Marketing on the Web I have always felt that conversion tracking was an absolute necessity if you are running Adwords Campaigns. The Google AdWords team just announced that displaying the AdWords Site Stats logo is no longer mandatory. This is good news as I always felt the logo was unattractive and distracting for customers/prospects coming in through AdWords campaigns.
MoreSearch Engine Marketing
Marketing on the Web discusses Search Engine Marketing and how it can improve your marketing efforts.
Building National Campaigns for Local Business
I attended an Advanced AdWords seminar last week and am revisiting the topic of Building National Ads for Local Needs . This seminar was sponsored by Google and lead by Brad Geddes of BG theory . While most of the Advanced Class was more a refresher than anything new, it has prompted me to make a change in my national campaign strategy for local business. In addition to the negative terms I use (listed in the original article), I now also use exclude cities, regions and metro areas in the cam...
MorePPC Campaigns and Quality Score
Google recently announced changes to its approach to Quality Score. Quality Score is the bane of my existence. It turns previous 'best practices' into bad practices and dooms the long-tail to obscurity. Sure it makes sense to have the keywords relevant to the ad and the landing page relevant (duh!), but in practice Google weighs click thru rates (CTR) in the overall campaign to judge what you should be paying and if your CTR drops too low for the ad group, you'll receive a Quality score minim...
MorePPC Management Options
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 ...
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...
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.
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