Google Beta Testing New Tracking; King.com's Huge Valuation

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Testing Cross Channel

Google is testing a new cross-device targeting option with advertisers geared to brand sites with more than 100,000 visitors, AdAge reports. Google drops a tag on the brand’s site which can then be matched across devices. “We’re always running experiments with our agency partners. This small trial started last year, testing a way for marketers to reach their customers across devices using their own customer data,” said a Google spokesperson. Read on.

IPO King

Mobile game developer, King.com, looks to raise up to $532.8 million in its IPO, according to The New York Times. That puts the company’s valuation at $7.6 billion, with a lot of that success owed to the franchise’s widely popular Candy Crush Saga game. The company’s closest competitor, Zynga, has struggled since its IPO in 2011. Read more.

Track Block

Adblock Plus now blocks 8,600 trackers, which allow advertisers to target users across the web. The company is known for its popular browser extension that blocks ads from 90% of advertisers (it claims 10% of advertisers are on its whitelist). “We don’t think all tracking is bad – it can actually be useful if done transparently; but we do think you should have a robust block list if you want to get rid of it,” Adblock Plus’s CEO and co-founder, Till Faida, told TechCrunch. Read the rest.

Tweaking Twitter

Twitter is beta testing a click-to-call button, in a play to connect to local ad markets. By modifying the app, Twitter hopes to “generate leads, drive app download, collect consumer’s email addresses and induce incoming calls from customers,” VP of global online sales Richard Alfonsi told Digiday. Services such as Google Maps and Yelp already employ a similar feature, one that connects users directly to advertisers, but the decision for Twitter comes in the wake of a decrease in ad revenue at the end of last year. Read more.

The Content Strategy

Yahoo’s CMO Kathy Savitt hopes the company’s focus on content will pay off in the long run as more sites are redesigned for the modern user. Examples include Yahoo’s food and tech sites, which reflect this new “digital magazine idea” that Savitt explained to Adweek. Although Marissa Mayer has made leaps and bounds in hiring and mobile development, ad revenues remain elusive. Read the rest.

Mobile Marketing In China

Mobile usage in China may be soaring, but that doesn’t necessarily bode well for all app developers, according to new Forrester research. Analyst Xiaofeng Wang found that mobile users in China prefer social and messaging apps that are light on data, due to slow speeds and poor infrastructure. A suggestion is for marketers to work with well established messaging and social apps that have a large user base. Read the release.

You’re Hired!