Relevant news, random thoughts, and infrequent rants. Calling it the way we see it , simply because we can.
Stock Picks Part 1
This is the first of what will hopefully be many, more frequent, and more detailed posts about my stock picks. I am doing this to become a better investor. In January 2012 I started managing more money than I had previously. Therefore, this post will track my investments since then. I’m almost 26, I hold no financial certifications or charters. I don’t work in finance.
CJES – C&J Energy Services Thesis
There are a lot of moving parts here; taken together they created a perfect storm for the United States land-based fracking market. CJES’s share price reflects the extremely pessimistic sentiment, which I believe has created an opportunity.
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Google Upgrades Remarketing
Last Friday, July 27, Google announced a number of updates to its Remarketing program – which you can read more about here.
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Now Building Banner Ads
As part of the roll-out of our expanded service lineup, we’re now able to build banner ads for our clients engaged in Display/Content and Remarketing. Just a couple of things I wanted to shed some light on. To those of you in the know, Gargoyle Consulting was formed over a year ago as a pure-play SEO & PPC management company. While we didn’t previously create banner ads, we did manage the optimization for display/content/remarketing accounts.
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Google’s Q2 2012 Conference Call
Like our GOOG Q1 2012 conference call post, we’ll start of by saying that none of us own Google shares or Google debt. This is not about whether Google makes for a good investment or not, rather it is intended to highlight some of the more interesting aspects of the conference call and financial results, released July 19, 2012.
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Product Listing Ads – Now Mobile
Last Friday Google announced it had implemented its Google Shopping ads (aka Product Listing ads) within smart phone and tablet SERPs. This comes on the heels of last month’s announcement that Product Listing ads on Google Shopping will no longer be free. Indeed, it seems like a pretty well-thought-out strategy to help monetize mobile traffic – particularly on smart phones.
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Behold: The New Gargoyle
Well, it’s been a year since Gargoyle Consulting LLC was founded. Over this time, we’ve established some awesome relationships with some awesome clients, gone through 3 website makeovers, added 2 members to our team (Jesse & Eric), and expanded the number of services we offer by a factor of 3, to name a few highlights. We learned a lot in our first year working together, and our excitement about our future is tough to overstate.
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The Value of Facebook Advertising
Today, comScore & Facebook released their second rendition of “The Power of Like.” The first was released almost a year ago, which is nicely summarized in this video. In these whitepapers, comScore showcases three brands (Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, and Bing), and describes their experiences with Facebook marketing and discusses some of their results. While comScore developed what appears to be a great tool for actually measuring certain elements of social media advertising, the whitepapers fall short of solidifying confidence in Facebook advertising in general.
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Goodbye Google Places
Farewell Google Places. Hello Google +. Try a few local-based searches on Google. What you’ll probably find is that the information previously contained on a Google Places page now exists only on Google + pages, with some additions. Most noticeable are the Scores in lieu of Stars. Formerly, each reviewer would rate the business between 0 and 5 stars. Now, reviewers can rate businesses between 0 and 3 points. Each business gets a score out of 30 points, calculated based on averaging these user reviews.
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Website Optimizer, Meet Google Analytics
Starting August 1 2012, the capabilities offered by Google’s Website Optimizer will be included in Google Analytics, effectively ending Website Optimizer as a stand-alone product. The change was announced last Friday, in this post.
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