Marketing on the Web
I handle pay per click campaigns for most of my customers. The front-end, setting up and tuning the campaign is the most time consuming part of the effort. Finding the right words and then determining which words best convert. After the initial set-up maintenance requires fewer hours, with much of the time spent, testing new ad copy and adjusting bids to improve acquisition cost. However diligence and attention are important as search phrases should be constantly evaluated and the results fed ba...
MoreDon’t Count Yahoo out
I had a meeting at Yahoo this week. The meeting was targeted at companies heavy into affiliate programs. We heard from a number of program managers, but because I am under NDA, can't disclose all the great stuff they are working on. However, I will say these guys are not sitting around worrying about Microsoft. They are firmly focused on the future and presented an impressive list of products and upgrades. Most interesting was some of the stuff going on with PPC management and while I can't be ...
MoreWeb Marketing Parallels to Bricks and Mortar
I recently went through a pre-launch design study with a client. The client is launching a new division of an existing company and after hearing me speak at a local business group, wanted to be sure he was starting with the right stuff. First let me say this is a great approach. Its much easier to fix problems on the front end than to try and undo mistakes that have your site identified for the wrong things. However, when you work on an existing design you do have some history of what is work...
MoreHuntsville Internet Marketing Services
When I started my consulting business, I imagined that I would be working with larger firms as part of a team, with in-house web and marketing resources, applying my SEO/SEM skills to a given situation for others to carry out. While it does work that way with larger accounts, I am frequently called to apply technical changes for small companies that have little or no marketing and/or the technical expertise. (It is unlikely they employ anyone who knows what an <H1> tag is, or how to con...
MoreChasing the Long Tail
It appears that attitudes on mining the lesser used, but more specific "long-tail" phrases is changing. Quality Score is making it too expensive to go after these phrases. What this means is to improve the performance and lower the cost of your campaigns you need to clear out the deadwood. If you must stubbornly clinging to your long-tail phrases, move them their own group so they aren't needlessly impacting the Quality Score of your other campaigns. More on this topic here in Yahoo's Sear...
MoreMeasuring Conversions
I am always surprised when I find businesses measuring Ad effectiveness based on click-thru rate. CTR is a simple measurement of clicks given as a percentage of impressions. That is, for a given volume of ad impressions, some number of readers have clicked-thru to your site. Unfortunately CTR can be very misleading. If you create a gee-wiz ad (such as click here to WIN), you can make your CTR soar, but if 100% of those clicks bounce, or otherwise don't go past your landing page, you have wasted ...
MoreInternet Marketing Overview
This past week I was asked to speak to a group of CEOs at the Huntsville business incubator, BizTech . In preparation for the meeting, I created a slide presentation that discusses organic versus paid search results and some of the elements that come into play when improving Search Engine Rank. Here is a link to that presentation. Internet Marketing Overview. I recently updated this presentation for the North Alabama Web Developers group. The update is here.
MoreSEO Beyond the Page
Let No Good Phrase Go Un-clicked If you have read much on SEO, you know that page name, title, and content play a big roll in the optimizing you pages. However, there is a second phase of optimization that shouldn't be neglected. When you develop your content, you optimize you page for certain keywords or phrases. However, after launch it is important to follow up to see what phrases are driving people to your site. It's important to verify that your key phases are working and certain your...
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