The Week in Review

Facebook Launches Ad Targeting by Topic, Teams up With American Express

Instead of targeting users that like a specific page, Facebook advertisers can now simultaneously target all users who like any variation of a word or phrase. This, along with the recently unveiled ZIP code targeting, shows that Facebook is quickly expanding the way advertisers can reach potential customers on its site. Separately, the social networking giant teamed up with American Express to offer small businesses points for buying online advertising. (Inside Facebook, Mashable)

Facebook’s New Redesign Emphasizes Privacy (and Smells of Google+)

Facebook is set to roll out a big redesign that emphasizes user privacy. Among the interesting changes are tag approval, sharing settings, profile content control and easy mirror-checking. These changes will be made live in a few days. (GigaOM, Wired.com)

Best Practices for Affiliate-Program Communication

Here’s an outline of the best practices of communication with affiliates. Among the main points are two-way symmetric communication, different types of communication (open communication channel, regular/expected communication and publications) and arriving at your own approach. (Search Engine Journal)

The Effects of Branding Your Email Subject Line

What happens when you include your company/brand name in the subject line of outgoing emails? Many companies say it boosts brand recognition among subscribers, while others argue that the sender line works to achieve the same recognition and that the subject line should be reserved to communicate the content of the email. A study found that there isn’t a significant difference between a subject line that includes a company name and one that doesn’t, in terms of opens and clicks. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t times when branding a subject line makes sense. (MailerMailer Blog)

How to Build a First-Class Email List in 30 Days

You have 30 days and nothing to start with. Now go and build a responsive email list. This post outlines the simple strategy for accomplishing this feat. It involves five points: 1) intentional social media networking, 2) ask your colleagues, 3) forums are not dead, 4) starting small isn’t a waste of time and 5) excel at what you do. (Copyblogger)

Google AdWords Topic Targeting: What it Is and When to Use it

Google AdWords topic targeting is “taking a similar but less granular approach to targeting than keyword targeting.” It’s kind of like broad match because it’s aggressive and enables you to quickly generate a lot of volume, but it offers less control and specificity than more granular targeting options. This post offers an overview of three use cases: 1) using topics and keywords; 2) using placements and topics; 3) using audience and topics. (WordStream)

Online/Offline Mobile Integration Will Be Huge Business

People still want telephone calls. So it should be no surprise that click-to-call mobile campaigns are becoming a huge business. Think about it: Is a tiny banner ad or a phone number that you click to call going to be more effective? This entrepreneur-turned-VC offers two “bets”: 1) “the applications that win and become huge are the ones that build an authentic relationship with their users by getting you to open up the application for some form of entertainment or utility other than ads” (goodbye generic coupon apps); 2) “the mobile applications that become big will find unique ways of reaching you to get relevant offer in front of you that are unobtrusive, authentic, location-aware and specific to your current needs.” (Both Sides of the Table)

How to Calculate Success on Google and Bing

“Are you capitalizing on the intent of each user’s query?” A session on advanced keyword modeling at SES San Francisco went into the topic of analyzing how your keywords and snippets match a user’s search query and, more importantly, that user’s intent. Search types, listening to your audience and how to find what tier your keywords are in are among the main points. (Search Engine Watch)

5 Ways to Measure Social Media

Any marketing strategy is in dire need of the ability to measure the effectiveness of marketing activities. This poses a problem for social media marketing, a channel that isn’t as easy to measure as others. Here are five lenses through which you can get a better idea of the success of social media efforts: 1) awareness and exposure, 2) share of voice and sentiment, 3) influence, 4) engagement and 5) popularity. (ClickZ)

Tips for Spying on Your PPC Competitors

Spying might be a dirty word to most people, so maybe it’s better to call it “competitive intelligence gathering.” Whatever name you give it, the activity of keeping tabs of competitors is something we all do in some form. The three primary uses for competitive intelligence are: 1) benchmarking/forecasting, 2) tracking day-to-day tactics and 3) forensics. Also discussed in this post are how to study your competitors, manual vs. automated data collection and ethical considerations. (Search Engine Land)

The Rise of the ‘Supercookies’

Cookies are so 2000 – behold, the rise of the “supercookies.” Cookies are, of course, the small files websites install on users’ computers to track their online activities. Supercookies” which are able to re-create users’ profiles after they deleted their regular cookies, are being installed by the likes of Hulu and MSN.com. (WSJ.com)

Content Is the Engine of Social Media Marketing

What do you do after you amass communities and followings on all those social media sites? The thing with social media is that you can’t just treat the relationships built on those channels as one-shot deals for a particular campaign. You need to keep on feeding those engaged fans with content. Here are two things to do: plan out your proactive content needs and build a process for reacting to the community. (Forrester)

5 Reasons PPC Search Beats PPC Social

PPC social media is sexy and “growing like a weed.” While PPC ads on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn certainly have their place in your media plans, it’s important to examine five reasons PPC search is better than PPC social: 1) social media fatigue; 2) harvesting demand is easier than creating/influencing demand; 3) profiles are underpopulated; 4) profiles lie; and 5) likes are poor success metrics. (ClickZ)

The Top 10 SEO Myths

At its worst, search engine optimization is “a dark art, misunderstood, an unwieldy afterthought, a quick fix that did you more harm than good.” Truly effective SEO demands good design, content creation, general business practice and looking beyond the dashboard. Among the top 10 SEO myths are that its endorsed by Google, a high PageRank number equals a high ranking, and that you can set it and forget it. (.net magazine)

Is Your Blog an Asset or a Liability?

The truth is that you don’t have to blog to have a successful online business. If you end up hating it and it becomes a chore, there might be other more profitable things you could be doing instead. Here’s a look at six habits of effective blogs, along with four ways you can tell if your blog isn’t effective. (Search Engine Land)

Android to Become the Top Mobile Advertising Platform by the End of 2011

According to InMobi, Android will be the top global mobile advertising platform by the end of the year. In the three months to the end of July, Android captured 16.6 percent of mobile ad impressions served by InMobi. (Telecoms.com)

Integrated Facebook Marketing: Pages, Apps, Ads and Sponsored Stories to Get Fans

Here’s a walkthrough on how to carry out an integrated Facebook marketing campaign to boost the number of likes for your page. Three basic steps are involved: 1) set up a like-gated landing tab; 2) promote your landing tab with shares, page posts and ads; 3) run your page like Sponsored Stories ads. (SocialTimes.com)

How to Create a Landing-Page Testing Strategy

Many marketers are running underperforming campaigns because they either don’t know how to create and test landing pages, or they lack a general awareness of the benefits of good landing pages. To make sure you have a proper landing-page testing strategy in place, account for each segment being targeted, ensure that your test varies depending on the mediums and audience segments targeted with that campaign, and conduct testing to figure out the behavior patterns of your target segments. (Search Engine Watch)

Advertising Groups Don’t Like the Future of Internet Addresses

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA), Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A) have expressed their disapproval of The International Corporation for Names and Numbers (ICANN)’s plans to expand generic top-level domains (GTLDs) starting in 2012. The groups’ concerns focus on the confusion, cybersquatting and other malicious conduct that the expansion would usher in, along with the costs for brand owners. (CNET)

Google Is Testing AdWords Format for Gmail

Google is experimenting with a unique AdWords ad unit designed just for Gmail. "The new AdWords units appear above the text ads in the right sidebar. They include an image, a headline and a couple of lines of text. They also feature the name of the advertiser next to an envelope icon, indicating that clicking-through takes the user to an e-mail message." The new format takes advantage of user behaviors associated with email and allows for larger creative units that weren’t available in Gmail before. (Search Engine Land)

64 Facebook Marketing Techniques

Being boring is the biggest sin of Facebook marketing, so you must not only get fans’ attention – you need to keep it as well. This requires creativity. This infographic lists 64 simple Facebook marketing techniques broken down into eight categories. “Randomly select one marketing tactic from each category, and combine them for an innovative marketing campaign.” (AllFacebook)

Lego Tries out Two Landing Pages: Video vs. Mobile-Optimized

Lego recently ran a banner-ad campaign in Singapore that experimented two separate landing pages: 1) a 30-second video on Google’s mobile ad network and 2) a mobile-optimized website. The former received a 1.3 percent click-through rate (CTR), while the latter received a 1.0 percent CTR. (MarketingVOX)

3 Alternatives to Attribution Modeling for Search Marketers

Once a search marketer gets beyond the basics of site retargeting and search retargeting, they’ll want to examine the interplay between search and display, a more holistic approach that offers more insight. Using the media overlap report, the PSA study and traffic quality (new vs. existing and LTV) will help answer some questions that come along with this. (Search Engine Land)

Mobile Email: 3 Things to Consider

Smartphones mean a lot for email use, and email has been the key to the success of smartphone manufacturers. So how does one go about starting up their mobile email program? 1) Know your audience, 2) think through the process and 3) design cross-platform. (MediaPost)

Why You Should Use Multiple Web Analytics Tools

When it comes to SEO, digging into what’s working is essential. That’s where Web analytics comes it. “Without analytics you are flying blind.” Most analytics tools are good for either real-time tracking or offering granular historical data – few reasonably priced tools are good at doing both. This is why you should consider using at least two Web analytics tools, which also gives you a stable foundation should something change. Here’s a look at primary Web analytics tools (e.g., Google Analytics, Clicky, Omniture) and backup Web analytics tools (e.g., Min, Piwik, Open Web Analytics). (SEO Book)