Facebook vs. Google Plus: Which is Better For Marketers?
July 17, 2013: Should You Invest Your Time and Energy in Facebook or Google +? Amongst my friends, the general perception is that Google+ isn’t worth bothering with. “But all my friends are on Facebook!” is their battle cry. However, from a marketer and social media specialist’s point of view, Google Plus may well be a […]
Forrester and Shop.org: E-tailers Prefer Paid Search Over Other Marketing Channels
July 16, 2013: Paid Search continues to be the preferred customer acquisition channel among e-commerce merchants, according to findings of the latest annual survey done by Forrester Research and Shop.org. According to the 2013 survey, approximately 40 percent of etailers’ budgets are currently allocated to paid search media across Google, Yahoo, and the other search […]
Are 40 Percent of “Ordinary People” Unaware That SERP Links They Click On Are Paid?
July 16, 2013: New research from the UK claims to demonstrate that 41 percent of people clicking on paid Google links are unaware that these links are advertisements. CEO Rob Stevens of Bunnyfoot (which conducted the study), quoted in the article cited above, notes that “there is a world of people out there who don’t know […]
Guest Blogging – Baking The Perfect Cake (Without Cooking Your Own Goose)
July 10, 2013: Guest posting is a great way to generate inbound links and the consequent higher Page Rank that follows in Google and Bing. But Guest Blogging is risky, because doing it the wrong way can get you consumed — in grisly fashion — by Penguin and Panda, Google’s anti-spam algorithms.Here’s what I think […]
Being #1 on the SERP Doesn’t Always Cut It
July 8, 2013: A study over at MarketingProfs.com touts the fact that the very top organic ranking on a search engine results page results in a disproportionately large amount of traffic (the study pegged it at 91 percent). Traffic results drop off significantly with the second-ranked (27 percent), third-ranked (11 percent) and fourth-ranked (5.4 percent) […]
Facebook Loads Up on Ads: Will Users Revolt?
July 2, 2013: Forbes contributing writer Paul Tassi takes aim at Facebook‘s penchant for loading up its virtual real estate with ads from the social network’s more than one million advertisers. The onslaught of ads appears to have begun in earnest “in the past several months;” Tassi notes that the result of this recent deluge […]
FTC Gets Serious About Search Engines Paid/Unpaid Listings Differentiation
June 27, 2013: This past week, the Federal Trade Commission put the search engines on notice that they needed to do more to clearly differentiate paid and unpaid listings. The FTC evidently feels that search engines — which had complied with an earlier 2002 letter specifying that such listings be differentiated — were no longer doing […]
Mobile Shoppers Hit Major Roadblocks at Etailer Sites
June 25, 2013: An article by Internet Retailer’s Bill Siwicki contains enough alarming statistics to suggest that a full-blown crisis is in the works for etailers. According to Siwicki, who cites data compiled by Harris Interactive, while almost three quarters of smartphone users have declared that they shop with their phones, almost 90 percent have reported […]
Tween Wars: Why Vine is Dead (and it isn’t why you think). Plus: the end-run attack on Pinterest
June 24, 2013: In January 2013 Vine exploded onto the social media scene as the app for Tweens and Teens. An extension of Twitter’s service, Vine is easy to use and allows for the uploading of 6 second long videos. This was an immediate smash hit with the 9 to 16 year old set, allowing for […]
Does Google Care If Your Site Uses Stock Images?
June 18, 2013: Matt Cutts, Google’s chief anti-spam engineer, posted a new video in which he answered a question from a user about whether Google rewards (or penalizes) sites relying on stock – rather than original – photographic image. According to Cutts, Google doesn’t do so now (although Cutts appeared intrigued by the idea that classifying […]