As expected, marketers’ eternal riddle on SEO vs PPC did not fail to generate interest at SES San Francisco last week, as Imelda Khoo reported. Earlier this year, Kevin Gibbons had already shared with us his in-depth analysis of the SEO or PPC option. This is why, this time, we decided to meet with SpyFu‘s CEO, Mike Roberts, as the search analytics company has created RECON, a tool that gives marketers a better understanding of SEO. How? By giving intelligence reports on your competitors’ keywords, campaigns and ad variations… Read on.
After months of speculations, Facebook has finally unveiled its geotagging feature. Facebook Places goes live today in the U.S., in partnership with several location-based services. You heard it, it does sound a lot like Twitter’s earlier-launched Twitter Places: the name, the partners (at least for Foursquare, Gowalla and Localeze) and the same principle of layering and meshing data from those partners. So what’s the difference? Where’s the edge?
Covario, the provider of interactive marketing analytics, unwrapped for us here at SES San Francisco the latest upgrade to its SEO deployment tool, the Covario Organic Search Optimizer.
The enhanced version provides a 56-point audit as well as recommendations that allow marketers to adjust their campaigns per web page – meaning that the changes can be implemented “on the fly,” on multiple pages simultaneously and with “minimal development support,” the company said. Arnel Leyva, director of product management, said the platform lets marketers make changes easily and seamlessly across the page. It “gives control over the IT environment to SEO practitioners and marketers so that they can take advantage of opportunities immediately,” he added.
Google AdWords has launched Enhanced CPC, an automated bidding feature that allows marketers to maximize conversions by adjusting their CPC automatically based on their track records of conversion.
In short, AdWords’ Enhanced CPC will adjust your costs to the likelihood of conversion, thereby boosting ROI – and, yes, conversions too. AdWords said the new tool also “detects attributes such as the user’s location, language settings, browser, and operating system and analyze how these attributes may impact the likelihood of your ad converting.”
Bits and bobs to keep up with search agency news: Magnetic and BrightRoll, Local.com, Conductor and Internet Retailer.
Magnetic, the search data marketplace and search re-targeting company, entered a partnership with BrightRoll, the video advertising network, in a move to optimize video ads. Now Magnetic brings search retargeting to video ads with BrightRoll’s key differentiator giving the company “the pinpoint accuracy of search engine marketing to deliver brand-building engaging ads to customers wherever they are on the purchase funnel,” it said in a statement. On a side note, this sounds just like the kind of technology that would work hand in hand with a service like Affective Interfaces to leverage the power of video.
Twitter is also boosting its mobile interaction but mostly the news mobilizing attention on the chirpy company is the launch of its own Twitter button and the impact of it on Tweetmeme.
Mobile interaction with Twitter is becoming easier than ever. Now the micro-blogging site enables non-Twitter users to follow accounts of their choice via SMS. The service, called “Fast Follow”, was launched alongside a couple of other mobile facilitation functions such as SMS alerts (and its appending keep-it-quiet option) or latest Tweet SMS access.
Truth is, interaction with Twitter in general is becoming easier with the launch of the company’s own Twitter button.
Google is beefing up its mobile features with two launches.
First, it has introduced Voice Actions for Android, making it possible to voice command your phone on the company’s operating system. Here’s a video of how it works:
Second, Google has also launched a new Chrome-to-phone extension. A button to allow users to to “instantly send the current web page, map, YouTube video, or selected phone number or text to your Android device running Froyo (or Android 2.2),” it explained in a blog post. Here’s the video:
Affective Interfaces (AI) is a startup with a powerful emotional recognition technology that can support marketers and brands in their go-to-market strategies. It provides insight and analytics into the emotional response of prospective users/ consumers to future products, campaigns,… that they want to test. CEO Jai Haissman walked us through the technology.
Yahoo published on its Search Blog a discussion with Dr. Ben Shahshahani, head of Search Sciences at Yahoo Labs. Here are the main outlines of the conversation.
Yahoo’s Approach To Search
Echoing the words of the company’s Senior VP of Search, Shashi Seth, and definitely putting an end to speculation that Yahoo is abandoning search outright through its Search Alliance with Microsoft’s Bing, Dr. Shahshahani explained Yahoo’s approach to search as an ongoing process towards more and more sophistication. “We like to consider search not as a stateless, information-extraction, but sort of an ongoing dialogue between the user and the system. User intent even in the context of search can be beyond the query that the user submitted; it could be in the context of the entire session,” he said.
It’s hard to find an original headline when the company name actually is “Wowd.” The search startup has launched what it calls a “Social Discovery Client For Facebook,” quite a stern name for a practical and pretty ‘cool’ social app that lets you cut through the noise to find, manage and organize your social connections on Facebook.
