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Last month Google released their long anticipated mixed campaign attribution reporting.  The reporting functionality goes by several names depending who you’re talking to (or which search engine), but the Adwords team dubbed the new reporting “Search Funnels“.  What’s great about this increased transparency?  For one, it puts the speculation to rest about the value of those dog campaigns you keep around for branding purposes.  Guess what?  All those campaigns with zero conversions actually do contribute to assisting other campaigns, and now you can prove it! Read more…

The buzz is certainly upon us.  Not unlike several months ago when Google spearheaded their PR campaign to introduce the world to what they thought (and still kinda is) a revolutionary work-flow solution in Google Wave, the company releases – albeit slowly – their social media platform entitled Google Buzz.  Obviously, social media has become the focus of tech-savvy companies the world over, minus those that haven’t objected to social media or don’t know where to start.  Few companies have really learned how to monetize the social media space.  This is one area where Google may have the upper hand and wherewithal to succeed with Google Buzz, they know how to monetize useful applications and platforms. Read more…

You know, I didn’t know what to make of all the hype back at SES Chicago last year.  There were tons of people talking about how great Bing! had become, and how it would be so much better once they integrate Yahoo properties into Adcenter.  Being a seasoned veteran of the pay-per-click marketing game and having wasted many hours on trying to bleed the stone, I didn’t think twice about giving Microsoft another chance until recently.  Boy, was I wrong to wait! 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…

Every now and then I like to run a check-up on my contextual match content network campaigns, to make sure Google is doing it’s job in keeping Adsense partners in check.  I’m happy to report that recent screening and higher scrutiny has gone a long way to clean up the Google Adwords Content Network.  The whole point of contextual match campaigns is to find areas advertisers can generate impressions, and hopefully cheap clicks. Read more…

Whoa, didn’t see this one coming.  In a surprising move yesterday, Google announced that advertisers would be allowed to use trademarked terms in their search ads, making for quite the conversation piece admidst legal uncertainty surrounding rights-holders.  The older rule allowed advertisers to request Google remove trademark and brand names from ad text, thereby providing some protection for owners.  Is this good or bad?  Depends which side of the fence you’re sitting on. Read more…

In marketing, vendor and partner transparency is king; more transparency equals better client relations.  In the online marketing world, there’s the tendency for vendor relations to languish or stagnate by maintaining the status quo. After watching Google as an advertising vendor for many years, they simply aren’t that kind of company.  With the web being what it is today, clients and agencies that use Google Adwords are very vocal about improvements they’d like to see made, including the improvement of transparency.  Google’s new Search Based Keyword Tool is one such improvement: more better. 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…

In response to my coverage of previous Search Engine Strategies events last year, the organizers of the show reached out to ask me if I would interview a few of the speakers this year.  In the first of what I hope will be a three-part series of interviews, I sat down with Julie Batten, SES Toronto speaker and eMarketing Manager at Klick Communications for a little Q&A on a range of topics affecting our industry. Read more…