Planning, customer segmentation, goal and event tracking, and page categories. These are some of the topics that Sarah Carling outlines in her guide on what to track through Google Analytics. For instance, she explains why some of the customer segmentations for an ecommerce site should include new visitors who don't create an account or make a purchase -- not just the ones who do.

Customize dashboard SEO widgets, set up custom alerts to identify when SEO goals have been met, and gain deeper insights into SEO conversion processes with multichannel funnels. These three important tasks are described by Dali Burgado, who also provides custom reports that marketers might want to save and refer to another time. For example, Burgado explains how to add an SEO widget to a dashboard and how to determine the number of steps that assist in a conversion, along with its value. 

Ohio-based Paid Search Engine Tools sued Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo in the Eastern District of Texas, alleging that its paid-advertisement services infringed one of its patents. District Judge David Folsom ruled in favor of the search engines that invalidated a patent related to paid-advertisement services. The judge said the patent was not valid based on prior art. Attorneys for Paid Search filed suit against Yahoo in September 2007, claiming that Yahoo Search Marketing infringed its patent related to paid searches. The company later sued Google and Microsoft.

The Department of Justice Tuesday approved Google's $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility. The Mountain View, Calif. tech giant said it wanted the company to improve Android and control the patents. The previous day, the European Union also approved the deal, saying it did not believe the acquisition would threaten competition and would "not significantly modify the market situation in respect of operating systems and patents for these devices."

Brian Rauschenbach put together an ad copy worksheet template that marketers can use to develop new ad-copy ideas and best practices. He takes us through the process of effective A/B ad testing and best practices. One example defines what it means to localize an ad by creating a "geo ad group," and picking a city to set the location. Rauschenbach suggests running only one ad against what he calls the AdWords campaign, making it easier to test ads.

Viewers using Viggle to check into the Grammy awards that aired Sunday got a surprise. Bing, integrated into the experience, allowed users to interact with real-time trivia, polls and voting related to programming, as well as search on the engine to help viewers find information about artists and events. Chris Marlowe said the app has been downloaded 140,000 times since the Jan. 25 rollout, and users average 70 minutes per session each time they launch it.

Title tags communicate to Google's bots, sending signals to determine authority, but even Google makes mistakes sometimes when optimizing sites and Web pages. Cregan Montague points to an "untitled" page for Adwords indexed in google.com. Montague gives us a quick reminder to make unique title tags of between six and 12 words, or 66 characters, and to avoid placing the company or Web site name in front of the description.

Google has been drawn into a piracy dispute one year after the Motion Picture Association of America  (MPAA) said it would prove that Hotfile had a business model encouraging users to upload copyrighted motion pictures and TV shows to its servers and then link back to them using third-party sites. The MPAA claims that Google holds valuable information on Hotfile and should produce it, but the search giant refuses without the file-host's consent, according to TorrentFreak.

Similar to search, every campaign in social needs special attention. Stephen Anderson provides eight recommendations that marketers should consider before launching a Facebook campaign. In one of the more important tips, he suggests taking advantage of segmentation features without limiting the audience, building a library of creative assets, and optimizing the heck out of the campaign. 

The Google employee Jon Rockway, caught leaving a comment on Hacker News that SEO is bad for the Internet, started a chain of blog posts from Aaron Wall and Graham Charlton analyzing what he really meant. Charlton called it "a surprising statement" by a Google employee. Folks like Elizabeth Ayers, Andrew Girdwood, and Rishi Lakhani also piped in to state their opinion.