Paid search was the best last-click channel for Mother's Day with nearly 31% of orders, followed by organic at around 24% and referral at around 23%. Paid-search ads were clicked by 31% of all online shoppers immediately prior to purchase.

A recent study found that after conducting a voice search, 28% of consumers will call a business, 27% will visit its website, 19% will visit its physical location, 14% will research the business further, and 12% will research other businesses.

Forrester's latest U.S. mobile and tablet e-commerce forecast estimates Americans spent $153 billion on retail products using mobile devices in 2017. But when asked how often they purchased physical goods on a mobile phone, 46% in 2017 said they never did -- up from 41% in 2016.

Paid-search advertising, desktop and mobile rose about 18% year-on-year to nearly $41 billion in 2017. Digital ad revenue captured by search fell to 46.2%, from 47.7% in 2016.

As Google unveils AI technology that helps its virtual assistant schedule appointments in a human-like voice, varying speech patterns and dialects may no longer be a consideration for businesses receiving phone calls from a mobile phone, an online ad or search extension. But for now, here's some analysis to consider.

On Thursday the White House will host a summit with Accenture, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Intel, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and other tech companies, and will discuss funding for "cutting-edge research" into technologies like machine learning for agriculture, health care and transportation.

The move follows the appointment of Jeff Dean to head of AI at Google. Dean, who joined Google in mid-1999, helped to design and implement the initial version of Google's ad-serving platform, five generations of the Google crawler, indexing technology, and query serving systems.

Amazon "abruptly" shuttered its Google Shopping campaigns after competing in the auction for more than a year and a half, according to Merkle, a performance marketing agency owned by Dentsu Aegis Network.

Google has been called a master marketer -- of its own products and services as well as cultural experiences. But SEO and paid-search tactics have helped hundreds of companies get started and remain in business.

Engagement on automotive websites grew by nearly 10% in the first quarter of 2018. Visits from desktop devices grew 13% in the first quarter of 2018, compared to the last quarter in 2017. Visits from tablets rose 5%, respectively. Engagements from smartphones rose slightly, but was down from the peak in the third quarter of 2017.