by brad
links for 2009-10-30
3:02 pm in PPC Marketing Blog by brad
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Fascinating data and discussion from Jim Jansen, one of the leaders in search query research from Penn State.
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Google comparison ad page for mortgages.
You are browsing the archive for 2009 October.
by brad
Video Friday: All the new Google Videos in One Place
7:20 am in PPC Marketing Blog, Video by brad
Google creates a large amount of videos every week. They are good at creating videos, they aren’t necessarily great at promoting videos. For instance, there are a couple videos below with less than 25 views. No official Google video should have that few views.
So, I’ve decided to try a new feature on Friday’s. While many people are posting Friday Fun days or recaps of the best weekly information on Fridays (and if you do that – don’t stop – I love round up posts). I’ve decided to try something new:
Every Friday I’ll feature all the new Google Videos.
If our friends at Microsoft or Yahoo decide to make it easy to feature there new videos, I’ll add those as well.
If you’d like to see all the videos for yourself, you can check out our YouTube Channel.
New Videos from Google Channel UK
New Videos from Fast Forward
- Holiday Season: Nail the Basics
- Holiday Season: Multichannel
- Holiday Season: Emerging Media
- Holiday Season: Stay Optimistic
New Videos from At Google Talks
- Authors@Google: Serge Michel & Paolo Woods
- Authors@Google: Henry Pollack
- Authors@Google: Christopher McDougall
- Marketing Talks@Google: Kate Roberts
- Authors@Google: John Micklethwait
- Women@Google: Padmasree Warrior
New Videos from android developers
New Videos from Google
- Google Music Search Feature
- The Google Story
- Google Maps Navigation (Beta): car dock mode
- Google Maps Navigation (Beta): Street View
- Google Maps Navigation (Beta): satellite view
- Google Maps Navigation (Beta): search along route
- Google Maps Navigation (Beta): traffic view
- Google Maps Navigation (Beta): search by voice
- Google Maps Navigation (Beta): search in plain English
- Google Maps Navigation (Beta)
- Voicemail, the Google way
- Google Earth Hero: Save The Elephants
- Google Earth Hero: BOS, Borneo rain forest
- Google Earth Hero: Chief Almir and the Surui tribe of Amazon
- Google Earth Hero: Project Kaisei
- Google Earth Hero: Appalachian Voices
- How Google Social Search works
- Social Search demonstration
New Videos from Google Webmaster Help
- What should I do if I don’t know why I’m penalized?
- Should I link to all press mentions of my site?
- JavaScript and email addresses
- Google City Tours
New Videos from Google Apps
- Cloud Futures: Marc Benioff CEO Salesforce.com (Google Atmosphere Session
- Google Atmosphere Closing Remarks
- Fireside chat with Dave Gi
rouard and Alan Eustace (Google Atmosphere Session 10) - Just the essentials: Focus on the Core by Geoffrey Moore (Google Atmosphere Session 9):
- Panel – Collaboration in the Workplace (Google Atmosphere Session 7)
- Panel – Risk and Reward (Google Atmosphere Session 5)
- Panel – The Perfect Storm (Google Atmosphere Session 4)
- Cloud Capability: Dr Werner Vogels Amazon CTO (Google Atmosphere session 3)
- Era of the Cloud: Nicholas Carr (Google Atmosphere Session 2)
- Google Atmosphere Session 1: Opening
New Videos from google tech talks
by brad
Last AdWords Seminar of the Year. We're headed to Miami
8:50 am in PPC Marketing Blog, Speaking Events by brad
The AdWords Seminar for Success series is heading to Miami.
When: December 1st & 2nd
Where: Embassy Suites Miami International Airport Hilton
3974 NW South River Drive
Miami, FL 33142
The AdWords Seminar Curriculum has been completely revamped based upon feedback from previous attendees. We’re now offering a two day seminar. Each day is optional; however, we’re offering a discount to those attending both days.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
Before you read the new curriculum, don’t forget the fun goodies you also get for attending:
- $100 AdWords Credit ($50 if you register for a single day) **Must Register 7 Days in Advance
- 2 USB Thumb Drives with Presentation Materials (1 for each day)
- Other Google Goodies
See What Other Attendees Have Said:
| AdWords Seminar 301: Advanced Account Optimization | |
| Morning Session | Afternoon Session |
| Psychology of Search
Best Practices for PPC Success
Advanced Optimization Techniques
Open Q&A |
Quality Score Demystified
Beyond Text – Multimedia Ads
Content Network Deep Dive
Advanced Geographic Targeting
AdWords Editor: Quick and Easy Account Changes
Google Analytics Implementation Open Q&A |
| **Bonus Presentation: Marketing in a Down Economy | |
Brad – GREAT JOB! you managed multiple experience levels beautifully. I learned a lot. Already seeing better results from my Adwords campaigns. I’m sure I’ll attend another session.
Steve Hodgdon
The Google Adwords seminar by Brad Geddes was the most informative and enlightening one I have ever attended. The day flew by and the information gleaned was more than most two-day sessions I have attended.
Jeff Cunningham
Cunninghamn Gas Products
Curriculum Day 2
| AdWords Seminar 302: Advanced Conversion Optimization | |
| Morning Session | Afternoon Session |
Setting Profitable Business Goals Putting Your Ad Dollars to Work
Learn How to Track Conversions
Exploring ROI and Profit
Effective Bidding Strategies
My Client Center Successful Account Organization
|
Find Effective Messages through Split Testing
Be More Productive Using AdWords Reports
Google Analytics Reporting
Click Quality and Reporting Even More Tools for Effective Research
Resources Open Q&A |
| **Bonus Presentation: Actionable Items: Step-by-Step: How to Maximize Results for Your Limited Time | |
I attended your “Google Adwords Seminar for Success” sessions in Austin earlier this week. I just wanted to say I really appreciated the content you offered. Your material was well balanced. I was fearful that because my company is not a product-selling company that we would not benefit from your information. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. Your seminar validated to me that the direction we have taken so far is appropriate. It is good to see and hear from an expert that we have made good decisions about our Adwords strategy. Your information and tips have given me new things to think about and to use when looking for new keywords to use, and as well to examine our existing keyword performance.
Stu Roberts
Director of Information Technology
Nelson Architectural Engineers, Inc.
Investigative Engineering & Forensic Technology
Brad, great job with the seminar. It was taught well and at a good learning pace. You handled the array of questions from simple to hard with great explanations and analogies. I will probably be calling you for some personal phone consultations for my larger ppc clients.
All the best!
Tony Mandarich
I’m an affiliate and this type of training is essential and you guys delivered the best quality in content I’ve even seen about the subject of adwords. I left the seminar feeling more confident about this interface, but I sure would have been glad to pay extra for access to recorded video sessions.
Maybe that’s something you guys could
offer soon? 
Thanks very much.
Charlie Perez.
Brad is a genius–and I don’t say that about a lot of people. He knows Google adwords inside and out. I was thoroughly impressed by his presentation.
-Anon
I attended this conference in order to learn the latest Adwords developments, and in this respect, I found it to be most useful. We are using Adwords tools daily, so know more about them than the average user. Still, it is useful from time to time to take a step back and listen to an expert who is obviously plugged into the latest, as well as upcoming, developments.
Brad is an exceptional speaker, offers insightful views about marketing theory, and is a technical master. Aside from that he demonstrates during his presentations a willingness to roll up his sleeves and delve into the nuts and bolts of how to manage Adwords to improve ROAS for clients.
Chris Lude
Denver-PPC.com
by brad
Please let me know if you notice any errors & upcoming video testimonial test results
6:09 am in PPC Marketing Blog by brad
I spent yesterday morning:
- Updating the CMS
- Updating plug-ins
- Working on the server
- Backing up & Compressing the databases
- Creating workarounds for Feedburner’s multiple RSS feed issues
- If you didn’t see any new posts for a few months – it was a Feedburner issue with their branded feeds. I’ve done some 301 .htaccess subdomain coding to mitigate any future issues (and hopefully send the RSS to everyone regardless of their feed subscription).
- Other random backend items
I looked through the site and I haven’t seen any issues. If you notice one, can you please let me know?
Need something to read?
I’m also aware of the lack of new blog posts. There is a new Search Engine Land column I wrote a couple weeks ago that you can read: The 6/90 Rule Part 2: Best Uses For The AdWords Keyword Report
Excellent Video Testimonial Conversion Data Forthcoming
I’m also working on some interesting data comparing the AdWords Seminar conversion rate with and without video testimonials. Once I have enough data, I’ll let you know my findings. I’ll move on to some other potential multivariate tests such as:
- No video
- Male testimonial first
- Female testimonial first
- Interview first
Normally with video I’d also test things like:
- autoplay with sound
- autoplay without sound
- no autoplay
However, as I’m cheating on video hosting for the moment by using YouTube, I’m not going to conduct those tests. That type of test will be done next year with a new product we have coming out. For now, it’s a simple A/B test with and without video to look at conversion rates, play rates, etc.
Here’s the first set of video’s I’m testing (if you receive the blog by newsletter, you may have to click to the site to see embedded video):
As this is actually 9 videos strung together; and I’m not my target market, can you as a reader easily tell this is 9 videos that you can jump around and watch?
Last AdWords Seminars for a Few Months
Lastly, there are only two seminars left this year: Miami and Los Angeles. As January and most of February are being dedicated to a new product, it will be late February to mid-March before there is another advanced seminar.
by brad
links for 2009-10-21
3:03 pm in PPC Marketing Blog by brad
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Analytics will be rolling out some improvements to accounts over the coming months. The best one: max 20 goals per campaign (and a couple new goal types).
by brad
links for 2009-10-20
3:03 pm in PPC Marketing Blog by brad
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Interesting study about how people search on one engine and may click on an ad from another one before final purchase. I think your main takeaway should be to answer the question, "Should I be on multiple engines?". Many advertises only use Google as that's the biggest engine out there. However, if you only use on source of advertising, you will miss some potential customers.
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There have been arguments for years if SEO is an art or a science. Someone is taking the time to examine this from the PPC side. Personally, I think its a bit of both. Art gives you the creativity to start. Science (i.e. numbers) tells you how good your art is and when you need to change brushes or add a different color paint.
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Multiple browsers on the same computer (http://community.microsoftadvertising.com/blogs/analytics/archive/2009/10/19/do-you-have-a-primary-browser-that-you-use-most-of-the-time.aspx) or multiple browsers via different locations (this study) mess up attribution management, cookies, and so forth. Some fascinating data about access to the web:
While most people (75%), and almost all those who use the Internet, use it at home, more than two out of five adults (43%) go online at work and a third (32%) do so at other locations (schools, cybercafés, libraries, etc.)
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Campaign Insights is a unique measurement tool that can give reliable data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness, or active user interest, in a particular product or service. It looks beyond the traditional measures of clicks and conversions to calculate the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits that result from a display ad campaign.
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Google made a small design change recently where the ads are no longer justified to the right side on larger monitors and are closer to the organics. Discussion at WMW, poll from SE Roundtable:
1) Increased AdWords CTR: 24 (50%)
2) Increased organic CTR: 4 (8%)
3) No change in AdWords CTR: 7 (15%)
4) No change in organic CTR: 7 (15%)
5) Decreased AdWords CTR: 1 (2%)
6) Decreased organic CTR: 5 (10%) -
Problem: 74% of purchases can only be attributed to a single click anyway. By definition, that’s the last click. Attempt to “attribute” that purchase to prior clicks or other factors? Good luck.
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Some good insights into SMBs using social. Here's the real issue in SMB adoption:
"79% of respondents report annual marketing budgets of less than $5K per year with 44% spending less than $1K annually on advertising and marketing."
by brad
links for 2009-10-19
3:03 pm in PPC Marketing Blog by brad
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Nice look into optimizing search for FaceBook.
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How not to write a testimonial.
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Interesting Webmaster World discussion looking at both duplicate content penalties and how to do SEO when you have multiple country TLD sites.
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This is big news.
Yahoo Search Submit was one of the (cheap) secrets to getting quite a bit of search traffic from Yahoo. I'm not sure how many people realized that there were paid results in Yahoo's organic traffic; but as an advertiser – it worked quite well.If I had to guess why this was going away – it's because there wasn't a good way to integrate this with Bing results if the Yahoo/Bing search deal goes through. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo works with large companies who were doing serious dollars though search submit and what their new strategies will be for these advertisers.
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PageRank is an easy number to use when discussing how important a page/website is to another webmaster; but too much emphasis is placed upon it for SEO work.
SEL has a nice (long) writeup about what is pagerank and how it works:
http://searchengineland.com/what-is-google-pagerank-a-guide-for-searchers-webmasters-11068
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The average internet user per month:
spends 68 hours online
visits 2,645 webpages
across 87 domains
by brad
links for 2009-10-16
3:02 pm in PPC Marketing Blog by brad
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Calculator to see how long you need to run a test for to get significant results. Please note, some tests need to be run longer due to changes in search behavior on weekdays vs weekends vs changes in monthly purchasing behavior.
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Nice walkthough on changing cases in Excel plus some other tips.
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Which post-Thanksgiving shopping day gives the biggest online bang?
by brad
You are Not Your Target Market
5:26 am in PPC Marketing Blog, Usability by brad
Way to often I hear statements such as:
- I don’t click on ads, I bet no one does
- I wouldn’t do that; therefore, I’m not going to market that way
- Why would someone search for our products that way?
- Of course our site is easy to navigate, we have conversions
- What do you mean we are a bad judge of our website?
These statements tell someone that you are not looking at things from the customer point of view; but your own.
In every Google AdWords seminar, I end up going on a rant about about how most people are bad judges of their website. Once you know something so well, you do not think about how to use the product; you just do it by instinct.
- Have you ever driven to work and could not remember actually driving?
- That does not happen when you take an unfamiliar route
- When the familiar is routine, we cease to notice the small details
The same can be said for your website. You know that your phone number is in the upper right hand corner inside your navigational banner. Ask someone to find that same phone number, and there are times a searcher stares at the page and says they can’t find it.
You know that to access your shopping cart, there’s a small icon at the top of a page. I’ve been on sites where I added something to the cart, and then couldn’t figure out where my cart was.
- This happens because often designers create a website for themselves.
- Or they create it for the marketing team.
- They are not always creating websites for the consumers.
While these are basic principles, we all forget them sometimes. A good designer never forgets this principle.
I have 6 different Firefox profiles on my computer and often have 3 Firefox profiles open, all with different plug-ins and navigation, along with Chrome and IE. To me browsers are a tool to be customized so each one helps you become more productive. I don’t think about saying something like, “Make a new Firefox profile that just uses GTD & the Better Plug-ins and then layer over a Grease monkey script based upon your email navigation preferences and then you can have have a dedicated email browser for your hosted apps so that you can be more productive.”
I said that a couple weeks ago to a very techie audience, and more than half of them stared at me blankly. I’m not my target audience.
I would guess that more than 90% or more of people who read this blog know what a browser is. However, what about your audience who is wandering the streets of New York City? Do they know what a browser is – the fundamental access point for the web?
Here is an enlightening video that asks those on the street a simple question: What is a browser? For many of you this is your target market. The answers might surprise you.
If you’d like to see all of Google’s videos; and our favorites such as the above video - subscribe to our YouTube channel.
by brad
Everything you need to know about Google's SK Tool via Video Tutorials
7:08 am in Google AdWords, Keyword Research, PPC Marketing Blog by brad
Google launched the SK Tool (search based keyword tool) in November 2008. This tool uses Google’s crawler information and combines it with AdWords data to suggest keywords for your website. You can examine the results about any domain via the SK Tool. If you access the SK Tool while logged into a Google account that is associated with an AdWords account that buys traffic to a domain, then you can see some associated data points with the suggested keywords.
Google is excellent at making helpful videos about their products. What they aren’t great at is putting the videos in useful formats and marketing their own videos. Some of these videos have under 300 total views, and most are under 1000. Considering how beneficial these videos are (and how many people conduct keyword research); those numbers should have a couple more 0s after it.
I’ve taken the videos that Google has produced and created some custom playlists so that you can view Google’s information is an easy-to-follow manner.
SK Tool Introduction & First Steps
This first playlists consists of 9 videos:
- Video 1: Product intro (3:49)
- Video 2: Getting started (4:06)
- Video 3: Navigating the interface (6:23)
- Video 4: Refining results (6:27)
- Video 5 & 6: Exporting the information (7:49)
- Video 7 – 9: Tracking the results (3:52)
It will take just over 30 minutes to watch all of the videos. However, as these videos do play in the correct order, you can leave and come back and jump to the next video you wish to view.
SK Tool Opportunities
The next playlist is a set of six short videos totaling around 15 minutes of ways to use the SK Tool to identify missed opportunities.
SK Tool – Other Videos
The last two videos are:
- Using the tool to promote new part of your website (2:22)
- Identifying how well your active keywords are doing (2:39)
More Google Videos
Google has quite a few channels and videos that they maintain. If you would like to see all of the official Google channels, you can view our subscription list or subscribe to our YouTube channel.
