Today, at 12pm PST, Google announced a massive change to Google AdWords that will significantly impact both advertisers and agencies that have been using the current model. This change is the rollout of ‘Enhanced Campaigns’, which Google defines as follows:
Enhanced campaigns let you easily manage complex targeting, bidding, and ads for different platforms like mobile and computers all within the same campaign. Account management has also been consolidated for tablets and desktops. Additionally, with enhanced campaigns you can reduce the overall number of campaigns you need to create — you no longer need to create a separate campaign for each target device type or location.
We humans hate loss. In fact, we seem to value losing something about twice as high as gaining something. For example, imagine I gave you a coffee cup and then offered to buy it back from you. That’s Scenario 1. In Scenario 2, I ask you to buy the same coffee cup from me. The price you assign to the coffee cup in the first scenario will be, on the average, about twice as much as in the second. And yes, there’s research to back this up.
Marketing, even online, is an extremely resource intensive pursuit that must be planned and executed with the utmost diligence and realistic expectations. The purpose of this article is to highlight some methodologies of assisting those with smaller marketing budgets to create effective marketing campaigns in a crowded and noisy marketplace.
Are you dissatisfied with the performance of your website? Maybe it's time to take another close look at your web pages. Look at your website with the eyes of an uninterested third party. Step back and take a neutral look on your website:
Facebook has released today a Graph Search product, the third pillar of Facebook, News Feed and Timeline being the first two. Facebook Graph Search uses Open Graph, Facebook’s database on all basically anything you can “like.”
Essentially, Facebook Graph Search will allow a user to search for specific queries and return results based on data driven by the user’s friends’ likes and interests. Search results are driven by results that are sorted by social signals. Graph Search will allow a user to launch a query returning results based on social recommendations from their own friends.
Good backlinks from related websites are the most important element in Google's ranking algorithm. Getting these links is the hard part. Since Google's Penguin update, automatically created low quality links don't work anymore. What can you do to get good backlinks and what can you do if your link requests get rejected?
Credibility is an important ranking factor. The more credible a website is, the better it will rank on Google. How do search engines measure the credibility of a website and what can you do to improve the credibility of your own site?
Both the Harvard Business Review and the New York times have recent posts on the subject. In HBR, Justin Fox tells of a presentation by Vivek Ranadive, who said, “I believe that math is trumping science. What I mean by that is you don’t really have to know why, you just have to know that if a and b happen, c will happen.”
He further speculates that US monetary policy might do better being guided by an algorithm rather than bankers: “The fact is, you can look at information in real time, and you can make minute adjustments, and you can build a closed-loop system, where you continuously change and adjust, and you make no mistakes, because you’re picking up signals all the time, and you can adjust.”
Anyone who knows me knows I love strategy. I have railed incessantly about our over reliance on tactical execution and our overlooking of the strategy that should guide said execution. So imagine my discomfort this past week when, in the midst of my following up on the McLuhan theme of my last column, I ran into a tidbit from Ray Rivera, via Forbes, that speculated that strategic management might becoming obsolescent. Here’s an excerpt: As amounts of data approaching entire populations become available, models become less predictive and more descriptive. As inference becomes obsolete, management methods that rely on it will likely be affected. A likely casualty is strategic management, which attempts to map out the best course of action while factoring in constraints. Classic business strategy (e.g., the five forces) is especially vulnerable to losing the relevance it accumulated over several decades.
Without much debate, every American shopper and retailer knows that Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year. It is observed on the day after Thanksgiving and is regarded by many retailers as the official start of the holiday shopping season. On Black Friday, it is not uncommon to see stores open just before sunrise. After all, retailers spend huge amounts of money on advertising for this day – they want to keep the store open for as long as possible. On this day, it is also not uncommon to see hoards of people waiting outside for hours or even days before the store opens, forming long line-ups – no matter what the weather!