“Every few months, someone seems to attack search engine optimization. SEOs are often quick to rise in defense of their profession. I’ve done that plenty myself, in the past. But a barrage of recent cold-call SEO pitches in my inbox even has me hating SEO.”
-Danny Sullivan, Founding Editor of Search Engine Land and Marketing Land
Survey: Most Users Support “Do Not Track” Idea, Don’t Want Websites To Collect Their Data
As part of the Amsterdam Privacy Conference held earlier this week in The Netherlands, professors from the UC Berkeley School of Law presented research on US consumer attitudes toward online privacy and the concept of “do not track” (DNT) in particular. The three professors behind the research, Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Jennifer M. Urban and Su Li, have published several consumer privacy studies, most recently in the context of mobile payments.
This new survey, supporting the report “Privacy and Modern Advertising,” was conducted among a nationally representative sample of 1,203 US adult internet users in Q1 of this year.
Source: marketingland.com
It’s unwise to just do outreach from your parent company. There are a lot of crazies on the internet… If you’re a marketing company, you should build some online personas so that you can protect your own brand.
Source: searchengineland.com
Google Disapproved 134M Ads And Disabled More Than 800K AdWords Accounts In 2011
Like fighting spam and click fraud, finding and nixing bad ads on AdWords is a continually escalating battle. One telling stat the company revealed in a blog post today: 134 million. That’s how many ads Google axed in 2011, a 136% rise from the year before. Back in 2008, the company only disapproved 25 million ads.
Source: searchengineland.com
Understanding The True Reach Of Pinterest
Pinterest became the social media’s new golden child earlier this year when marketers learned that it drives more web traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined. Yet despite recent studies showing that referral traffic from the channel is decreasing, it’s still a big hitter in the social space. As B2B publishers we haven’t seen the same surge in traffic as others have, but for many others the impact is very real. Now marketers, publishers and community managers are asking, how do we track our content? How do we measure up to other sites? Are people really seeing our content if it’s not driving traffic? And most importantly, will this platform drive revenue?
After a bit of a rant on Twitter about not knowing what the heck is going on with our content on Pinterest, Lexie Kier introduced me to Curalate, a new image moderating tool to help us “listen” to curated content. According to Apu Gupta, Curalate’s CEO and co-founder, “Pinterest finally makes it possible for people to not just “like” a brand, but to actually express their love for the specific products they care about. Engagement no longer has to be about brands and their posts, it can be centered around the actual products they make. The implications to how brands use this information for modifying their content, commerce, and advertising strategies is potentially far reaching.”
It’s not just about referral traffic anymore.
“Internet Marketing” Isn’t A Scam; Fix It, Please, The Verge
by Danny Sullivan
Hey, The Verge. Can I just call you Verge? We’ve got a little problem. Apparently you’ve grown past your gadget roots. In doing so, you’ve stumbled into just labeling a wide swath of legitimate marketers as scammers. By the way, in doing so, you’ve made yourself out to be scammers as well.
You know what I’m talking about, that giant feature article called Scamworld. It’s a good, scary, sad tale of scummy make-easy-money programs out there. I’d love it if not for this one thing:
Raygoza is an Internet Marketer — a 21st century snake oil salesman.
Here’s the issue. I’m an internet marketer, but I’m not a 21st century snake oil salesman. Neither are the thousands or millions of other people who perform internet marketing activities such as:
- search engine optimization
- email marketing
- paid search
- display advertising
- social media marketing
These are all legitimate internet marketing activities. I can see that The Verge itself does some of them. So how’d we end up being further described like this:
The term Internet Marketing describes both a particular business model used to sell fraudulent products and services online, and the community or subculture that embraces it. It operates out in the open — with poorly designed websites, tacky infomercials, and outrageous claims designed to scare off the wary and draw in the curious, desperate, and naive.
Wow. I’m in an airport right now dashing this out, but when I get home, I can’t wait to tell my boys this new term for what Daddy does.
Hey, don’t believe me that you’ve got it wrong? How about a look at Wikipedia. It has a page about Internet Marketing. What’s there is like what I describe, not the nightmare that you’ve redefined internet marketing to be.
Oh, but you mean — let me quote as I was informed — Internet Marketing. With Capital Letters. As your features editor tweeted to me:
we’re pretty clearly talking about a particular phenomenon, capital I capital M.
Oh, you’re pretty clearly talking about a scummy segment that pushes “Internet Marketing” as a make money scam. But you’ve done nothing, nada, in that giant huge article, to clarify there’s actually a broader, longer-standing discipline of Internet Marketing that has nothing to do with that.
But hey, if Nokia comes along and declares that all its Windows Phones are now iPhones, I suppose you’ll start calling them iPhones, too.
Please fix this error. Because it is an error. Then I can go back to loving The Verge again. Please?
Source: marketingland.com
AdWords To Automatically Match For Misspellings, Other Variants
misspellings, plurals, and other variations on a keyword or phrase. Now, Google will do all this automatically — as it does with organic results — with exact and phrase matching, though advertisers will be able to opt out.
The new behavior will take into account five different variations in language:
Misspellings (“waterprof sunblock” instead of “waterproof sunblock”)
Singular/plural forms (“beach balls” and “beach ball”)
Stemming (“single serve” and “single serving”)
Accents (“hotel” and “hôtel”)
Abbreviations (“Dr.” versus “Doctor”)
Acronyms (“NYC” versus “New York City”)
The company says up to 7% of search queries include misspellings, and the longer the query, the more likely it is to contain some misspelling.
This is big news for PPC managers.
Despite its reputation as a female-dominated social network — or perhaps because of that? — every team in Major League Baseball is now actively using Pinterest.
In fact, not only are all 30 MLB teams on Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook, but Google+, and Tumblr too. Why the sudden increase in social?
