This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Report: Facebook Tops Social Media Brand Loyalty.
• Analysis: Why 80% of Your Social Media Efforts May Miss the Mark.
• Bookmark: 5 Tips to Strengthen Your Company’s Social Media Voice.
• Command Center: Don’t Just Engage In Social Media, Monetize It.
• Social Push: Quora’s Traffic May Be Catching Up With Its Hype.

• Position² Blog: Segmenting Traffic Based On User Intent: Using Google Analytics.
• How-to: What To Do If Someone Else Claimed Your Google Places Listing.
• Infographic: The Noob Guide to Online Marketing.
• Search Stats: Bing Search Volume Up 29% In 2010, Google Up 13%, comScore Says.
• SEO Tips: SERP Sniffing – A Long Tail Keyword Strategy.

Video of the Week Why Top Ad Exec Places Bet on Social Media. Miles Nadal, founder, chairman and CEO, MDC Partners, explains why his company is making significant investments to back social media sites.

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Position² Blog: The Enterprise Social Media Command Center: Processes.
• Social Media 101: Lessons From Ford’s Brilliant Use of Social Media.
• New to Social Media: 5 Social Sites You May Not Have Heard About (Yet).
• Social Traffic: Social media drives 3% of traffic to e-commerce sites: survey.
• How to Go Social: Why Your B2B Website Needs Social Interaction.

• Correction: Google’s Scraper Algorithm Now Live, Not Content Farms.
• SEO Tips: 8 New LinkedIn Features Worth Exploration.
• Link Building Tips: 7 Alternatives To Link Exchange.
• Future Search: Is SEO really killing Google?
• Alert: New PageRank Formula May Change Your SEO Priorities.

Video of the Week Bing Faces Off Against Google Over Search Results. Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google, accuses Bing of using Google data to improve its search results.

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Position² Blog: Integrating Social Media Monitoring with Business Functions: Marketing.
• Survey: Many Brands Don’t Track Social Media Conversations.
• Research: How are market researchers using social media?
• Reality Check: Social Media ROI Is Still MIA.
• Social Media Protest: Social media @ the front line in Egypt.

• Add-ons: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox announce tools to block Web tracking by advertisers.
• SEO Tips: Small Business News: Improving Your Blogging and Social Media.
• Stats: Which Search Engine Would Be a Jeopardy Champion?
• How-to: Using Webmaster Tools like an SEO.
• Analytics Tips: 127 new dimensions and metrics through the Google Analytics API.

Video of the Week How has social media changed your life? Rory Cellan-Jones asks leading figures in the social networking world how social networking has changed their lives.

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Position² Blog: Quora: A Growing Channel for Brand Monitoring and Engagement.
• Power of Social Media: Pew Report: 53% Of Internet Users Believe Social Media Affects Politics.
• Top Spends: Social Media Marketing: Sites that benefit most.
• Stats: Younger People See More Social Network Benefits.
• Images with X-pire Date: New Facebook Photo Protector Allows You to Be Ridiculous Online–and Then Erase the Images.

• SEO: 32 SEO Tactics to Avoid in 2011. You probably have a long list of SEO tactics in the pipeline for 2011.
• Case Study: How to improve your site indexation – XML Sitemaps.
• Wayback Machine: Google May Use The Meta Keywords Tag Again, according to a recent forum thread on High Ranking Forum.
• Analytics Tips: Using Google or Twitter Trends to Boost Your Blog Ideas.
• SEO V2: Can Social Media Be The New White Hat SEO Technique?

Video of the Week A new frontier for social media? Broadcastr: Listen to stories pinned to your location.

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Position² Blog: Integrating Social Media Monitoring with Business Functions: Customer Service
• How-to: The Four Essential Phases of Social Media Adoption
• Social Media Usage: Participation in Real-Time Social Media Increased 20% in 2010
• Facebook Vs MySpace: Hot Social Networking Site Cools as Facebook Grows
• Tip: Here’s How To Make Sure Your Social Media Campaign Isn’t A Complete Waste Of Money And Time

• SEO: Why StumbleUpon Sends the Most Traffic
• Analytics: Regular Expressions – Don’t Use Google Analytics Without Them
• Search Engine War: ComScore December Search Data Out! Google And Bing Up, Yahoo Down
• For Web Developers: Microsoft Launches WebMatrix, a Web Development Tool Which is Pretty Awesome
• The Big List: 168 Marketing Trends, Predictions & Resolutions For 2011

Video of the Week The Daily Show’s Take On The Verizon iPhone Announcement (The cause of a lot of hilarious commentary on Twitter channels #veriPhone and #attfail)

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Social Media 2011: SEO for Social Media ‘Must Change’ in 2011.
• In-Vehicle Infotainment: Pioneer Brings Deeper Facebook, Twitter & Pandora Integration to the Car.
• Future Value: Social Media: Next Dot-Com Bubble?
• How-to: Building Your Brand with Social Media.
• Facebook: Facebook Details Leaked: Company Is Much More Profitable Than Everyone Thought.

• SEO: Is Your Business Still Chasing Google?
• Bookmark: 10 Websites to Watch in 2011.
• Training: Enter the Online Advertising World with Google Engage.
• Off-page SEO: 16 Crucial Link Building Tools for Inhouse SEOs.
• Acquisition: Salesforce Buys Web Conferencing Platform DimDim For $31 Million In Cash.

Video of the Week Marissa Mayer: ‘Google Hasn’t Gotten Social Right Yet’: Google consumer products VP Marissa Mayer admitted that her own company has lagged a bit behind in the space.

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Social Media Monitoring: 7 Ways to Fatten Your Social Media Monitoring Payback.
• Best and Worst Campaigns: Top 10 social media hits and misses of 2010.
• 2011 Predictions: 4 Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2011.
• Twitter: The Power of Twitter in Information Discovery.
• Facebook: Google has been overtaken by Facebook for the title of “Most visited website in the US” in 2010.

• SEO: 7 Ways to Improve Your Blog SEO with Inbound Links.
• Adwords: Google Targets Small Businesses With $100 Million Worth Of AdWords Credits.
• Design Innovation: The Best Ideas of 2010, in a dynamic NY Times layout.
• Borrow and Lend eBooks: Amazon announces Lending Books with Kindle.
• Online Privacy: “2010, the year that privacy died?” – Informative op-ed by the BBC

Video of the Week Following Dell’s Approach To Social Media: Forbes speaks to Brian Solis on the impact of Social Media on business.

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Kodak’s Social Media Play: Kodak recently introduced a service they are calling Social Photo Album Creator for Facebook.
• Skype Goes Down: Skype is not working for millions of users, and the angst is playing out on Twitter right now.
• Social Money Transfer – Dwolla: Dwolla is a peer-to-peer payment platform that allows social network users to exchange money quickly and at a low cost.
• Facebook Feed Filter: Facebook Rolling Out Redesigned News Feed Filtering Options.
• How Travelers Use Social Media: Young adults ages 25 to 34 checked social sites most often, with nearly a third using them multiple times an hour.

• SEO 2011: SEO Predictions for 2011: Local, Trustbait and Social Media Optimization.
• Social SEO: The Integration Of SEO, Social Media, the Mobile Web, Ecommerce And Our Lives.
• Google Sitelinks: Getting Google “Sitelinks” Under Your Brand Search Result.
• A Holiday Card From Google: Five Artists, 250 Hours, Six Months to Create the Search Engine’s ‘Doodle’.
• Google Goes to Pakistan: A delegation from YouTube and Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, just flew to Pakistan to “explore business and content opportunities.”

Video of the Week Google Search Trends by Matt Cutts: “What are some of the things on your radar, or some of the trends in search you’d like to talk about?”

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Is it true that we have to set a CPC bid limit when we’re using automatic bidding?

The above question will be answered in the following paragraphs.

With automatic bidding, the Search Engine Marketing systems (like: Adwords, Adcenter & Search Marketing) adjust the bids automatically to earn the most clicks possible within the given budget. It isn’t possible to set a specific CPC bid. However, we can set an upper limit on the CPC bids for the entire campaign. This is the CPC bid limit. Specify a bid limit and the Search Engine Marketing system will never bid over the specified limit for any single click.

If it’s important for us to control the cost of individual clicks on our ad, it’s good to specify a CPC bid limit. Say if we sell a product that costs $5.00, we may wish to set a CPC bid limit of $5.00 maximum, so we never pay more than the maximum limit for a click.

By setting a limit we have more control over our costs, but we also may restrict the ad position or the number of click the ads receive. If we choose not to set a click price limit, automatic bidding will function the same way as it normally does, choosing whatever maximum CPC bids it determines will earn the most clicks possible within the set budget.

If a lot more control is required from our end on a day-to-day basis, manual bidding for clicks will be the best advised process to go for. Nevertheless for long campaigns & low budgets, Auto bidding is very useful.

Here are 3 key points which will help us understand the working of Automatic Bidding

• When you place a bid, you enter the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for the item. The seller and other bidders don’t know your maximum bid.

• We’ll place bids using the automatic bid increment amount, which is based on the current high bid. We’ll bid only if it’s necessary to make sure that we remain the high bidder, or to meet the reserve price, up to our maximum amount.

• If another bidder places the same maximum bid or higher, we’ll place another bid. Our maximum bid is kept confidential until it is exceeded by another bidder.

Contributed by Leo V J

• Bid Management in a Complex and Dynamic Search Landscape (0)
• Best of the Week! – Feb 11 2011 (0)
• Best of the Week! – Feb 04 2011 (0)

Introduction
For those not familiar with Quality score (QS). Google gives each keyword in your AdWords account a Quality Score or QS. QS is a numerical value that ranges between 1 and 10. To allot a keyword to an advertiser, Google conducts an auction. Keywords with awith higher QS are eligible to enter the auction more easily and at a lower cost compared to keywords with a lower QS. Google’s goal is to encourage relevant ads for their users and their pricing system is designed in a way that favors relevant ads and keywords, i.e. ads that get a high click-through and therefore make Google more money.

The following factors determine a keyword QS

• Keyword click-through rate (CTR)
• The relevance of the keyword and ad text to its ad group and the keyword’s landing page
• Landing page load time & content
• Keyword performance history

A few important facts on Quality Score
A Quality Score is calculated by the number of times a keyword matches a search query or, every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad.

A First Page Bid is an amount the advertiser in an auction pays, on average, for first page placement. So, if the first page estimate matches the ROI goal, then bid for the first page to obtain clicks and develop your CTR.

The only keywords that affect the overall QS of an account are the ones with really low CTR, which means that they have accrued impressions but have few or no clicks. Keywords with no impressions will not affect your score. It’s also important to note that the number of impressions weights the effect a keyword has on your Quality Score. So, a keywords with 0.0% CTR and 10 impressions will have a smaller overall affect than a keyword with 1,000 impressions and 0.0% CTR. So, in most cases long tail keywords have low volume that the effect is minor (even if the word is performing poorly). The only time advertisers can run into trouble is when they have a large number of low traffic volume keywords. The total sum of all these impressions add up and can pull down an account’s performance.

Tips to improve Quality Score
Write relevant ad copy – An ad copy should be relevant to your keyword and landing page’s content. Incorporating both into your ad will get the best possible QS.

Better keyword management – Remove/pause ineffective keywords that continuously achieve a low QS, because they affect the overall QS of an account. The moment you load a keyword into AdWords, it receives a QS. This initial QS is determined by each keyword’s performance history, including other advertisers. Google AdWords has monitors s a keyword’s historical performance for multiple advertisers who target this keyword. Google determines an aggregate score and this is becomes a “base score.” This score is a keyword’s starting point with regard to QS.

Make your landing page more relevant – Your landing page and ad copy should provide a smooth presentation. The landing page should deliver on whatever is promised, offered or advertised in the ad.
Make your website more credible – To acquire a significant QS, you need a good website as well. Not just the landing page, but it appears that the entire site has to meet certain criteria such as: a contact page, a privacy policy, and at least three pages of relevant content. So, as long as you have a good, high quality website, and the page you send the searcher to matches with their search, your keyword can earn a very high QS.

Establish a pattern of high quality campaigns - Google uses data to establish patterns and trends. When you create several campaigns that earn a high QS, Google will reward your future campaigns with a higher quality rating.

Choose a more focused keyword matching option – Consider using a phrase or an exact match for your keywords to narrow down the search phrases that can trigger your pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Although you will get fewer impressions, the ones you do get will be much more applicable to your PPC ad.

Contributed by Manisha

• Bid Management in a Complex and Dynamic Search Landscape (0)
• Best of the Week! – Jan 28 2011 (0)
• Best of the Week! – Jan 21 2011 (0)