Prepping For The Holiday Lag; Facebook Ad Updates (Again)

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Prepping For The Holiday Lag

Holiday shopping and spending is projected to decrease again this year, according to The New York Times’ Stuart Elliott, so some stores are ramping up efforts to gain foot traffic. Two examples are Premium Outlets in Roseland, NJ, and Toys R Us, which are hoping that running ad campaigns earlier and offering shoppers more flexible hours and more frequent deals will boost sales this season. The companies are also making social media a bigger part of their campaigns, and Premium Outlets plans to implement flash sales. Read more. Programmatic opportunity, too?

Facebook Ad Updates (Again)

Facebook is on a roll with ad updates, this time with a new method for buying mobile app ads. Now, businesses can bid on cost per action (CPA), which Facebook claims is more cost effective than CPC bidding. The company also announced the ability to use video in news feeds to promote app installs, allowing potential customers to watch a video about the app before installing. Read more. Facebook is also cozying up to publishers by offering a new “Stories to Share” feature on media pages. The new feature will give publishers a glimpse at what they haven’t shared from their website yet, along with a button to do so directly from their Facebook page.

Creative Tech

PandoDaily highlights the competition created by the launch of Google’s new “Ready Image Ads” to display ad-tech firm PaperG. PaperG’s co-founder, Roger Lee, tells Pando, “We’ve seen a trend of companies realizing that creative is the major barrier to display advertising. Google entering the space is a testament to the growing strategic importance of ad creation, since it’s the starting point for all ad campaigns and where the dollars flow.” Read more.

Re-couponing

Coupons are regaining traction and going mobile, according to revised numbers from eMarketer. The original projection for the number of people who will redeem coupons was 4.6%, but the new number is 11%. Tablets are also being included for the first time, given that shopping is one of the most popular activities for tablet users. From the article: “We expect … one-third of all smartphone users ages 18 and older, or 42.1 million people, to use a coupon obtained via app, mobile internet, mobile barcode or SMS this year.” Read more.

Ratings Online

With measurement firm Nielsen’s Q3 earnings report coming on Wednesday, Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser takes a look at the measurement firm’s Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) product, which aspires to bringing TV budget online. Wieser says there’s traction, BUT: “Issues limiting OCR include absence on Google’s YouTube, the absence of Facebook data on children under the age of 13 — reducing the perceived quality of measurement on kids’ Web properties — and challenges integrating online and offline measurement given the differences in the composition of the panels used today.”

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The Tablet Grail

Magazine publishers may have hoped tablets would be the cure for their digital age woes, but Adweek’s Lucia Moses reports some bleak statistics about tablet use from the Magazine Publishers Association. Aggregated news apps are a growing trend, and now 97% of those apps are free, meaning people aren’t spending time in any one magazine app. Read more.

Mobile Analytics

Yandex is bringing its free Web analytics tool to mobile, the company announced. The product, called Yandex.Metrica for Apps, creates customized reports, provides real-time information, offers crash reports and will work on any platform. The company is also working on a complementary marketing tool, which will give developers data such as traffic sources and funnels. Read.the.release.

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