Data management strategies integrated with search engine marketing will allow marketers to view the combination in a different way that delivers more personalized messages to consumers. Google advertisers share best practices for integrating data with paid search.

Avinash Kaushik defines universal analytics, why marketers no longer love it, what business needs to succeed, and how to use it. Images, examples and step-by-step instructions take marketers through the process. He explains how three features outlined in the post -- User-ID Override, Dimension Widening, and Measurement Protocol -- allow marketers to remove the limitations of any system and free siloed thinking and siloed decision making. Kaushik explains.

Mike Blumenthal confirmed that YellowPages.ca  (YP.ca) is no longer Google's primary data source for business listings in Canada. He believes this has led to new terms in many countries -- which would mean that Google now owns, rather than licenses, their business listing data. Apparently, in the fall of 2013, Google began renegotiated terms to purchase data instead of licensing data. Some of their partners did not agree to those terms and left the program. Blumenthal explains.

Google has started showing direct answers to questions related to SEO. After experimenting with a slew of questions, Bill Slawski warns that not all the answers are correct. He tells us that several were created from Wikipedia pages and from Google help and support pages. There are some that seem to spread SEO myths, like the answers about Keyword Density and the one about LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), but the ones related to the Semantic Web seem more up to date, he writes. 

When David Buckley delivered the keynote at the last MediaPost Search Insider Summit he spoke about how Sears Hometown & Outlet Stores saw a higher click-through rate in visits to the store after adopting local inventory ads. Now he provides more details in a Google blog post.

Internet interactivity pushed New York Life into a content marketing model. The company's marketers began thinking about what their customers wanted before they were ready to buy. So, they restructured their home page to focus on providing answers for life events, life stages, and planning for the future. It meant segmenting their audience and content based on keywords and page-level SEO. Esther Chung explains.

Searching for the perfect recipe? Williams-Sonoma has released a mobile version of its Recipe of the Day app, available in Apple's App Store. It offers up seasonal recipes for each day of the year, from a selection of Williams-Sonoma's starters, salads, sides, soups, main dishes, and desserts. The app's built-in search tools allow users to filter recipes based on course, season, technique, ingredient, or dietary preference such as vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free.

Quid, an artificial intelligence company, reported Friday that it had closed a $39 million Series D funding round. The company said its Web platform enables users to search and process millions of indexed documents and to visually map answers to questions that might previously have required weeks or months of research. Companies launching a new product might use Quid to understand market reception to the product's features by searching thousands of blog posts and media reviews, producing a visual mapping of results within a matter of seconds.

Tokyo Internet –based services company Rakuten said Thursday it has acquired US-based OverDrive, an ebook and audiobook marketplace, for $410 million in cash. The platform lets users search and borrow more than 2.5 million ebooks and audiobooks from more than 30,000 local libraries. The move will allow Rakuten to move into supporting digital content aimed at improving search rankings on engines.

Earlier this week, MediaPost published an article about Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's continuous interruption as his former colleague U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith spoke. While reports suggest that he didn't realize the error, it turns out that women are more likely to get cut off mid-sentence, according to several studies. Researchers at George Washington University found that women were the more interrupted gender -- frequently getting interrupted even by women. When men were talking with women, they interrupted 33% more often than when they were talking with men, the study found.