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
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
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
Background: If you don’t know about this development, here is Google’s video explaining the change:
In my opinion, Google personalized search could very well be the best thing to happen to the SEO industry since…well…since Google itself. While there certainly will be discussions on privacy, here are four reasons why I think personalized search will change the SEO industry for the better.
Tuesday, a client asked me how Twitter might integrate into their SEO strategy. Here is part of my answer, paraphrased:
Twitter helps …as a function of our link building efforts. Twitter will help us (build) relationships with bloggers and site owners who may be interested in linking …an additional benefit is that both the profile and individual updates (may) get indexed in search. As a result, there are opportunities for both to rank for various keywords (the brand for the former and long-tail keywords for the latter).
Market researcher Nielsen Online (PDF) reports that the time online users spent on Facebook in April is up 700% year over year. The U.S. spent 13.9 BILLION minutes on Facebook in April 2009 alone and over 20 billion minutes were spent on social networking sites altogether.
Google has released a white paper touting the benefits of the Content Network. The paper provides the following analysis:
Ads on the Google Content Network can be an effective way to gain additional conversion beyond those you get via search.
When used in combination with Search, the median advertiser has a content CPA that’s within approximately 2% of their Search CPA.
The Content Network drives nearly 20% of total conversions for the median advertiser.
Conversion rates are higher for advertisers who used either of two AdWords campaign management controls: the Conversion Optimizer and site exclusion. ... Read the full post
Today we’ve taken the first step by clarifying the conversion terminology on the AdWords Report Center and conversion tracking tool pages. “Conversions” columns are now labeled Conversions (1-per-click), while “Transactions” columns are now called Conversions (many-per-click). The current AdWords campaign management pages display 1-per-click conversions, so if one click leads to multiple conversions, they’re counted only once. On the other hand, many-per-click conversions count each conversion that occurs after a click on your ad. ... Read the full post
Over the past ten years we have seen link building strategies come and go but they never really disappear. There is always something that can still be done.
I have listed three such tactics below that not only can be used but should be used.
1. Reciprocal Linking
I can’t tell you how many emails I sent and received asking for links when I first started in this industry (and trust me when I say they weren’t very good emails). Links were links and it really didn’t matter whether the site had anything to do with your own, as long as they placed a link on their site, you’d do the same. ... Read the full post
Over the past ten years we have seen link building strategies come and go but they never really disappear. There is always something that can still be done.
