YouTube
Budweiser won the hearts of millions who voted "Puppy Love" as the best Super Bowl Commercial on YouTube. The ad took the title of YouTube Ad Blitz 2014 Champion. Overall, the ads from Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Chrysler, Duracell and others attracted more than 101 million views combined.
Cnet
Six candy hearts arranged where Google's logo belongs on its search engine tell the story of "Crush," "Mr. Right," "First Kiss," "4Ever Yours," "Puppy Love," and "Blind Date." Click on any of them to hear a love story of real human beings, taken from public radio's " This American Life."
WordStream
Conversion tracking works for more than online purchases. Margot Da Chunha suggests that not tracking conversions is like driving down a winding road in the dark. In a detailed post, she presents ways to analyze conversion tracking and how to set it up and manage, and serves up several reasons why it's important to start tracking today.
Moz
Loyalty deserves more attention than thinking of each customer as a transaction. Rand Fishkin shows marketers how to move away from a transaction model and find the benefits in personalizing the marketing strategy for long-term success. Think about seeking and building relationships, rather than prioritizing the sales.
Kenshoo
Kenshoo has released a mobile app that gives its customers access to custom reporting from anywhere. The app provides Kenshoo clients with the ability to view performance reports and metrics. Through Kenshoo Anywhere, marketers can analyze campaign data, identify opportunities for optimization, and collaborate with others on the search team.
Wall Street Journal
Following Google's sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo, reports put the handset maker's CEO Dennis Woodside in the COO chair at Dropbox, per The Wall Street Journal. Woodside worked at Google for more than 10 years. He will lead a a push into business software, WSJ reports, citing three sources.
SFGate
Facebook began testing a free water taxi service for its employees from San Francisco to its Menlo Park headquarters, a spokesman told the San Francisco Gate. The commuter service, run by Tideline Marine Group, makes one trip down the peninsula for Facebook in the morning and back in the evening. The 30-person catamaran picks up boarders at Pier 40 near AT&T Park and disembarks at a guest dock in Redwood City, where a shuttle bus takes them to the main campus.
WordStream
Larry Kim serves up some tips on how to increase AdWords click-through rates in a detailed post that covers everything from defining a good click-through rate to what makes the top 1% of paid-search ads tick, and how to optimize mobile ads. Here's one tip on defining a good CTR: Kim tells us that much depends on the industry, competition and goals -- but marketers that are satisfied with 2-5% CTRs will underachieve the potential of the campaign.
eMarketer
Some 85% of people are "somewhat" concerned with an algorithm capable of reading email content, but few are worried about someone else reading them, according to research from Virtru conducted by Harris Interactive. eMarketer cites the report revealing that three-quarters of U.S. email users are worried, but few are "extremely concerned." The biggest concern points to their email providers matching contextual ads to messages.
The Next Web
Chinese Web monitoring service GreatFire claims Microsoft's search engine Bing censored information in queries from China worldwide, but the Redmond, Wash. company attributed the problem to a system error. Regardless of Microsoft's claims, GreatFire insists it made no error in its research, calling for Microsoft to release a transparency report.