SEO: one channel to rule them all? A new “merchant confidence survey” from lead-gen company MerchantCircle/Reply.com, among 2,500 US small businesses, finds that search engine optimization is the marketing channel they would choose if they could choose only one. The question asked was: “If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?” The list of ...

A Social-Media Decoder From his 24th-floor corner office in midtown Manhattan, the veteran CBS research chief David Poltrack can gaze southward down the Avenue of the Americas, its sidewalks teeming. For more than four decades, it has been his job to measure people’s television habits, preferences, and reactions. In large part, this has meant following the viewing habits of Nielsen panels of ...

You’ve read time and time again about how social media can fuel SEO and even vice versa, but where does PPC fit into this equation? The answer is in retargeting also known as AdWords remarketing. If you’re not familiar with the concept of remarketing, I’d recommend you read this step by step AdWords remarketing guide. I’ve written many times on using social media to promote linkbait-style content ...

Google is opening wider a beta test of Dynamic Search Ads, an interesting new type of AdWords ad for larger advertisers that eliminates the need for keywords. With this ad type, designed for retailers or other advertisers with large, often-changing inventory, Google automatically generates ad copy — based on the advertiser’s template — by looking at the content in the advertiser’s Web site. ...

FairSearch, a group of search companies including Microsoft which lobbies that Google is too dominant, has sent a white paper outlining its anti-trust concerns about Google to the 50 state attorneys general in the US. Below, a review and some fact checking of the paper. You’ll find the paper here, if you wish to read it directly. I’ve had a run through today (it’s long, 44 pages) and some email ...

Today Topsy Labs, a real-time social search platform, announced the addition of Google+ as a source in its real-time social search index.  Topsy features an influence algorithm to display the most pertinent and popular social results.  In addition to social posts, Topsy displays shared links with social context within the results.  A little over a month ago, we had previously anointed Topsy ...

A group of users have sued Facebook after it emerged that the social networking giant tracks its users’ online activities after they are logged out. Australian technologist Nik Cubrilovic recently claimed that when the user is logged out of Facebook, rather than deleting its tracking   Tweet