US marketing executives were much more optimistic about the economic outlook in February 2010 than they were the year before, when the recession was in full swing, and many were planning to increase budgets, according to the “Marketing Trends Report 2010” from Anderson Analytics and the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG). But they have become even more focused on getting a good return on their marketing investments.
Anderson and MENG found that “marketing ROI” had jumped to become the most important trend to marketing executives. Social media cracked the top 10 this year, when 72% of respondents were planning a social strategy. The two concepts were also key when combined: Social media ROI was an important buzzword for 36% of executives.
Marketing ROI
If you sell to marketers, embedding Marketing ROI in your argument is guaranteed to get their attention.
I received the following email today regarding the recent upgrades to the Microsoft adCenter Desktop.
Microsoft Adcenter Desktop
Microsoft says its recent improvements to the adCenter Desktop make it faster and easier to make bulk changes to adCenter accounts.
The latest version of Microsoft adCenter Desktop includes:
A clearer, easier-to-understand user interface.
Faster campaign importing from other search engines.
Targeting via importing and exporting
I haven’t yet had an opportunity to try out their latest advertising account management tool in my Microsoft accounts.
Microsoft adCenter Desktop Beta
Whether or not these recent account management improvements will make managing search advertising accounts in a Bing driven Yahoo search environment remains to be seen.
I just now noticed the following message in one of my Google Adwords accounts:
Target CPA Bidding
Clicking to learn more about Target CPA bidding produced the following Google Adwords help page:
With the Bid Type advanced option, you can select the method that suits you best when setting your Conversion Optimizer bids.
Max CPA
With this option, which was previously the only option offered with Conversion Optimizer, you set bids using a Max CPA. This amount represents the most you would want to pay for any individual conversion. The way a Max CPA bid works is similar to the way a maximum CPC bid works. If you set a maximum CPA bid of $5, for example, the actual average CPA is likely to be somewhat less, such as $3. Likewise, a maximum CPC bid of $0.50 may result in an average CPC of $0.30.
Target CPA
This new option allows you to bid based on the average amount you would like to pay for a conversion. For example, if you want to achieve an average CPA of $25, you could use this option and set your bid to be $25. Advertisers with CPA targets they would like to reach may prefer to use Target CPA so they can specify those goals directly.
To change your bid type to Target CPA, please follow these instructions:
Select the Settings tab from within your Campaigns tab.
Under the “Bidding and budget” section, click “Edit” to change your bidding option.
Select the “Target CPA” option and click “Save” to finish.
Although I haven’t yet bested my own performance using Conversion Optimizer, allowing Target CPA bidding should help those Adwords Advertisers who are using it to better manage their acquisition costs.
I saw this ad today for Facebook.com in a Google search result for advertising.
Reach The Exact Audience You Want With Targeted Ads
Any search marketer who has successfully sold paid search to clients should be able to spot how Facebook’s argument for advertising on their site is fundamentally flawed.
Although digital, advertising on Facebook is still display advertising.
New SEO salesman are similar to other media sales people particularly those who are new to the business.
Traditional media sales people often canvas other media’s advertisers in an attempt to generate leads for their media offer over the advertiser’s existing media advertising preference.
New SEO “media” salesman often take a page from their traditional media contemporaries with one notable exception – they don’t canvass other media for prospects – they look for prospects in of all places – search engines!
The problem with this strategy is that unless the prospector drills down beyond the fifth or six page of results for a particular query, they end up contacting a business who already knows enough about search engine placement to be visible in search results to begin with!
This results in the SEO salesperson contacting prospects usually via their “contact us” form who are most likely not in the market for their services because their site is already present in search engine results pages.
SEO Comments
Although the SEO salesman in the example above may claim use of white hat tactics for getting a website on the first page of Google, he obviously isn’t aware his hat is also pointy.
Yahoo Search Marketing has created an offline tool that enables advertisers with multiple campaigns to easily create and manage their Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts.
The Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop tool offers simpler and quicker campaign management than bulk sheets or the Sponsored Search interface.
Yahoo Search Marketing Desktop
I have downloaded Yahoo’s new search marketing desktop tool and will report any discoveries I make at TimothyCohn.com.
Search Marketing Desktop
I for one am glad to see Yahoo finally get this type of tool into the hands of Yahoo advertisers who are already used to managing bulk campaign tasks in a similar manner in Google.
comScore released a study today on social networking access via mobile browsers.
comScore’s study found that 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up 8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago.
Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347-percent jump.
Number Of Mobile Subscribers Accessing Social Media Sites
However, the growth in mobile access of social networking sites trend appears to have missed MySpace.com which instead saw a 7% drop in its mobile visitors during the same time period.
Why isn’t the MySpace audience making the leap to mobile?
Search Marketing Communications 
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