Google Analytics has announced new social reports today, designed to help marketers measure the return on investment for social media activities. “Many social measurement tools focus on social listening by monitoring keywords and buzz. While they’re helpful in many cases, these tools don’t connect the dots to show how investments in different social channels ultimately lead to sales or business objectives,” said Phil Mui, Google Analytics group product manager, explaining how the new tool is designed to go beyond listening. “Our goal ...

Google this week introduced the ability to target more than 30,000 ZIP codes in AdWords, giving advertisers the ability to find potential customers in a familiar, granular way. Another new feature, Location Insertion, is aimed at letting advertisers with multiple locations create one ad, and have information dynamically inserted depending on the user’s query or location. Both features are part of location extensions. which are also getting some other tweaks in response to feedback. For ZIP code targeting, advertisers will be able to add up to ...

Google penalized its own browser’s search rankings Tuesday over a marketing campaign that went bad, the company confirmed. “We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days,” a Google spokesman said yesterday in an email. The decision to demote Chrome’s PageRank — the rating Google assigns to sites based on how many other sites link to them — came after bloggers Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Danny Sullivan of ...

Highlighting the growing importance of local SEO and mobile marketing, a new study from mobile media company JiWire found that mobile consumers are becoming more comfortable sharing their location information to gain access to relevant content. In a survey of more than 2,800 U.S. consumers, 53 percent of respondents indicated they would share their location to find local deals and offerings on their mobile devices. This represents a significant shift from even a few months ago, when mobile companies like Apple and Google came under fire for their ...

Google Inc. (GOOG) will expand closer to Silicon Valley rival Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) by leasing new office space in Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., hometown. Google’s recently-signed lease at Technology Corners at Moffett Park, a 716,000 square-foot office campus in Sunnyvale, highlights rampant employee growth at the Mountain View, Calif., Internet giant. The lease allows for occupancy in 2013. It was not immediately clear how much of the five-building campus Google plans to occupy. In a statement, Google Vice President of Real Estate and Workplace ...

When thinking about SEO, many website owners put undue attention onto the site itself, worrying about things such as meta tags, keyword density (actually a myth ), headings, and titles. While on-site factors do play a part in SEO (especially when it comes to content), they pale into insignificance when it comes to links. Most SEO practitioners spend their days obsessing over links and link building, but many site owners ignore them completely or pay them only cursory heed. The reason for this is pretty obvious: your site is something very tangible ...

If you’re using the new version of Google Chrome that was released today, you may notice that you can access the top organic results for a given query faster than usual. This is because Google has announced announced that its Instant Pages feature is available in the latest version of Chrome, and content marketers may find the feature rewards their efforts. As Brafton reported, Instant Pages was first introduced at the Google’s Inside Search event in June. The company explained that the service automatically downloads results when the Google ...

It is one month since the launch of Google+, a belated attempt at a social networking tool that invites users to follow friends’ activities in their news feed and share favourite content by marking it “+1″. If this sounds familiar, it shows the extent to which Google is playing catchup with Facebook, which is brewing a public offering next year that could value the firm at $100bn and, critically, has positioned itself as the gateway to the web for many of its 750 million users. Much of this pressure is down to the abrasive ambition ...

Bing-powered Yahoo searches, or ‘Binghoo!’ if you’re that way inclined, are creeping up on Google and may pose the first serious threat to their search monopoly in many a year, according to some new research by the Rosetta agency. The research measures the percentage contribution of organic clicks and splits the results into vertical markets such as financial services, retail, B2B and healthcare. Whilst the study showed that Google is still dominant in many respects, generating up to 75% of clicks in some markets, there were surprising ...

Content is King! Of that there can be no doubt. But this axiom makes no reference to what type of content is good, or how best to create that content. These two things are left for us to decide on. Conventional wisdom dictates that a blog is the best way to build up a decent body of highly engaging, relevant and SEO enhanced content, over time. This is certainly true and blogs have proven their worth time and time again. However, like any marketing method, blogging has pros and cons. In fact, the vast majority of bloggers who start a blog end up ...