Retargeting or Remarketing–you may have heard these buzz words before, but do you know what they really mean? You should! Below I will describe to you seven typical retargeting tactics and how to best use them to reach your low hanging fruit: customers and prospects most likely to convert or take an action on your website.

First off, there are two main types of Retargeting: On-Site and Off-Site. On-site is typically used as a retention tool, to keep your prospects engaged, coming back to your site, or even to upsell/cross-sell them; the target is people who have already visited your website. Off-site retargeting, on the other hand, is used as a prospecting tool and adding new customers to your sales funnel that have not already engaged with your website. Below are the several tactical components that fall under each type of Retargeting.
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On-site

1. Site Retargeting – This specifically targets individuals who have visited certain pages of your website. By placing a tracking cookie on their browser, you can later serve them ads on other websites based on the content they consumed on your site. Ever see an ad pop up that has the exact shoe you were looking at online yesterday? With a coupon to come back to the site and purchase it? Yep, that’s site retargeting. Common uses are to entice a user to come back to your website with a special promotion, a reminder that they abandoned their shopping cart, or just to keep the brand top of mind.
2. SEO/SEM – Here, if a user arrives on your site via a certain keyword through search engines, you can later serve them an ad when they are again browsing in the network. Knowing exactly what they were searching on when they came to your site allows you to be able to target them with appropriate messaging later on.

Did you update your site to HTML5, while updating your meta data to reflect the new SEO keyword research done in AdWords, that will best help the webpages PR and PPC quality score so the keywords appear above the fold in the SERPS. Did you have trouble understanding all of those interactive marketing acronyms and terms used in the above sentence? Most people do and that is why we are here to help you have a better understanding of the world of web marketing!

Web Marketing: Internet marketing, also known as digital marketing, online marketing, search marketing or e-marketing, and is the marketing of products or services over the Internet.

HTML5: Hypertext Markup Language version 5 or in simpler terms, the way your website is most likely built or going to be built in the near future

Meta data: data that provides information about the other data managed within an application or environment or in simpler terms, background data on a webpage that helps the search engines figure out what your webpage is about.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing):  is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): can be referred to as organic, natural, or algorithmic rankings and it is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines or in simpler terms, the optimizing of a webpage by changing known factors that best help said web page rank higher in Google.

Keyword Research: is a practice used by search engine optimization professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into the search engines when conducting a search.
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It hasn’t even been a month since I started interning here at EIM, yet I feel like I’ve already learned so much. Prior to arriving at EIM, most of my experience with digital media involved managing social media accounts for various local events and businesses and maintaining my own personal blog. As a recent college graduate who studied media and communications for four years, I felt very much aware of the power of social media and how sites like Twitter and Facebook have been reshaping our lives and the way we do business.

But while social media channels can certainly play a great role in things like brand management and customer engagement, it is really just a piece of the marketing puzzle. It’s not enough to just make a Facebook and Twitter page for your business and wait for fans and followers to roll in. It is very important to make sure your social media efforts line up with your overall marketing strategy. It’s also useful to find ways to integrate your social media pages into other channels such as your website, newsletters, mobile apps, print ads, and even TV commercials (see: American Express)

As social media strategist Jay Baer puts it, “Social media is not a solo act. It’s best as part of a jazz combo.” And one very important player in that combo that I knew very little about before coming here was “search marketing.” While working closely with the Web Marketing Team here at EIM, I’m really starting to recognize the importance of search marketing. SEO, SEM, paid search, and search engines in general all play huge parts in gaining traffic to your company website and reaching your marketing goals, whether that means increasing product sales or raising brand awareness.
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It’s true—meet the newest members of our team, Mikky and Grant. They’re here to help us drive strategy, foster strong client relationships, come up with smart ways to make search marketing work for businesses, and bring their marketing know-how to the table.

Mikky Wright, Senior Account Manager
As someone who has owned his own successful businesses in Chicago, Mikky’s marketing strategy and management skills are invaluable when it comes to working with the clients to help them grow their business. He absorbs any and all information he can get his hands on, giving him a well-versed scope on any project he undertakes. It’s no wonder, then, that some of his favorite things to do outside the office cover a variety of activities: sculpting, painting, playing baseball, and dream analysis.

Grant Sabatier, SEO/SEM Account Manager
Grant comes to Chicago via Washington, D.C. with seven years of experience in online marketing and SEO/SEM work. Here at envisionit media, he’s responsible for developing sound SEO and SEM strategies for our clients. In his downtime, he collects guitars (17 at last count) and enjoys the fine sounds of electronic ambient music, which he says goes well with SEO work.
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This month Google released “Adwords Call Metrics,” a call tracking service for Adwords campaigns. The service is free for Adwords account holders and integrates a Google Voice number into ads on both computers and mobile devices. Google Voice is the free service that allows Google account holders set-up a phone number from any area code in the United States. For the purpose of Adwords, users can set up either a local phone number or a toll-free number. Users are then able redirect the number to any phone. The total number of calls and average duration of the calls can be tracked in the Adwords dashboard.

The same Google Voice number used in Adwords can also be used on other marketing materials or a website for increased tracking through Adwords, although we recommend setting up a separate Google Voice number for each campaign. Separate numbers allow for more targeted conversion tracking.

Although this service is still in BETA, there is an incredible amount of potential for the Google Voice/Adwords integration. First, “Adwords Call Metrics” creates another way for Adwords users to reach customers, track offline conversions, and measure the success of their ads. Also, there is a lot of speculation that Google will introduce a pay per call metric, very similar to the pay per click metric. In the future Google might also offer increased call metric capabilities for Adwords, such as recording, transcription, and enhanced analytics capabilities.

Currently Google is offering the service to a limited number of customers, but as they test the service and refine the features it will be released to more customers. You can tell if you have the option of “Adwords Call Metrics” by looking under the Ad Extensions tab in your Adwords account.

To read more about “Adwords Call Metrics” from Google click here or here.
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It’s been confirmed that Google has recently begun testing some new language above the right side of their search results pages, where their paid ads are housed. These have historically been (and probably still are for most readers) labeled “Sponsored Links.” But before long you may see a new label above the ads…wait for it: “Ads” (gasp!).

This screen shot below shows the new “Ads” test (provided by a Google-related blog—we’re not seeing the test here at EIM yet):

And here’s a screen shot of what you’re used to seeing:

The desire for Google to experiment with this language certainly makes sense. On the one hand, “Sponsored Links” may in fact be misleading since Google doesn’t truthfully sponsor any of those products or services. Advertisers, such as envisionit and our clients, pay Google through their Adwords program to be listed there. On the other hand, the “Sponsored Link” language could soften the search experience in the eyes of the advertising-adverse searchers out there. The word “Ads” could potentially dissuade someone from clicking. And Google wants clicks—that’s how they make money. Do they label them what they are or do they spin the label to coerce searchers into clicking? (Hmm, it actually harkens back to the Facebook switch from “fan” to “like”).

If they move forward with this, it won’t be the most dramatic change Google has implemented in recent months. From Caffeine to Google Instant, the search engine behemoth has thrown a lot of curve balls at us lately—many of which have had us wondering what Google’s true agenda is (helping the greater good quickly find the information they seek online, or helping themselves make money?). There is no doubt, Google continues to keep search marketers on their toes, no matter the size of the shake-up.

When Google launched their brand new search engine enhancement Google Instant two weeks ago it sent the whole world of SEO/SEM into a frenzy. Every search marketer was asking questions, and nobody had any answers. (I can picture the nightmares already) But don’t worry search marketers you can slip on your onesies and sleep uninterrupted, because EIM has some answers for you.

What does Google Instant mean for SEO?

1. There is no change to the organic ranking algorithm

Although user experience is significantly affected,  Google search results will be ranked the same as always. (Don’t worry first pagers, your ranking will stay the same)

2. It’s very important to rank above the fold for general terms

There’s been a lot of talk that Google Instant is the death of SEO, but contrary to that rumor it has caused SEO to be even more important than ever. Before instant 68% of people didn’t go past the first page, now that instant is implemented it pushes all of the results down and to get to results on the bottom of the page you have to scroll down.  This means that more than likely the results above the above the fold will receive a significantly larger amount of traffic then the results below, which means you want to optimize to not only be on the first page, but in the top 5.

3. Optimize for both Short-Tail and Long-Tail Keywords

Now that instant’s auto suggest plays a larger factor then it used to, it is important to optimize for those more generic terms so you show up for the early rounds of auto suggest.
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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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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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