A large B2B Industrial Supplier approached us several years ago wanting to increase the effectiveness of their PPC campaigns. At the time, the PPC campaign and budget was smaller with significant opportunity for growth. The available inventory for the campaign was 16 times what the budget was able to effectively cover. At the time, the organization was very apprehensive with the investment into SEM and digital advertising; however, would be willing to increase budgets providing that success could be proven.
Whether you have been in the Search industry for six months or six years, we all understand the value of keyword research. Simply put, the activity of search begins with a keyword query. As a user, you type a series of words or phrases into a Search bar (regardless of which engine you use) to find information. Typically you are looking for information or for an answer to a problem or question that you may have. Search engines then do their best to return the results that they deem most relevant to your keyword query. (On a side note, anyone else think it is funny that when you search for the word “search” in Google that the top result you get is for Bing?)
Twitter has taken steps to significantly improve the relevancy of its advertising platform by introducing keyword targeting. Advertisers were historically able to target by interests, gender, device and geography, which allowed for more branding-based advertising programs. With the new targeting by keyword, in addition to the aforementioned targeting capabilities, Twitter has now introduced contextual relevancy into the equation.
Sitelinks and Call Extensions have long been used as tools to boost the performance of AdWords paid search campaigns for advertisers targeting at the local level. They offer the ability for your ad to do more, whether it is linking to the latest special offers on your site, giving directions, or making it easier for potential customers to get in touch with their nearest store location. Along with the upgrades to bid management and location targeting that came with the launch of Enhanced Campaigns, Google has also launched a series of updates and new features to Sitelinks and Call Extensions that will provide major benefits to advertisers targeting at the local level.
In a move that many saw coming, Facebook has announced its plans to start allowing real-time, biddable, targeted ads within the news feed; a move welcomed by many marketers. The News Feed is where people spend the most amount of time than any other part of Facebook. Up until this point, advertisers have been relegated to the right side of the page where ads certainly attract less attention. Advertisers have long known that click through rate on Facebook ads pales in comparison against the click through rates of other major search engines. The move to include the ads within the news feed will improve ads’ visibility and improve click through rates. Some experts believe that the move to include ads within the news Feed will increase the ads response rate by 10 to 50 times that of right rail ads. Facebook is also expecting that the targeted ads within the News Feeds should improve the relevancy of ads for people.
For many webmasters, link building has been a numbers game. The more links a website has, the better. Whole industries were built around this idea. You can buy links in bulk and there are several tools that automatically created hundreds of backlinks through low quality links from forums or blog comments.
Since Google's recent updates, even the most ignorant webmaster should have understood that this is not the way link building works. Google hates these artificial backlinks and you can even get your website in trouble if you use tools and services that automatically create backlinks to your site.
It's the quality of the backlinks that matters, not the quantity. When you try to get new backlinks to your website, consider the following:
Firefox’s recent press release on blocking the cookies triggered a lot of conversation amongst data advertising advocates. A lot of data advertising scholars started questioning how this initiation would impact audience targeting. A number of them got concerned if other browsers would go down the same road. A few started exploring a non-cookie targeting techniques. And everyone was exploring various ways to measure its impact on their business.
Although (today!) the entire idea of data advertising and audience targeting is shaped around collections of cookies, and therefore the latest Firefox’s announcement could be a huge hurdle along the way, there are several key factors that need to be understood before coming to conclusion that ‘data advertising is coming to an end!!’. Which is not even close.
For Facebook the message has been clear: Develop a clean and consistent interface with personalization at its center point. Yesterday, Facebook unveiled a complete revision of its News Feed to become cleaner, emphasize photos, and allow Facebook users greater control to customize their experience.
Photos and mobile are clear keys to Facebook’s longevity. About 50% of News Feed posts on Facebook now contain a photo; up from only 25% in 2011. As mobile devices with high quality cameras make it easier to snap and upload photos, it is clear that photos and videos are becoming the entry point for people’s Facebook experience.
Optify recently released their 2012 B2B marketing Benchmark Report. In reading the executive summary, two apparently conflicting points jumped out at me:
“Google is the single most important referring domain to B2B websites, responsible for over 36% of all visits”
BrightEdge recently released the results of their 2013 Search Marketer Survey. The survey was conducted to try and help identify, and more importantly clarify the priorities and needs of organic search marketers across the globe. Organic search has undergone a major transformation in the past couple of years, but at the heart of everything, the fundamentals have not changed that much. To be successful in organic search, there are a couple of key components that should be focused on: