Today, ChiTownMenus.com launched a new look and feel for their website…with a little help from the team at EIM. Take a look, we’re patting ourselves on the back and just loving the new look – www.ChiTownMenus.com. As ChiTownMenus continues to expand it’s restaurant list and grow its customer base, it was critical that they had a website design that looked GREAT and reflected what they were all about.

The gang at ChiTownMenus really knows where to eat in Chicago. Their site features hundreds of restaurant menus in the area, and new ones are added weekly. They also offer online ordering which we also are loving, and daily specials (and who doesn’t love discounts??) Want to meet the gang from ChiTownMenus and get some free grub? Stop by their launch party tomorrow at State on Webster at 7:30 pm, where they’ll be serving some free drinks and appetizers, and gift bags for the first 100 guests. Not wanting to cook tonight? Use promo code Launch15 on their site and get 15% off your online order!

Since food is one of our favorite topics at EIM, we want to ask our readers – what is your favorite place to eat in Chi-Town??

In the spirit of optimization, we often sit in on online seminars about new technologies or topics important to our industry. Gotta keep this machine well-oiled! I recently sat in on a search marketing web seminar that was all about keyword research. Now, as these things tend to be, it was largely a sales pitch. Hrmpf. But, it did provide a nice reiteration of some best practices (so quick nod to the host of the webinar, paid search reporting platform, ClickEquations).

This inspired me to spread the continuing education love and share some small steps you must be taking in your keyword research and selection to make your paid search advertising campaigns successful.

Before you set up a campaign, you always start with your planning phase—the volume research, the competitive analysis, etc. This is an important phase. More important, though, is what comes after you launch your campaign: the keyword optimization. It’s important that you keep an eye on your keywords, measure performance, and use your findings to perfect your paid efforts.

Things to look for during the keyword optimization phase:

Absolutely review your search query reports regularly

• This tells you what detailed searches your visitors are actually finding you through and can drive a lot of your decisions regarding bidding strategies, budgets, negative keywords and more.

Look for themes and opportunities to break out campaigns or ad groups

• Your search query reports should start to reveal some behavioral trends among your visitors and give you ideas about how to narrow down your messages into more targeted ad groups.

Implement Exact Match on well-performing words

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The envisionit media brand is now alive and well on the mobile web. If you haven’t seen it yet, get out your fancy phone and take a look (the new mobile site is currently limited to iPhone and Droid visitors only.) The site features a mobile-optimized version of this here blog, a teaser-style version of our portfolio, and the basic nuts and bolts about who we are and what we do. So, go check it out–and let us know what you think!

You love Carol’s Cookies. So generously sized, such fresh and natural ingredients, lots of homemade goodness, and 13 amazing flavors to choose from…they’re just plain delicious. You, the visitors of CarolsCookies.com, are also intrigued by Carol’s story. And you like looking at big pictures of cookies online.  We know this about you, and we don’t blame you. So we’ve made a few updates to the Carols’ Cookies website.

Be greeted by the adorable Carol herself when you arrive on the home page. Delight in that gigantic, mouth-watering cookie imagery. Order cookies right online for your household, the office, or as a gift to say thanks or congrats or happy Wednesday! And for your quick Carol’s fix, check out the Where to Buy section to find your closest Carol’s retailer.

No need to thank us for the heads up on this little CarolsCookies.com refresh. …But if you are so inclined sugar, snickerdoodle, chocolate chip, and toffee crunch are just a few of our favorites flavors.

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Once the year starts winding down and the months begin to get closer to the holiday season, there’s one thing lurking in the back of everyone’s mind (whether they like it or not), and that one thing is, you guessed it, shopping for the holidays. The feeling of the season-of-giving creeping up might give you a warm tingly feeling inside, or on the other hand completely stress you out. But in the end, the bitter realization is, that when this time comes around people will be spending money, and lots of it (no matter the state of the economy).  The big difference these days is (with the economy in its current state), consumers are going to use every resource possible to find the best deal out there.

Although lots of people still do their shopping in stores, there is one resource that almost everyone utilizes. Yep, you said it, the Internet! I know this is a big surprise to everyone, but the important thing to focus on isn’t the fact that people use the Internet to do their shopping, but HOW they use it to shop.

There are a cornucopia of different resources (blogs, social networks, email services, rewards & directories, cross-shopping) that can be used to find information about products/deals, but one resource that single-handedly dominates all of them is, search engines. Take a peak at this graph from Hitwise -

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If you’re managing paid search campaigns for your company, or your own business, you’ve probably heard the talks the past year over the Yahoo to Bing transition. If you’ve been living on Mars, then you should know that Yahoo paid search ads will soon be running through the Bing AdCenter, but ads will be shown on both Yahoo And Bing sites. Below are some differences in the two campaign managers and some changes you should make to your accounts.

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Blog readers, meet Ari Franklin. He’s the new Associate Project Manager who joined our team last month.

Ari comes to us from the account team at a large branding agency here in Chicago, and he’s now helping to coordinate and streamline the production of envisionit media’s interactive projects. Since he began, Ari’s experience and strategic thinking has been upping the momentum of our projects and helping to cement our many new client relationships. As he continues to settle in here, we look forward to the ways in which he’ll help our team create work that stays on schedule and on strategy.

When asked the old “what do you like most about being here” question, Ari mentioned the supportiveness of the envisionit media team. When asked him what he does for fun, he sort of blanked out in that way people do when asked to talk about themselves.

So, in the spirit of supportiveness, I’ll fill in the blanks based on what I’ve observed over the past month: When Ari’s not working, he’s messing with his Droid, eating gigantic sandwich wraps from Rosati’s and keeping up with interactive blogs and websites.

Welcome aboard, Ari!

My father has a real knack for taking photos of people while they’re eating. And then he posts those photos on his Wall. I don’t object to dad-friendly social networking, nor do I care too strongly about the less-than-flattering photos. But, generally, I like to keep these photos safely away from the eyes of my colleagues and exes.

With the passing of another 4th of July, another family event, another unfortunate photoshoot at Famous Dave’s, we at envisionit thought it would be a great time to point you towards our friends at Chattertree.

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The word around town lately is that Google is working on their own social media network, called “Google Me.” It would apparently be modeled off Facebook, and one can clearly infer it is intended to (attempt to) crush the ol’ FB. And things heated up a couple days ago with former Facebook CTO, Adam D’Angelo, stating on his own social platform, Quora, that the rumors are not rumors. No one from Google is commenting, but social media enthusiasts sure are all atwitter (tee hee…pun totally intended). Facebook seems so ingrained in our lives now—and became so quite quickly, really—that it feels like no one could ever top them. Of course if anyone can, it would be Google, the king of brand-name-as-commonly-used-verb companies. Shall be an interesting one to watch!

It’s the end of my second month here at envisionit media, and I’m proud to say that as the weeks pass, the learning curve continues to become steeper than ever before.  I stated in my last post that, “I’m only at the tip of the iceberg”, and let me tell you that statement was more dead-on than I could even imagine. During my first month I learned an abundance of different media and techniques (SEM, SEO, PPC, and Social Media to name a few) that could be applied to client accounts, but through my second month here I’m really beginning to delve deeper under the water by learning how to utilize these techniques to provide maximum gain for our clients.

With that said, let me give all of you local/nationwide/global business owners out there one small tip of advice I’ve learned while interning here: Use Social Media!! Unless you’ve been living under a rock (no offense if that’s your preferred living space), you’ve probably heard about Twitter and Facebook.  So you have heard about it? (I hope so) Are you using it? (Most likely) But the real question is; HOW are you using it?  Facebook currently has 400+ million users and Twitter is at 75 million, and botH can be great for promoting your business.  But on the other hand, there are already many other businesses being social, so it can be very hard to stand out amongst the crowd.

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