Marketing on the Web I have been participating in Microsoft's AdCenter beta program. This type of desktop PPC management tool is essential to managing PPC programs. I have participated in, and managed several beta programs in my career and you expect things to be a clunky at first. if you have used the early releases, I am sure you would agree, there was room to improve. A Little History We were once satisfied to manage out PPC campaigns in an excel spreadsheet. Tabbing, cutting, pasting, searching and replaci...
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How Google AdWords Bidding Works – Quality Score
Great article that explains Google's AdWords auction process. No real insight into Quality Score here, but it does explain how it figures in the mix. Google Quality Scores and Ad Auctions Added 11/08/2008 More on Quality Score woes here: The Account Quality Score: Money Pit for the Uninformed Google's Ever-Evolving Quality Score Added 11/11/08 Google AdWords Quality Score -- That's Old-School for SEO
MoreGoogle Stats Logo No longer Manditory
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.
MoreBuilding 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...
MoreStarting your SEO Efforts
When optimizing your site for traffic, you will need some means to see where you are, track your progress (or your lack there of), and help identify mistakes. Here are the core elements I recommend: Sign-up for a Google Analytics (GA) account, it's free and it some if the best information you can get about visitor activity and how they got to your pages. If you do PPC marketing on AdWords and don't have Google Analytics installed you can add it under the Analytics tab in AdWords. If you a...
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 ...
MoreBroad match in SEM campaigns
I have said that you shouldn't use broad match in AdSense campaigns. While I still lean in that direction, it would be more correct to encourage you to test both phrase and broad match and then base your decision on hard conversions data. An excellent article on this topic: Google AdWords Marketing: Exact Match Bidding How these differ: Broad Match: Broad Match actually matches the words from the phrase any order. What is a little harder to follow is broad also matches synonyms for ...
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