Archive of SEM Tools Posts

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.

Even though the adoption of RSS is improving, many people still give us a look of uncertainty and confusion when the conversation about using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) arises. Here are a handful of things you need to know about RSS and why it may actually improve your experience (and marketing savvy) online.

• RSS is really about information
  Don’t let another acronym get in the way. There is no special coding or programming language you need to know to “get” RSS as a consumer of information. Just remember that RSS is an easy way for any website publisher to send/distribute information to the masses.

What does Google mean to you? An opportunity for sales, a puzzle to be solved or a noose tightening around your neck? However we feel about Google individually, the fact that it is a tremendously popular website property holding an incredible amount of data on visitor traffic and behavior cannot be argued. A recent Nielsen/NetRatings report on search providers states that Google now processes 56.3% of US search results (PDF), representing over 4 billion search queries per month and year over year growth of almost 45%. In addition to the sheer volume of patterns and relationships uncovered between websites and web pages alone, consider how the depth and reach of Google services yield massive market research opportunities for understanding human behavior, preferences and insight into what we value (both online and offline).

In my last post, I told you about some of the project-management tools we looked at, and their shortcomings… After months of searching, I was about to give up. Then I did another Google search and stumbled across a company called Project Insight.

My heart started racing…this looked great! But there had to be a catch. I spent weeks peppering the representative assigned to us with questions. I re-entered entire projects and all the tasks into Project Insight. It became an extremely time-consuming project in itself, but I was determined that the next tool we bought would do exactly what we needed it to do.

This is the second of a three-part posting on how my firm, KoMarketing Associates, LLC, chose a project-management tool. In the first post, I outlined the key features we were looking for. This post explains why it was so difficult to find the right product.

I looked at a number of different tools (there’s a handy-dandy chart in this post, but you probably already saw that…).

In one sense, it seems kind of odd that finding a project management tool is a project in itself.

But, the KoMarketing team has faced a challenge many small businesses would love to have: how to deal with too much business.

Quite simply, we’ve been busy…getting new clients from referrals and word of mouth.

Not too busy though to write a three-part blog post on how we selected a project-management tool. This is the first part…

We’ll post the next two in the coming weeks (I hope the anticipation does not keep you from actually working…).

It seems like forever since Google first announced a Sitemaps program for webmasters; allowing the website owner to submit their web addresses to Google for indexing and crawling. Sitemaps has since evolved into a suite of Google services and tools - Google Webmaster Central, which allows webmasters to better understand how their site performs and is viewed by the search engine as well as diagnostic and reporting tools designed to aid the website owner in addressing issues and resolving problems. This post is meant to provide an overview of Google Webmaster Central, highlighting how to use the service and specific functionality many of our clients have found valuable in their search engine marketing efforts.