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SEO consultant and podcast host Dan Shure has noticed a sizeable uptick in the number of pre-roll and mid-roll ads being served up on YouTube videos he has viewed during the last week.While logged into his Google account, Shure says, YouTube delivered six total ads during a 17-minute video from the Maschine Masters channel: two pre-roll ads (both of which were skippable), two ads that showed up one-third of the way through the video, and then two more ads that displayed two-thirds of the way through the video.Here’s a video from Shure highlighting YouTube’s pre-roll ad notification, specifying two ads:Shure was unable to trigger the multiple mid-roll ads in the video he shared, but others confirmed on Twitter that they have also witnessed similar upticks in YouTube ads recently.When asked for comment, a YouTube spokesperson emailed the following response:Our goal is to ensure ads are useful and relevant to users. The amount of ads that a user sees will vary based on a number of factor…

Although all businesses with an online presence should invest in search engine optimization, it isn't the end-all, be-all when it comes to driving traffic to a professional website.

via Entrepreneur: Latest Online Marketing Articles

rvlsoft / Shutterstock.com Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced a major company reorg yesterday, tapping Periscope co-founder Kayvon Beykpour to head products and Mike Montano to lead the company’s engineering team.“Through the lens of increasing our durability, agility, invention and entrepreneurial drive, and simplifying the way we work, I’ve decided to make our organization more straightforward,” wrote Dorsey in an email to staff. Dorsey shared his email publicly via a tweet yesterday.The goal, according to Dorsey, is to take the company back to an “end-to-end functional organization” organized by discipline versus the previous general management structure that resulted in more siloed teams.“The most glaring examples of this are a separate design and video org that had to matrix in,” wrote Dorsey.Ed Ho had previously led the company’s product and engineering teams. According to a series of tweets from Ho, the Twitter executive had stepped away from Twitter in May to take a “breather” b…

Can contextual ad targeting work as well as interest- or occupation-based targeting?That question has become very relevant these days, in light of the consent requirements and other limitations surrounding personal and third-party data.To help answer that question, two London-based firms — performance-based online agency Roast and ad platform Teads — decided to conduct a test, which is covered in a recently released white paper, “The Enduring Effectiveness of Contextual Targeting” [free, email required]. Roast’s head of mobile/display and paper co-author Lucy Cunningham told me that, to her knowledge, this is the first test of its kind.The word “enduring” in the paper title relates to the fact that classical modern advertising, such as in the TV- and print-oriented days depicted in the “Mad Men” TV series, was fundamentally contextual. Advertisers bought ads on, say, sports events to reach men and soap operas to reach women.This contrasts with the data-based approach of current digit…

I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably continue to say it in the future: Link building is hard.In particular, content-driven link building is hard because you’re hoping the idea and execution you’ve come up with is strong enough to attract links.You may think you have the best idea in the world, executed in a stunning way via a great design, but if the person on the other end of your outreach email doesn’t agree, your content can fail in spectacular style.While hard, executing a good link-building campaign is not impossible. Today I want to talk about ways to identify and overcome what I call “blockers,” which are issues or situations that can stop you from getting things done. You can be the best agency in the world, but if you can’t get things done, it’s not going to count for anything.Minimize lossAt my agency, we don’t lose many clients, but it does happen. That’s part of agency life. We try to minimize our losses as much as possible, but there are always going to be times when th…

For the opening session of SMX Advanced, we were treated to a keynote by Bing’s Fabrice Canel. Here are my notes from that session.Fabrice started by pointing out that search is becoming more intelligent. For example, search engines are getting better at sentiment analysis. If you search on whether video games are good for you, you’ll get one set of results, and if you search on whether they are bad for you, you’ll get a different set of results.You can also get multiperspective answers offering different opinions. Bing does this in featured snippets, as shown here by this sample result:As Bing prepares for continued growth in voice interactions, it is becoming more conversational in its approach to search.For example, if a user asks a very broad query which could have several intents, Bing will ask a clarifying question, as you’ll see here:And where it’s appropriate, search is becoming more visual.More and more technology is being applied to help search become more human as well, all…

About a week ago, the Advertising ID Consortium said it will offer the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Tech Lab’s DigiTrust ID as one solution, in addition to its own Open Ad-ID and The Trade Desk’s Unified Open ID.This was a possible sign of reconciliation from two of the biggest efforts to find a unified way to identify online users, instead of every site dropping its own cookie and outside services dropping third-party cookies.Because of the limitations on reading a cookie that another entity has deposited, the plethora of cookies means that vendors often have to sync up their cookies in order to know if they’re dealing with the same person.But the two ID efforts previously took different approaches. The central, open solution from Advertising ID Consortium is based on LiveRamp’s IdentityLink technology and cookie, while DigiTrust — a non-profit that was acquired in April by the IAB Tech Lab — is an independent, vendor-neutral effort supporting one cookie whose data can be s…

Google remains at the forefront of developments in many areas that have the potential to disrupt local search.Artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), the internet of things (IoT), voice search and cloud technology are all being increasingly used by consumers and businesses alike.Yet there is one area where Google doesn’t sit in pole position: social media.Google is way behind in socialGoogle has made several attempts to get some traction in social media: Orkut, Dodgeball, Buzz, Latitude. The fact that you likely don’t recognize these names says enough about their success.The one Google hasn’t given up on is Google+, or more recently, “G+.”  With a major rewrite of the Android app as recently as this past spring, Google has tried hard to boost its usage, even overreaching at times by mandating the creation of a G+ account in order to use certain features of its more popular products.On the positive side, those who use it seem to like it. Google+ ranked tops amongst social m…

Some people look at the changes Google makes to its algorithm as adding new rules and penalties, but most of the time, the company is just reshaping the existing order.The Panda algorithm of 2011 introduced a new structure to Google’s ranking factors and was implemented to keep poor-quality content from ranking well. Panda had a seismic effect on our industry and changed how the search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) industries approach content creation. Under the new algorithm, not only did thin content devalue a web page’s value, but it also devalued the quality of your domain as a whole.In general, parsing pages should be taken case by case to evaluate different strategies that would fully utilize the value of each individual page.There are three basic strategies for dealing with thin content: You can update or redirect it or use a noindex tag on the web page you don’t want in the search index. There are advantages to each strategy, although your decisio…

Audiences are the dotted lines that have the potential to connect nearly all of our digital channels.Audiences can help improve performance within a campaign, and they can also help influence strategies in other campaigns, and even in other channels. Using audiences within paid search, we can strategically share content based upon where the prospect is in the funnel and bid accordingly. We can start to gather information about their interests, their demographics and the ways that they’ve engaged with the brand.Today, I’d like to talk about all of the audiences you should be using within your paid search accounts. I’ll review the audiences you should be leveraging within your pay-per-click (PPC) account plus a few bonus suggestions on how you can leverage what you learn from the other paid and organic campaigns you’re running.Action, action, we want action!Activity-based remarketing lists are tried and true. I love to create audiences based on different activities within the buyer’s jo…

When it comes to search engine marketing (SEM), geotargeting is a local advertiser’s best friend. After all, if you only serve customers in Evanston, West Virginia, it doesn’t really make sense to pay for clicks from people in New York City.Geotargeting is also great for franchises. Even if you have locations around the world, potential customers are a lot more likely to respond to a location-specific ad than one-size-fits-all ad copy.But what about national or international e-commerce retailers? What if you run a business-to-business (B2B) services or software as a service (SaaS) company that serves clients anytime, anywhere?Surely, a broad targeting approach is best for businesses with a broad target market.While nationwide targeting is often recommended for nationwide offers, it isn’t always the most profitable way to market your business. Even if you can technically serve or sell to customers anywhere, when it comes to SEM, not all locations are created equal. In national campaign…

At every search conference, you hear the same click-bait question: “Is SEO dead?”The short answer is “no,” and the longer answer is still “no,” it’s just changing. Maybe the term search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t really a good way to describe the wealth of practices and factors it encompasses anymore.I’m convinced we’ll soon start to hear “Has content marketing been dethroned?” The argument for this, while still designed to get heads turning and tongues wagging, is particularly relevant for local businesses in the search world of 2018. As Google more firmly fits itself into the divide between a searcher and local business websites with featured snippets and the like, a more fitting question would be “Is there any point in local businesses doing content marketing?”I’m here to tell you “Yes, it absolutely is,” and also share tips on:What to focus on with content marketing for local business.How it can help rankings and engagement.How to get great results on short time frames and ev…

Pay-per-click (PPC) practitioners with mediocre skills simply maintain accounts.Average practitioners step up the game a little by optimizing accounts.The truly effective pro, however, has the critical ability to scale and grow search accounts in an organized and calculated manner. Those top performers can increase budgets and maintain a return on investment (ROI) because they have honed strong approaches to account management and optimization. They have established a solid account foundation and are much more apt to drive meaningful value.Abiding by an ROI-based account management approach when entering or optimizing search accounts yields benefits beyond cost efficiencies. It aids in prioritization, strategic direction, innovation and performance consistency.This article underscores the value of ROI-based management and how to shift paradigms when approaching search accounts with long-term prosperity in mind.Setting the table for successStepping into an inherited account is the busi…

With a record number of data breaches last year and a steady stream of new revelations about the misuse of data, you may think you’ve heard everything there is to know about data breaches.You’d be wrong.Now, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) fully implemented, there’s yet another way for companies to be in breach of data privacy laws. GDPR is a sweeping set of rules governing the handling of European Union members’ personal data, no matter where it is. It came into full force in May, and breaches carry huge fines — up to 4 percent of a company’s annual global turnover or €20 million (whichever is greater).What is a breach under GDPR?GDPR defines it as a “breach of security leading to the accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorized disclosure of, or access to, personal data.” Under GDPR, entities have only 72 hours to notify a supervisory authority, which is also known as a data protection authority (DPA). Data controllers are required to report …

Image: Google Following on Tuesday’s announcement that Google is grouping its advertising into three new brands — Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform and Google Ad Manager — the company is consolidating and updating its marketing partner program as well.Google Marketing Platform combines the DoubleClick advertising products and the Google Analytics 360 Suite into one solution for enterprise advertisers.The new Google Marketing Platform Partners combines the Google Analytics Certified Partners and DoubleClick Certified Marketing Partners and includes resources across all of the products on the platform. “Whether you’re looking to build skills in-house or partner with a service provider, the program helps ensure the needed skills and resources are readily available,” writes Chip Hall, managing director for media platforms at Google, in the announcement.There are three partner designations:Certified Individuals: Those who complete certifications for individual products in the Google Mar…

Running a WordPress website or a blog is exciting. The thrill of being able to share your content with your audience at ease is the driving factor in why WordPress powers over 30% of all the websites. A people’s platform, WordPress is a popular Content Management System (CMS) for new and experienced users alike.WordPress however, does offer its fair share of issues that trouble its users. Some of these issues are generic and can be addressed with small amendments. Other complications with the system demand a technical learning curve to solve. This article highlights the common issues and how to solve them.Issues with themes and pluginsThemes and plugins are essentially the structures that support WordPress’ framework. Users often have to deal with issues related to them.Theme issues:Theme installation failedMissing stylesheetSample data import errorsHomePage not similar to the demo etc.The root cause of such theme related issues could be that something is missing in the zip folder or …