Jason Abbruzzese says, “Amazon finished 2014 much stronger than some expected. The company’s Prime service grew its membership by 53% worldwide off a base of “tens of millions” in 2014. The ecommerce retailer also announced solid earnings for the end of 2014 in its fourth-quarter earnings release on Thursday, logging $0.45 per share of profit, easily beating expectations of $0.17. Its total revenue of $29.3 billion just missed analyst estimates. Shares moved sharply higher in after-hours trading, adding around 12.9% after the company’s earnings call. “When we raised... [...]

Whether online or in a live presentation, you need to keep people’s attention. Action, movement and excitement help you do that. Motion Suite Pro V.2 provides you 138 new HD Motion Backgrounds that include many different themes that you can use to enhance any rich media project, online or offline. Motion Suite Pro V.2 is compatible with your favorite video editing software, such as PowerPoint (2010 and above), Open Office, Keynote, Explaindio, VideoMaker FX, Easy Sketch Pro V.2 and many more. It can be used in any of the marketing videos you build to avoid a mundane feel. Each of the 138 videos... [...]

Graham Charlton says, “How can businesses find out that they have been penalised by Google?  I’ve been asking a number of search experts for the tell-tale signs to look out for… Types of Google penalties First up, I think it’s important to distinguish between manual penalties, for which sites will recieve notification via Webmaster Tools, and those caused by algorithm changes. The larger changes like Panda and Penguin are designed to cut down on nefarious practices like automated link building or on sites with thin content, as in the latest updates. However, Google also takes... [...]

Sean D’Souza says, “Let’s say you’re choosing between three photography courses covering similar topics. The prices are stacked like this: $200 $250 $2,000 What’s going through your mind right now? Curiosity floods your brain. Even if you’re not sure you can afford the $2,000 course, you want to know why it’s so expensive, compared to the other photography courses. If we were truly happy with lower prices, we would simply snap up the $200 workshop, right? We wouldn’t so much as take a glance at the rest”. Do Lower Prices Lead to More Sales? ‘Copyblogger’ Blog  [...]

Michael Cottam says, “This is a story about Panda, customer service, and differentiating your store from others selling the same products. Many e-commerce websites get the descriptions, specifications, and imagery for products they sell from feeds or databases provided by the manufacturers. The manufacturers might like this, as they control how their product is described and shown. However, it does their retailers no good when they are trying to rank for searches for those products and they’ve got the exact same content as every other retailer. If the content in the feed is thin, then... [...]

Allison Howen says, “Snapchat made a major move this week with the launch of a new feature called “Discover.” With Discover, users are able to find Stories from a variety of editorial teams, such as CNN, Comedy Central and Food Network. According to Snapchat’s announcement, Discover is the result of a collaboration with media partners to build a storytelling format that puts the narrative first. Moreover, Snapchat puts an emphasis on the fact that this feature is not social media. “Social media companies tell us what to read based on what’s most recent or most popular. We see it... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “Foursquare Tips meet Facebook Place Tips. Today Facebook introduced Place Tips, which offer a range of content, information and recommendations about places in the real world. The value is obvious. As with Foursquare Tips, Facebook Place Tips offer advice and information from the location’s Facebook Page and from people in your network who’ve been there before. At a high level, there appear to be two main differences between Foursquare Tips and Place Tips. Foursquare Tips are from the public generally, while Place Tips are from your network (and the entity). The... [...]

Siobhán McGinty says, “According to retargeting platform AdRoll, only 2% of shoppers typically convert on their first visit to an online store. That’s a lot of people slipping through the cracks. What’s a marketer to do? Enter retargeting. Retargeting allows you to zero in on those 98% of visitors, giving them a second (and in some cases third, fourth, and fifth) chance to convert. Here’s how retargeting works: It allows you to show targeted ads to potential customers via search, social media, and other websites. They see them, click back to your website, and then... [...]

JP Mangalindan says, “Love it or loathe it, Facebook is as integral to our day-to-day lives as checking email or texting that special someone. And in case there was any doubt, the social network unleashed new data on Wednesday to prove it. Nearly 1.4 billion people around the world use Facebook every month. Some 890 million people visit it daily and now view more than 3 billion videos a day. Unsurprisingly, much of the growth is happening on the mobile side. Almost half of Facebook’s 1.89 billion mobile users now check the social network exclusively on their phones and tablets. In other... [...]

David Moth says, “Mobile and desktop paid search ads vary wildly in terms of the use case and the UX. Fewer ads are displayed on the mobile screen and advertisers have less copy to work with. Mobile searchers are also in a different frame of mind. They’re more likely to know what they want and are ready to take action rather than browsing. Research shows that three out of four mobile searches trigger follow-up actions, whether that be further research, a store visit, a phone call, a purchase or word-of-mouth sharing. As a result of these differences, marketers need to monitor different KPIs... [...]