Over the past couple of days, numerous stats and figures have been published about how Super Bowl advertisers took advantage (or not) of social media this year. But commercials also drive people to search engines, which in turn (when things go right) can lead potential customers to advertiser web sites where rather than talk about a brand as they can on social media sites, they can watch the commercials again, cementing brand messaging, and take a closer look at the products being sold. (Which is presumably why a company would spend $3.5 million dollars on a thirty second spot in the first pla [...]

Related Topics: Featured | Features: Analysis | Search & Society: General | Search Ads: General | SEO - Search Engine Optimization | Top News

Borrell Associates has come out with an extensive new report about small business ("SMBs") and social media adoption. It contains forecasts and spending estimates as well as other data about SMB usage of social media as a marketing tool. There's a great deal of data already in the market about SMB adoption of social media. What they show is that between 45 percent and 70 percent of SMBs say they already have a presence on social media sites (mostly Facebook). Borrell reports that between 60 and 64 percent of SMBs have a formal presence on social media sites. An earlier 2011 study by [...]

Related Topics: Facebook | Google: AdWords | Search Ads: General | SEO: Local

In life, timing can be everything. But in marketing, it can make the difference between a sale and a missed opportunity. That’s why the topic of recency is so important to marketers. Fortunately, search retargeting can help marketers capitalize on recency to drive performance. Understanding Recency & The Window Of Opportunity The concept of recency has been a key element in marketing for decades. It speaks to customer engagement in relation to time. For example, a consumer who interacted with your brand two days ago is more engaged and has a better recency score than someone who di [...]

Related Topics: Search & Display | Search Ads: General

We talk a lot in the digital industry about the overlap between search media and display media, and how when planned and operated in unison, there is a 1+1=3 benefit model that magically appears, resulting in higher returns than could be generated by those channels on their own. But does this overlap really exist, and does 1+1 really equal 3, or does is it actually just equal 2? In order to find out the answer, I recently asked several experienced figures within our industry for their insights and comment. AKQA Media – Drew Wahl, Director of Business Development Booyah Advertisin [...]

Related Topics: Search & Display | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting | Search Ads: General

The RKGBlog blog posted a screen shot of Bing testing search ads directly in the organic results. Honestly, I almost cannot believe it - but more on that later. Here is a cropped picture of the screen shot. Why is this so shocking? Placing search ads inline with organic free listings is somewhat taboo for search companies. Years ago, search engines had "paid inclusion" programs which guaranteed content to be indexed, but they had no ranking factors. In fact, Yahoo after much controversy dropped their paid inclusion program in 2009. But to allow advertisers to inject ads wi [...]

Related Topics: Microsoft: adCenter | Microsoft: Bing | Search Ads: General | Top News