PPC-Advice.com

You’re sure to remember that back in June, I interviewed Avinash Kaushik in advance of his appearance at SES San Jose 2009.  Well, he’s agreed to come back and talk to us again, and this time we’re chatting about his new book Web Analytics 2.0, which is on sale now.  Just like his old book Web Analytics an Hour a Day, his new book is chock full of great advice and helpful life lessons when it comes to web analytics, plus proceeds of his book go to great causes (Smile Train and Ekal Vidyalaya). Read more…

The more I talk to the people at ClickEquations, the more impressed I become with their product development.  I last caught up with Alex Cohen and Craig Danuloff of ClickEquations back in August at SES San Jose, believe it or not – on the advice of Avinash Kaushik.  There are a ton of pay-per-click bid management vendors out there, so I sought to find out what made ClickEquations different by sitting down with Craig Danuloff, President and Founder of ClickEquations. 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…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 7 years, or 2 years which seems more popularly accepted, you would be blind not to notice the impact social media and networking sites have had on society.  Some say product purchasing decisions are slowly migrating from search to social, forgoing the researching and evaluating phases for instant gratification and credible influence.  So why are online marketers finding it so hard to determine the net effect of their social marketing efforts on a handful of web 2.0 sites? 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…

External measurement tools enable us to track the relative success of our marketing efforts with those of our competitors.  As most internal measurement tools are closed and often more guarded than Fort Knox, external analysis can be extremely helpful to put our metrics in context.  comScore offers a vast array of online measurement tools, combining the best of panel-based data collection and on-page tagging.  Eli Goodman is a 10 year veteran in technology and marketing and leads comScore’s Search division.  He sat down to talk to us at Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2009, after delivering an eye-opening presentation entitled “Where to next?” 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…

Feeling fresh, alert and green coming off of EST and attending my first SES conference, I was met with a sluggish start to SES. This means low energy attendees, no freebies as was advertised from previous years’ attendees and worse of all, no brekkie! Even the coffee was weak. Those who needed more of a jolt had to make a trek to the Starbucks in the hotel next door or feed themselves with the $10 dollar fruit plate from the adjacent hotel. Read more…