Piyush Mangukiya says, “Local SEO is a very comprehensive and sophisticated marketing strategy. It’s utilized to improve rankings on local search engine results pages and is very effective in bringing foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores. Like all SEO strategies, this one sounds easy and simple at first. It’s only after you work on it for a while that you realize just how much effort it requires. After all, you have to optimize your website for more than 250+ local ranking factors. So we have developed a comprehensive 32 steps local strategy that you can use to rank higher on Google... [...]

Andy Taylor says, “Just a few years ago, the paid search landscape could adequately be summed up as “text ads on desktop computers.” This simplicity meant analyzing performance didn’t require too much slicing and dicing to get meaningful takeaways from paid search data, and often a simple brand vs. non-brand look would do the trick. With the rise of additional ad formats and devices, however, understanding search performance requires that PPC managers and analysts dissect their data in several specific ways before coming to any conclusions. Here, we delve into the most important of... [...]

JR Oakes says, “Machine learning is quickly becoming an indispensable tool for many large companies. Everyone has, for sure, heard about Google’s AI algorithm beating the World Champion in Go, as well as technologies like RankBrain, but machine learning does not have to be a mystical subject relegated to the domain of math researchers. There are many approachable libraries and technologies that show promise of being very useful to any industry that has data to play with. Machine learning also has the ability to turn traditional website marketing and SEO on its head. Late last year, my colleagues... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Google made a series of announcements on Tuesday during the DoubleClick Leadership Summit. Not surprisingly, the announcements centered around mobile and programmatic, starting with a launch push for AMP for Ads. AMP for Ads launches Google announced ad-related initiatives for the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), the open-source project aimed at improving mobile web experiences and speeding load times for mobile webpages. AMP for Ads has been in testing with several ad tech vendors and publishers for several months. In June, the company said more than half of publishers... [...]

Stela Yordanova says, “Many B2B marketers have unique challenges when it comes to measuring digital marketing performance. Difficulties include long sales cycles, complex products and services and multiple influencers and decision makers. How can B2B marketers best use Google Analytics to improve website performance and marketing results? In this article I offer several get-started tips to help digital marketers analyze website traffic, engagement and conversion — by channel. A subsequent article will address customer personas and custom segments. Understand website engagement by channel User... [...]

Tom Capper says, “Sampling is a process used in statistics when it’s unfeasible or impractical to analyse all the data that exists. Instead, a small, randomly selected subset is used to keep things manageable. Many analytics platforms use some sort of sampling to keep report loading times in check, and there seem to be three schools of thought when it comes to sampling in analytics. There are those who are terrified of it, insisting in unsampled versions of any report. Then there are those who are relaxed about it, trusting the statistical logic. And then, lastly, there are those who... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “The average mobile cost per click (CPC) for brand keywords started to shoot higher starting in the last week of June. In a blog post Friday, Merkle’s Senior Research Analyst, Andy Taylor, wrote that the median Merkle advertiser has seen mobile CPCs rise 25 to 30 percent above where they were in early May. Tablet and desktop costs, meanwhile, continued to fluctuate within normal ranges. Mobile traffic share has also remained steady through this period, on average, for Merkle advertisers. Last year, Merkle saw a jump in brand CPCs across all devices, beginning in the first... [...]

Todd Cameron says, “Influencer marketing has been around for a few years, but with the current level of media coverage and discussion around it, it is fair to say that 2016 marks its growth inflection point. No longer are marketers asking, “What’s influencer marketing?” Today, many are asking, “Should we develop an influencer marketing channel?” or, “How much effort and budget should we put behind it this year?” Embracing something new, regardless of how advantageous it might be, is difficult. It’s change, and change in an organization is rarely... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “As sellers are starting to prep their holiday campaigns, Google announced several new updates to Shopping Campaigns on Tuesday (which also happens to be Amazon Prime Day), including a whole new look for generic product queries. Showcase Shopping Ads for broad queries The biggest announcement is a new ad format for broad, non-brand product searches like “women’s dresses” or “patio furniture”. Google says 40 percent of product queries are for these kinds of broad terms. Where in the past Google has often either not shown any product listing ads on broad queries... [...]

Amie Marse says, “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an incredibly intricate process that has recently become a crucial component of digital marketing. Search engines are remarkably valuable to business, with Google dominating more than 80 percent of all search engine users. SEO is essentially a game between marketers and the search engines: marketers attempt to leverage how search results are collated, and search engines constantly change how that happens to keep things pointed toward quality results. One disadvantage marketers face in this game is that the search engine companies can essentially... [...]