March 9th, 2010 by Josh
A long time ago, we wrote briefly about how higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) values aren’t always desirable, and our clients often ask how to best interpret the significance of CTR.
CTR is literally defined as the percentage of people who viewed an ad that clicked on it. For example, if an ad is shown 100 times and [...]
March 4th, 2010 by Josh
Mitch Joel has written another great post, this one about community building in social media. In particular, he points out how the “build and it and they will come” strategy usually doesn’t work.
Social media is often portrayed simplistically as a monolithic source for new business, much like a new advertising venue. Instead, it should be [...]
March 2nd, 2010 by Josh
Google recently announced that AdWords advertisers could enable click-to-call phone numbers for AdWords ads that are rendered on mobile devices with full browsers. This includes, most notably, iPhones.
As shown above, the phone number is displayed in the ad. When the user clicks on the phone number, their phone automatically dials it.
This service is most likely [...]
February 26th, 2010 by Josh
Now that Google is allowing searchers to specify the location of search results, it is more important than ever to ensure search engines know where your click-and-mortar business is located. We recently wrote about local SEO (part 1, part 2), and now would be a good time to take basic steps to improve the likelihood [...]
February 25th, 2010 by Josh
The Google Retail Advertising Blog recently posted sales cycle statistics for a variety of consumer products. At the low end, shoppers took an average of 7 days to purchase pet supplies, while they took 16 days for electronics. The data did not include purchases larger than home appliances like cars or homes which presumably take [...]
February 18th, 2010 by Josh
Microsoft and Yahoo! have received regulatory approval for their “search alliance” in which Microsoft will provide search and advertising on Yahoo’s websites. Details are being revealed at http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-alliance/home.
Advertisers do not need to take any actions right now, as the integration is not likely to take place before late in 2010, and we assume that they [...]
February 17th, 2010 by Josh
You know your products and services inside and out. This knowledge can be a critical challenge when communicating with customers. They may not be experts, or they have a perspective and terminology that’s different from yours.
The good folks over at SPOS recently wrote about this and gave an excellent example:
Customer language is often not the [...]
February 8th, 2010 by Josh
Web 1 Marketing is pleased to announce that one of our team added one to his team. Late last week, Ian and his wife Jeannine welcomed Kaija to the world. Everyone is doing fine.
January 20th, 2010 by Josh
Google just blogged about synonyms as they related to searcher intent. They provide several examples of how a concept as simple as a synonym complicate natural language processing. This also brings up some important recommendations for site owners with respect to SEO.
Prospective customers type in all kinds of variations on your most obvious keywords (hence [...]
December 21st, 2009 by Ian
Recently we blogged about local SEO and local store marketing. There we talked about adding local listings to online service directories. In this installment, we’ll provide some specifics about improving the ranking of your Google local listing and visibility in map results for geographic searches.
David Mihm has written an excellent report on local SEO. According [...]