PPC-Advice.com

After two days of intense information uptake via osmosis, I had already typed my fingers to bony stumps hacking out what seemed like an endless stream of status updates on Twitter @gprzyklenk and @marketwire and recaps of each day on this blog.  Finally, day three of Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2009, and what would be my last day at the show.  Lucky for me, I got out of Chicago on a delayed flight, several others couldn’t say the same due to a massive blizzard that struck the entire Midwest and Eastern seaboard.  I’m thankful I stayed for day 3, because unlike other shows, the information didn’t stop as crowds thinned out. Read more…

Once upon a Google Adwords report, the impression share metric represented a peculiar, but intriguing metric.  Impression share can be thought of as a “share of voice” metric which measures the total impression your ads generate in a campaign out of the total available impressions for your keywords and targeted geography.  However, campaigns can be large, complex messes full of different ad groups and match types, so an impression share metric was relatively useless, unless your campaigns were simple.  Although not revealing their quality score hand completely, Google has bestowed more meaningful insights to advertisers, if you know where to look. Read more…

At first, I thought it was curious that my paid search campaigns would show relatively consistent patterns on a monthly and yearly basis.  Trends that I blogged about before some 2 years ago, still hold true today while others have become even more obvious.  Needless to say, knowing about these trends gives you a significant leg up on the competition, and verifying which patterns exist for your industry is as easy as tuning your campaign reporting to historical dates in the past. Read more…

First off, I have to state that Jason Matheson and I go way back.  He actually used to be my boss as Marketing Director and (reluctant) personal mentor at Netfirms.  People that know me well will know that there are a very few people I trust enough professionally in a work environment to hand over creative control or technical aspects of a project, but Jason makes my short list of candidates.  I recently caught up with him to find out about his most recent venture as founder and owner of NextTree, one of Canada’s fastest growing custom web design companies. Read more…

In the best of scenarios, collectively, the IT department within an organization is an extremely busy place, with the hustle and bustle of scoping, engineering, implementing, and testing every phase of an online web property. Priorities on projects originating from product development, marketing, sales, and support have to be weighed accordingly.  However, with the ever-changing world of online marketing, companies have to be increasingly more agile, and aware of changes across the enterprise. Read more…

Day two started right where Day one left off, with tons of more informative sessions.  Unfortunately, we only have two people from PPC-Advice.com covering the conference, which means we can only cover 2 of a possible 5 simultaneous tracks, hopefully next year we can get more people to come along.

Speaking of next year, the organizers of the show have already scheduled next year’s Silicon Valley show for outside of the valley, but within the bay Area.  Next year, SES will be coming from San Francisco, and no one could be happier about that than me.  Apparently, organizers, sponsors, speakers, and the engines themselves have all agreed – San Jose is hard to get to, has zero night-life, and is about the same distance from the major engine’s HQ’s in the valley.  Sweeeeeet. Read more…

I dropped the ball on this one, it’s been over a year since Yahoo acquired IndexTools but with all the Microhoo/Yagoog/Yahbing/Binghoo news between then and now, I admit that I took my eye off Yahoo Web Analytics.  Thankfully, enough folks remained on the IndexTools/Yahoo Web Analytics team, and I was able to get my hands on membership.  With the rumors going around about how Google pimps their own Search conversion/goal attribution, it’s nice to know there’s more choice out there. Read more…

The honor of interviewing a world-renowned Web Analytics expert such as Avinash Kaushik doesn’t come along every day, so I’m pleased to present a little preview into what marketers can expect at SES San Jose in August.  Avinash’s official title of “Web Analytics Evangelist” at Google really beguiles his true dedication to our industry:  he’s author of a best-selling book Web Analytics an Hour a Day, his blog Occam’s Razor is a first-stop on my daily online reading list, he speaks at countless conferences across the globe, and manages to sustain a frantic pace on Twitter.  Plus he’s a really approachable and helpful guy. Read more…

With all the talk lately about new and emerging technologies, social spheres, and potential easy wins in online marketing, it’s hard to decipher the signal from the noise.  A shaky economy doesn’t help matters, because many companies are moving to either increase short-term gains or foster long-term strategy and right the boat.  Fragmented advice is easy to come by, so I present to you one cohesive strategy of online marketing with a few tactical real-world examples of how you might implement change. Read more…

Continuing my pre-show coverage of Search Engine Strategies Toronto, I have the privilege of introducing Janice Hatch of Google Canada.  Janice is scheduled to speak on Day 2 of the conference in a session called “Campaign Performance Tracking” and was nice enough to spare some time to answer a few questions that relate to Google Adwords and the future of search marketing. Read more…