5 for Friday — Links, Stories, & Posts for Your Weekend

March 8th, 2013 by Search Influence Alumni

Round 1-081. The High Cost of Missing Listings: $10 Billion (or More) – Screenwerk

Have you ever wondered about the real cost of erroneous or missing business contact information for local businesses on the web? A research firm has studied the issue, and you might be surprised how big the numbers are. An estimated 43 percent of listings have some kind of error — often in the business name, phone number, or address — and it’s having a big effect on commerce.

2. How Ads Look in the New News Feed Layout – Inside Facebook

There was a lot of chatter this week about the unveiling of Facebook’s updated design for News Feed. While everyone immediately noted the larger photos and individual story modules, internet marketers looked for differences in the new ad design. This article compares some page post ads before and after the update.

3. Google for Mobile: How Google Makes Money from Mobile – Wordstream

While many thought Google would be doomed by the inevitable shift to a web environment where mobile rules, it’s beginning to look like the search giant is in the process of successfully transforming into a mobile-first company. In this excellent blog and infographic, you can delve deeper into all their entire mobile portfolio to answer the question, “How does Google make money from mobile?”

4. Top 5 Google Analytics Changes You Might Have Missed – Search Engine Watch

Have you been keeping up with all the changes in Google Analytics? This blogger takes a look at five recent additions to the toolbox that can help you save time and find the data that means the most to your site.

5. When It Comes to Analytics, Are You Doing Enough? -SEOmoz

Sometimes online marketers forget that descriptive analytics is only one-third of the data researching pie. By focusing equally on predictive and prescriptive analytics, this author argues, your team will be empowered to find the story in the data, formulate reliable predictions, and operationalize your findings.