Crowdsourcing is a practice that gathers together services, ideas or content from a large group of people. These days they are typically done online where it is easy to gather together a large group of people using social media networks.

If you have tried to use Bing Ads conversion code within Google Tag Manager you may have noticed that your conversion information is not working properly, if at all. Unfortunately, the Adcenter conversion code does not trigger any errors within Tag Manager (like other document.write based tags do), and while it appears to work, the data simply is not flowing to Bing.

Google AdWords Dynamic Search Ads (DSA’s) are a moderately recent addition to the Google AdWords landscape. They are a great way to target additional traffic beyond normal match types to your website. When a search query comes in with keywords that match the content on whichever pages you’ve set up to run dynamic search ads, Google dynamically populates a custom headline based off of the search term.  If you already have existing keywords active, Google holds back that keyword from showing, allowing your existing campaigns to serve ads unabated.

The Search Marketing Expo (SMX) 2013 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on March 20 and 21 was a successful event collocated with other events at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre including eMetrics Summit and the Predictive Analytics World. I was fortunate to speak at SMX side by side with the main stars of International SEO, Andy Atkins-Kruger, Group CEO of WebCertain and Ian McAnerin, CEO of McAnerin International.

This week, one of our team members, Philip Mastroianni shared with the IMI team some insight into Reddit.com, a highly effective social news and entertainment website.   Reddit, familiar to many of us already, has a bulletin board system where users submit content, can vote up or down a post, and comment on many different subtopics.

As we say hello to warmer weather for springtime, we say goodbye to the first quarter of 2013. For those of us working in social media,  we’ve been on our toes keeping up with all the latest updates Facebook and Google have rolled out to us in past three months.  Get ready, we’re about to recap the biggest announcements in social media marketing so far this year.

Nothing is less fun than doing tons of work only to see someone else steal the thunder. Having someone else take credit for you work is a feeling that most have experienced, yet nobody enjoys. In the online marketing world, properly tagging your efforts and ensuring that tracking is working as expected is the best way to make sure you don’t have to experience that sinking feeling in your gut any longer.  If you are already familiar with URL tagging and just want a great utility to make tagging easier you can skip the read and grab my tagging sheet @ http://bit.ly/bulk-url-tagging. If you are not familiar with tagging, please read on!

With so many ads bombarding us online, it is refreshing to see an ad that makes us smile and resonates with us personally. Today, brands are challenged with figuring out how to make money from their online community. Most of the time we don’t want to be interrupted while we are trying to get our social groove on, so how do you wiggle your way into  your customers’ browsing experience in a way that doesn’t make them annoyed? You can start by creating tailor made content that your fans will naturally like. Just ask the online strategists from some social savvy brands that figured out how to do this – Gatorade, Whole Foods, Samsung, Oreo, and Coke.

On Tuesday, March 5th IMI invited some of our local clients in house for an exciting thought-leadership event sponsored by Google called Google Engage. Our clients watched a compelling 2 hour live broadcast from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. As a partner agency to Google, we were delighted to be included in the first ever Google Engage for Agencies event.  Speakers such as Lisa Gevelber, Google’s VP for Americas Marketing, discussed how businesses can grow in this digital age and reach more customers online.  Below are the key takeaways from this event.

Here are 5 things any brand can do to leverage contests for successful marketing campaigns online.