built into Stories, which would function in the same way as similar video editing tools available on other platforms. In the creative options along the top of the first frame, a new editing icon has been added. Tap on that and you’ll be taken through to the second frame trimming process. The addition is fairly straight-forward, but it […]

How to Use Social Media to Market Your Event [Infographic]

How to Use Social Media to Market Your Event [Infographic]

These days, if you’re marketing an event, social media is really a must-have element, enabling broader awareness, connection and engagement, across a range of streams. You can use Facebook and LinkedIn to create dedicated event pages, Twitter and Facebook Live to stream specific elements and reach an even wider audience, and Instagram, and even Messenger, to re-cap and keep in touch following the function. And from these, you can glean powerful business connections, further boosting brand awareness, and increasing your capacity to close more deals as a result. The benefits of social media connection in and around events are significant. It’s worth considering how you can incorporate social into your […]