Accelerating our Wildfire Integration

In 2012, Wildfire joined Google with the aim of helping businesses improve their digital marketing across all channels, including social marketing. Together, our goal has been to help marketers bring together insights from their social campaigns alongside insights from the rest of their digital marketing. Last June, we took an important first step towards this goal by starting to build Wildfire technology right into our ad technology platforms. 

To help accelerate this, we’ve decided to dedicate our resources to this integration. The Wildfire Social Marketing Suite, which helps businesses manage their posts and content on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest, will continue to be supported, but further investments will be limited: we won’t be building new features or signing up new customers. Our focus will be on integrating Wildfire's technology with our ad technology platform and building new features that enable marketers to use social insights to improve their marketing campaigns.

With this increased focus, we think we can better help marketers get the most from their digital campaigns. Our teams are looking forward to working with our customers to make that happen.

-- Victoria Ransom, Product Management Director

read more...

How Large Brands Measure the Value of Social [Google Infographic]

Social has morphed rapidly over the last several years, yet sustaining engagement with social audiences continues to be a top priority for marketers, and it remains the key metric of social success. In the second infographic of our Wildfire by Google State of Social infographic series (based on exclusive research in partnership with Ad Age), we reveal the top expectations and challenges for brands in social and how they are measuring social’s value. For example:

• 42% of brands say the #1 impact of social is increased engagement (24/7 customer interaction is a distant second at 12%).
• 90% of brands agree that it’s crucial to integrate social into their other digital media initiatives.
• 57% of companies say content shares are the most important social metric, but conversion impact is closing the gap at 54%.

What are your brand’s top expectations for social and which metric leads in measuring social success? Please share your perspective with us in the comments.

INFOGRAPHIC #2

read more...