RKG Report: PLAs Fuel AdWords Growth, Bing Ads Spend Rises Sharply In Q4

RKG has released its Q4 2013 Digital Marketing Report, and as other reports have indicated, paid search saw solid year-over-year growth in the holiday quarter. Paid search spend among RKG’s retail-heavy client set rose 23 percent year-over-year. Overall click volume increased 19 percent, and…

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Bing Ends 2013 With All-Time High In US Market Share, But Google Also Up [comScore]

Bing ended 2013 with an all-time high market share of search activity inside the US, but it was Google with the biggest monthly gain in December according to the latest comScore qSearch data. Google’s share of search queries was up 0.6 percent in December to 67.3 percent. Using…

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WMT: Google Gets Personal With SEOs?

Christmas morning, I got something I never expected: a personal email from Google. And it truly felt like a gift! Right out of bed, I had my 3 cans of Red Bull and checked my messages, as usual. Initially, I wasn’t surprised to see that I had an email from Google. I figured it was […]

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The Bing Dilemma: What To Do With The Little Search Engine That Can’t

The challenge that Microsoft faces in the online search landscape could be a business school case study: how to capture market share from a competitor whose very brand (“Google”) has become synonymous with the act of searching online. Imagine that you are the person at Microsoft…

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Rap Genius Back In Google After 10 Day Penalty, Ranks For Its Name But What About Lyrics?

Lyrics site Rap Genius says that is is no longer penalized within Google after taking action to correct “unnatural links” that it helped create. The site was hit with a penalty for 10 days, which meant people seeking it by name couldn’t find it. That’s been fixed, though…

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Mastering PPC: How Did You Come Up With My Budget?

What a coincidence that we both have the same New Year’s resolution for 2014: to crush it with PPC advertising. To do that, we determined a budget to pay for our PPC efforts. Management may ask – how did you decide on the budget amount? Luckily, Google and Bing have tools that provide cost estimates. […]

The Global SEO & Content Marketing Landscape

Search unifies people across the globe, and search engines are the catalyst for making that connection. For global brands, optimizing for different search engines and different cultures increases awareness, visibility, traffic and conversions. Global S…

EU: Google Antitrust Concessions “Unacceptable” As Second Study Condemns “Rival Links”

European Union competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia announced Friday in a Spanish radio interview that Google’s second round of concessions in its current antitrust settlement proposal were “unacceptable.” The main obstacle to settlement is still Google’s treatment of…

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Mastering PPC: PLAs – Mysteriously Murder Your eComm Competition with PLAs

Let’s say you are an online retailer of books, and you’ve noticed that in the last 6 months your traffic has been slowly declining. Your average position doesn’t appear to be slipping; your ad copy hasn’t changed, and yet… declining traffic. You do a few test queries to investigate and find: This. Your ad, while […]

Yandex Does What Google Can’t: Provides Bitcoin Exchange Rates

How much is one US dollar in UK pounds? Google will give you a direct answer to that and many other currencies with the conversion tool that’s built into its search results. But when it comes to Bitcoin, Russian-based Yandex seems to have won the honor of being first to support conversion of…

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Google’s Matt Cutts On Search Spammers: “We Want To Break Their Spirits”

In episode number 227 of This Week in Google on the TWiT network, Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts answered some questions from the hosts Leo Laporte and Jeff Jarvis. In one question, Matt explained that Google aims to “break the spirits” of spammers in order to encourage…

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