Laura Scott takes us through three areas in the Google Analytics Flow Report that can help marketers make the most of identifying consumer behavior and path to conversions. She tells us reasons why marketers must pay attention to high through-traffic pages, and pay attention to the visitor's path to conversion. Do they take the expected interactions, or do users follow a different path to conversion?

Google could be in talks to acquire mobile-payments company Softcard in a deal that would pair the Internet giant with the largest U.S. wireless carriers, reports The Wall Street Journal. Softcard is owned by AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile U.S., which recently laid off employees. Last week the remaining staff were told to stop working while the business sought a buyer.

Some products or services are not traditionally known as Valentine’s gifts, but that shouldn't stop marketers from taking advantage of the holiday to promote their wares. If they fall into any of these categories -- an evening out, household goods or furniture, clothing, jewelry, or gift certificates for the holiday -- a Valentine’s promotion could become a good fit. Lisa Raehsler provides some tips on making paid-search promotions work.

Rand Fishkin shows marketers how to find interest-based keywords, rather than use the more obvious and conversion-focused keywords. Fishkin describes how to "hack" into searches to find the interests of people who perform searches, might perform searches in the future, or might never perform those searches -- but are interested in the products or services the brand offers. He calls it "perfect keyword targeting keyword research if you're doing paid search, because with paid search you need a return on that investment right away."

In a short video, Jody O’Donnell describes three options to take a Web site global. He talks about the pros and cons of country code top-level domain (ccTLD), and what happens to link equity, and click-through and conversion rates. He runs through the advantages and disadvantages, targeting tips, and available tools through Google and Bing.

At least two AdWords campaigns were hijacked by scammers who modified legitimate ads to automatically redirect visitors to scam sites once they get displayed, no clicks required. The one-month old problem escalated through December, and became really widespread Jan. 9, 2015, but by the end of the weekend, Google seemed to have it under control, reports Sucuri.net. Denis Sinegubko explains.

Broadcasters on Twitch gained access to another source for music Thursday. The gaming platform, which Amazon acquired in August 2014, introduced music.twitch.tv, a library of free-to-use music that Twitch broadcasters will offer up for live content and associated archived video. The Twitch Music Library features more than five hundred songs from established and fledging labels, including Mad Decent, Dim Mak, Spinnin Records, OWSLA, Monstercat, and Fools Gold. The site said it will continue to add to this library as more music industry partners become part of the system. It is also experimenting with music content creators with a new beta …

An inspired musician either wants to test the limits of search engine optimization or has a lot of time on his hands to write more than 16,000 songs in the past seven years. He records when he's not doing his day job on keyboard, vocals, and occasionally guitar — available on iTunes and Spotify. Wired says the search results look like "something between a giant, online art installation and the first true example of search-engine-optimized music." Through online sales, Wired reports he made more than $27,000 in 2014, about $13.50 an hour.

Google has introduced a method to integrate store visits into AdWords. Larry Kim explains how Google's Store Visits -- an AdWords Estimated Total Conversions enhancement -- are estimated and integrated into the platform based on aggregated, anonymous data. It's done from a sample of users who have enabled Location History on their device. The data is then extrapolated to represent a larger population. He believes that knowing where sales came from doesn't give marketers more sales, but using that knowledge to optimize the overall ad spend could. He tells us how.

Does a knowledge gap between email and search marketing exist? A survey from Econsultancy designed to test and benchmark digital marketing knowledge, with results broken down by seniority and sector, could provide some answers. Those participating in the survey posted the lowest scores for digital channels like search and email, while the highest scores came from strategy, content and customer experience. Here's why.