Most marketers I talk to are dealing with increased competition for organic search placement and increased cost for PPC campaigns. So, it was interesting to hear about one industry where the biggest brands seem to be missing in action when it comes to search marketing.
Michael Arrington of TechCruch recently posted an interesting analysis of Microsoft’s new Live Search CashBack campaign.
The program allows advertisers to offer users a rebate on online purchases made after searching on Microsoft’s Live Search. It moves advertising spending from a cost-per-click to a cost-per-action basis. It’s also an attempt by Microsoft to attract some of the shopping search volume away from industry leader Google.
With the U.S. economy still on shaky ground, it’s no surprise that people are looking for signs, prognostication, or insights into how the marketing community might adapt to the slowdown. One of the latest reports finds that digital marketing channels might be the biggest beneficiaries of downturn-induced strategy changes.
A couple months back, when I rounded up recent news from the online video-on-demand market, I didn’t expect to be revisiting the topic quite so soon. But as summer has rolled on, online video purveyors have continued to make big bets or scale back their ambitions in one of the toughest subscription content markets to crack.
When talking to search marketers, I often hear grumbling about Google’s commanding influence in the search world, and its increasingly mysterious internal workings. I was reminded this week of just how powerful and inscrutable Google has become when I saw AdGooroo’s second quarter Search Engine Advertiser Update.
As I noted in our keyword research tool user guide, published last week, the fate of the old Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool had been a bit of a mystery. The mystery is now solved: Yahoo confirmed to Search Engine Land that it has decommissioned that tool once and for all.
If you’re a B-to-B marketer who hosts lead-generation webinars, you’ve probably asked yourself that question. The most recent newsletter from webinar services vendor Bulldog Solutions offers some guidance.
What are the most important factors to achieving high ranks in local search engines, such as Google Maps and Yahoo Local? SEO consultant David Mihm recently tried to answer that question by asking 20 local search experts to rank the importance of 47 criteria that determine a site’s placement in local search results.
Excitement over advertising revenues was palpable among the online publishers I talked to all last year. That’s not surprising, given the 26% annual growth reported for online advertising reported by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Then, early this year, fears over the impact of the economic slowdown began to raise concerns about online advertising’s continued growth among publishers who were increasingly basing their business models on ad-supported content.
Some of the most interesting moments during any MarketingSherpa Summit come when audience members begin debating an issue among themselves or with a speaker. This year’s Selling Online Subscriptions Summit was no different. Debate flared early on the first day over the best way to handle subscription cancellations.
