Search Engine Marketing

Facebook is working with a data mining firm to show marketers that consumers who see ads on the social network actually buy advertised products. The company has purchased data on 70 million U.S. households from Datalogix, which culls information from loyalty cards and programs from more than 1,000 retailers, according to The Financial Times. Datalogix matches emails and data associated with those cards and programs with emails and information required to set up a Facebook account, according to the report. Using this information, the company can say whether a consumer purchased an item after seeing it advertised on Facebook.

Julie L. Daly, president of the e-commerce division of Avenue, a cross-channel retailer of plus-sized women's fashion, offered attendees to her session at eTail in Boston this week a peek into how the brand increased its number of new buyers by implementing an organic search program based on nonbranded search terms.

Online merchandising teams spend considerable time grouping items together and deciding which products to display when consumers enter specific search terms. Likewise, SEM teams dedicate resources to identify the keywords and phrases that lead to the most relevant landing pages. What these teams rarely do is share how their efforts can be integrated to produce results. 

Petco, a leading pet specialty retailer, deployed LP Insights to aggregate and analyze data from multiple customer touchpoints as well as gain a comprehensive understanding of customer sentiment across the online and in-store experience. Erin Smith, Petco's director of customer care, shares the retailer's success story.

Fifty percent of Google Product Search traffic will be switching to paid Google Shopping by July 28. Online merchants who aren’t ready for the switch will face some serious repercussions.

Consumers are increasingly looking to video to fulfill their information needs and Google is taking notice by allocating more of its search engine territory to video content and less to traditional web results. Although Google's integration of video has created more competition for plain-text results, it has opened the door for video assets to acquire coveted search engine rankings.

To beat web "spam," Google continues to change the rules and algorithms on how consumers find websites and products through its search engine. With the latest algorithm debuting on April 24, "Google Penguin," many online retailers are scratching their heads as they find their website traffic has slowed or come to a complete stop. Unfortunately, their poor page ranking in Google is the result of being penalized for search engine optimization practices in use for over the past 10 years.

Retailers, more than most marketers, have a wealth of data and information at their fingertips. Retailers also have more product, geographical, and inventory diversity than marketers in other industries.  Thus, being able to leverage all data is crucial.  By leveraging your data across all aspects of paid search optimization you can do some amazing things. 

From June to September, there will be an estimated 1.2 million weddings in the U.S. And if you’re like me, you have two or three wedding invitations stuck to your fridge, serving as reminders of the plans I need to make, dress I need to buy and, of course, gifts I need to buy.

An unusually mild winter this year (along with with a recovering economy) resulted in an earlier jump in search queries for garden, patio and outdoor equipment. By mid-March, query volume on Google for the outdoor and patio category had already reached May 2011 levels. Many advertisers benefited from this earlier spike in interest though more sales earlier in the year. Those who succeeded most were the ones with competitive search bids and daily budgets that were already set up to capture demand when it occurred, regardless of the time of year.