[ad_1] Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond. This week: the sheer massiveness of this year’s holiday weekend spend, a couple of Google updates and a shameless plug. Thanksgiving is the new Black (Friday) Kenshoo has revealed the paid search trends…

[ad_1] Google Analytics comes with quite a few standard reports and settings, but you can extract much more value, and tailor it to your own needs with a little customisation.  You can create custom reports, custom dashboards, and segments to interrogate the data in different ways.  In this post I’ll look at how to create…

[ad_1] Last week we published a very handy guide to social media image sizes on our sister website ClickZ UK.  If you click on the above link, you can see a much larger version of the infographic, but we also thought it was worth sharing here at SEW. All of the sizes are in pixels…

[ad_1] An article from Intercom’s Ben McRedmond about growth hacking has been doing the rounds over the past week or so. The headline ‘growth hacking is bullshit’ makes the author’s position quite clear from the outset. Ben starts off by questioning the very concept of growth hacking: Related articles “I’m not even sure if…

[ad_1] Businesses know that the holiday period can be critical to the success of their entire year, with nearly one fifth of annual sales occurring during these couple of weeks.  And of course online sales are playing an increasingly prominent role in the hustle and bustle. There were $72.03bn in ecommerce sales during 2014’s holiday…

[ad_1] Even though you optimize like crazy for keywords and keyword groups, don’t overlook another powerful, although somewhat mysterious, Google ranking factor: user behavior. There’s strong evidence that optimizing for user metrics can boost your position in SERPs. True to form, Google has never explicitly said that searchers’ behavior influences the way your web pages rank.…

[ad_1] We’ve known for some time that Google uses humans to complement its search algorithm, to help it sense check the quality of its rankings. In 2013 it publicly shared its advice to those who perform these checks, which helped to shine a light on what it considers ‘quality’. Two years is a long time…

[ad_1] Google has today announced new features for its store visits metric for AdWords users.  The new metrics will give advertisers more insight into store visits, with the ability to view visits at a keyword or Ad Group level.  Advertisers will also be able to view visits by day, week or month to give them…

[ad_1] Over at ClickZ we’ve published a very handy mobile design article by digital consultant and ClickZ writer Andy Favell, entitled six strategy questions to address before you design and build a mobile-friendly site (or app). We thought it was so terribly handy, that we’re going to excerpt it here for you now on SEW.…

[ad_1] Thanksgiving Day is among other things, dedicated to friends, family and (over) indulgence.  This day includes traditions that date back to 1621, as well as ones that have changed over time. Therefore I wanted to step back from my own Thanksgiving rituals and take a look at how other Americans are spending this day.…