Net Briefs - March 2018 Edition

Website Magazine's 'Net Briefs highlight some of the most interesting developments for digital pro's.

MARKETING NEWS BRIEFS

Personalization Matters

For the second year in a row, Monetate found a direct link between profi tability and personalization, with more than 70 percent of those who experienced profi tability increases in the last 12 months indicating they have a documented personalization strategy in place, compared to fewer than 20 percent for those with decreased profi tability. Monetate's study also revealed that organizations that exceeded revenue goals also had personalization in place across disciplines including marketing, ecommerce and IT. Further Reading: Page-level Personalization In Focus - wsm.co/pagepersonal

Can Facebook Beat Google?

Facebook continues to narrow the gap on Google's lead in digital advertising thanks in part to the growth of Instagram and video ads according to recent research from Cowen, but is it enough to actually take that lead away? Cowen analysts, surveying some 50 senior ad buyers, suggested that Facebook and Instagram ad budgets will increase in 2018 and 2019, and budgets for Google ads will actually decline slightly. That does not necessarily indicate that this is the end for Google, but it does show that advertisers are ready and willing to spread their budgets around now more than ever. Further Reading: Ad Engagement Explodes in Q4 2018 - wsm.co/adexplosion

Here Comes the Dot PR

Domain registry operator Afi lias will provide the technical services and infrastructure necessary to support Puerto Rico's country code top level domain (ccTLD) on the Internet, .PR. The .PR domain/ extension is unrestricted, so it is a natural fi t for public relations agencies and practitioners worldwide. It also makes sense for those doing business in Puerto Rico. Further Reading: 101 Fascinating Domain Name Facts - wsm.co/101domainfacts

TECHNOLOGY NEWS BRIEFS

Who's Who on the Top 100 Software Companies

Along with technical analysis, customer feedback is a good source to turn to when scouting software options. Review site G2 Crowd has released its list of the top 100 software companies (based on user reviews at its platform) with Slack, Shopify, Google, Mailchimp, Salesforce, WordPress, Survey- Monkey, Adobe, Zoom Video Communications and HubSpot included in the top 10, in order. "We were not surprised to see some of the top brands like Slack and Google among the top companies on the list," G2 Crowd Chief Crowd Officer, Ryan Bonnici, told Website Magazine. "We see those very strong reviews coming in regularly, but it was really cool to see some of the smaller businesses, like 15five starting to run with the big brands. It's really exciting to see who the up-and-coming companies are from the eyes of the customers."

Fewer Merchants Want Bitcoin

Despite being the first major payments company to support Bitcoin payments, Stripe announced it is "winding down support for Bitcoin payments." Stripe will stop processing Bitcoin transactions on April 23, 2018 citing Bitcoin becoming less useful for payments as the reason. Transaction confirmation times, for example, have reportedly risen substantially and the fluctuations in Bitcoin price can cause the "wrong" amount by the time transactions are complete. For these reasons, Stripe indicates the number of customers interested in accepting Bitcoin has decreased. The company did say, however, it is optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall.

Further Reading: Make the Blockchain Useful

The End of Website Tagging As You Know It?

Web workers could soon find themselves with more time. ContentSquare, a UX analytics platform, announced the launch of Auto-Zone, which could eliminate the need to manually place unique tags on individual page elements before they can answer related customer journey questions.

Further Reading: Tagging with Google Tag Manager

MOVERS & SHAKERS

+ SheerID announced the close of an $18 million Series B investment round led by Silicon Valley and New York-based investment fi rm, Centana Growth Partners. SheerID is a thirdparty verifi cation platform for brands off ering special group discounts - such as military, teachers and students - to avoid fraud and reduce friction in the redemption process. By the end of 2017, the company experienced 112 percent year over year growth and added new customers such as Target, Lowe's, Adobe, TOMS and Sprint.

+ GoDaddy Inc., announced it has entered into a defi nitive agreement to acquire do-it-for-me social media platform Main Street Hub for approximately $125 million in cash plus up to $50 million in potential future earnouts.

+ Deloitte announced an investment in cloud management services by acquiring assets of ATADATA, an Atlanta-based provider of a cloud platform that maps, migrates and manages workloads in any combination of on-premise and cloud environments to support enterprise operations.