KoMarketing Associates - Search Engine Marketing Blog

What is the Google Grants Program?

If you are currently working, own, or operate a 501(c)3 non-profit organization you may be eligible to receive an advertising grant from Google to raise awareness for your program through Paid Search advertising.

Here are the basic requirements:

• You must have a website, and your ads must link to a page on your website.
• The keywords you target must be relevant to your programs and services.
• Your website cannot display revenue generating ads, such as Google AdSense or affiliate advertising links, while participating in Google Grants.
 ... Read the full post

Earlier this week a prospect called KoMarketing Associates. They were frustrated that they could not find a search engine marketing firm interested in their small business. They could not understand why so many companies had no interest helping a new company get their SEM strategy started.

When I explained to the caller that KoMarketing Associates works primarily with B2B companies and organizations, I was met with the following reply:  ... Read the full post

The other day a group of colleagues were discussing SEO strategy with the owner in the software business. The individual was looking for ways to refine the website’s visibility in search engines.

As the discussion unfolded, it became apparent that the website did not have a significant SEO problem.  ... Read the full post

I’ve found that once people have determined what their ideal campaign settings are for a particular client they usually go into set it and forget it mode.  I’m going to go into detail about how we can use one specific section to get a little bit more out of our campaign settings.

Giving National Campaigns a Local Flavor

Normally when choosing to serve ads to the United States you’d simply pick the United States bundle under the Locations and Languages tab in the campaign settings.  Instead, try manually choosing each state from the list one by one.  ... Read the full post

Leads that turn into sales are certainly the most important conversions when evaluating the effectiveness of a search engine marketing campaign; or any marketing campaign for that matter. However, if you’re only focusing on closed deals as the yardstick for measuring these efforts, you might be missing other opportunities for defining value.

Here is a short-list of additional conversion opportunities marketers should consider when measuring value of a search engine marketing (online marketing) campaigns.  ... Read the full post

It’s important to differentiate between a time-saving shortcut and one that has some serious drawbacks to the quality of your work or your relationship with your advertiser.

Here are a few “shortcuts” that I’ve found are important to avoid:

Failing to Use a Unique Login (Or Your Master Client Center) To Access the Account

The first thing you should do when you build an account for an advertiser or take over as the primary manager of an existing account is to associate a unique user name to all of your interactions.  This is important for several reason:  ... Read the full post

The other day a B2B company called inquiring about our SEO services. While our services where not a good fit in this specific circumstance, a distinct challenge surfaced that’s worth writing about.

The company was interested in gaining visibility for broad keywords (unrelated example: “packaging manufacturer”) but only served a specific regional market (such as “packaging manufacturer in Boston”)

B2B organizations focused in a local or regional market will find difficulty creating an SEO campaign for broad-based keyword strategies. A few possible reasons:  ... Read the full post

A common question about keyword research and the Google keyword tool is whether to ignore keyword opportunities that list “not enough data” for global and local search volume estimates.

The answer is NO; the misconception is that “not enough data” means “no one is searching for this keyword”, which in many cases will be far from the truth.  ... Read the full post

Keyword insertion is a tactic used for creating ad copy, where rather than display a specifically crafted headline you choose to import the search query.  Due to character limit restraints not all searches can be imported as the headline, so a reserve or backup headline needs to be crafted.  Only keyword phrases that are under 25 total characters can be shown, and when the search query is too long, the pre-generated message would be displayed.

So using the above ad text as an example, if the search phrase was  PPC Management the ad would read:

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Sometimes you don’t need to use a limousine to get somewhere when a bicycle will do the trick.

… and sometimes you just might not have an advanced analytics tool and your only options are AdWords and Google Analytics.  I was setting up some basic revenue tracking for a low impact project of mine and I was amazed at the lack of instruction in the help center on how to track variable shopping cart revenues, namely revenue that is generated from a sales action that does not have a static value.  So I thought I’d take a few minutes and lay out instructions here.  ... Read the full post