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I attended Marketing Week Live! earlier this week - a two day marketing event at Olympia that show-cased a variety of speakers and case studies across the broad areas of Insight, Data Marketing, Online Marketing and Instore.

There were plenty of really good, interesting speakers, a couple in particular spoke of the importance of getting maximum value out of any client, customer, competitor or industry data available to you, and not just stopping at face value insights and results.

We continue to hear that people no longer watch television in its traditional format. This continues to be the view of several commentators. This tends to be opinion, rather than fact.

Like Shakira's hips - the numbers don't lie.

Last month Depaul U.K launched an App called IHOBO with Publicis London which has now become one of the most popular Itunes downloads.

Google have finally released a new web indexing system, Google Caffeine. It may seem a bit odd for the world’s number one search engine to change something that wasn’t broken before but with the continuous evolution of the web, Caffeine promises to return searchers with more up to date, relevant content then before from not only text based content but from video, images, news and real-time updates.

In May this year Google unveiled their latest product, Google Secure Search. Secure Search or SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is Google’s very on secure search engine, or in Google’s words:

“SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that helps provide secure Internet communications for services like web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers. When you search over SSL, your search queries and search traffic are encrypted so they can't be read by any intermediary party such as employers and internet service providers (ISPs).”

Last month, Google Local Business became Google Places and a Local Business Listing became a Place Page. Google also released some astonishing facts on Google Places. There are 4 million Place Pages worldwide, 2 million in the U.S., estimates put this as 10-15% of all U.S. businesses have a Place Page. 20% of searches on Google are related to location, that’s 1.28 billion per month.

On Monday 7th June, SPAR will become the first advertiser to run a truly local advertising campaign on Spotify, using a postcode-specific targeting strategy conceived by MEC Manchester.

Once you have set up your campaigns, adgroups, adtexts and keywords in Adwords you still need to be able to track their performance. Google conversion tracking is a free, simple way to do this. Once our conversion tracking tag has been placed on the ‘thank you’ page of the website we can then see exactly which keywords have driven conversions. These 'conversions' are attributed to the last click; in other words the last keyword they searched and clicked through on before converting.

Digital Radio UK are set to try and convince more radio listeners to move to digital listening after they announced this week that they would be launching a month long scrappage scheme on 22nd May, designed to get listeners to trade in their old FM/AM radios for a shiny new digital radio.

Following on from Google announcing page load speed to be a ranking factor, they have had a patent granted that was filed in 2004 for a new ranking signal, semantic closeness. This is when Google uses the HTML structure of a webpage to view how close words are together and determine a visual structure of the webpage that is semantically meaningful.