Birchbox, a discovery-commerce startup, announced that it’s taking a step outside of its usual focus on beauty products for women with a limited-edition Birchbox Home, a collection of home goods and accessories, design products, and gourmet food items. This special-edition offering comes just in time for the holidays. Birchbox is also launching a corresponding online […]

A conversion funnel is the “graphical report representing a series of pages or steps that a user visits before converting.” Setting one up in Google Analytics just requires a minute of your time. Before getting started, define your website goal and know how to track it. Also, you’ll need a URL destination, like a “Thank […]

Kal Raman, a former eBay executive, has been appointed by Groupon to be its chief operating officer (COO). He will be charged with helping the company’s growth in its overseas operations, which have struggled. The COO position has been vacant since last September, when Margo Georgiadis ended his five-month stint before returning to Google. CEO […]

Mobile ad creative and messaging have a major impact on the effectiveness of a mobile advertising campaign. This means testing and refreshing are crucial. Here are five best practices for putting together mobile ad creative, in addition to blind data to show how ad creative makes a difference: 1) Keep messaging simple: if a user […]

The Whole Brain Group, an online marketing firm based in Ann Arbor, Mich., created an infographic to explain, in simple terms, what inbound marketing is and how it differs from traditional marketing. “Traditional techniques such as advertisements, billboards, and cold calling can be costly and often ineffective, and they don’t always reach the people who […]

Pinterest is drawing a clear line between businesses and people with its introduction of business accounts, which will enable businesses to officially link to their websites on their Pinterest profiles. Verification badges will help users identify these official accounts. Businesses can also integrate the “Pin It” button, “Follow” button, profile widget or board widget on […]

According to estimates from eMarketer, real-time bidding (RTB) digital display ad spending will account for 13 percent of total digital display ad spending this year, or $1.9 billion, up 149 percent from the spend last year. RTB is expected to account for 19 percent of total display ad spend next year, and will account for […]

Facebook has confirmed that it’s launching a “Share” button for its mobile News Feed, according to TechCrunch. The button is now available on Facebook’s mobile site and will be available on the iOS and Android apps soon. The mobile “Share” button will do what the Web version does: allow users to repost links, photos or […]

Laptops and desktop computers are so 2011. According to comScore, mobile phones and tablets now account for 1 in 8 total Internet page views in the U.S., and by the end of 2012 smartphones will become the mobile majority. As a result of this tidal wave of a trend, the mobile ecosystem and location-based interactions […]

Foursquare’s pursuit of a fourth round of funding turns the heat up on the growing battle between the location-based social network and Yelp. While the latter has a strong head start, the monster wave that is mobile