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Archive for the ‘Search Marketing’ Category
Qualifying Your Investment In Advertising
April 2, 2010A Bold Prediction?
April 1, 2010I noticed the following ad this evening while scanning my inbox.
What caught my eye was the ad’s headline: “Social is the Next Search”
Social Is The Next Search
Predicting that “Social is the Next Search” is quite a bold statement.
I am going to make a bold prediction myself: “Social is not the next search.”
Business Owners: Why Is This The Single Most Important Page On The Web?
March 31, 2010Most businesses think their homepage is the single most important page on the web and rightfully so.
However, for any business other than those with a well established offline brand and a corresponding branded domain name, such is not the case.
The Single Most Important Place On The Web
Why?
What happens to those businesses without well established brands who’s prospects or customers don’t know exactly where to find them online?
They first ask for directions from Google, the single most important page on the web.
Twitter Tweaking Home Page
March 30, 2010Twitter is tweaking its home page to generate more interest in both the Twitter property and its users data streams.
From the Twitter blog:
Twitter’s homepage is a work-in-progress. Today, we’re testing a new design that bubbles up more of the information flowing through Twitter. This builds on a series of changes starting last year when we redesigned the homepage to make search and trending topics more visible and easily accessible to everyone. With that version, we brought the power of search.twitter.com to the homepage and let people explore the value of Twitter without an account.
With the new design, we’re intentionally featuring more dynamic content on the front page, revealing a sample of who’s here, what folks are tweeting about, and the big topics that they’re discussing. The homepage now features a set of algorithmically-selected top tweets that automatically appear every few seconds. It also highlights a random sampling of suggested sources; hover over any of them to see a profile summary and their latest tweet. Trending topics now scroll across the page, allowing us to present a large set of trends using little page real estate. Hovering over some of these trends will show a description explaining why the keyword is (or has recently been) popular.
All of our recent changes embrace the notion that Twitter is not just for status updates anymore. It’s a network where information is exchanged and consumed at a rapid clip every second of the day. With so much being shared, we know that there’s something of value for everyone. People who internalize the value of Twitter understand the power of this simple medium. But it hasn’t been easy to make that value transparent or obvious for curious folks coming to Twitter for the first time.
We’ll be monitoring the data on this homepage design, and how its effects ripple out to other areas. Expect us to continually try new ideas that help users more easily discover who and what they can find on Twitter, and how they can personalize and filter the stream of rapidly flowing information.
While these tweaks obviously increase the Twitter site’s usefulness, whether or not these improvements increase their site’s web traffic and stickiness remains to be seen.
Twitter Traffic
Top 10 News and Current Events Sites February 2010
March 29, 2010From the Nielsen Company’s NetView and MarketingCharts.com.
Top 10 News and Current Event Sites February 2010
Audience size notwithstanding, if news were transactional for its publishers and advertisers, the future of the news business wouldn’t remain in doubt.
Surprising Social Site Usage Patterns
March 28, 2010I was somewhat surprised to learn nearly one-half of social site users check their statuses while in bed.
Social Site Usage
From eMarketer:
It may seem extreme, but users who can’t resist checking Facebook and Twitter in the middle of the night are not alone. According to the March 2010 “Gadgetology Report” from consumer electronics site Retrevo, 48% of social media users log in to the sites either during the night or as soon as they wake up.
Users under 25 were more likely to check or update their social network status after bedtime, with nearly one-fifth saying they did so anytime they woke up during the night.
Almost as many younger users (18%) checked the sites in the morning before getting out of bed, while 17% of respondents of all ages turned to Facebook and Twitter before TV in the morning. iPhone users were notably more likely than average to do each of these activities, with 23% saying it was how they got their morning news compared with 16% of all social media users.
Depending on how you look at this either social site users are either a group of highly disciplined of people or they are a group of highly undisciplined people.
Anyone have an idea how many man hours are spent each day in the U.S. on social networking sites?
Have any studies shown any correlation between social networking site usage and productivity or the lack thereof?
Add A Location To Your Tweets – No Thanks
March 17, 2010I declined to add my location to my Tweets by clicking – No thanks.
Twitter Turn On Location
My question is – will I continue to be presented with a pop-up box every time I log on to Twitter via the web after now having “opted” not to provide my location?
Marketing ROI: Getting Marketers Attention
March 12, 2010From eMarketer:
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.
Microsoft adCenter Desktop Beta
March 11, 2010I 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.
Google Adwords Conversion Optimizer Now Allows Target CPA Bidding
March 10, 2010I 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.
Search Marketing Communications 
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