The Week in Review

Facebook Sponsored Stories Ads: 46% Higher CTR, 18% Lower Cost per Fan

According to TBG Digital, a Facebook Ads API service provider, Facebook’s new Sponsored Stories ad units get a 46 percent higher click-through rate, a 20 percent lower cost per click and an 18 percent lower cost per fan than the social network’s standard ad units. “The new ad unit has looked especially promising because it so tightly fits in with how people use Facebook. It converts a user’s activity, such as Liking a Page or a using an application, into a sidebar ad shown to their friends. Those friends can then respond to the ad unit, through taking actions such as Liking the Page or playing a game.” (Inside Facebook)

Why You Must Own Your Brand in AdWords

Bidding on your brand through Google AdWords isn’t a waste of money, even if you dominate the organic rankings for the term. A case study revealed this simple finding: brand PPC campaigns means increased sales. Why does PPC and SEO work better than SEO on its own? The combo appeals to those who prefer advertising, owning all Google real estate for your brand enhances the perception of your brand to searchers and you can test compelling ad copy. (ineedhits)

Is SEO No Longer a Viable Core Marketing Strategy?

Entrepreneurs may want to think twice before spending money on SEO as their primary marketing strategy, according to an entrepreneur/investor. There are many who disagree, of course. “Many technology experts don’t buy Dixon’s argument, but most, including McClure, concede that SEO must be viewed as part of a more comprehensive strategy that gives increased weight to newly emerging platforms. They also point out that higher standards for quality are making effective SEO even more time-consuming than ever before, adding to the difficulty faced by startups with limited resources at their disposal.” Then there’s the issue of black-hat SEO, which may render high-quality content powerless. (Reuters)

5 Tips for Building Brand Loyalty via Twitter

Twitter isn’t a sales driver – “it’s a far subtler marketing tool.” Among the five tips for building brand loyalty by way of Twitter are tweeting something worthwhile, encouraging staff to tweet (with guidance) and being fun. (Search Engine Watch)

Differing Perspectives on Link Building

Any website with a business model based on search engines being the primary driver of traffic have no business being on the Web at all. If your business model sounds like the following, expect to fail: “We will launch a site about XYZ, buy a bunch of links, put out a bunch of press releases, outsource our link building, hire a bunch of content creators to push articles with anchor text all over the web, get high rankings, monetize with paid ads, and then wait for the buyout offers.” Mass press releases, blog commenting and link swaps, among other link-building tactics, are unnecessary. Contrarian findings from a long career in this field include smaller can be better and get away from Google. (Search Engine Land)

Paid Search, Pallets of Bananas and Misleading Averages

Incremental vs. average CPCs – if this is a foreign notion to you, read this post. “The people who click on an ad in position 10 are equally likely to ‘convert’ after they get to the site as people who click on an ad in position 2, 3, or whatever. There will be fewer visitors and fewer conversions in position 10, but the value of the traffic is the same. Hence, if the goal is to maximize conversions within some ROI constraint then the goal of bid management is to pay a price for those clicks that corresponds to that anticipated value and let the position fall where it may.” An understanding of all this, along with clear-cut goals for paid search, will help with setting bids. (RKGBlog)

Facebook Page Admins Can Offer Pre-Paid Deals

Thanks to thruSocial and FaceItPages, Facebook Page administrators can offer their own pre-paid coupons without Facebook Deals or distributors like Groupon. “These tools types of tools, several of which exist already, allow businesses to avoid paying out up to 50% of the revenue they make off their deals to providers like Groupon, LivingSocial, and syndication partners for Facebook Deals such as Home Run. However, businesses lose the massive distribution power these third-parties provide, making tools like thruSocial and FaceItPages less helpful to Pages without a large existing fan base.” (Inside Facebook)

Build Trust, Not Links

Easily gained links are too often relied on. After all, will those kinds of links really get you the trust of search engines and users? Building a reference in your niche requires effort and pickiness. Also, don’t try to demand the trust of search engines with anchor-text links leading to your site. Publish a guest post and properly bait links for your great articles instead. (Search Engine People)

14 Differences Between Mobile Search and Desktop Search Results

Most businesses still aren’t thinking about mobile as something relevant to them today, and that’s a problem. To combat this, a good starting point is to discuss how mobile SEO differs from desktop SEO. “In order to convince those of you who still think optimizing for desktop search is enough to rank in mobile today and in the future, here are 14 ways that mobile (smartphone) search results differ from desktop results today.” Among them are that certain queries have interactive results in mobile, pushing Web rankings down; positions of vertical results are likely different in smartphone results; and smartphone results have different filters at the top. (Search Engine Land)

Surviving the Wild West of Affiliate Marketing

“You might not appreciate the scale yet, but there is an escalating battle for legitimacy in the world of affiliate marketing. The discovery of enormous riches in what we do, coupled with a complete disregard for how we get them, has lead to an industry-wide division. There are affiliates, and then there are cowboys.” If affiliate marketing is to purge itself of the sullied reputation it has, the “dream” that new marketers are sold has to change. (5 Star Affiliate Blogs)

The Future of Advertising Will Be Integrated

“The reality is that advertising has got to become more integrated with content in order to drive efficacy… I believe that ‘integrated advertising’ is one of the more effective types of advertising out there. You have to find a way to get your audience to actually ‘engage’ with the content in the way that Solve Media is doing, in the way that in-game advertising works for video games or the way that celebrity endorsements work.” While there’s always a tension between audiences claiming they don’t want any ads and advertising reaching audiences however they can, consumers will always prefer ad-supported content that costs them nothing. (TechCrunch)

Twitter’s Text Ads

Text ads on the side of Twitter users’ timelines have been spotted. While this is probably in its early test stages, it does seem to foreshadow interesting things to come. (Digital Inspiration)

6 Misperceptions of PPC Marketing

There a lot of different thoughts on how to succeed with PPC marketing. Among the top six misperceptions of PPC marketing are that a high quality score means a good campaign, lots of keywords and negatives is a good thing, and it’s OK to use PPC to drive traffic without conversion tracking. (SEM Geek)

Free Keyword Competition Research

Competitive research doesn’t require “expensive tools, shiny buttons, cute charts, and fancy (sometimes foolish) language about precise insight into a particular site or marketplace.” Among the free tools you can use are SEO for Firefox, SEO Toolbar and Blekko. (SEO Book.com)

Google Instant Previews for Paid Search: Meaningless?

Why would Google introduce instant previews for paid ads? It “takes a lot of the impulse out of clicking on an ad thus potentially reducing the amount of clicks and possibly hurting revenue.” However, it won’t really matter much in the end because “Most searchers are extremely unsophisticated and many still don’t even know that paid ads are actually what they are. They just see it as a result. They just click because they are interested in fulfilling their search need and the tech side of any of this is of literally no interest. I am willing to bet that much of Google’s paid search revenue hinges on the unsophisticated user.” (Marketing Pilgrim)

The Uncanny Valley of Advertising

Improvements in ad-targeting technology seem like a boon for all parties involved – advertisers waste fewer ad dollars, publishers can charge more money and consumers get to see relevant ads. So why do so many people dislike ad targeting and being served targeted ads? Part of the reason could be the uncanny valley of advertising. We’re getting a glimpse of the “holy grail of advertising,” but consumers feel spied on and invaded. (Wired.com)

How Often Should You Upgrade Evergreen Content?

Despite its name, evergreen content often needs to be upgraded. Make that part of your annual audit process – every 6-18 months, “review and prune your dead posts.” A full writeup might not be required, but it’s worth seeing if you can clear “already tweeted” and “already published” flags, or if you can rerun the post without bogging your followers down with outdated content. (Graywolf’s SEO Blog)

50+ Tools to Automate Your Link Building

Let’s face it: you’re a human trying to build links, which means you’re limited to what a human can do. Why not get some helps from “robots”? Here’s a long list of helpful tools you can use to help build those links and shift as much workload to computers as humanly possible. Among them are Majestic SEO, Blekko, BacklinkWatch!, SEOLink Analysis and Link Insight. (Search Engine Watch)

6 Tips to Increase Your Facebook EdgeRank and Exposure

The “Top News” on your Facebook News Feed filters content with EdgeRank. It’s kind of like Google’s PageRank, except it doesn’t stay the same for every user. Affinity, level of interaction and timeliness are factors taken into account for EdgeRank. Once you understand all that, it’s time to move on to the six tactics to use in order to boost the likelihood that your content or objects will show up in your friends’/fans’ “Top News” feed. (Social Media Examiner)

5 Ways to Improve Mobile Pay-per-Click Performance

Building campaigns devoted specifically to mobile, making use of Google AdWords click-to-call ads, customizing your ad copy to specific devices, creating a mobile device and turning off mobile ad syndication on poorly performing campaigns are all effective ways to improve your mobile PPC performance. (Practical eCommerce)

Google Search Adds Quora, Gowalla and Others

Google’s Realtime Search recently added results from Quora, Gowalla and other sites. These results join the ranks that include Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Google Buzz, among other sources of updates. (TechCrunch, MarketingVOX)

5 Tips for Boosting Your User Signups

Getting users to sign up for newsletters or paid-subscription services doesn’t have to be that difficult. When working on a signup page, just ask yourself two questions: Does this make it easier to sign up? Does this give a better reason to sign up? Making your call to action obvious, simplifying your signup form and offering incentives are among the five simple ways you can increase your signups. (KISSmetrics)

Should You Advertise on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter?

If you’re wondering whether advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter is right for you, this post should point you in the right direction. “All three platforms are also developing new and innovative ways to target advertising messages, based on the overwhelming amount of data they possess about their users. Marketers should explore the paid opportunities social networks offer with as much thought and effort as they experiment with the ‘earned’ and ‘owned’ aspects that these networks provide.” In the end, a “test and invest” approach should serve you well. (Social Media Examiner)

Social PR: 6 Tactics

Dale Carnegie’s words of wisdom still hold true today when pondering how to make people like you instantly. Among the time-proven ways to win friends and influence search are using QR codes, using a good Facebook profile image and utilizing your LinkedIn status well. (Search Engine Watch)

Stop Comparing SEO and PPC

SEO consultants need to stop comparing SEO and PPC. Sure, SEO has better long-term ROI than PPC, but that’s like comparing a stone to an iPhone 3G. “By debating the merits of PPC and SEO in a vacuum, all SEO and PPC consultants ignore the larger point: both SEO and PPC can help a business meet its goals, and that’s how the two should be evaluated.” (Search Engine Journal)