Benchmarking State of Marketing Industry Skills | B2B Buyers Want, Don't Get, E-Commerce | Google's Penguin Update Cut Down Repeat Domain Entries

Agencies:

• As the marketing field becomes more quantitative, Rand Fishkin benchmarked the stated skills of marketers by harvesting self-reported areas of expertise on various social media platforms. The data may prove helpful over time in establishing the industry's evolution.

Business to Business:

• The new generation of business buyers want to transact online, but the sector tends to do a poorer job of providing this ability.

Search:

• eConsultancy studied how many different domains pop up in the search results for popular keywords, both before and after the most recent Penguin update. It turns out that Google has done a good job of consolidating results so as to prevent the same domain from popping up multiple times (down to 34.7 domains per 100 versus 19.3 before the most recent update). eConsultancy appears to worry that this might lower relevance for the sake of diversity.