INTERNET MARKETING

Having a hard time convincing your CMO that online advertising is worth the investment?  Then you might want to show them the new report produced by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP (PwC) and first reported upon by Direct Marketing News.  The findings showed that Internet advertising revenues for 2012 came out to about $36.6 billion.  This is a 15% increase from 2011, where online ads generated approximately $31.7 billion. Read more

Building a conversion focused landing page is easier said than done; however, the experts at Unbounce produced this great list of successful Landing Page elements.  Below, we’ve pulled our favorite tips and tricks to provide some useful steps to help you build the most effective page for your product or service.

Step 1. Define & create a relevant reward

No one is going to just give you their personal information without something in return; two great things you can create and use as “digital candy” to gain contact information are: reports and white papers with relevant industry stats, or webinars offering life sessions, Q&A’s, or guest speakers. Read more

Google has changed its search algorithms yet again, forcing digital marketers to think on their feet and adapt to a new way of increasing search ranking on the engine.  In the past, keywords, back-links, and anchors were an SEO professionals bread and butter; they were the top ways to ensure your content would rank highly in a search.  However, with the new algorithm adjustments that Google has begun to introduce, new methods are poised to become even more significant than anchor text has been.  According to Search Engine Journal, the two new SEO tactics to watch are co-citation and co-occurrence. Read more

Early this week, eBay released a study that incited controversy in the online marketing world; the ecommerce giant stated that search engine marketing, as well as paid search advertising, was “ineffective”.  This claim was based upon eBay’s study, conducted by its own internal economists, who turned off the company’s Google-based ads and strictly managed its set of ads elsewhere on the Web.  The company states that they noticed no significant in decrease in site traffic and conversions when the ads were taken down.  Furthermore, the study states that even when the ads were kept up and used, the high cost of the ads outweighed the sales benefits they generated.  These preliminary findings fuel SEM detractors’ arguments that paid search ads are too expensive and their results are too difficult to measure to make them effective marketing tools.  However, we couldn’t disagree more. Read more

The convergence of mobile and online is nothing new, by any means; as long as there have been smartphones, there have been businesses sticking QR codes onto every flat surface imaginable. Even before smartphones, businesses used the integration of online and mobile to create a new dimension of knowledge which was previously unavailable. For instance, take bar codes- They are as old as the kraken, and yet since 1948 they have been dotting every item we pick up, from shampoo to pickles, giving the individual scanning insight into the item like price, shelf life, and shipping information. Read more

Since April 2011, Rockland Trust has been an exciting client that has utilized a number of different marketing tactics to spread the word about their community bank. Recently, the Providence Business News did a story on Rockland Trust acknowledging their outstanding customer service approaches and their aggressive strategy of buying market share in the Northeast. (The story can be read in full here: http://www.pbn.com/Rockland-Trust-eyeing-expansion,70491) Read more

Back in April Jeremy Krantz wrote about how Google was changing the ad platform of YouTube to incorporate PPC ad targeting. This change means that now relevant ads are displayed to users on YouTube as opposed to unrelated ad content. Read more

Google (GOOG) announced yesterday that they are going to launch a massive update for advertisers on YouTube. These changes will apply to how marketers display their video advertisements on the network. Unlike the prior model of YouTube advertising, which displayed random videos to individuals, the new platform is keyword based and integrated into Google AdWords. This will enable advertisers to refine the audience that their ads are presented to. With over 800 million monthly visitors on the site, there is plenty of money to be made by the search giant (which is already making over $30 billion from YouTube social media marketing alone).

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With Google rumored to be de-indexing blogs from search engine result pages and the search algorithms in the near future, many people are left wondering as to how to best avoid being penalized. Well it seem that all eyes have now turned to rising superstar blogging platform Tumblr. Read more

There is no such thing as an effective pay-per-click campaign without effective landing pages. For PPC beginners, a landing page is the page the user is taken to when they click on an advertisement. That landing page should be tailored to the user coming in from that particular ad. What is going to make the user most interested in your product or service? What content on the landing page is going to get the user to convert?   Read more