ChannelAdvisor clients selling on Amazon saw a 37.9% year-on-year increase in same-store sales (SSS) in September, down from 45.1%, sequentially. Amazon filled about 35% of the sales, up from 30.2% a year ago. Search came in at 28.5% for the month, up 13.6% compared with August. Google Shopping came in at 45.2% compared with the year-ago month, down from August's 54.3%. Conversion rates rose 6.6% year-over-year from 2.09% to 2.23%, and the average order value rose 33.9% from $93.50 to $125.17.

It works with search engine marketing, too. Consider whether the audience clicking through an organic listing or paid-search ad is either brand or price-driven. It may sound simple, but you'd be surprised at how many marketers skip that nuance. Knowing the pre-existing attitudes of potential shopper can have huge influence in brand strategy. A premium brand competing in a commodity market category needs to know what attracts existing buyers, but also needs to think about reinventing the category to thrive and grow.

Conductor has unveiled the next generation of its Web management platform, Searchlight. The platform allows marketers to map their content to consumer personas and the buyer's journey to drive demand for products and services and differentiate against the competition. The platform also provides data on video content running on YouTube, and viewing the performance of content across more than 400 locations and three device types including smartphones and tablets.

Building links that help grow online businesses and organic search traffic continues to get more difficult. While links will remain a ranking factor, other signals will gain influence when it comes to determining the better pages to serve the searchers. Paddy Moogan points to patents that provide insight into the shift. Some signals may become diluted, while others replace what marketers deem important today, especially as Google gets better at understanding intent.

Bing brought a new way to show consumers the local movie houses showing flicks. The carousel format, offered only in the U.S., lets consumers browse what’s playing, similar to Google's carousel feature. The name of the movie and the image will appear in the stream. If one looks interesting, click on the thumbnail and Bing will refresh the results while maintaining the carousel at the top of the screen.

The longer the tail for keywords the better is not always the case when it comes to optimizing campaigns. Katie Lyons has put together some best practices and tips that allow marketers to get started. Lyons lays out some myths and then digs into the truth, providing insight into specifics. While she explains that the myth is more prevalent among users in highly competitive industries that find all of the popular keywords too expensive to justify, marketers could probably use long-tail keywords in accounts, but it’s most likely that reaching specific advertising goals will become tough. She provides the reasons why.

It's been around longer than Google Glass: Epson's Moverio smartglasses. The company best known for its printers and projectors has been developing its own smartglasses for the past few years. Although they're clunkier and dorkier than Google Glass at first glance, the features are innovative and smart. Each lens of the Moverio includes a tiny projector that makes it appear as if a transparent screen is floating in front of the person wearing the glasses. The glasses can produce an overlay image on top of the real image. The SmartReality app from JB Knowledge also can project a 3D model …

Pinterest has launched Pin Picks, a new collection of Pinterest's favorite things. There's plenty of fodder. In fact, 176 million Halloween Pins on Pinterest make this holiday one of the busiest times of the year for Pinners. Pinterest wanted to make it easy to inspire easy and fun costume ideas. The company is working with creative partners eHow, Funny or Die, and YouTube star Michelle Phan to help surface pins and provide costume inspiration each week of October.

Understand competitors' strategies, identify how people find your products, and use search engine keyword tools to help identify search trends. These are three basic strategies to help marketers conduct better research before launching SEO campaigns. Ben Goodsell provides tips and tricks on competitive analysis to find the words that consumers use to search for your brand's products and products like yours.

Data from a report published by Moz shows a jump in the number of Google's Quick Answer boxes that return in query results. This measurement focuses on answer boxes -- snippets of information about a subject that appears in a box at the top of the search query results, such as direct answers, stock quotes, weather forecasts, box scores, and even the new, attributed answer boxes. The study suggests that the Quick Answer boxes appear up to 44% more frequently, while the attributed answer boxes appear 98% more frequently. Peter Meyers tells us why this matters.