Currently Google offers three settings in AdWords for campaign managers to manipulate manually. 1) Optimize for clicks (default): By using this option, your ad group will likely receive more impressions and clicks overall, since higher-quality ads attain better positions and attract more user attention. 2) Optimize for conversions: Although this option may result in your ad group receiving fewer clicks than the previous option, it will likely receive more conversions, which can result in an improved ROI. 3) Rotate evenly: This option, which will experience the change, currently rotates ads evenly, even if one ad has a lower clickthrough rate or conversion.

Greg Finn, in an April 30^th post on Search Engine Land, states, “The ‘rotate evenly’ setting has been the preferred type for achieving apples-to-apples testing as ads were evenly disbursed at all times. The change will now require users who are using ads to test landing pages or copy-based conversions to be limited to 30 days per trial. Each time creative is enabled or edited the 30-day window will restart over again.”

Pay Per Click marketers should be aware of these changes when using the rotate feature on AdWords, as it is no longer a truly “set it and forget it” option for ad campaigns.

istockphoto.com/Ingvar Bjork

For example, corporate B2B marketers should be able to drive marketing planning, which should be high-level enough to be used flexibly, but also enforce discipline.

Marketers should also be brand stewards, which involves making the team's strategy or vision obvious to stakeholders as well as making sure marketers can unify newly acquired companies to build a strong brand architecture.

Corporate marketing can also be utilized to help the voice of the customer inform business.

"When we see what firms are doing, it's often not voice of the customer – it's voice of somebody else," Ralph Oliva, executive director of ISBM, told the news source. "A strong corporate marketing function can bring strong voice of the customer to corporate strategy – inform business strategy and corporate investment strategy at the C-level."

Other functions of corporate B2B marketers include teaching and communicating, driving internal integration, communicating during a crisis and understanding marketing funding and measurement.

Anything Goes Marketing adds that a B2B corporate blog needs to look professional when compared to a company's corporate website. So if a firm decides to go the blogging route, it needs to make sure the site itself is clean.
 

The report, B2B Marketers Must Focus on Partnership and Experimentation as 2012 Budgets Rise, was intended to reveal major trends about B2B marketer's budget growth as a way to help senior marketers benchmark their budget allocations based on others in their industries. It also identified key drivers of marketing budget allocation decisions.

Specifically, researchers found that B2B marketers expect their marketing budgets to increase by an average of 6.8 percent this year, with high-tech services leading all other niches with a projected 9 percent growth, MarketingProfs reports. While encouraging, this estimate still pales in comparison to 2011's 17 percent expected increase.

Other optimistic industries were manufacturing, business and professional services and high-tech products, which all expected 7 percent increases. Pharma, medical devices and biotech, which predicted a 3 percent decline in 2011, was back in the black in 2012 with a 2 percent estimated budgetary rise.

In general, the majority of respondents (27 percent) were moderately optimistic, predicting increases of between 10 percent and 19 percent. Sixteen percent projected budget boosts of more than 20 percent, while nearly the same amount (19 percent) expected their budgets to decrease in 2012. 

Options can be separated into two broad categories – search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

According to Social Media Today, SEO is the process of optimizing a website using keywords and website development to boost search engine listings – ideally to the area "above the fold" on results pages. A recent Practical eCommerce study revealed that 94 percent of online merchants use SEO in some way, and 62.4 percent said they felt their SEO efforts resulted in at least 50 percent of their site traffic.

Another way to build site traffic is search engine marketing, SMT explains. However, instead of optimizing a site, paid tools are used to attract consumers. For instance, paid inclusion and trusted feed programs, pay-for-placement management techniques like pay-per-click and link popularity/reputation development. Google AdWords is an effective way for companies to gauge the effectiveness of their SEM campaigns, and, in general, is a good way to boost traffic if their budget allows.

Online catalogs (93 percent) and direct sales (70 percent) have been involved in the majority of B2B customer decision making in 2012, but mobile websites have emerged in a strong way. Mobile web jumped by more than 10 percent to 24.5 percent in 2012, making it the third most influential channel used by B2B e-commerce customers. These results are expected to be backed by investments throughout 2012, as mobile ranks fourth on the list of areas to increase investment.

Forty-two percent of respondents will invest in SEO efforts throughout 2012, followed closely by managing and leveraging product content (38 percent) and developing more robust products (36 percent). Mobile web will see increased investment, according to 32 percent of respondents. From the report, “The bottom line: mobile is no longer just the concern of B2C brands launching the next cool consumer app. For top B2B brands, mobile is now a core piece of the customer experience, generating value and utility for the direct sales force and customers.”

As mobile web consumption rises, B2B marketers are beginning to see the effects it has on B2B customers’ purchasing decisions. However, investments in mobile web will surely send it up the list of influential channels for B2B marketers this year.

As with Panda, Penguin was enacted to keep Google's search engine results pages "relevant, useful and clean of spam," as Search Engine Watch states. This latest update looks to more effectively identify websites that use "aggressive web spam tactics that don't adhere to Google's quality standards," explains Matt Cutts, head of Google's spam team.

Specifically, it's looking for over-use of blog or link networks which may include an unrestricted number of links from pages that could be of poor quality, contain less than satisfactory content or use keyword stuffing to improve SEO.

"This is a wake-up call to those who may have relied in the past on low quality sites and suspect methods in order to build links and increase their rankings," said Pete Goold, managing director of integrated online PR social media and search agency Punch Communications. "Many businesses may be unaware that the SEO methods their SEO team employs, such as utilizing low quality blog and link networks, could potentially now be considered as 'aggressive web spam tactics' by Google"

Google cannot guarantee that the update won't negatively affect some companies' organic search results visibility.
 

While social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are enjoying a massive upswing in popularity within the consumer audience, research findings indicate B2B customers value LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and blogging as a source of information for their professional lives. In particular, write Schoenherr and Corey, “blogs present a clear opportunity to reach sophisticated audiences such as in-house counsel, but the cost of entry involves a precious commodity—time.” Though a willingness to establish thought leadership on issues of high importance may prove daunting to some companies in the B2B space, the majority of survey respondents are, on average, visiting blogs once a week, meaning companies can invest more time in developing compelling content.

“B2B marketers who are not using new media actively to communicate with clients and prospects should take note that buyers are adopting new media in growing numbers,” state Schoenherr and Corey. For today’s marketer, taking note may not be enough: Keeping an ear to the ground as B2B and B2C audiences evolve will become vital to overall success.

The report, B2B Marketers Must Focus on Partnership and Experimentation as 2012 Budgets Rise, notes that 27 percent of marketers will expand their budgets between 10 percent and 19 percent this year. What's more, 20 percent expect to increase by 5 percent to 9 percent, while 18 percent of respondents will grow budgets between 1 percent and 4 percent.

Also of note, 16 percent of marketers will boost their budgets by more than 20 percent this year. Industries that intend to use the largest percentage of their budgets on marketing include finance and insurance (3 percent), high-tech (2.7 percent) and pharma and medical (2.6 percent).

Forrester's report follows a similar trend between 2010 and 2011, when marketers reported they planned to increase their budgets by 6.7 percent. Finance and insurance once again devoted the largest amount of their budgets to marketing, although it was far higher last year (7.8 percent) than this year.
 

Using its own award-winning Twitter petition site, Twitition.com, Branded3’s study took a hard look at the effect tweets have on Google rankings. The sample size consisted of 8,528 Twititions; with each Twitition signed, a tweet was sent out on its behalf to allow for simple tracking. Twititions were divided into three groups: 1–99 tweets (5,322 Twititions); 100–499 tweets (1,382 Twititions); 500+ tweets (1,824 Twititions).

Twititions with 1–50 tweets experienced a significant page rank boost, jumping from an average ranking around 70 to nearly 50. There was a plateauing effect from 100–499 tweets, as the boost levels were fairly insignificant. Pages with 500–7,500 tweets, however, experienced substantial, incremental page rank boosts.

The average page rank for Twititions with 500–1,000 tweets was 46. Those with 1,000–5,000 had a rank of 41, followed by 5,000–7,500 tweets seeing an average page rank of 31. More than 7,500 tweets saw the most dramatic jump with an average page rank of 5, meaning pages with more than 7,500 tweets are virtually guaranteed to experience first page results.

Search engine marketers can leverage this data to increase page visibility, using Twitter to boost page rankings. Share-friendly material can be very beneficial, with the chance of going viral, and, for that reason, first page rankings could be at stake due to a single social network’s success.

But what about Bing?

"To many site owners, Bing is a mystery and is considered an afterthought in a search engine marketing campaign," the Elevate blog explains. The news source notes that Google makes up approximately 65 percent of global search engine queries, where as Bing and competitor Yahoo account of around 30 percent – a significant chunk that shouldn't be ignored.

What's more, when it comes to Bing's demographics, most of its users are over 34 years of age, and many are either retired or have had children.

So, besides realizing that a Bing-focused marketing campaign should focus on more mature topics, it's also important to understand how Bing looks at SEO.

According to the company blog, one specific point of interest that seems to be overlooked by marketers is the meta tag.

"Blank meta descriptions and poorly constructed ones are skipped over in favor of content we find elsewhere in an attempt to explain relevancy to the searcher in our search engine results page," notes the blog. Meta data acts as a "steering wheel" for SEO optimization once a site has been created