Retargeting the Week’s Best Headlines

By Brooke Nichols

No matter your level of experience or knowledge of Search Marketing, there is a steady stream of new information coming out every week. And that’s a good thing, as the industry is evolving at break-neck speeds. Check out some of this week’s headlines to keep up with the latest news.

The Ginsu Guide to Search Analytics
The ability to track online (and in many cases offline) advertising to offline conversions has been the biggest hurdle in measuring ROI (define) for many Web-based or Web-involved businesses.

First and foremost, it allows more efficiency in advertising purchases. Obviously the source of any company's greatest ROI will garner more spend. (In this model a true zero-sum game is possible.) If online advertising were a slot machine, and you put $20 in and got $40 back, would you stop after one transaction? Or would you keep going until it was no longer giving you more than you put in?

Are You The Next SEO Superstar? Perhaps the better question is--do you want to be the next SEO superstar? If the answer is yes, then Lee Odden says you might need to get your priorities straight. "An amazing number of people seem to think becoming well known in the search marketing business is an end in and of itself," Odden says. "Establishing a well known brand and reputation in an industry is only worthwhile if there's something to back it up. Otherwise, all that is achieved is a hollow online existence requiring the constant feeding of "notoriety crack."” More

Search Marketing Strategies For The Next Decade
The emerging practice of “search-as-research” goes beyond the context of search marketing effectiveness. Instead, search-as-research applies observations and interpretations of searcher behavior to develop insight into marketing and business challenges outside the search landscape. Through this approach, marketers exploit the search channel to develop deeper insight into consumer needs, better understand market trends, and inform new product opportunities. While search-as-research is a relatively new trend, some interesting applications have already emerged.

On the most basic level, for example, marketers are using search as a testing ground to inform other promotional and marketing efforts. One advertiser (who shall remain nameless) employing this method very effectively uses paid search ad copy to test various promotions, offers, and product positioning statements. The “winners” in these copy tests are incorporated into the messaging for other marketing communications, both online and off. True, this kind of testing can be done in other channels, but not with the speed, ease of execution, low cost, and real behavioral feedback paid search affords. Search, and the insight derived from searcher response, provides quick and accurate feedback, allowing this advertiser to make its print ads, online media, mail, and other messages more effective.

PPC Search: Create, Influence, Capture, and Harvest Demand
Search marketing has evolved and the time's right for marketers to move beyond harvesting demand generated elsewhere. Capturing and harvesting consumer or business demand already in play is easy and can be done passably using rudimentary Web analytics or campaign management technology. Instead of being demand harvesters, marketers (those with brand budgets, in particular) must use search the same way they do other media: to influence consumers positively toward eventual purchase and create new demand for the brand and perhaps for their industry category as a whole.

Search In Pictures: Tennis at Google, The Mars Volta at Yahoo & Schwag
In this week's Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.