Walking around blind? It may feel that way for marketers without a benchmark strategy. Gregg Hamilton tells us why competitive benchmarking should become critical to paid-search strategies. He believes this is one of the fundamental and valuable tools for paid-search campaigns because it puts efforts into perspective, helps to manage accounts, and helps to determine whether they are working. Answering his list of questions should help marketers stay on the correct track. Read the article here.

Google has finally introduced product listing ads on mobile. This ad unit is labeled "Sponsored," and displays rich product images, prices, and retailer name. Marketers using PLAs are eligible to display in the new smartphone ad unit on the mobile shopping experience, which has become available in all markets supporting the format. Read the article here.

Google continues to shuffle execs. Jeff Huber stepped down as head of mapping and commerce and will move to Google X, the lab run by cofounder Sergey Brin, who is working on experimental projects like wearable computing. The mapping division will join the Google search team led by Alan Eustace, and the commerce division will move under the advertising group led by Susan Wojcickim, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Tim Tuttle released a search engine, Mind Meld, Tuesday at SXSW that combines predictive algorithms, voice recognition and search. It monitors words in conversations and then serves up relevant information. His company, Expect Labs, supports the notion that people won't enter a question or query into search engines in the future, but rather data will pull from a variety of sources to automatically serve up the content. Read the article here.

Web site code, one of the things that determines success or failure of a site, also needs consideration when auditing search engine optimization strategies. Glenn Gabe tells us what we can find in the code because the correct implementation of tags, scripts, and more becomes critical to optimization. He provides eight examples of what marketers can find, such as canonical URL tag issues, server side code errors, hidden content, meta robots problems and more. Read the article here.

Google acquired research firm DNNresearch, a 2012 startup from the University of Toronto in an effort to improve context-based recognition of voices and imagery. The company, founded by Professor Geoffrey Hinton and his two graduate students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, offers expertise in neural networks and computerized learning. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Pinterest has launched a tool that allows profiles with verified Web sites to see what users pin from their sites, how they interact with them and understand where the pins get placed. The tool, Pinterest Analytics, builds on the set offered to Web site owners. In the coming months the company plans to add new tools that add insights. Read the article here.    

About 37% of companies use an autoresponder and send follow-up emails after an online form submission, and 25% lack a form on their Web site to collect visitor information and generate leads, according to Optify. The study released Tuesday looks at Inc. 5,000 companies to evaluate adoption of autoresponder industry best practices. Read the article here.

I prefer to stay in a bed and breakfast, rather than a hotel, when I travel. You meet interesting people from around the world over coffee during breakfast. Reading the reviews has become the first thing I do after locating a few places in the area that I plan to visit. Mike Blumenthal's survey points to the same conclusion. A sample of about 1300 American adult Internet users 18 and older provides insight into behavior patterns when making decisions on where to stay. The survey results cover where they begin their search, the most important attributes and keywords, and the …

Lenin Nair wanted to know how search engines handle synonyms, so he started by doing a Google search for "funny pets," which served up relevant results. Then he searched on "hilarious pets," which returned a different set of results. It turns out that the results returned contained the specified search term rather than its synonym. He points out that the keyword for the search query has low competition, and most of the top results do not point to advertisements. The top results that Google returned were highly relevant to the query -- and when done correctly, could bring positive results …