Jason DeMers serves up seven steps to get the most from campaigns. He believes the tips will boost sales and return on investments during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It all begins with creating the landing page, but he suggests making sure the pages support mobile devices, since analysts expect that many more consumers this year will click their way to purchases. On the list of seven, marketers also will find optimizing for speed, Web site audit tips, and ways to test for ease of use. Read the article here.

Kids 8 years old and younger spend less time in front of TV and computer screens compared with a year ago. But the time spent in front of smartphone or tablet screens tripled during the two-year period to reach 15 minutes this year -- up from 5 minutes 2 years earlier, according to eMarketer, citing stats from Common Sense Media. The number of kids who used a mobile device at least once daily also climbed to 17% -- up from 8% -- during the same time.

Several known candidates on the list to run Microsoft after Steve Ballmer moves on include Ford CEO Alan Mulally, former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, and Computer Sciences Corp. CEO Mike Lawrie. There are a few internal candidates as well, such as former Skype CEO Tony Bates, and Satya Nadella, the company's cloud and enterprise chief. The list began with about 40 potential CEOs, according to Reuters. Nadia Damouni tells us a little about each candidate. Analysts and investors are calling for the next CEO to spin out the Xbox and Bing businesses.

Tag management system Tagman has launched a Search Optimizer Toolkit to help advertisers compensate for recent changes to Google's search algorithm and the limited availability of organic search keyword data. The tools identify how consumers get to an advertiser's Web site, pages they land on and what they search for once they are there -- regardless of changing algorithms or search engine restrictions.

Some 40% of online insurance research time is spent on mobile devices, according to a study from xAd and Telmetrics. The study, conducted by Nielsen, suggests that one in four mobile searches related to insurance results in a conversion -- 60% of which occur offline, including 43% via calls. Searches for Auto, Home and Health Insurance are most popular. Some 25% of mobile purchases are made via calls to local insurance agents and 21% convert through calls to insurance providers' toll-free numbers.

The umbrella for search engine optimization known as search engine marketing continues to gain significance in online marketing professionals as the integration with other search-related media becomes critical to sustain a successful campaign. Search marketers now need to know about social, email, referral, content, native, affiliate, mobile and, yes, search -- a topic we will discuss at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit in Deer Valley, Utah, Dec. 8-11, 2013.

Global Equities Research Director Trip Chowdhry has been pushing for Microsoft to roll out a few operating units like the search engine brand Bing. Now Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen believes the same. He believes the company should spin out gaming console Xbox and the search engine brand Bing.com into a separate company to focus more on the business-to-business (B2B) operations. Allen believes the company should separate consumer from business ventures.

Bing renewed its partnership agreement with Twitter to keep tweets serving up in search results. Not much more to say on the subject except that the engine hopes the tweets will build a larger following through social signals. Bing began featuring tweets in 2009, followed by Facebook and then Klout.

Some still wonder whether Marissa Mayer is good for Yahoo, and how much credit the former Google No. 20 employee should receive for the company's turnaround. Buried at the bottom of the post, Nick Bilton tells us that since Mayer took the helm the company’s stock price has doubled. Last quarter, Yahoo acquired eight start-ups and released 15 new product updates, which have led to a 20% increase in site traffic.

Former and current Google employees are having an interesting conversation on a Quora thread highlighting the worst things about working at the Mountain View, Calif. company. Some reveal that the company lost its start-up mentality, it hires the best people to do the most mundane jobs, and middle management is mediocre, and the bigger it gets the more unlikely that one person can have an impact.