Save Our Search: 3 Reasons Not To Overreact About Losing Google Ads In The Right Rail
Keep calm and carry on with your PPC campaigns despite recent changes in the SERP layout, urges columnist Kevin Ryan.
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How David Can Take Goliath With Digital Marketing Every Time
Columnist and co-author of "Taking Down Goliath" Kevin Ryan explains how small businesses can use digital marketing to their best advantage.
The 12 Days Of Procurement
It’s that time of year again — yes, the time we all reflect on years past and look forward to the New Year with a youthful exuberance and hopeful optimism that can only come with the holiday season. While everyone else is busy with hopeful optimism, my grand tradition is to take the “healthy skeptic” approach and try […]
Weak & Unethical Agency Sales Pitches: How To Spot Them And Why You Shouldn’t Make Them
How not to win new clients. Does anyone you know fall into this trap? If so, try an intervention.
How To Corrupt The Social Data You’re Gathering (And Kill Your Focus Group In The Process)
The trend du jour for virtually bringing people together (with no actual physical or emotional commitment) is inside the protective walls of a secret, members-only group on a certain social network. Sometimes this is under the aegis of a brand, while, at other times, the group forms spontaneously — creating a ready-made focus group for […]
Vendors, Listen Up! Here’s How Your Marketing Software Can Stand Out
The reality for the modern marketer is that while the discussion about SEO resources (in the form of software and tech tools) may be getting long in the tooth; it continues to occur and evolve as the market itself matures. Companies big, small and in the middle — not only in search but in digital […]
Reading Keywords’ Future In Interactive Marketing
If you think keywords have any place in the next-generation, digital marketing world, you’d be mistaken. If you haven’t taken notice of recent announcements about keyword restrictions, you really should take a minute or two and have a look. Right now, Google is moving away from providing third parties with the depth of data it […]
The Slipperiest Search Campaign Ever
There are a lot slick opportunities out there in search marketing. The wheels of progress have never been greasier. Yep, since people first started paying to be included in search results, a lot of smooth transactions have taken place. Yet, for a whole lot of good reasons, search lacks certain criteria for brand building. Over […]
Say No To Commercial Creep In Search Results
You’ve read all the guidelines. You’ve hired experts to determine the morally correct and righteous path. You’ve watched the endless hours of Matt Cutts videos on YouTube. You pay experts thousands of dollars a month to make sure your search efforts are optimized safely and accurately. You work within the confines of the assumed moral […]
Not Who, But What, Is Driving Google?
With the depth of attention given to Google’s broken promises lately, the natural-language-processing, sometimes-sponsored-content-identifying engine clearly has some ‘splaining to do. For those of you who haven’t read Danny Sullivan’s excellent piece from a few weeks ago, let me elaborate on those broken promises. Google at one time decried paid inclusion — but then, in 2012, […]
The Brain Pick: Marketing Geniuses, Don’t Give It Away For Free!
Ever get those emails asking to “pick your brain” for some ideas? The good-hearted person in you says, “I can do that!” But favors like that have consequences and costs that may not have occurred to you or the person asking for them. For a myriad of reasons, search marketing seems to get more than […]
Operation Greener Grass: Why Aren’t SEOs Up In Arms?
Once again, SEO is in the news. Once again, the media (along with an elected official or two — shocker!) clearly doesn’t understand how the industry works. While it seems New York’s elected (and appointed) officials could give a rodent’s posterior about protecting the interests of anyone except Big Corporate, “so called SEO companies” are […]
Omnicom + Publicis = Publicom & Much Ado About Shareholder Equity? What’s The Real Impact?
There’s never a dull moment in the advertising world. The proposed Omnicom and Publicis merger has everyone talking, but what (if anything) does this mean for the digital ad world? Who will be the winners and losers? What possible upside exists for the clients? Having had the pleasure of working within large and small agencies […]
Social Search: The Promise & The Problems In The Way
One of the reasons people clamor for good social search is their pre-purchase desire to access user-generated reviews — information from people who know the product or service and can offer a useful opinion. With Facebook graph search going live for all (using US English), we’ve learned a lot about how it works, and what […]
Unboxing Google Engage
I’ve got big plans for my agency. Apparently, so does Google. While the agency world’s demise has been the subject of quite a bit of opinion over the years, it seems Google is embracing the fact that advertisers often hire professional services firms to help them — at least for now. Agency “certification” programs are […]
An Open Letter On “Super Firm” Failure And Composure
Disclaimer: All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real businesses, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Failure is a key part of success, or at least an important step on the road to becoming successful. When the still-young search industry witnesses a failure of any kind, it seems to revel in […]
Enhanced: Today’s Pain, Tomorrow’s Love
Google Enhanced is the online marketing advice-giver’s gift that keeps on giving for 2013. By now, everyone touching search has been in several hours of meetings discussing these changes and where they will take us (mostly in the short-term), and has probably written or consumed at least one FAQ, eBook or White Paper on the […]
Yahoo Confidential: The Real Story
In case you hadn’t noticed, Yahoo ranks number one for “Yahoo sucks.” Everyone in the digital marketing business knows it sucks, and efforts to turn the place into Google have yet to achieve fruition. Sure, the stock got a bump when Marissa came in, but that’s largely due to her status as one of the […]
Google Shopping: New Revenue Stream Or More Of The Same?
The ad community loves free products, and if those products are effective at meeting goals, it’s only right to eventually pay for them. That was the thesis of my last column, which looked at the outcry over Google replacing organic shopping results with paid ad units. Now that marketers have concluded this is a worthwhile […]
To Pay Or Not To Pay, That Is The Power Shopping Question
Much hype, and many public relations wars, has been waged over the last couple of months centering on the physical dynamics of paying your way into shopping results. Most of the attention has been focused on Google, and as often happens in the search community, Big G’s motives have been dissected, reviewed and morally judged, […]
Looking Back Over 2012 Through Tweets
2012. Wow, what a year. The world didn’t end, yet. For me, this year was quite different from those in the recent past. I experienced several personal milestones, enjoyed a lovely editorial year (my first with Marketing Land) and my agency continued to grow in spite of my absence for part of the year. Here’s […]
5 Ways To Know How To Say No (To Potential Clients Or Agencies)
We need a new agency. We are thinking of hiring an agency. We’d like to hear more about your agency. Do you do search? We’d like some SEM help. Can you conduct a review of our current program? How many times have you been asked any of the above questions? How far would you go […]
The Rise Of The Search Butler
Let me start this month with the following disclaimer: I despise humble bragging in all its forms. I find the whole process nauseating — so much so that I have taken to parodying my own tweets that even remotely smell like a humble brag. That stated with the utmost sincerity, I can tell you I […]
Can Facebook Build A Better Search? Should It?
The road to Facebook’s mid-term success is paved with search goodness, many believe. When the stock starts tanking, the top execs apparently believe a good thing to do at a shareholder’s meeting is make an opaque reference to building a better search engine. “Build a better search” is an anthem many of us in the […]
How Not To Write A Sales Letter
The industry’s quest for search advertising and next-gen digital technologies is endless. Though technology is undoubtedly important, too often, there’s not enough emphasis on the soft science aspects of closing the sale. This applies to everything from search technology to agency services. Take the sales letter, for example. Like many agencies; we get sales solicitations […]
The Search Time Warp
Search advertising is easy. You just pop up a couple of bids and drop in some text and you are off to the races. Search ads are a cash machine and you really only need about 20 minutes to really start spitting out ATM goodness. Of course, none of the above is in any way […]
Battling Baffling Search Marketing Afflictions
The evolution of the digital marketing universe is sometimes quirky and funny, and sometimes it’s just downright sad. Ten years of writing op-ed for various publications, well in excess of 15 years working in, around, or at the helm of agencies in the digital marketing sector, and it still surprises me when I see odd […]
Yahoo’s Nose Dive. Pull Up.
The foundation of search lies in the definitions of what people want and what makes them click to find what they seek. In other words, search is the foundation of digital commerce. Yahoo’s latest drama is only the tip of the iceberg for the stressed Internet company. Since former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz officially threw […]
Train Wreck Scenario: Search Marketing
A cold harsh inevitability of your career in digital marketing is that you will come across a disproportionate number of people who know a lot less than they should about subject matter that falls into their responsibility. Search is one of those subjects about which many people are less-than-informed and you’ll need to learn how […]
Avoiding Three Common SEO Gremlins
You’d think at this stage of the search marketing game, best practices for Search Engine Optimization would be foregone conclusions and everyone would be on board regarding the importance of executing on search initiatives. Well, unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Mom always told me if you can’t be good at something; don’t bother doing […]
Twitter’s Shark Leap: A Nauseating Display Of Self Importance.
I’ve heard no greater example of self indulgence than Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s nausea-inducing claim that 2012 was going to be the year of the Twitter election. (He spoke at the recent All Things Digital event in Southern California.) Amid the Google/Twitter separation mishigas (read: Twitter’s finger pointing) the notion of Twitter as a communication vehicle should […]
Is Google+ Mandatory For Marketers? And Is That So Bad?
When Google launched its Google+ social network, the marketing world (along with everyone else) barely noticed. When Google decided to make this social network a bigger part of search results, marketers had little choice but to sit up and take action. Over the last week or so, we at Motivity have spent a fair amount of time […]