AdWords Now Available for Nielsen DMAs, Same as TV

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Google has made an update to AdWords that now allows for targeting through Nielsen DMAs (designated marketing areas) in the US and postal code targeting in Canada. Using Nielsen means that any marketers can expect to be able to target the same groupings of people online as they would be able to through television. Google has also made adjustments for nine other countries to allow for city and regional targeting, and adding location extensions for the first time in six new countries.

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AdWords Adds Geo-Targeting Options in 11 Countries, Including Canadian Postal Codes

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4 Business Web Design Mistakes, How To Avoid Them

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Most businesses realize they need a solid web presence. There are right ways and wrong ways to accomplish this. Here are four mistakes often made by web site designers that should be avoided to come out on top:

  1. Avoid complicated web design – Making it flashier doesn’t necessarily mean better. Sometimes less is more, keep the design best for the user’s experience.
  2. Avoid overflowing content – Keeping your content short and to the point is often the best way to manage things. If visitors have to search for what they’re looking for it will often push them away.
  3. Don’t look like your competitors – Imitating can sometimes seem like an easy way to get started, but to really stand out you need your own brand and your own image.
  4. Don’t just build and wait – Site design does not magically draw traffic. You’ll need some kind of online marketing to do the work whether it’s social media or paid advertising. Once you’ve done that, the traffic coming will then make you appreciate the work you did for your site design.

Remember these tips when you put your site together and you’ll have a much better outcome with your new design.

Read the original article here:
4 Common Website Design Mistakes to Avoid

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Online Paid Subscriptions For Newspapers Growing

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In the past year the number of newspapers that require paid subscriptions has doubled from approximately 10% to 20.9% of all U.S. newspapers. This is a sign that the newspapers are seeing a change happening that they’re having to adjust to, but whether or not the public will be willing to pay for online news is yet to be seen.

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20% of Newspapers Now Have Online Paywalls

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How To Do Business Research With AdWords and PPC

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Pay per click campaigns are sometimes great ways to generate interest and sales within a business at a low-cost bargain. But what some people fail to realize are that these PPC scenarios also give business owners huge insight into businesses and who and where their customer base comes from. Because the systems track information from the clickers, the business owner can learn a lot about its customer base.

Five quick details data from PPC can tell you about your business:

  1. Brand marketing results – You can put your business brand into a campaign and track exactly how many searches your brand gets daily.
  2. Landing page performance – If you narrow down your PPC campaign to a tightly targeted relevant search audience and are getting good CTRs from your ads, the conversion rates will say a lot about the quality of your landing page and whether or not it needs revision.
  3. USP testing – AdWords ads are a great place to test out various Unique Selling Propositions for your business. Try doing a split test with two different USPs in your ads, see which comes out with a better CTR and conversion rate. This USP can be used for other advertising after testing here.
  4. Keyword usage – Checking your “Search Query” results in AdWords is worthwhile. In your Keywords tab, click “Keyword details” and check either selected keywords or all keywords shown. Here you’ll see what people are really searching for, and you can adjust your site content and ads to match these phrases.
  5. Product popularity – Find out how many people are looking to buy specific products online by targeting these products by keyword, each product uniquely. Seeing the response to this can tell you if it’s worth putting more time in to online attention or not for certain products, as well as how much product you should have available for your target market.

Using these tips should help you use PPC effectively to do business research and improve your ROI.

Read the original article here:
5 Things PPC May Be Telling You About Your Business (Without You Realizing!) – Search Engine Journal

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Video Ads Through AdWords – 5 Quick Tips

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YouTube could be a useful tool for companies looking to boost their customer base through advertising. This tactic has worked for businesses, movies and many other entities in need of a boost. Five basic reasons why you should try YouTube Ads:

  1. Setup is easy – Inside of Google AdWords, create a new campaign, and choose “Online video”. Then, inside the “Shared library” section, choose “Link YouTube accounts” and connect a YouTube account that you own that contains a video you want to advertise. The rest is similar to standard AdWords ads.
  2. Not overly expensive – YouTube ads are still relatively new to many advertisers, so the competition hasn’t driven up costs yet. Your Cost Per View is small compared to relevant Cost Per Click costs.
  3. Free link back to site – It’s a “Call-to-action overlay”. Find this option inside your AdWords video campaign. It will allow you to place a link and call to action back to your site on top of your video.
  4. Options to show – You’ve got four different ways to display the video: in search results, as an option for viewers to choose your video before watching their video on YouTube, as a suggested video in the list of recommended videos next a video playback, and as a preview before a requested video on YouTube.
  5. It works – Video is still growing and a good advertisement created through video, when done right, will get results.

 

Read the full article here:
5 Reasons to Try YouTube Ads & Setup Tips – iMedia Connection (blog)

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Tips to Improve SEO For Mobile Phones

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Before you start worrying about SEO on a mobile device, you’ll want to check and see how many people are finding you through mobile searches. One of the easiest ways to do this is through Google Analytics. You can go in and adjust the Advanced Segments section of any page you’re interested in. On the Traffic pages you can set up Mobile as a segment and see exactly what keywords people are using to find you through mobile searches and details related to those searches.

Another tool that you can use to check mobile details is Google Webmaster Tools. You can set up a filter here to see only mobile searches for keywords and traffic (Traffic->Search Queries, then the Filters button and change the dropdown under “Search:”).

One that many people don’t realize is available is the popular Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You can change settings there to specify showing only search details for mobile searches (under “Advanced Options and Filters->Show Ideas and Statistics for”).

After doing your research, you’ll want to know what kind of results people are seeing when they get to your site. You can use Webmaster Tools again to check this out. In Health->Fetch as Google you can change “Web” to any type of mobile device and Fetch. It’ll take a little bit of time (could be a few minutes), but when completed you can see what the mobile bot is getting from your site, code-wise. You can also use a Firefox plugin (there are several) to change the agent the browser is imitating to display the look that device will get.

So now you’ve got an idea of your site’s appearance. At this point you’ll want to decide if you are going to go through making a separate site design for mobile visitors based on the traffic you’re expecting/wanting and the look mobile visitors are currently getting. Before you can make that decision, having the ability to do the proper research for your mobile market is very worthwhile.

See the video for this here:
4 Tips For Your Mobile SEO Strategy – Whiteboard Friday

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Facebook Messages Get An Update

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Facebook Messages is going through a change in design, to more closely mimic an email interface. They are testing it with limited users at the moment, but this change will roll out to all users over the next few weeks. In a recent post on their blog, Facebook stated, “The new side-by-side layout lets you click your most recent message on the left to see the whole conversation on the right. You can also bring conversations to life with multiple photos and emoticons.”

Read the full article here:
Facebook Messages Testing Recent Design Overhaul

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Google Is Now Showing “Hidden” Facebook Pages

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Originally Facebook was completely cut off from Google. All posts by personal profiles were hidden from the search engine, and you couldn’t do searches inside of Facebook that way. It appears that somehow Google has been able to get access, and some searches for Facebook content will display results with direct links to posts from personal profiles. This may have come from people sharing the links through other crawlable sites (such as Twitter). At any rate, some of these posts are now showing up in the Google SERPs.

Read the full article here:
Google Search Results Show Some Facebook User Posts Leaking Out Of Walled Garden

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Google Search Preferences Saved In Account Now

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Does it bother you when you have to reset your search preferences (such as turning off Google Instant) on Google when when you switch from using a laptop to an iPad or a computer? And if you change your browser, you have to reset those preferences again. Google has announced that search preferences can now be saved at the account level. As long as you are signed in to your Google account, saved search settings will be available from any computer.

Read the full article here:
New: Save Your Google Search Settings & Take Them With You

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Facebook Status Updates For Businesses: 7 Tips

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Facebook has implemented an algorithm called “EdgeRank” which adjusts the weight of importance of any post based on how popular it is. So how can you improve the EdgeRank of your posts on your business accounts on Facebook? Here’s a few ways:

  1. Scheduling – Pay attention to when your followers are most active on Facebook, when they’re most likely to see new posts. Try experimenting with different times of the day. Facebook allows you to schedule posts, so this is easier to do than you might have expected.
  2. Add tags – Pages that you’ve “liked” will be more readily available so that if you want to add a tag it will be easier to find these. To find any sort of connecting page to get a tag, just type in an “@” sign and start typing. You can discover many tags this way – it’ll help promotion.
  3. Add a location – When you do a status update, there’s a “placemark” icon that looks like an inverted teardrop you can click on. This can come in handy to tag events or to put your business location when people have a reason to come visit.
  4. Target specific locations – You can make your post in a specific place (instead of “Public”). Doing this is good if you are needing only to connect with people that are in that location, for example if you are promoting an event in that area.
  5. Target by language – Use the same customization you use for location (instead of “Public”) to target a language. This way you can do a very personal outreach to members of the public who are more comfortable with a different language.
  6. Add pictures/photos – If you put photos in your posts, it will grab attention much more readily and make it a lot more tempting to share or comment on.
  7. Emphasize a post – You can pick out special posts and draw attention by either “highlighting” it (click the start at the top of the post) to make it go across both columns in your timeline or you can pin your update. Pinning it will make it stay on top of all updates so that something of particular importance will stay at the top until you unpin it. To do this, click the pencil icon and choose “Pin to Top”.

Make your Facebook posts stand out by trying any one of these or a combination. See what works best for your page and keep those practices.

Read the original article here:
7 Tips For Crafting Local Business Updates In Facebook

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