Consumer leads traveling through a company's marketing funnel don't always convert or sign up in the end. They may stop at several pages to make an informed decision. Jason Shah believes "too many startup founders, product managers, and user experience designers are letting the dogs and loud music run wild." Shah put together a list of tips, such as rethinking each step between a user indicating interest.

In a one-on-one chat with Marin Software VP of Marketing Matt Lawson, Laura Johnston digs into the most important trends related to paid-search marketing. Most of the discussion revolves around mobile marketing and whether it will outpace desktop search marketing. Remember Siebel Systems, which Oracle announced in 2005 that it would acquire? Lawson found his way to Marin through Siebel. 

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a study Friday indicating that Google may be risking its dominant position with searchers. The study found that 83% of U.S. search engine users rated Google as their preferred search engine, despite recent privacy concerns.  Among search engine users, about three-fourths do not want search engines to sift through their personal information to serve up personalized results.

Saturation levels in Twitter continue to make it difficult to be found, according to Lisa Buyer. who points to research that shows Twitter growing at a rate of around 11 accounts per second and reaching 500 million registered users in March. So she outlines some guidelines for marketers to follow that should help improve visibility. The most important points are paying attention to optimizing profiles and the structure of tweets. And among other points to consider, don't forget the retweet strategy.

Setting clear marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) becomes crucial before implementing any online marketing campaign because the real value of Internet marketing can come from the data and the obvious results. Shaad Hamid presents a straightforward strategy to determining the correct KPIs for branding and conversions, as well as gaining Fans. Think of the KPIs as keywords that can influence searches on Bing, Google, and Yahoo. 

Google gives us an overview of changes it made to AdWords terms and conditions for API clients. The overview outlines six changes, including an update to the definition of an AdWords API client, modifications on the definition of an "End-Advertiser-Only AdWords API Client," and clarifying when Google may terminate a token for non-use.

Google has redesigned the search app for Windows 7.5 smartphones. New features include Google Autocomplete, Voice Search, and My Location. The app is available in the Windows Marketplace in English, Spanish, French, Italian and German. 

Garrett French gives us a guide to link prospecting with the tilde. He outlines some findings on experiments with the Tilde operator in guest post prospecting for the health industry. French writes that it enables the discovery of synonyms for big head tearms, works in conjunction with intitle and inurl operators, and analyzes the impact on domains within guest posts.

Use multilingual markup tags, implement geographic specific schema tags, create webmaster accounts for each country, set up Google Places listings, and engage in local link-building. These are five of the top SEO strategies suggested by Crispin Sheridan. He walks through each to explain some best practices for global SEO optimzation, which Sheridan believes drives better traffic and higher conversions. 

Francesca James says yes. She tells us Pinterest has more than 10.4 million registered members, with about "20.8 million potential eyes on your pinboards." There are some important points to consider when it comes to posting content and topics. While there's no official business section on the site, marketers can connect not only existing customers, but potential as well. James provides some ideas on how to create followers and attention through pins and boards. Interesting to note that Microsoft FUSE Labs created something that slightly resembles Pinterest through Montage.