KoMarketing Associates - Search Engine Marketing Blog

For those of you interested in calculating Pay Per Click (PPC) projections, I have created a basic PPC calculator that is available for download (click on the “PPC Calculator” link to download the Excel file).

There are two worksheets in the file - one for B2B Lead Generation and one for E-Commerce.

Each calculator requires a series of inputs from you in order to calculate the primary metric - Target Cost Per Acquisition (in each case, B2B & B2C).

You can use the calculators to focus on an entire program, a specific campaign, a specific ad group, or specific keyword.

Last night I played in a charity poker tournament sponsored by PR Newswire and organized by PRSA Boston.

The event was fun and I met lots of great PR folks in the Boston area.  Last year’s event helped raise enough money to allow PRSA Boston to raise its scholarship grant from $1,000 to $2,000.

It was also fun to watch the side action based on a friendly rivalry between Schwartz Communications and Racepoint Group (both PR firms located in Waltham, MA).

One of my favorite things about the Search community is that they are not only smart but also pretty darn witty. After reading 20 blog posts in a row about Twitter (or whatever the latest topic is) it can be very refreshing to read something that just makes you laugh out loud.

I have gathered 22, of what are in my opinion, Hi-larious posts from bloggers in the search community (and a few randoms as well) to make you laugh. Here are the links along with some evidence of their funniness:

Lists of Funny

While there are many reasons why businesses who start blogging end up failing, in most cases it has nothing to do with the expertise and intelligence of the individual or team responsible for it. If your blog is not receiving comments, subscribers or traffic, you need to think about why this is the case.

Best practices for post formatting, compelling titles, linking and writing structure only get you so far in the process. When all else is said and done, if your blog is not living up to expectations, you can usually pinpoint 1 of 2 issues:

This past week our agency representatives at Google AdWords sent out their weekly update and highlighted a tool that I am very excited about.  (This is not completley new, the Google AdWords blog made mention of this on March 6, 2008 & David Szetela wrote a nice piece on this as well in a March 17th article on SearchEngineWatch.com). 

Advertisers can now exclude parked domains and exclude error page ads from the Content Network.

What does this mean?

My clients’ understanding of the value of PPC might hinge on my ability to lucidly present data. So by flooding them with data I do us both a disservice. I don’t accurately portray the success of the paid search campaign and the client does not necessarily understand what he or she is getting for their paid search investment.

I am going to show how some universally reported paid search metrics can be presented so that someone with little or no experience in paid search would be able to see the value.

Metric 1: Clicks

I am a self-admitted fan of celebrity gossip. I don’t know how it happened or when it happened but I have been sucked in and I can’t get out. Needless to say on Monday I was skimming through the various ‘entertainment’ blogs and I came across a few stories on how John Mayer Googles himself every morning and how he responded to the accusation. A lot of the authors were making fun of him but I don’t blame the guy one bit.

Yesterday I was interviewed for a podcast by Ken Rayment from Better Process Podcast.  The title of the Podcast is Industry Report Andy Komack Komarketing Associates (has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?).  The “industry” referenced here is small and medium-sized manufacturing companies in the U.S.

Ken, a manufacturing engineer with a Six Sigma Black Belt, asked to interview me after reading the How Strong is Your Brand Online? article in IndustryWeek.com.

The Podcast focuses on how manufacturing companies can leverage online marketing techniques to remain competitive (both in the U.S. and abroad).

We covered themes such as:

Yesterday Google released it’s Automatic Matching Beta.

Automatic Matching is an opt-in feature that allows your ads to be shown on additional search queries that Google finds are both relevant and that are not covered by your keyword list.

We’ll get more into that in a moment, but first I wanted to point out some of the good things Automatic Matching has going for it.

Pros for Automatic Matching:

Cost Controlled
It will only provide additional traffic if you are spending less than your maximum daily budget in a given campaign.

We have been running a Google AdWords campaign for some time promoting KoMarketing Associates’ focus on B2B SEO.

I thought it would be interesting to share a small portion of the data we have collected.

The table below highlights search impressions for some of the keywords we have been advertising (but not all of course!).  The data was gathered from May 2007 through February 2008.  The data set is by no means complete.