How To Make Friends And Influence Facebook Fans by Laurie Sullivan

Forrester Research created the "Facebook factor" to identify how much more likely Fans are to purchase a brand's products or services. The method, based on logistic regression modeling, requires brands to ask four questions around these themes: being a Facebook fan of the brand, likelihood to purchase, amount of money spent in the past 12 months, and probability to recommend. ...Read the whole story

  • search Marketers Increase Search Budgets, Mobile Gets Uptick by Laurie Sullivan

    Marketers spent 16% more on search budgets in Q1 in the U.S. and 3% in the U.K. compared with the year-ago quarter, according to a report published Monday. The Adobe Systems Global Digital Advertising Q1 2012 Update reveals that ROI for campaigns in the United States rose 11% in the quarter compared with a year ago. Finance and automotive demonstrated the most increases, while the retail sector fell 5%. ...Read the whole story

  • Pay-Per-Call Ad Tracking 348% Growth Attributed To Mobile, Local by Laurie Sullivan

    Mobile advertising continues to shake up traditional ad investments for a variety of media. For call tracking, the shift continues to move dollars from national to local ads. Some 61.6% of the pay-per-call share resides in local ads vs. the remainder for national -- the opposite of a year ago, according to analysis from Telmetrics, which measures pay-per-call ad tracking. ...Read the whole story

  • Appeals Court Rules Against Google In AdWords Lawsuit by Wendy Davis

    Google potentially confuses consumers by allowing companies' trademarked names to trigger competitors' pay-per-click ads, an appellate court ruled on Monday. Rosetta Stone presented enough evidence to justify a trial about whether consumers were confused by AdWords ads. ...Read the whole story

Structured Thinking About Semantic Search by Ryan DeShazer

Following a March 15 Wall Street Journal article, "Google Gives Search a Refresh," the topic of semantic search has again become a hot-button issue for SEOs and webmasters. In that article, author Amir Efrati refers to coming changes across Google results pages, largely derived from enhancements in its core semantic search capabilities, as "among the biggest in the company's history and could affect millions of websites that rely on Google's current page-ranking results." If this "new" news is to be believed, then Google appears primed to make good on its promise to better understand both the Web and the intent ...More