Study: 55 Percent Of Mobile-Search Driven Conversions Happen In One Hour Or Less

Large numbers of people believe that the majority of mobile search activity happens “on the go.” However, according to an extensive new study from Google and Nielsen, the overwhelming majority (77 percent) of mobile search happens at home or work — even when there’s a PC nearby and readily available.

These people are choosing to search on their smartphones rather than PCs because of speed and convenience. And most of these users take some sort of near-immediate, follow-up action. In fact, the study found, 55 percent of mobile-search influenced conversions take place within one hour.

This finding closely mirrors a now-famous statistic published by Microsoft in 2010: 70 percent of mobile search activity begins and ends – in other words, a decision is made or the objective achieved – within one hour.

Read more: 73 percent of mobile searches trigger follow-up actions

What Are The Benefit Of Online Marketing?

Online advertising goals generally fall into one of two categories: direct response or branding.

Direct response

If your goal is direct response, you'd like a user to perform an action after clicking through your ad to your website: make a purchase, sign up to a newsletter, or request a quote, for instance. The completion of your desired action by the user is called a conversion.

To manage your online advertising strategy and costs, it's useful to define a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) that you'd like to achieve per conversion. You'll then be able to monitor the performance of your ads to ensure that they're meeting your CPA goals.

Branding

If your advertising goal is branding, your main reason for advertising online is to raise awareness and visibility of your product, service, or cause. To achieve this, you'll want to aim to place your ads in front of as many people as possible within your target audience.

Use cases

Although just about anyone could use online advertising for any reason, here are some of the best use cases:

• An online retailer without a physical store location:Use online advertising to drive traffic to your website.
• Show ads both in response to relevant keywords on search engines and on Display Network webpages that your target customers would be likely to visit.
• A small business that cannot afford expensive, traditional advertising methods: Use online advertising to narrowly target your ads to a particular audience, and to closely control your costs and track your return on investment (ROI).
• A large business that would like to build brand awareness: Show image ads or multimedia ads on Display Network webpages that your target audience is likely to spend time on.

The Internship Movie - Google

Looks like Zukerberg isn't the only one who can make the big screen come to it. A movie called the Internship is coming out. This is a movie about two slackers played by Vince Vaughn (Swingers) and Ownen Wilson (Meet The Parents).

Billy (Vince Vaughn) and Nick (Owen Wilson) are salesmen whose careers have been torpedoed by the digital world. Trying to prove they are not obsolete, they defy the odds by talking their way into a coveted internship at Google, along with a battalion of brilliant college students. But, gaining entrance to this utopia is only half the battle. Now they must compete with a group of the nation's most elite, tech-savvy geniuses to prove that necessity really is the mother of re-invention. | The Internship opens in theaters June 7, 2013.

Read more: The Internship Movie - Google

Intro To Marketing Your Local Business Online

Each type of listing -- organic and paid -- has a type of marketing approach associated with it.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves building new websites, or changing existing websites, so that they rank highly in a search engine's organic listings when users search on terms that are related to the site's content. To learn about SEO for Google organic search results, visit Google's Webmaster Central site.

Search engine marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the process of promoting and marketing a website through paid listings (advertisements) on search engines. In order to create an ad for a given search engine, you need to create an account with the advertising product or branch of that search engine. For Google, this product is AdWords. After creating an account, you then create your ad and enter a list of user search queries -- called "keywords" -- that can trigger your ad to be shown.

Ads on most search engines operate on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, meaning that you pay only when a user clicks your ad, and not for the ad impression (the instance in which the ad appears on the page). The other common pricing model in online advertising is cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), in which you pay per impression, not for any clicks on your ad.

Site owners often choose to advertise their site instead of, or in addition to, optimizing their site for placement in the organic search results. Although it's necessary to pay for the clicks your ads receive, advertising allows you to be proactive about when and where a listing for your site appears. Creating an AdWords account takes minutes, and ads can run almost immediately in response to keywords that you choose.

10 Things Matt Cutts Didn't Know About Orgasms

Found this interesting video from on the Huffington Post today. Even more interesting than the talk is who'se in the audience at time marker 9:25. Could it really be the face of Google, Matt Cutts?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-roach/orgasm-ted-talk_b_2689995.html

Read more: Matt Cutts at Ted Talks

A More In depth Look at How Google Search Works

Now that we've looked at the basic over of how Google works, let's take a more in depth look that the way Google creates a results page. This will look at answering questions such as:

• What is Page Rank and how does it affect the Search Engine Results Pages. (Also called SERPs)?
• How does Google's search algorythm evaluate web sites and web pages to return the most relavant results in the SERPs?
• How often does Google search algorythm check and determine the best results to display in the SERPs.

Facebook Mobile Advertising Disappoints Wall Street

More bad news for Facebook. A mobile ad bubble was believed to be a sure fire bet for investors on Wall Street. Facebook however failed to meet Fourth quarter expectations resulting in another opening drop for Facebook.

Facebook Ads Are Failing To Impress

(Reuters) - Shares of Facebook Inc were set to open 7 percent lower on Thursday as a surge in fourth-quarter mobile advertising revenue failed to live up to Wall Street's high expectations.

Three brokerages downgraded the stock of the No. 1 social network, which has struggled to develop a full-fledged mobile advertising business.

Facebook has long established itself as one of the most important websites, but investors have worried that until the company's mobile advertising strategy takes off, revenue growth will remain shaky.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/31/facebook-ads_n_2589310.html

How Google Search Engine Works: Marketing and Online Advertising For Local Businesses

A search engine helps users find the things they're looking for online. The user types a word or phrase, called a query, into the search engine, which then displays a set of results that are relevant to the query.

Most search engines provide two types of results listings in response to the same user query: organic (also called "natural" or "free") listings, and paid listings (i.e., advertisements). Google keeps these two types of listings separate, and ads are noted by the phrase "Sponsored Links" appearing above them.

Most search engines rank the results within each type of listing -- in other words, they determine in what order to show the listings on the results page -- according to how relevant the result is to the user's query, with the most relevant appearing at the top of the page.

Each search engine calculates relevancy in a different way for each type of result (organic and paid). This is one of the main differences between one search engine and another, and it's a factor in many users' decisions about which search engine to use.

On Google, although both organic and paid results appear in response to the same user query, the results are independent of each other. The ranking of an organic search result has no bearing on the ranking of any ads, and vice versa. This makes it possible for an advertiser to perform well in the paid listings and have an ample online presence, even if their site isn't present in the top organic search results.

In Google's organic results, relevancy to the user's query is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link from site A to a page on site B adds to site B's PageRank.

Google AdWords also uses a combination of factors to rank paid listings, which will be explained in depth later in this lesson.

Let's take a closer look at how the PPC bidding works

Google Local Listings: Called Google Places

This week, a Virginia judge ordered a Yelp user to change a negative review.

Jane Perez was sued by Dietz Development, a building contractor, who claims to have lost business because of her negative postings on sites like Yelp and Angie’s List. He sued for $750,000, and claimed that he lost $300,000 because of her words. (News source)

SUPREME COURT HERE WE COME

I would not be surprised if this case makes it's way to the US Supreme Court. On one side is the Yelp reviewer and the 1st Amendment. On the other is Deitz Development claiming the review was essentailly libel and cause the business to potentialy close or force them to hire a bankruptcy attorney and file for Chapter 13 so some other reoraganization.

This could have huge remifications

Do You Want to Know the Secret To Top Search Engine placement?

I'll give you a hint: Think about High School...

More precisely think about the social order of high school. Who ended up being homecoming/prom King & Queen? More often than not it was the most popular and relevant kids that everyone wanted to be around.

Read more: Know the Secret To Top Search Engine placement