Nirav Sheth writes that if we ask for less, they will buy more. He's referring to reducing the number of steps to checkout in an ecommerce strategy. There's nothing worse than asking the consumer to make a purchase in five steps when they can do it in two. He believes that to ask the consumer to do less, the Web site must take on the burden. That means a possible redesign at checkout. One way is to tie ZIP codes to cities and states. Similarly, the first few numbers of the credit card can provide insight into the credit card …

Marketers can justify budgets and campaigns without using a last-click attribution model. Scroll down about one-third of the way through the post to read Kevin Lee's steps on developing a "true search engine marketing campaign," rather than "a demand-harvesting machine." He suggests factoring in last-click conversions that understate the aggregate rate due to deleted, blocked and filtered cookies, as well as the loss from consumers using more than one device to make a purchase or download a white paper. Read the article here.

Google provides details on blocking rogue pharma ads. In fact, Google has blocked or removed from its systems more than 3 million ads by suspected rogue pharmacies in the past two years. It supports the decline of illegal drug and pharmacy ads on major search engines like Google and Bing. LegitScript estimates that decline at 99.9% percent since 2010. Rouge pharmacies are not only disruptive on the Web, but a serious health hazard because many sell counterfeit drugs.

Ray Kurzweil, Google director of engineering, futurist and author, made a prediction at the June 16 second Global Futures 2045 conference causing a bit of buzz. He described a transformation in the health and medicine industry that would treat biology as software, reprogramming cells to treat diseases and other ailments. Scientists have already made progress in medicine, but he said humanity can expect this to be 1,000 times more powerful by the end of the decade, and a million times more powerful in 20 years. Read the article here.

The TrueView formats in YouTube allow advertisers to target messages by search terms and interest to drive traffic to brand channels. Benjamin Spiegel takes us through several services such as in-stream, mobile and search ads, and provides tips. For instance, viewers have the option of watching or skipping the in-stream ad, which helps retain viewership of the selected video and reduces the incidence of people closing or stopping the video before it's done. Read the article here.

Michael Martin analyzes Google rankings for smartphone searches. He tells us why and how smartphone rankings are changing, and provides tips and actionable insights on correctly mapping and optimizing Web sites to better understand mobile user intent. The problem, according to Martin, is that Google plans to improve searches by rolling out ranking changes in the near future for misconfigured and non-optimized mobile sites. Read the article here.

Through a series of screen shots, Matthew Mierzejewski shows marketers how to use tools to see full search engine results pages by device for product listing ads. The same query on different devices presents varying results. Since owning each device with various system versions is not an option, Mierzejewski tells us about a tool built into the Chrome browser that overrides the User Agent and allows marketers to view how sites function per device and operating system. Read the article here.

Billed as an alternative to Google, DuckDuckGo has increased traffic by 33% since the NSA news broke in early June, reports CNBC. The search engine doesn't track search traffic. Government inquiries include Yahoo at between 12,00 and 13,000 requests; Apple, between 4,000 and 5,000; Facebook, 9,000 to 10,000; and Microsoft 6,000 to 7,000. The information the government requests does not get saved in cloud servers. Serving relevant ads based on searches does not require the engine to save the data.

While some search engines and apps believe they don't need tracking technology to serve up relevant ads and related content, others think differently. MIT Technology Review reports that Aetna will launch a smart app this week that gives it access to user information. CarePass will serve as a search portal for member activity and possibly medical records. Other health providers are expected to follow.

Evidon, which bought Ghostery in 2010, helps companies improve their use of "tracking code by selling them data collected from the eight million Ghostery users who want to search anonymously," according to MIT Technology Review. Some might view this as a conflict of interest, but Ghostery users can opt not to share data with Evidon. The post explains the companies' two main services.