The Week in Review

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What Drives a 52% Boost in CTR for a PPC Ad?

In this edition of the ongoing contest from BoostCTR campaigns running AdWords, we get a glimpse at why one PPC ad got a CTR that was 52 percent better than another. Some of the key ingredients were a more direct approach in the title, a claim to close out the body copy and a first line of body copy that flows naturally from the title copy. (WordStream)

Facebook Launches Ads API

Facebook recently unveiled its Ads API, which enables developers to create tools and services that programmatically create, buy and manage Facebook ad campaigns. “This increase in access to the Ads API will undoubtedly impact that third-party Facebook tool and service provider landscape.” Facebook is the biggest winner here, but the increased competition among third-party providers should drive down fees and improve ad performance. (Inside Facebook)

8 Places and Ways to Use Your Keywords

SEO begins with keyword research. But what do you do after that? Among the eight places and ways to use keywords are page title, META description tag, URL of the page and image alt text. (American Express OPEN Forum)

Searching Google+ for Content

Google+ can be a tool to use to monitor what’s being said about your brands. While a developer API isn’t yet available to make the process perfect, there are still ways to go about this. “All of G+ is indexed, so if you use Google’s own “site operator” and then your search term, it limits your search and returns results.” Check out some examples. (Michael D. Jensen)

10 Lessons From Working at a Search Startup

In the interest to give back and share some knowledge, this online marketer shares 10 key things he learned from working at a search startup. Among his lessons are that education is everywhere (conferences, blogs, Twitter, etc.); conversion rate optimization is essential, not optional; and create late-stage content first. (Search Engine Watch)

6 Advanced Ways to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

Failing to be found atop search results could mean you’re missing out on significant revenue. If you already have a basic understanding of SEO, try these six advanced strategies: 1) don’t be afraid to slow down, 2) get social, 3) diversify your links, 4) don’t just add content – ad great content, 5) buy links ethically, and 6) leverage Google for building links. (Quick Sprout)

5 Steps to Build a Search Persona

The real reason to do SEO is the customer, so take a step back and find out what techniques actually align with your customers’ needs. “Similar to a marketing persona, creating a search persona helps marketers to accurately identify their target customer, to understand how users are actually searching for their business online, and to ultimately drive higher conversion. This isn’t a very time-consuming process, and will have a significant impact on your marketing efforts.” Among the five steps to building a search persona are to know your audience, be compelling and know your data. (Search Engine Watch)

American Express Teams up With Verizon Wireless for Digital Wallet Platform

American Express announced that it’s teaming with Verizon Wireless for the credit card company’s Serve digital wallet platform. “In the coming months, Verizon Wireless customers will be able to use Serve to make payments for digital goods and other transactions on their Verizon smartphones and payments.” (VentureBeat)

11 Ways to Measure the Value of Social Media

How can you measure the value of social media? This post offers a rundown of 11 ways to do this, including social benchmarks, traffic, sales, leads, search marketing and PR. (Econsultancy)

Advertisers Look Beyond Facebook and Twitter

As marketers plan on extending their social media ad investments, they’re looking beyond Facebook and Twitter. According to figures from The Pivot Conference and Brian Solis, YouTube, LinkedIn and Foursquare are radars for ad campaigns by U.S. marketers and agencies. Facebook seems to be offering the most satisfying paid-ad programs, followed by YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn. (eMarketer)

The Value of a Strong Conversion Rate

Increased competition in the affiliate marketplace requires advertisers to optimize their campaigns. A long-term, cost-effective approach is to improve on-site conversion rates, which impact earning per click (EPC). This post highlights five ways to improve conversion rates. (ReveNews)

SEO Doesn’t Stop

Putting SEO on hold during redesigns is a trap. SEO should be maintained during redesigns for these reasons: 1) redesigns take time and spiders continue to crawl the existing site; 2) optimized content is design-neutral; 3) SEO is a long-term, continual investment. (Searching Beyond the Paid)

Turning Duplicate Content Lemons Into Link-Building Lemonade

You’re bound to eventually find some of your site’s content used on another site. While Google Alerts can help combat duplicate content on the Web that doesn’t give you credit, Copyscape is a tool to also consider. If even some of those sites agree to link to you, it’s a link-building win. Of course, you can report it to Google, which will usually remove those duplicate-content pages from their index within 24 hours. (Link Spiel)

3 Tools to Improve AdWords Campaign Performance

Google offers some pretty spot-on tools for optimizing your AdWords campaigns. Here are three of them, along with tips on how to utilize them for your campaigns: 1) Conversion Optimizer, 2) AdWords Campaign Experiments and 3) Google Insights for Search. (Search Engine Land)

SEO in a Social Media World

The emergence of social media has caused some businesses to ignore marketing or even building their websites altogether. Does SEO not matter anymore? The short answer is that SEO still matters n today’s social media world. Here’s a discussion of several reasons why, including SEO’s long reach, its continued relevance and its longevity. (Search Engine Guide)

The Holy Grail of Facebook Marketing

Is marketing to friends of fans on Facebook the holy grail of Facebook marketing? This post examines that question and points out two ways to reach friends of fans: 1) page publishing and 2) stories about friends. (jeffbullas.com)

Google Is Poised to Gobble up the Market for Display Ads and Nobody Cares

Google’s acquisition of Admeld used to be a hot topic. Now it’s on the backburner, which reflects a big problem in the industry: "The other advertising and technology players are letting Google make big purchases, and they’re failing to respond in any meaningful way that will help them compete with Google in the long run." Admeld puts Google a step closer to being an end-to-end advertising platform. Yahoo, Microsoft and company need to think about getting involved in data, lest they be totally pushed out of the way. (AdAge.com)

Google Unveils Page Speed Service

Google announced its new Page Speed Service. "Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe." According to Google’s tests, several sites have seen speed improvements of 25-60 percent. (Search Engine Land)

6 Ways to Capitalize During Holidays and Seasons

How can search marketers capitalize on insights about holiday and seasonal shopping? Among the tips discussed in this post are to be timely in execution, use PPC ad extensions and remember yearlong gifting occasions. (Search Engine Watch)

Twitter Bumps up Promoted Tweets

They’ve finally done it: Twitter has begun placing Promoted Tweets atop users’ Twitter streams. It probably sounds worse than it is, since users will only see Promoted Tweets from accounts they already follow. Users also have the option to get rid of these commercial tweets from their timelines. (ZDNet, ReadWriteWeb)

2 Reasons to Pay Attention to Your Unsubscribe Process

Email unsubscribe processes usually don’t get a lot of attention. However, many email marketers fail to follow unsubscribe best practices, despite the fact that it’s a key stage in the email subscriber’s lifecycle. Here are two reasons why you should pay attention to your unsubscribe process: 1) bad unsubscribe experiences lead to complaints and 2) it’s a chance to offer alternatives. (MediaPost)

10 Tips for Writing Great Email Content

Thinking of ideas for email content doesn’t have to be a daunting task. Great email content just has to be informative and relevant. Among the 10 tips to inspire you to write exceptional email content are to solve a problem, make it about them, get creative, take a poll and lose the jargon. (MailerMailer)

Mind the Bid-to-CPC Gap in Paid Search

"So you’ve nailed down the value of your PPC clicks with a high level of detail and confidence and you’ve set your bids accordingly given your efficiency target. Over time you notice that performance is consistently more efficient than needed." While that’s not a terrible problem to have on your hands, it may represent a lost opportunity to drive additional revenue or margin dollars. Here are three tactics for pushing your bids up to bring about the CPCs you can afford: 1) push bids across the board, 2) a progressive approach and 3) consider the margins. (RKGBlog)

8 Ways to Maximize YouTube Marketing Results

YouTube is a great marketing channel, but there’s loads of competition. Here are eight tips for getting the most out of your YouTube marketing efforts: 1) create compelling videos; 2) make your video findable; 3) brand your YouTube channel; 4) use annotations to build subscribers; 5) post a bulletin and alert your friends and subscribers; 6) use YouTube ads; 7) leverage other social media platforms; and 8) review YouTube Insights. (Social Media Examiner)

Facebook Mobile Credits Is Near

Facebook is reportedly in talks to enable developers to sell virtual goods via mobile browsers. "The change would let developers use Facebook’s currency, called Credits, on mobile applications accessed over the Web, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the talks are private." Facebook could grab about 30 percent of revenue generated by the sale of virtual goods, and this pending move would be part of its overhauled mobile strategy. (Bloomberg)

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