Paid Search Spend Rose 21 Percent YoY In Q2, With Mobile Up 98 Percent [Covario]

Global paid search investment continued its rise through the first half of 2014, according to Covario’s latest quarterly analysis of search spend. Overall spend among the firm’s clients rose 21 percent in the second quarter year-over-year, and 2 percent over the first quarter of 2014….

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Should You Be Bidding On Your Brand Terms For Your Search Ads?

While many advertisers have bought into the idea of bidding on search terms that include their brand name, there are still plenty of smart people that question the incrementality of such a practice. We’ve questioned it ourselves, most recently in a 2012 study. That study looked at incremental…

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Using Adobe Flash For Your Web Site? Google Mobile Results Will Issue Searchers A Warning.

Flash, Adobe’s multimedia based web site technology, is not a friend of mobile devices or search spiders and now Google has decided to step up their campaign against such sites using the technology. Google announced that starting today, they will be issuing warnings to searchers when their…

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Bing & Cortana To Get Academic Search Integration At A Whole New Level

Microsoft shared details about their future plans for deeply integrating academic data/search into the Bing search engine. Starting this Fall, Microsoft said they “will be able to point the way to a wealth of information from the academic community.” Microsoft explained that currently…

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Changing Existing Links: Perfectly Normal — Except When It Isn’t

You may have recently read Links That Change Are Trusted Less By Google’s Algorithms, which was sparked by a recent tweet from a former Google employee regarding changing links: Did you know Google is less likely to trust a link once it has changed from the 1st time it was seen? — Pedro Dias…

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Google Posts 63 World Cup Logos Since Start Of Tournament – Here Are 10 Worth A Second Look

The Google Doodle team outdid itself during this year’s World Cup, posting a total of 63 World Cup inspired Google logos from the start of the tournament until yesterday’s final game. To kick-off the FIFA 2014 World Cup, Google posted the above image of Rio De Janerio on its global…

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Google’s Quality Rating Guide Leaked Again; Here Is Version Five

Google’s Quality Rating Guidelines document has been leaked once again! Version 5.0 was leaked a few days ago, where Google has reportedly completely revamped the guidelines. Jennifer Slegg has documented most of the new guidelines on her blog. You can also read the full new 160 page…

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Google Giveth & Google Taketh Away Author Icons

Google recently announced they’d be removing a major element from their search engine results pages (SERPs) that they’ve been featuring for the past couple of years: author icons. Since this is something we Local Marketers have enthusiastically encouraged, what does this mean for…

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Reassess How You Prioritize Your E-Commerce PPC Campaign Builds

Over the last couple of years, the prioritization of e-commerce PPC campaign builds has shifted dramatically. With the rise of Google Shopping and with dynamic solutions now available to advertisers, standard Search Network text-ad campaign builds fall down the priority list. In today’s world…

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Apple Maps To Offer Choice Of Google, Others For Directions

According to Cult of Mac Apple is doing something very interesting with iOS 8 Maps. It’s giving people a choice of apps to use for directions. A GIF in the article shows that once a destination is located users will be able to choose directions from, presumably, any mapping-related app…

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Search In Pics: Google Burgers, Android Dress Up & Inflatable Android Robots

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Google At Unilever: Source: Google+ Android Dress Up: Source: Google+…

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New Google AdWords PLA Test Groups Products By Price

This could get interesting. Last month, we saw Google running a test that ranked product listing ads (PLAs) by ratings and reviews in search results. Now, a new test groups and ranks products by price. In the screenshot below, provided by CPC Strategy, PLAs are grouped in two pricing stacks —…

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