Google sets up live carousels for brands

There has been a lot of talk recently about digital companies creating publishing platforms to host third-party content. Content24 has picked up on this theme – and it is Google’s turn in the spotlight. Plus we look at the rise in content marketing budgets and an elephant in the room…

Google launches live blog carousel

Google has come up with a way for publishers to create real-time blog updates.

The development, which seems largely targeted at smartphone users, consists of a carousel at the top of your search results that updates itself with the latest news. So far it has been trialed by publications including the Guardian and Take, for example, a search query for this week’s England-France friendly.

In addition to the regular search results, the carousel at the top showed updates At the same time, Google has signed a deal with content marketing software company ScribbleLive to provide the carousel service for brands. It will do this by hosting branded “Live Blog” content on its own platform, which Google will Then the reader will be redirected back to the brand’s site, albeit on the ScribbleLive platform.

Creating live content will put you straight at the top of the page. However, the downside is the updates themselves can arguably be read without the need to click through to the original page.

Content marketing budgets rise, but there’s a but…

The rise in B2B content marketing budgets has been a long-term trend, regularly borne out by research. However, the same analysis has tended to show that companies are unsure what they are getting in return for their outlay.

US marketing company KoMarketing estimates that firms will have spent around $100 billion on worldwide B2B content by the end of the year. However, it found around 25 per cent of respondents were unsure how effective this has been.

There were also challenges in terms of visibility and targeting audiences.

The need to establish measurements for content marketing ROI is an important challenge for the industry. Things are good at the moment, but if marketing budgets get cut then answers will need to be found.