In accordance with the eZanga Core Values, it was necessary for our team to celebrate Halloween on October 30^th and not only ‘Work Hard’ but ‘Play Hard and Eat Hard’ too!

eZanga.com held their annual Halloween Costume Contest and was also provided free lunch courtesy of the Executive Team for full costume participation and keeping with the Halloween spirit!

The Winners of the 2009 eZanga Halloween Costume Contest are:

Scariest: Jessica Brown, Office Manager as the ‘Grim Reaper’

Funniest: Anthony, Account Manager as ‘Redneck’

Weirdest: Tied between Matt Donahue, Account Manager as ‘Don King’ and Tim Vaillancourt, Account Manager, as ‘Santa’s Helper’

Most Creative: Shane Donnelly, Account Manager as ‘Frank the Tank’ from Old School

‘I Can’t Believe You Wore That to Work’: Tied between Tim Vaillancourt, Account Manager, as ‘Santa’s Helper’ and Derek Pehlman, Account Manager as ‘Elf’

Best Overall Costume: CEO, Rich Kahn and Director of Sales, Dan Zitofsky for ‘Harry and Lloyd’ from Dumb & Dumber

Check out all the costumes on our social network, HopOnThis.com in Jimmy Hoppa’s photo gallery. Also, visit our homepage to see Jimmy all dressed up!

eZanga.com would like to wish everyone a fun-filled and safe, Happy Halloween!

PPC Hero, a web site devoted to all of the latest on pay-per-click advertising, recently conducted a survey looking to find the best second tier PPC search engines.

The survey asked over 100 users “Which second tier search engine produced the best results for you?” and eZanga.com turned up in the results, garnering 1 percent of the vote as one of just seven search engines named in the responses.

The report, which can be read here, also includes a chart depicting the results.

“To generate supplemental traffic, leads, and revenue, these search engines can be a useful resource (if managed and optimized properly),” it reads. “Also, diversifying your search marketing efforts can help stabilize your performance just in case you should incur any fluctuations in the “big 3.” And for certain advertisers, these search engines may even work just as well as Google (gasp!). This is some food for thought when creating a strategy to expand your PPC efforts beyond Google, Yahoo or MSN.”

The newest edition of Delaware Today Magazine features an article titles “Great Places to Work.” In it, the magazine highlights a number of ideal places in the First State to work for.

eZanga.com was one of the businesses featured and CFO Beth Kahn was happy to share some of the merits of working for eZanga.

“We’re in Middletown so there’s not a lot of restaurants around here,” she said. “So what we do is go to the store and I pick up things like soda, Twinkies and Hostess cupcakes. I usually get bagels for breakfast, and there are always snacks.”

“Of course, there are traditional benefits, too,” the article points out. “The company offers medical, dental, vision and supplemental insurance. There’s no limit on how much salespeople can earn. And the office is full of practical jokers. Workers may find their bikes have been festooned with streamers and flags or that their cubicles have been gift wrapped on their birthday. Best of all, commuters don’t fight Wilmington or Philadelphia traffic.”

You can read the full article at DelawareToday.com or if you are in the Delaware area, look for the November issue of the magazine at local newsstands.

Reports this week revealed that search advertising spending is steadily increasing in 2009, nearly matching the spending levels from a year ago.

Search marketing agencies such as Search Ignite and Efficient Frontier disclosed data that showed their clients’ spending had increased to between 5 and 10 percent from second quarter results. Year-over-year spending is still down nearly 5 percent, according to Efficient Frontier.

That trend has been witnessed at eZanga, where search spending has increased by 70 percent from last year.

The news brings a great deal of hope to the search marketing industry after the economic recession made an impact in spending over the last year. Reports from eWeekEurope, ClickZ and Advertising Age give some of the details about the recent rise in ad spending and what it could mean for the immediate future of search marketing as a promising fourth quarter begins.

Yesterday kicked off the SMX East Expo in New York City. The eZanga team was hard at work setting things up this morning and has already been busy documenting the event with photos, which are only being posted on Jimmy Hoppa’s HopOnThis.com photos page.

Pictures will be added daily from the three day event so keep checking the SMX East 2009-10 gallery for a look at what the gang is getting into in the Big Apple.

Our eZanga team is ready to hit the road again, this time for the annual Search Engine Expo East event which will take place Oct. 5-7 in New York City at the Javits Convention Center.

During the three-day event, there will be over 60 sessions focusing on important search marketing topics as SEO, PPC, social media, local and mobile search. We will also be an exhibitor during the trade show on Oct. 5-6 with many other leading search engine marketing solution providers.

eZanga CEO Rich Kahn will be speaking during the event, giving a presentation about the pairing of SEM and display advertising titled “1 + 0 = 2”.

For more information on the SMX East event, visit the official website at http://searchmarketingexpo.com/east/.

Our social networking site, HopOnThis.com, is currently running two raffle giveaways and you could be one or our winners!

If you have not already done so, all you need to do is sign up on HopOnThis.com and start earning points by uploading all of your favorite photos and videos as well as blogging, commenting and inviting your friends to join on.

This month, just one point gives you the opportunity to enter for a chance to win an iPod Touch. If you can get to 1,000 points, then you are eligible to enter to win a PlayStation 3! The winners will be drawn on September 30.

Remember, you can only win remarkable prizes like these by logging onto HopOnThis.com and staying active. So be sure to hop on today!

eZanga founder and CEO Rich Kahn is back in the news. Kahn once again joins the debate on which online marketing strategy gets the best results for businesses - SEO or SEM.

In an article published by Target Marketing Magazine Senior Editor Heather Fletcher, Kahn is one of three online advertising experts to lend his opinion to the often-debated topic.

From the article:

“”If you put up a campaign with search engine marketing, you can put up a bunch of tests, a bunch of different campaigns, test them all—and you can do that all in the first day,” Kahn says. As for the most obvious ranking aspects, he adds, SEM always ends up with the top rankings, no matter how high the SEO results are. And beyond that, paid search has access to more than Google.com. Google teams with other sites, so paid search customers also have access to those sites, Kahn says.”

Kahn goes on to talk about how personal experiences through eZanga help lend credence to this view, which you can read in the full article here.

The Targeting Marketing Magazine website garners close to 26,500 visitors monthly.

eZanga announced this week that it will now include display advertising with its Search Engine Marketing capabilities by issuing a press release detailing how the service works and why it will be an effective tool for eZanga and its customers.

The release has so far been picked up by notable outlets such as Market Watch, Search Engine Watch, Earth Times and Forbes.com.

eZanga provides its eZanga Display customers with reports that detail budget used, number of impressions the campaign has secured, cost per thousand impressions (CPMs), number of unique visitors, and the geographical, contextual and demographic distribution of visitors.

“Research has shown that exposure to both search and display ads from the same advertiser results in a 22 percent increase for conversion rates over search alone,” said Richard K. Kahn, CEO of eZanga. “We launched eZanga Display in order to capitalize on both of these key Internet marketing channels to help our clients reach their bottom lines faster and more efficiently.”

Al Gibes, a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, profiled eZanga and its many services in the August 29 edition of its newspaper and on its website.

For his column, ‘Online Guy’, Gibes interviewed eZanga CEO Richard Kahn to talk about the many things that have made the company successful over the years including how eZanga got its start in the industry six years ago.

Also mentioned is eZanga’s Traffic Advisors system and how it works to limit click fraud, as well as its venture into social networking with HopOnThis.com.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal has a print circulation of 668,000, while the website gathers about 360,000 visitors monthly.