As promised last week in my post on Quantitative Search Share Analysis, over the next few days we’ll be examining traffic share across individual search engines based with respect to Canadian and US targeting. Today we’re starting things out with a bang, and we’ll dive right into the search leader – Google Adwords. According to our figures, Google dominates the paid search scene with over 90% search share. But how is traffic share divided along the Canadian-American border? As we learn, the stats are not exactly what you might expect. Read more…
This post could also be called, “Clearance for Landing Denied, Go Around.” It’s a common occurrence for pilots, but not a great scenario for pay-per-click advertisers. You take the time to design a killer campaign complete with performance keywords, strong calls to action, and high conversion landing pages but you don’t see a single sale. Why? Geo-targeting gone bad. Read more…
One key analytics test I wanted to address early in my blogeer (blog + career?) is the concept of time scale. How long do you have to wait in order to notice trends in your pay-per-click campaigns? How should you determine whether day-parting is a useful tactic for your campaigns? Can you ever really measure the true ROI of search marketing?
The answer to all of these questions and more… Read more…
As we all know by now, Adwords advertisers were notified wednesday morning of an impending Google Adwords algorithm modification that would essentially favor quality score plus maximum CPC to determine position, rather than quality score and the bids of your lesser competitors. This will undoubtedly have a huge impact on the average cost per click for larger organizations, however the ones it could hurt the most are affiliates. Read more…
As promised, today we’re going to take a quantitative look at search volume share across Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter over the past 3 months. For obvious reasons, I can’t divulge what search terms these numbers relate to, but I can discuss the type of campaigns that generated them. The three primary campaign types of any organization are going to fall into one or more of the following categories: branding, products, or services. Read more…
WordPress is a wonderful thing! The site redesign is now live, and the only thing left to do is a little bit of site monetization to pay the bills, and small finishing touches here and there.
The Google Adwords team has released a number of very highly sought after reporting tools over the past few months, one of which is the Search Query Report. If you’ve been in the pay-per-click arena for any length of time, you’ve probably had at least a passing desire to find out exactly what keywords people are using to find your ad. The report is powerful indeed, but it also reveals some of the inner workings of the machine that is Adwords. Read more…
An important first step in establishing successful pay-per-click advertising campaigns is picking the keywords that will drive traffic to your site. Easy, right? Not necessarily. In this post I’ll touch briefly on some good starting points for beginners when finding and bidding on keywords. We’ll review match types, search estimates, and other best practices when starting new PPC campaigns that translate well to Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter. Read more…
Sick of all the incestuous search marketing acronyms yet? Well too bad, it just keeps getting worse. Now each search engine is actually making their own acronyms. My theory behind this is that they are trying to find out which account managers are really up on their reading, and penalize your quality score if you’re not. All jokes aside, an important tool in my everyday use is the “My Client Center” screen. Even if you don’t have multiple accounts within your organization, I’m going to tell you why you should. Read more…
Seems that I wasn’t far off when I wrote just yesterday on the dangers of the content network. Robert Andrews of Forbes.com recently published an article called “Web Ad Nets Scrutinized As Brands Bail from Dodgy Sites.” Pretty soon you won’t be able to blame the advertising network responsible for bad placements because the advertiser does have a lot of power to dictate where ads should and should not go. Read more…
