In 1996, DoubleClick was born as an ad exchange provider, acquired by Google, and became known as DoubleClick by Google (aka DoubleClick AdX, aka DoubleClick Ad Exchange). Then along came Google AdSense somewhere in between, which is an ad network, not an ad exchange, confusing marketers and advertisers ever since. AdSense, launched by Google on June…
By now, all of us know online reviews play an important role in brand perception and online rankings. Despite that, studies into online reviews, and how consumers react to them, continue to defy our expectations. To make informed decisions about your review strategy, we need something more concrete than the knowledge that reviews play an…
At Microsoft’s AI event yesterday in San Francisco, the company showcased its vision for AI-enabled computing, as well as its AI differentiation strategy. The latter essentially boils down to three big ideas: making AI-supported software broadly accessible to people to improve “everyday” experiences, the seamless combining of work and personal functionality in the same tools and…
As SEO professionals, we understand how SEO initiatives improve organic visibility and drive revenue, but we need to take this to the CMO as well. For years SEO professionals have battled in the boardroom to convince marketing stakeholders to spend more money on organic search and have had to try to prove the tangible value.…
Your marketing team is hard at work tweaking ads and landing pages to drive efficiency and hit the targets set for them by the C-suite. And those targets are more than likely ROAS-related. But, for two reasons, these ROAS targets are actually causing a lot of damage: ROAS usually doesn’t take incrementality into account, which…
Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series looking back at the history of Google algorithm updates. Enjoy! May 3, 2015, it happened again. Google quietly launched an update – now popularly known as the “Quality Update,” though in truth it has no official name. ADVERTISEMENT It struck fear into the hearts of many webmasters,…
We have nearly unlimited access to information and data. For search marketers, this can be a blessing or a curse. It’s very easy to get sucked into the never-ending pool of data — but this rarely, if ever, benefits our work. So how do we protect ourselves from information overload? Futurologist Alvin Toffler predicted in…
Local SEO is competitive and fierce. With more and more local businesses vying for the Google local three-pack — and ads and online directories occupying a large percentage of the remaining SERP real estate — your local SEO strategy has to be aggressive. So, what can you do to outrank your local competitors down the…
Bing Ads is now letting advertisers import call conversion data, which can help connect phone sales back to the ad campaign that prompted the call. Call conversion imports are facilitated through Bing Ads’ Offline Conversion Import tool, which was released this past September. Any call-tracking system can integrate with Bing Ads, and import call conversion…
Are your SEO and content efforts not producing enough results? Are you heavily investing time and resources on link building yet you’re still getting minimal to zero returns? Then perhaps it’s time to take a step back and rethink your overall strategy. Last December 6, I joined SEJ ThinkTank to discuss how companies can gain…