Mother's Day, second largest gifting holiday after Christmas, is a little over a week away. Recent presidential campaign controversies have reiterated what we all know: being a mom is hard work. For search engine marketers, reaching the husbands and kids looking to buy the perfect gifts for their loved ones is hard work too.

If you're worried it's too late to reach customers, no need: a PriceGrabbers.com survey shows that 30% of shoppers wait until the last week to buy gifts, and 18% leave it until the last minute, within 48 hours of the holiday.

This article is reprinted with permission from Search Engine Watch. You can read the original article here

By Alistair Dent

Search partners are search engines that syndicate Google's AdWords ads. These websites aren't large enough to build their own ad serving platform, and don't have enough users to attract advertisers to it.

Without wanting to sound overly harsh: if you had an extra hour to spend on your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, would you use it building an Ask.com campaign or optimizing Google? There's no contest.

We sent a large team to Captiva Island, FL, last week for MediaPost's Search Insider Summit, where our VP of Revenue Andries de Villiers participated on the panel "Search + Data: Accelerating the intersection of Keywords and Audiences."

The conversation broached on the following questions: What type of technology/infrastructure needs to evolve to package search with data for media targeting? What capabilities are needed? What will marketers expect from these types of companies? What do success metrics look like? How do we scale keyword search?

When you bid on exact match at adMarketplace, we exact match. Unforunately the same can't be said for Google AdWords. This thorough analysis looks at the upcoming changes to AdWords and gives you instructions on how to opt out in order to prevent yourself from spending way more money than expected. The quick overview:

Starting next month, Google plans to silently change the way your existing Adwords campaign works. These are changes that, unchecked, could cost you a ton of money. And what’s worse, is that you may never figure out why – because the cause of the decreased performance would be completely hidden from you.

Here’s what’s going to happen:

Google has made “improvements” to Exact match and Phrase match to make them fuzzy. That means that when you advertise on a keyword, you’ll now be automatically advertising on misspellings, plurals, and any other form of the word.

Facebook’s fast-approaching IPO has given tech and business journalists plenty of data to analyze and leads to investigate. They are using the opportunity to poke at all the flaws, blemishes, and red flags lurking under the company’s hood, and have exposed the biggest issue facing the ‘Book: its reliance on CPM. 

CPM is dying. As chief digital strategist at Marketing Science Consulting Group Augustine Fou noted, “CPC based search ads have taken over two-thirds of the online advertising market, leaving the once dominant CPM-based display ad players like Yahoo and AOL crippled for life.”