Practical Steps Toward Integrated Direct-Response Marketing is a series of whitepapers offering clear instructions on how to improve ROI this year. Developed by Razorfish Search in collaboration with vertical experts from Google and marketers from Razorfish’s Media, Analytics, CRM and Ad Exchange departments, the series aims to cut through the hyperbole surrounding new advertising technology by telling executives exactly what they need to know. Razorfish believes a rare opportunity is at hand, and that sound guidance on measuring cross-channel activity, unifying views of the customer, testing contact strategies and optimizing creative are required for early success. Practical Steps… brings the broad experience of digital natives to bear on the core challenges of large marketing organizations.

Part 1 of the series is “Google’s Development Roadmap: More Info in More Places,” currently available at Razorfish.com. Forthcoming chapters will focus on specific verticals, starting with retail. All whitepapers in the series take an evolution-not-revolution approach, delivering recommendations on how to enhance offline direct-response efforts with online data. Razorfish believes success at integrated marketing is less a matter of tearing down traditional DR than of achieving the ability to learn new tactics that provide reproducible results.

We want to hear from you! Post comments or email us at razorfishsearch@razorfish.com

Today Razorfish released the sixth annual Razorfish Outlook Report.

The report drives home the fact that digital is on center stage right now. Consumers and technology are responsible for the shift  — marketers need to keep up.

Search VP Josh Palau provides the outlook for search. Explaining the concept “Search Everywhere,”  he points out that as consumers expect more and more information at their fingertips, smart marketers will make sure search is integrated into all aspects of marketing, not a standalone tactic.

We encourage you to explore the full report and check out the graphics on flickr.

Last week, Google launched a new results page layout, giving searchers a variety of options to the left of the search results. The changes are primarily to the layout and styling and are intended to provide an even richer search experience for users. While the search options panel has been available since 2009, this is the first time Google included it in the default view for all users.

While the changes seem minor, many feel that the changes go against Google’s simple way of presenting information. Some posts in Google’s forum describe it as “shocking and horrible”. Google has stated that the new layout is still a work in progress.

We polled our team to see if the new layout is useful for searches and the team was pretty split. I guess time will tell…

Update: We encourage you to check out the full Google Latest Results Page POV prepared by Steve Rose and Sam Hailstone, SEO Engineers from the Razorfish UK Office!

Google recently announced the ability to target iPads through the AdWords interface. While this development does present additional ways to leverage mobile, it’s important to realize that iPads are included in the “All mobile devices” targeting option in Google along with other high end mobile devices, e.g. iPhones, Android and Palm phones.

If you manage an account that is currently running a mobile campaign on Google with settings that target “All mobile devices,” it may be worth opting out of iPad targeting, specifically. This can be done under the ‘Settings’ tab for any campaign within the AdWords UI. Under the “Networks and devices” sub-header, click “Edit” next to “Devices,” then change targeting to “Target only selected mobile devices” and de-select the iPad as an option.

This adjustment is important for anyone running a click-to-call campaign, since phone calls cannot currently be placed from an iPad.

Last week, Google released their SEO Report Card, designed to identify opportunities for SEO improvement within Google and to share SEO best practices with the industry.  The report card measures the main pages of 100 Google sites against common optimization categories, assigning a grade for each.

We agree that scoring pages can be a good way to aggregate feedback and flag issues. We asked Razorfish’s SEO team to give Google’s report card a grade, based on its potential usefulness to companies with many websites. Our SEO team was unimpressed — zero As or Bs were handed out. Here’s a sample response, and a chart of all responders’ grades below:

“Google has outlined a basic approach but does not clearly define where emphasis should be placed to maximize value. There are dozens of tactics not addressed in this document that may be affecting their level of organic success.

Though they are self deprecating in their approach to pulling back the curtain, I think they might mislead some people about what is important in SEO. They discuss not having proper keywords in place, but they don’t do a good job specifying how to source keywords or the value of ranking for certain keywords. I mean, regardless of its title tags, the Google Keyword Tool ranks #1 for the top search terms for keyword research. On the one hand, yes, they’re not using some best practices, but on the other, SEO can’t be reduced to a checklist and not all sites are created equal. Some require one or two changes to show improvement while others need the full gamut of techniques.”

We want to hear from you so share your grade with us.

Have an idea for QuickPoll? Email us at razorfishsearch@razorfish.com