Tracking paid-search clicks to phone calls paid off for one brand. Paychex increased its lead generation 98% while decreasing cost per acquisition by 43% by adding the ability to differentiate between phone leads and form leads on its SEM landing pages. The data from phone leads also improved testing and optimization. David Kirkpatrick tells us how the paid-search team handled bidding and landing page messages to increase performance. Read the article here.

301 redirects can clean up messy architectures, solve outdated content problems, and improve user experiences when done correctly, according to Cyrus Shepard. He tells us that tests show a 301 redirect, when done correctly, should pass around 85% of its original link quality on Google. Shepard takes us through the process, provides diagrams and links, and provides tips on when marketers should use 302s instead. Read the article here.

Amazon Tuesday introduced the Birthday Gift giving feature allowing friends to surprise friends and relatives on their birthdays with a gift card. The feature combines Amazon.com Gift Cards with birthday messages on Facebook. One friend can start a gift and others on Facebook can contribute. People can add $1, $5, $10 or $25 to the Amazon.com Gift Card, along with a birthday message, which will not appear on the recipient’s Facebook Timeline until their birthday. The recipient can search for a product and purchase it with the electronic gift card.

Vine, with its 6-second short videos, could provide another targeting option in Twitter for brands. John Muellerleile wanted to find out what kids -- defined by Alexis Madrigal as anyone younger than him -- do with Twitter's looping Vine videos. So, he built a database called vinecrawler to search the posts and discovered a lot of people outside Silicon Valley actually use the tool to share specific things they like and dislike. Madrigal calls them the "age of Viners," defining them as the "first form of social media that makes late 20s/early 30s 'digital natives' feel like they emigrated."

Bing has made voice search on Windows more accurate and twice as fast through technology called deep neural networks, a new version, or representation, of how speech gets processed in the brain. The Bing Speech Team tells us the idea is to mimic human speech patterns by coupling Microsoft Research's major research breakthroughs in the use of DNNs with the large datasets provided by Bing's massive index. The group also cut response time by half and improved the word error rate by 15%, even in noisy situations.

Will search marketers head to Cannes Lions next year? That's the first thing I thought after reading this post from The Hollywood Reporter. "Once strictly an advertising festival, the 60-year-old Cannes Lions has emerged as a dynamic new player in the convergence of entertainment, branded-content creation and the building of digital buzz and engaging users and fans ... ." It's part of the digital evolution, not revolution. YouTube head of global content Robert Kyncl will talk about trends, creating branded content -- and perhaps, the five production studios the company plans to launch this year.

Mark Jackson tells us about an unnamed client that wants to increase what he calls "'good' organic search traffic" without focusing on "'head' keywords." Long-tail keywords tend to drive this very large site. He tells us how to report on organic search gains after filtering bad traffic. Jackson takes us through the steps to analyze Web site shopping patterns, prove SEO success, and distinguish good from bad traffic. Read the article here.

Google has created its own YouTube "intern" series where viewers can follow five real interns during their first week. The video look inside Google's Mountain View, California campus to see what they do this summer and learn how they will have an impact on the world. The play-work ground with scooters and bikes to get around the campuses, free food and places to rest your head are only the tip. In another post, CBS reports that Google received about 40,000 applications this year for applicants to intern at Google.

Test and measure campaigns frequently. What didn't work a year ago may work today. Ashley Hanania provides three barriers to test planning: the legacy barrier, the false confidence barrier, and the historical barrier. She takes us through each to explain why marketers should avoid them. For instance, don't automatically think a change that occurred one year ago hasn't changed again. That's why she recommends going back to retest processes or keywords that may have produced undesirable results last time. Read the article here.

A hardware teardown reveals the components and technology in Google Glass, a head-mounted voice-controlled Android computer that lets you access the Internet and snap pictures. The step-by-step teardown takes us through opening the case, revealing the side touchpad and CPU board, as well as the pocket behind the ear module. Read the article here.