Search

• Agencies

  High Tech, Personalization Let Citi Refresh ThankYou Rewards Program

  Citi has been actively innovating credit card rewards programs to make sure its cards are the ones consumers reach for when they make a purchase. The issuer has taken a multi-track approach, piloting new ways to customize point rewards but also testing some distinctly different ways to redeem those points.

• Digital

  How to Heal Your Site after Google’s Panda Update

  Google’s recent algorithm updates may spell search danger for lots of Web sites beyond “content farms”

• Agencies

  Annual Interactive Marketing Survey: More Tools, More Tryouts

  This year’s Chief Marketer Interactive Survey suggests that marketers aren’t waiting to try new tricks to capture online attention

• Agencies

  Outsider’s Perspective Helps Hoover’s Refine Brand

  Navel gazing doesn’t come intuitively to business-to-business firms, but perhaps it should: A good, hard, introspective look at itself – augmented by voice of customers and prospects research – was key in Hoover’s Inc.’s refining its marketing message.

  This was not a feel-good exercise. “With everything going into social media, the world is becoming more outside in than inside out,” says James Rogers, vice president of marketing at Hoover’s. “It used to be you could design what you wanted your brand to be, and then you’d promote it.”

  No longer.

• Digital

  Dashboards Help The Pond Guy Keep its Analytics Head Above Water

  A lack of data is not some¬thing emarketers today can really complain about. But what they can complain about is data overload, and how difficult it can be to fig¬ure out what data is most useful for their brands—without becom¬ing overwhelmed.

• Digital

  What Brand Marketers Should Ask Their Search Agencies

  Google considers its search algorithm a rather nimble moving target and makes prominent public mention of the fact that the formula it uses for calculating which pages come out on top in organic search undergoes approximately 500 annual revisions, large and small.

• Digital

  Using the Four Pillars of Optimization to Recapture Online Market Share

  There are four basic pillars of search engine optimization that elevate brands to the very widest end of the sales funnel or to the very top of a particular category.

• Digital

  Metrics Shape Become.com’s Keyword Bidding Practices

  Within paid search, the Mark Twain quote “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug” is especially apt. Consider Become.com, a comparison shopping site which saw one word make a difference when bidding for a profitable paid search term.

  “Everybody would like to rank for search terms that have a lot of volume,” says Arpana Tiwari, senior SEO manager at Become.com. “But you have to pick the keywords you can have an impact on in search.”

• Agencies

  Acquisition Spending, Direct Mail on the Rise: Winterberry Report

  Whether the check is in the mail is debatable, but marketers are increasingly writing checks for direct mail according to Bruce Biegel, managing director of Winterberry Group.

  Winterberry’s Outlook 2011: What To Expect In Digital & Direct Marketing reports that mail as an ad medium has seen a resurgence of late, and will continue to do so.

• Agencies

  Facebook versus Google or Facebook Fueling Google?

  I just attended Citi’s 21st Annual Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference in Phoenix, and a major topic among the financial analyst community is the potential impact of Facebook on Google