twurl 2: Top Links from the Past Week

by jody on June 13, 2011

PPC, Media and Social Advertising

Social Ad Startup Taykey Lands $9 Million – In a privacy-aware culture, Taykey promises a “privacy safe” ad solution powered by semantic technology and not by behavioral profiles.
Half of Mobile Campaigns Drive Consumers to Sites – With 49% of mobile campaigns driving users to a mobile site, “this…demonstrates how advertisers have invested in creating a persistent mobile presence” More brands are opting to invest in mobile sites and mobile-aware functionality. Hallelujah.
RIP Referrer Data! How Mobile Apps Can Kill Your Mobile Metrics – Mobile apps don’t retain the same refer data as browsers. Looks like the days of log file analysis have returned – oh joy! I smell a business opportunity here.
11 Facebook Ad Management Tools Reviewed – As Facebook advertising heats up, so is the market to manage and track. Now can we drop talking click thru rate and start talking conversion rate?
An Optimizer’s Guide To Facebook Ads Performance Reports – The most comprehensive guide I’ve seen for Facebook Ads – how to interpret the reports, what the metrics mean, and the nuances of advertising socially.
Google’s New Product Local Ads & Product Extensions To Show On Mobile – Google added two ad types to its mobile ads. Searchers can now get more information than ever about your product while searching via mobile – product availability, product images, price and more.

Connecting with Your Audience

8 Methods + Lots of Tools for Getting to Know Your Audience – Market Research, Social Industry and Brand Sentiment, Traditional Brand Sentiment, Site Feedback and User Interaction: Tons of tools plus good direction on how to organize and tackle this mammoth task.
Online Brand Development – Old School Link Building in the Social Media Age – A great list to cultivate in-bound links. Jason lists many more traditional approaches but guess what? They work. And he puts a social media spin on many of them.

Web Dev and Analytics

CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster – How a security company unintentionally created a Content Delivery Network, and made their sites significantly faster in the process.
Search and Rescue: 4 Ways to Find Lost URLs After a Bad Website Redesign or CMS Migration – If you’re planning a site redesign or if you just completed one, read this article to help discover where you went wrong…before it’s too late.

SEO

Introducing: The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors – A visual guide to all that impacts SEO. A pretty handy, condensed guide.
2011 Edition of SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors – In stark contrast to the SEO Periodic Table of elements, SEOMoz gives you keywords, domains, negative factors, historical comparison, social metrics and a slew of others. Read the intro by Rand Fishkin to better understand the results and how to interpret them.

Mobile

iPhone Mobile App Discovery with Bing – Bing announced several enhancements to the iPhone user experience – app search, deep launching into apps, and app autodiscovery. Nice move, Bing – you created a way to keep iPhone users on Bing and away from iTunes.
QR Code Generator by Mobile Barcodes – One of the most complete QR code generators I’ve seen. Create 4 different types of QR codes – the basic link to a URL, send a text message, call a phone number, or send an email.

Social

Where To Use Twitter’s New Follow Button – An intro to Twitter’s new Instant Follow button plus a few HTML tips for the newbs.

Bing

Updates to Bing Webmaster Tools, data and content – They rewrote Index Explorer (page level data), added a user-configurable crawl delay to set Bing to crawl slower during peak times and more frequently during slower times as well as updates to user management. Coming across this post was a reminder to get more familiar with Bing Webmaster Tools.

Apple and WWDC

Apple Integrated Twitter Authentication – Apple implemented Twitter Single Sign On (SSO) and added SSO methods to its API for use by app developers. And then TechCrunch posted a follow up detailing just how big a win it was for Twitter.
Apple iCloud vs. Amazon Cloud Player vs. Google Music Beta – PC Mag compares the cloud services and explains a few of the differences.
Apple pilfers rips off student’s rejected iPhone app – What would a big announcement be without a healthy dose of IP scandal? Even the logos are almost identical. Tsk tsk Apple.