Image Credit: Barrera Search Marketing

Google recently updated its Display Network settings within the AdWords interface to report performance information at the keyword level, rather than at the AdGroup level as it did previously. Performance information includes everything from the number of clicks and impressions a keyword receives to the number of conversions it generates, and at which display position it performs best. For advertisers, this means optimization for keyword-targeted Contextual campaigns will be far more granular.

What’s so great about Pinterest, anyway? Most users already know it’s an all-too-effective means of distraction (not that we ever get distracted here at 90octane!). However, as a result, the site boasts audience engagement statistics that most assuredly qualify it as a social media platform to watch.

Following the results of a recent Prophet survey, Forbes released a list of the five brands U.S. consumers viewed as most likely to fall flat by 2015.

The brands are below, listed in descending order by most likely to drop off:

Posted by:  Elyse Jarvis, Account Coordinator

Since its inception, Facebook has been a place where users can share their personal  information. Through status updates, photos, likes, comments and more, users are able to offer pieces of their lives with those they choose to connect with on the popular social networking site.

And while the beauty of Facebook is that it gives users real-time updates about people in their networks, it is also its downfall. The minute details of one’s life can push the more important information into the recesses of his or her social profile, making profile pages logs of activities instead of personal narratives.

Facebook Timeline, which is set to be released to the public in the very near future, aims to change that. The new feature will allow users to highlight important events in their lives, all within a timeline organized by year. Profiles will become more akin to autobiographies, and instead of scrolling through multiple pages of data, one can simply click on a year listed on the right-hand side of a user’s profile to view the most important content generated on his or her personal page that year.

Facebook profile changes tend to raise privacy concerns and, as The Washington Post points out, Timeline is no exception.

By Elyse Jarvis, Account Coordinator

Google announces it will no longer offer the Position Preference feature for its popular PPC advertising platform, AdWords.

Google announced this month that it will be discontinuing its Position Preference feature in AdWords. The search giant will replace Position Preference with an Automated Rules function that allows for automatic changes to a keyword’s bid, budget or status based on user specifications.

Position Preference has allowed users to designate desired placement for keywords and limits ads from appearing when bids were not high enough to secure the user’s preferred placement. For instance, if position one was selected as the intended placement, ads matching a user search query would only appear if the bid for the keyword was high enough to place it in position one.

While this capability was helpful for bid management, Google explained on its blog that it is important to understand that there are two processes effecting positioning, and that understanding these features is key to using positioning functions as success measurements for Google ads.

According to Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian on Google’s blog, the term page position refers to an ad’s location on the search results page. An ad’s auction position is its position in the auction for top positioning for a search query—which is essentially based on the bid for the keyword and the quality score. The average position AdWords reports is based on the auction position.

It is vital to understand the difference between the two. Although bidding high enough and maintaining a quality score high enough to secure auction position one will always mean your ad is the first shown on a search results page, the ad can be displayed in two different page positions on the page. The first position (shown in the top photo below) is the first ad above search results. The ad can also appear as the first ad on the right-hand side of results (shown in the lower photo). Ads appearing above search results typically encourage more user interaction.