Integrating SEO with your social media strategy isn’t just something you should “think” about doing. Optimizing your social media efforts so that both search engines and social community members can find your content is essential if you’re going to have any chance at success and for your own efforts to get the “credit” rather than another company or individual.
Take for example last year’s viral video of the man with the “Golden Voice.” I wrote about this in depth, but in essence, had the newspaper who originally found this man paid attention to optimizing their content along with allowing it to be shared, they would have gotten the millions of views, plus the notoriety that came along with finding the man and becoming the authority on the subject, not MSNBC’s Today Show or YouTube.

Your company doesn’t have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars set aside to integrate search engine optimization into your social media efforts. Any small business can make sure they’re taking the essential steps that will help their content get the traction it needs. The key to making sure that your content is optimized is two-part. First, optimizing for how people search when they go to a search engine like Google or Bing, and second, optimizing for how people search when they go to a social networking community like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
Read more: ClickZ
Key Findings in Audience Efficiency
I spoke the other week at AdMonsters OPS Markets London on the subject of audience efficiency. This is a methodology both to evaluate individual segments relative to a target audience, usually client converters or visitors, and the most efficient way to describe that target. We posted a preliminary piece on this very site. I offered five key findings based on more than 200 client models in my presentation and want to share three of those findings, and their implications, here.

A Reminder on Audience Efficiency

We can visualise audience efficiency as a tradeoff between how well an audience segment fits a client’s target audience (lift) and the reach. Mathematically, there is no possible selection of audiences that provides the same lift for a given reach or vice versa.

Third-Party Audiences Aren’t Efficient on Their Own

In this luxury auto manufacturer example we see that different third parties have radically different audience efficiency characteristics. At one extreme, we see that partner 2 has very high lift but very low reach. Partner 2’s total audience reach is higher than this, of course, but these are the only segments that show up as statistically relevant to this client target. At the other extreme, we see that partner 5 has very low lift, just 1 to 2 times the network average, though with very high reach.
Read more: admonsters

Founded in 2008, Posterous, which has gone head to head with Tumblr (a more popular simple blogging site), emerged from the well-known Silicon Valley technology incubator, Y Combinator.
The company’s team will be joining Twitter’s developers, as part of the deal, the company announced in a blog post.
Today we are welcoming a very talented group from Posterous to Twitter,” a Twitter spokesman wrote on the company blog. “This team has built an innovative product that makes sharing across the web and mobile devices simple—a goal we share. Posterous engineers, product managers and others will join our teams working on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better.”

Read more: The Telegraph
3 Proven Ways to Convert Traffic From Search
Most marketers have discovered effective ways to drive qualified traffic to their websites by optimizing paid search campaigns. But for all of the effort that organizations put into testing and optimizing AdWords buys, many overlook ways to improve the rate at which traffic converts after a search campaign successfully brings them to their website.
Currently there is a 92:1 ratio in the amount of money spent to encourage consumers to visit a website versus the amount spent to convert them after they’ve clicked through to the brand. With an average online conversion rate of just 2.5 percent, marketers are presented with a huge opportunity for improvement by investing additional resources into making the website experience more relevant for traffic driven to their sites via paid search.

Here are three ways for brands to optimize the website experience to maximize conversions from paid search traffic.

1. Make Every Page a Landing Page An important first step toward maximizing conversions from search traffic is echoing keyword copy with website messages that reinforce the trigger that brought the visitor to your site in the first place. Keyword copy can have multiple triggers up front, but the key is understanding what will resonate with visitors when they arrive at your website after clicking on an ad and carrying that messaging throughout the entire user session.

To optimize the customer experience and achieve improvements in everything from your add-to-cart rate to the total number of conversions, marketers must find the right messages that resonate with customers and be agile enough to change those messages.
Read more: ClickZ

Despite a lack of measurement standards, local online ad spending will show double-digit growth over the next few years, and will continue to increase its share of total local ad spending, according to a new report from eMarketer.

As consumers turn to local search, mobile devices, hyper-local sites and daily deals to satisfy their need for highly relevant news and information, local online ad spending will rise up to meet them, insists eMarketer analyst and report author Lauren Fisher.

“Local online ad spending is growing as fast as — if not faster than — total online ad spending,” according to Fisher. “National advertisers shifting dollars to follow the U.S. population online will largely fuel this growth.”

As of May, 90% of U.S. agencies surveyed by local forum site Topix said their clients had asked for geographically targeted ads. Although the agency sample was small, it included large firms that represent a greater number of national advertisers.

For eMarketer, any company using digital ads to reach an audience in a specific area is engaging in local online advertising. Most research firms agree on this general definition, but they largely disagree on how to apply it across advertiser type, ad format and online property. The result: conflicting local ad-spending estimates.

Read More: MediaPost

How Search Marketers Expect To Use Data In 2012

About half the search marketers participating in MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit survey during the three-day conference said they take responsibility both for search and social campaigns — making the range of topics discussed at last week’s MediaPost Search Insider Summit all the more important.

Most marketers — 72.7% — who participated in the survey said they rely on interest-based targeting in search campaigns. Targeting beyond keywords continues as a trend in search engine marketing, as well as social. Evidence of the movement can be found in a recent Twitter campaign connecting AMC TV brands to consumers.

Search marketers also clearly understand the benefits of tying social and social data into search engine marketing campaigns, as well as search engine data into social media campaigns. When asked whether their company has a Google+ account, 82.4% of respondents said yes.

It turns out that 60% of marketers said they tie search data into two or more online campaign media. Aside from social, some of the options discussed at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit include tying search data into display advertising or campaigns supported by demand-side platform providers.

Read More: MediaPost

It’s hard to believe another year has gone by already. This past year, we’ve seen the online advertising landscape continue to evolve at a rapid pace, fueled no doubt by increasing accountability for online media, key acquisitions, and online marketers demanding more from their campaigns—and the technologies that power them. What’s on the docket for next year?

Here are my thoughts:

A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT ROI

Finally—The Death of the Click
As the Drago of online advertising, the Click has been beat on from all corners, but has refused to fall. Next year will be the final round in the fight – and Drago is going down. I foresee the majority of savvy, online marketers finally abandoning the click as a success metric in display advertising. It’s been a long time coming, and marketers everywhere, particularly those targeting business professionals, have finally realized that high CTRs do not generally correlate to the most qualified leads. Among other things, I bet we’ll see an increasing focus on the value of branding and post-impression attribution.

First- and Third-Party Data Unite
In 2011, we witnessed more and more online publishers achieving a better understanding of the value of their audiences, and as a result, better monetizing their inventories. However, from the advertiser’s perspective, first-party data is only the beginning. Advertisers have seen the ROI benefits that come from using both first- and third-party data to target prospects. As a result, I predict that in 2012, these two types of data will begin to blend seamlessly, ultimately driving deeper insight and ROI for marketers. Advertisers will also buy third-party data sets to integrate with their own data for better efficiency and targeting.

Read More: Bizo

Mobile Behavior Could Finesse Search Strategy

Mobile queries on tablets spike between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. while consumers sit at home watching television — which could support a cross-channel search and TV campaign strategy, according to Michael Slinger, director of mobile advertising at Google.

That type of insight, shared by Slinger at the Search Insider Summit, should provide brands with a road map for charting search campaigns.

For instance, Slinger said the single biggest barrier that companies have in entering the mobile search space is their mobile sites. In February, Google reported that 80% of the Fortune 500 companies have a mobile ready site. About two weeks ago, Google released a tool at HowToGoMo.com that shows companies what their Web site looks like when viewed on a mobile phone.

Industry executives suggest that the average consumer stores about seven apps on their mobile phone. And while they might have an app for banking, they might not have an app for a specific retail brand. Companies need to give consumers choice.

Slinger points to research that Google conducted with Compete on the use of mobile devices during the automotive research process. The goal was to get consumers into dealerships. About 34% of consumers use tablets throughout the research process, versus 30% on mobile devices. Still, 20% of consumers rely on tablets at the top of the purchase funnel — compared with 22% on mobile phones — to do research on cars. In the middle of the process, consumers use tablets 34% of the time and mobile phones 19% of the time. At the very end of the funnel, as consumers enter the buying process, 8% will rely on tablets versus 27% for mobile phones.

Read More: MediaPost

Acquisition Enhances Ad Optimization Capability for Social, Search and Display Campaigns

SAN JOSE, Calif.—-Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Efficient Frontier, a leader in multi-channel ad buying and optimization. Adobe solutions are central to how digital marketing and advertising is created, managed, executed, measured and optimized. Adobe currently captures approximately five trillion digital transactions per year for more than 5,000 customers, including many of the world’s largest advertisers, publishers and advertising agencies.

The acquisition of Efficient Frontier will add multi-channel ad campaign forecasting, execution and optimization capabilities to Adobe’s existing Digital Marketing Suite. Along with the Suite, Adobe’s digital marketing capabilities include an enterprise-class data management platform, a leading video ad management and monetization platform, and an enterprise content management system. Adobe will continue to build upon the foundation of its independent ad buying and optimization platform for search, social and display, enabling the company to offer a more complete suite of capabilities to digital marketers, advertisers and publishers for reporting and analytics, personalized experiences, multi-channel campaign management and media monetization.

“With the explosion in global Internet advertising, our customers need to know where, when and how to spend their digital marketing dollars to get the greatest return,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of Adobe’s Digital Marketing Business. “The addition of Efficient Frontier will give our Digital Marketing Suite customers a leading platform for turning ad spend into business impact.”

Read More: AdExchanger

When Is Audience Targeting Worth It?

ADOTAS – The field of audience targeting – also known as audience analytics – has long proven attractive and effective to online marketers. Honing campaigns to focus on specific audiences is not only logical, but it promises to provide a better way to generate return on ad dollars for the goals an advertiser is trying to achieve.

Because advertisers pay a premium for audience targeting, it’s important to examine the return on investment as it relates to all aspects of a campaign. As online marketers are beginning to understand, it’s rare that any one dimension of a media campaign is responsible for success. Furthermore, they’re finding out that each dimension delivers different results depending on a number of variables.

Whether you’re trying to determine the best creative, the highest performing website, the right audience demographic or all of the above, the ability to simultaneously analyze these variables is key to determining the optimal mix of online ad campaign attributes.

Taking a holistic look at the ways audience analytics combines with other online marketing factors is essential to knowing how, when and where to invest in audience targeting. This is no easy task. A brand may be looking at targeting 10 different audience segments across multiple ad networks, making it difficult to determine the right combinations of creative, placement, timing and other campaign considerations that work best.

Read More: Adotas

Advertising on social networks soared during the first half of the year, jumping 20% in the U.S. and 12% in the U.K., according to PwC. Those rates were above what the firm projected and are “fueling” the collective Internet advertising market, which is in one sense benefiting from the struggling economy.

Search remains strong as does mobile, with the spread of tablets and smartphones. “It appears that the weakening economy is accelerating the shift of advertising from traditional media to the Internet,” PwC wrote in an update of its sprawling media outlook for 2011-15.

Social networking is also playing a role in a buoyed TV market, with it “stimulating interest, and live viewing, in shows.”

PwC said its projections across the ad market for 2011 remain on the “conservative side” and below others. Agency Zenith, for example, now forecasts a 2.5% increase in North America overall, while PwC projects 2.2% growth.

Globally, the figures are 3.6% and 3.1%, respectively.

There are three regions, however, where the two firms diverge considerably. In Asia-Pacific, Zenith calls for 5.5% growth, while PwC is at 2.4%. PwC says strength in China and India is being dragged down by a slower Japan.

Read More: MediaPost

Google, Private-Equity Firms Mull Bid For Yahoo

Google Inc. has talked to at least two private-equity firms about potentially helping them finance a deal to buy Yahoo Inc.’s core business, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Google and prospective partners have held early-stage discussions but haven’t put together a formal proposal and Google may end up not pursuing a bid, this person said. It is unclear which private-equity firms Google has talked to.

Any deal tying two of the biggest Internet companies would be sure to attract antitrust scrutiny.

Federal antitrust lawyers in 2008 thwarted a Web-search advertising partnership between the companies.

Read More: WSJ

Josh-Shatkin Margolis, Magnetic founder and former CEO, seems to have a successful habit of mixing things up. On Thursday, the company, which launched in 2008, will announce James Green’s appointment as head. Green is an ad industry veteran with experience in the movie industry. He worked at various media/tech companies in CEO posts, including Giant Real,  PVI and  24/7 Real Media. In the late 1990s, he worked as a vice president, marketing at Pixar Animation Studios, reporting to Steve Jobs.

After starting four companies, Green is ready to take on the CEO spot at Magnetic. The company supports display ad retargeting with search data. He will focus on driving overall company expansion and build out Magnetic’s search retargeting infrastructure.

During his year-long sailing excursion, from October 2010 until now, Green had time to think. Two trends in the ad industry stood out during the journey: data and technology. “I’ve been hired before to turn around companies having difficulties, and I didn’t want to do that this time,” he said. “I wanted to join a team in a company poised for growth. Magnetic is driven by technology and data.”

Read More:  MediaPost

AdSafe Media Launches New Real Time URL Analyzer Tool

Network Monitor+ Allows Brands To Instantly Check The Brand Safety of Specific URLs
More Than Half of the Top 50 Global Ad Networks Now Use AdSafe Media’s Network Monitor Solution

NEW YORK, Oct. 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Today, AdSafe announced the growth of its business with Networks and Publishers, as well as the release of a new feature to expand its Network Monitor product offerings. 

With the new Network Monitor+ feature, clients can manually input a series of URLs and instantly receive the brand safety ratings for those specific web pages.

AdSafe Media now monitors and protects over 1.5 billion impressions every day across their network and exchange partners. The company ranks individual web pages on a 1-1,000 numerical scale, — the most granular system industry-wide — measuring how brand-safe a page is across multiple content categories.  AdSafe Media’s proprietary and massively scaled system examines each page on a wide spectrum of data points to determine a page’s brand safety rating. With AdSafe Media’s continued growth and close partnerships across ad networks and publishers, the company now has visibility across 98% of the commercial web.

“Publishers and ad networks find our ratings invaluable. They proactively use these ratings to improve their Media Risk Index (MRI) — the overall content quality of their network,” said Scott Knoll, CEO, AdSafe Media. “On average, networks and publishers using the AdSafe Network Monitor record a 32% lift vs. the industry benchmarked MRIs. And now, with Network Monitor+, publishers and advertisers can instantly check on the brand safety of specific pages.”

Read More: PR Newswire

Efficient Frontier, one of the larger remaining independent digital marketing firms, is getting a little bigger. The company is buying one of the largest digital agencies in Australia, Downstream Marketing, for an undisclosed sum.

The deal gives Efficient Frontier immediate scale in Australia and the opportunity to expand in Asia as the company seeks to tap faster-growing international markets. Downstream Marketing’s clients include American Express, Avis, Vodafone and Weight Watchers. The 30-employee company is run by CEO Steve Knowles, former head of marketing for eBay in Australia.

It’s the second big deal in a year for Efficient Frontier, which acquired social-agency Context Optional in May for a reported $50 million.

Like a lot of foreign markets, digital ad spending is small but growing fast. Online advertising spending in Australia reached $2.45 billion in the 12 months ending June 30, 2011, up 20% from a year ago, and is on track to surpass $3 billion in 2012, according to the Australian Interactive Advertising Bureau. “Those aren’t small numbers and it’s another extension of our business,” said CEO David Karnstedt.

Like a lot of firms born in search, Efficient Frontier is attempting to expand beyond its original purpose into all areas of marketing where automated auctions are transforming media buying. Originally that was search and then display advertising, but has since expanded to ads on social networks such as Facebook, video and mobile.

Read More: AdAge

5 Ways to Reinvent the AOR for the Digital Age
 
I had a lively conversation over lunch last week with an agency head and his largest client. We were talking about digital media, connected consumers, and how they’re shaking up the advertising business as we’ve known it. We each saw things a bit differently, but we all agreed that the traditional ad agency business model is fatally broken and needs to change.

The client chided the agency head: “We need you to do more with less, especially when it comes to execution tasks like media planning and buying. I don’t want to pay by the head for monkey work.” Ouch. More generously, she said she valued the agency’s strategic message and program development work and hoped they could make better use of analytics to connect total client investment to results.

The agency head noted that the client’s procurement department had squeezed the AOR (agency of record) fees so tightly that it made it difficult for the agency to invest in innovation efforts – like analytics – that would enable it to become more strategic. “Procurement has drained the life blood out of agency-client relationships.” The client nodded sympathetically.

I had to chime in with, “Isn’t this why programmatic buying was invented?” I qualified my question by explaining that tech geeks like me are excited about the rise of ad exchanges, demand-side platforms (DSPs), real-time bidding (RTB), etc., but the reason these things are being adopted so quickly is that they solve a fundamental business problem for both the agency and the client. Using smart software to help do “monkey work” means – at least in theory – that the agency can reallocate staff and resources to focus on more strategic messaging and communication work that moves the brand forward.

Read More: ClickZ

Media6Degrees Becomes Ad Matchmaker Via RTB, Data

Media6Degrees will officially roll out a tool dubbed Planner next week that gives advertisers and publishers access to targeting data.

For advertisers, the report provides a list of the best publisher sites. For publishers, the report provides the same for advertisers. The tool relies on technology that creates matches based on data collected from Web page tags, or code, placed on advertisers’ and publishers’ Web sites. The data represents clusters of consumers with similar likes.

Calling the data that creates this “fingerprint” unique to a specific customer base, Andrew Pancer, COO at Media6Degrees, describes the code as a targeting pixel that gathers information. He believes the data can help publishers generate premium sales from real-time bidding insights, along with revenue generated from putting remnant into exchanges.

Publishers have been looking for ways to take advantage of RTB, but most don’t like the idea that inventory gets sold without the support of their direct sales force. These days it’s about adding “value” and “efficiencies” to inventory, which RTB allies suggest will bring to the process.

Read More: MediaPost

Historically, marketers have adopted a boomerang strategy when forced to deal with a new media channel. Step one: spin up a division to deal with the new channel. Step two: mainstream the division when everyone starts to realize that the new channel is just an extension of the consumer’s life. Remember Young & Rubicam’s Y&R 2.1 or Ogilvy’s Ogilvy Interactive? Didn’t think so. They were early agency responses to this new thing called the Internet. How about the early agency efforts at mobile marketing, Omnicom’s IPSH, Publicis’ Phonevalley, or IPG’s Ansible? Sensing a pattern here?

History appears to be repeating itself with social media and its poster child, Facebook. Facebook media shops are springing up like zits on the face of a Facebook-addled teen. With more than 750 million users around the world, Facebook offers marketers an immense and granular audience. According to recent comScore data, Facebook accounted for 346 billion ad impressions in Q1 2011, putting it at the top of all online display ad publishers with 31.2 percent share of all impressions served in the U.S. But does Facebook even belong in the category of “display ad publishers”? Many observe that Facebook has built a “closed” web – its treasure trove of user demographic and psychographic information in a walled-off garden – where advertisers can sow seeds but grow their business largely in Facebook’s garden.

Read More: ClickZ

Yahoo! Announces Leadership Reorganization

Board Appoints Timothy Morse Interim CEO

Board Initiates Search for Permanent CEO

SUNNYVALE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), the premier digital media company, today announced a leadership reorganization under which the Board of Directors has appointed Timothy Morse interim Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately, replacing Carol Bartz, who has been removed by the Board from her role as Chief Executive Officer.

The Board has also named key senior Yahoo! executives to a newly formed Executive Leadership Council tasked with supporting Morse in managing the Company’s day-to-day operations until a permanent chief executive is appointed, as well as supporting a comprehensive strategic review that the Board has initiated to position the Company for future growth.

Roy Bostock, Chairman of the Yahoo! Board, said, “The Board sees enormous growth opportunities on which Yahoo! can capitalize, and our primary objective is to leverage the Company’s leadership and current business assets and platforms to execute against these opportunities. We have talented teams and tremendous resources behind them and intend to return the Company to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation. We are committed to exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will put Yahoo! on a trajectory for growth and innovation and deliver value to shareholders.”

Read More: Yahoo!

“Relationship” Cookies

The secret to online marketing is at the cookie level.  Every moment is 1:1 between the brand and the consumer.  For each individual impression we can measure the resulting actions (or inactions).

So we, the media buyers and digital marketers out there, buy cheap impressions – the cheaper the better as long as they “perform.”  We’re smarter with our dollars.  We have data and algorithms that tell us where our marketing budgets are working most effectively.  We’re 100% accountable with our media down to the cookie level.

But what about the consumer?  Have you ever stopped to think about the net impact to the consumer of all your online programs combined?

Direct response media is still direct response media.  A banner ad might not be as intrusive as a piece of direct mail, but there’s a certain element of pushiness in campaigns that routinely and overtly scream at customers to buy.  It seems even more distasteful when all those ads appear at page bottom of anonymous content.

Read More: PointRoll

Magnetic will launch Wednesday a site retargeting tool dubbed Magnetic Force. The offering gives site visitors text or image-based display ads, complementing the company’s search retargeting service.

The effort allows advertisers to leverage the intent found in search data by consumers who have visited an advertiser’s Web site.

About 10 clients amid the Fortune 500 have been testing the site retargeting service, but Josh Shatkin-Margolis, Magnetic founder, expects more will sign on with the fledgling company to combine site and search retargeting.

The two services work together because while one drives customer acquisitions the other drives retention. It takes a consumer from a generic topic, such as “car insurance” from a search on an engine, and pushes her deeper into the funnel through different stages of intent to more specific brands.

Shatkin-Margolis points to a recent study from comScore and ValueClick showing that retargeted ads increase trademark search behavior by 1,046%. And between May and December 2010, the number of U.S. marketers using site retargeting rose from 17% to 22%, according to eMarketer. The research firm also notes that during that time, the proportion of marketers launching search retargeting programs jumped from 13% to 28%.

Read More: MediaPost

The 7 types of effective retargeting

The term “retargeting” has become common language within the digital marketing space, but it’s often misunderstood and, consequently, the potential it brings becomes lost. There are actually seven ways you should be looking at it for your media plans, outlined below.

When marketers refer to retargeting, they are typically referring to site retargeting — the ability to show display ads to an individual who has visited your site and then left again, often without completing a desired action. We hear of retailers using this in particular, trying to get a customer who has added some items to a cart to come back and hit the checkout button instead of giving the dollars to a competitor.

There is actually so much more that retargeting can do, and if you understand the basic principles, you begin to see an almost unlimited potential. In essence, retargeting is the process of identifying an individual who has done something you have defined, in order to determine who to target with an ad. And for it be effective, you define actions that imply an intent — an intent to buy a product, an intent to solve a problem etc.

Read More: iMediaConnection