In 2011 the State of Illinois passed a law which required all online retailers to collect state sales tax if they made sales through affiliates based in their state. While this directly impacted affiliate marketers using virtually all types of affiliate programs, the ones that got the most public attention were from Amazon.com and Overstock.com. … Read more
WordStream, a maker of Internet Marketing Software, recently published a new infographic which shares some very interesting data about how small businesses are using PPC advertising. They found that, on average, small businesses spend about $1200 per month in PPC advertising, but over 25% of that is wasted due to managerial and strategic errors. This … Read more
Google.com, the world’s most popular web address, is undergoing a bit of a remodel. Google has been famous for having one of the simplest home pages, with little more than a logo and search box on the page. Occasionally they will replace the logo with a “Google Doodle” for special events, but for the most … Read more
Three year old tech start up, Onavo, has announced that they are being purchased by social giant, Facebook. Onavo, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, is a mobile analytics company which provides millions of users with mobile utility apps. Their apps help consumers to run their mobile data services, including the managing and optimizing of the … Read more
Democratic Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts has put in a request to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Google’s recently announced ‘Shared Endorsements’ ads. These are the ads which will automatically pull information from social networks and use images and information about an individual to promote a product. If, for example, you rate a … Read more
Bing has recently announced a new feature which, they claim, will be able to reduce the total time it takes for people to get from typing in a search, to having the content they want in front of them by up to 50%. This is on top of the reduced search time from the implementation … Read more
Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, has announced that they will be holding a global Internet Governance Summet in April of 2014. The summit, he says, is in response to the information which was leaked by Edward Snowden, revealing the massive spying the US performs on countries around the world, including alleys like Brazil. The decision to … Read more
If you logged into your Google Analytics account and thought it looked odd, you aren’t going crazy. There weren’t any major announcements from Google about it, but they have certainly made some significant changes in the last day or two. They did mention some new reporting options rolled out in a blog post. While it … Read more
Facebook has announced a major redesign to their ad-buying and reporting tools. These new advertising options are, they say, designed to help give buyers recommendations on where to place the ads based on their specific objectives. Helping marketers of all types improve the results they get from their Facebook advertising. These updates are designs specifically … Read more
With Twitter’s upcoming IPO, they used some questionable accounting techniques to come up with the numbers used in their registration statement, which was filed last Thursday. In the statement, Twitter said that “in the eyes of management” the company had a profit of over $21 Million in the first half of 2013. Quite an impressive … Read more
Facebook holds an interesting competition twice a year for their Preferred Marketing Developers (PMDs). They are challenged to create new and innovative tools which will help businesses achieve their goals using Facebook. The grand prize winner of the challenge which was completed in September, titled “From Conversation to Conversion” was Optimal. Optimal is a company … Read more
It’s been about 8 months since Google last pushed out a real update to their PageRank system. They don’t offer a PageRank toolbar for Chrome, and they dropped support of the tool bar for Firefox in 2011. The writing has been on the wall for some time, but the fact that Google is phasing out … Read more
Cisco and Facebook have recently come to an agreement which will provide customers with the ability to connect to wireless networks at partner merchants using only their Facebook accounts. The service, called “Cisco Connected Mobile Experience (CMX) with Facebook Wi-Fi should begin rolling out to a variety of merchants soon. This service helps retailers in … Read more
Google confirmed a Penguin update just a couple days ago, which we’re still sifting through to find what all was impacted. They also announced that another update, this one completely unrelated to Penguin or any other cute animal. This update is directed toward sites which post police MugShots . Many of these sites gather information … Read more