If you're not on the first page of Google for the keywords that customers are using to find you, you're losing 90% of searchers. Plain and simple. According to data released by online advertising network Chitika, 34% of searchers click the first result. That's almost four times the total of every result from page two and beyond. But even being at the top spot in Google isn't enough: converting website traffic to opportunities and nurturing opportunities into sales closes the loop and increases revenue and profitability. Are your keywords searched by people early or late into the buying cycle? Are you targeting terms that appeal to decision makers or low-level researchers? Is there enough interest in a... Read More

Everyone's talking about search, but how much is that top spot really worth to your business? According to a McKinsey and Co. study, it's worth quite a bit. In fact, they found that most B2B companies get an ROI of 7:1 - and larger companies fare even better with a 17:1 ROI when they're invested in search technology across the enterprise. Does your sales team get numbers that good?  ROI from search doesn't stop there, though. Capitalizing on search traffic requires more than just climbing to the top of Google. It's about converting website traffic into sales opportunities, and then nurturing those opportunities to increase the probability of a sale. Read More

Why is search so important? 70% of all B2B buyers start their buying process with search. And 80% of B2B buyers reported that they initiated the sales process- with many of them entering the sales funnel through search. More importantly, companies need to have a scalable, low cost process for moving prospective buyers from their website into a high probability sales cycle. So not only is it more cost-effective to focus on inbound sales channels, more and more it's simply becoming more effective, period. Read More

Leverage your brand name with Yahoo's Rich Ads in Search (RAIS) served on both Search.Yahoo.com and Bing.com. Currently, RAIS are only available using exact match, exclusively for brand terms. These ads appear in the first position only at the top of the SERP above organic search results so you can take full advantage of the available real estate. Rich ads displace the standard text ads on the right, meaning, since the rich ad is the only ad displaying in mainline position, all other ads that would normally show up in mainline position would move to right rail placement. What's more, Google currently does not have a similar offering to own the space above organic search.Rich ad campaigns are also managed in AdCenter with the rest... Read More

One of the strengths of Google Analytics, besides its intuitiveness and powerful reporting, is the ability to deploy and go right out of the box for most applications. Unfortunately, the important qualifier there is most, and in some specific circumstances the code needs to be modified in order to fit a particular implementation or the reporting needs of an organization. One such circumstance is cross-domain tracking, and while the actual implementation is not technically complicated, knowing that a need for it exists can evade many organizations with a standard Google Analytics setup.First, though, it's important to understand what cross-domain tracking is and why it's important. Because of the nature of the internet, a... Read More