Elisa Gabbert Posts from the Internet Marketing Blog
The 9 Steps to a Better Conversion Rate [Infographic]
The folks at KISSmetrics and Conversion Rate Experts have put together an infographic that lays out a nine-step process to improving conversion rates. (Spoiler Alert: It's more of a document than an infographic per se, so put on your reading glasses.) At a high level, here are the steps:Determine your strategy and goalsAnalyze existing traffic sourcesAnalyze your visitors (especially those that don't convert)Study your marketplaceIdentify your most persuasive assetsDevelop strategic experimentsDesign pages to testRun your A/B testsApply your winning elementsClick the image below to view the larger version.
... > Read more
Is Nothing Sacred? Now Even Ads Are Social
SEOmoz this week reported on a new AdWords extension – and surprise, surprise! It’s a social extension!Seems like almost everything Google does these days is a subtle or not-so-subtle push for Google+, and this update is no exception.As you’d know if you read our Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords Ad Extensions, extensions are ways to make your ads bigger and give searchers more opportunities and incentives to click or reach you by including extra site links, product images, phone numbers and more.
When enabled, the new social extension shows searchers “how many people across the web have +1'd the landing page or the Google+ Business Page.” As Mozzer JustinV explains, there are two flavors of social extension, personal and basic:The personal extension shows how many people in the s... > Read more
Best of the Month: WordStream's Top 10 of November
Holy moly, guys. Another year, come and gone. I mean December basically doesn’t count; it’s basically already over, Christmas happened, and you’re all making hungover resolutions. Am I right?This time next month, I’ll be bringing you our best of 2011. But for now we’ll stick to the past 30 days.
Here are our top ten slammingest blog posts of the month:How Does the AdWords Auction Work? – Our latest infographic, a visual explanation of Google AdWords, was a big hit. If it you missed it the first time around, check it out.Small Business Saturday 2011: Tips and Tricks to Make the Most of November 26th – Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, but Meg’s marketing tips for SMBs are worthwhile year-round.Our Top SEO Link Building Posts of ... > Read more
AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 9
This is the ninth in a series of interviews we're conducting with AdWords advertisers who got unusually high scores using our AdWords Performance Grader. We're reaching out to high scorers to find out what strategies contribute to their strong AdWords performance. For more in this series, see:AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 1AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 2AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 3AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 4AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 5AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 6AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 7AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 8This week... > Read more
AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 8
This is the eighth in a series of interviews we're conducting with AdWords advertisers who got unusually high scores using our AdWords Performance Grader. We're reaching out to high scorers to find out what strategies contribute to their strong AdWords performance. For more in this series, see:AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 1AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 2AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 3AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 4AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 5AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 6AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 7This week’s AdWords expert interview is with Antonia Matthews, Online... > Read more
What Do Adult Sexual Services Have to Do with AdWords?
A couple of days ago our fearless head of marketing, Laura, noticed an odd result in the Google SERPs – the sponsored results for the query “adwords services” were pretty run of the mill, but the first organic result was a bit shocking:I tried the same search on my own machine and got the same result.
What the hell?At first when you see “Adult sexual services” you think someone has successfully spammed the results with white text on a white background or some such old-school black-hattery. But this result is from the official AdWords domain! The page is from the Legal section of the AdWords Policy Center (“Requirements for advertising with Google AdWords”). “Adult sexual services” is from a list of “Restricted Products and Services” that also includes abortion, endang... > Read more
How Does the AdWords Auction Work? [Infographic]
If you work in the search marketing industry, you may have found yourself having a conversation somewhat like this one (the same conversation I have every time I tell a "regular person" what I do):Regular Person: So, what do you do?Me: I work as a writer for a software startup.Regular Person: What kind of software?Me: Um, search marketing software?Regular Person: So .
.. like Google?Me: Well, yeah, sort of. We make software that helps people advertise on Google.If this regular person is curious enough to know more (rare), I usually find it helpful to explain that Google advertising functions similarly to an auction. In the off chance that they tell me advertising on Google does not work, I tell them that our whole company exists because it does work.how does google adwords work?Since there ... > Read more
AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 7
This is the seventh in a series of interviews we're conducting with AdWords advertisers who got unusually high scores using our AdWords Performance Grader. We're reaching out to high scorers to find out what strategies contribute to their strong AdWords performance. For more in this series, see:AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 1AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 2AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 3AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 4AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 5AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 6This week’s interview is with Danny Wood of Canada’s Web Shop, an online marketing company that offers pay-per-click advertising... > Read more
Our Top SEO Link Building Posts of All Time!
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from looking at our analytics over the years since we launched this blog, it’s that People. Love. Link building. Articles about link building consistently drive the most traffic over time. Why? It’s not the only thing that matters for SEO – you also need great title tags, strong information architecture, etc.
, etc. Those posts do pretty well too, but there’s not as much to say about them.My theory is that link building is more like a game, and I bet a lot of SEOs grew up as gamers. SEO link building isn’t just a matter of learning a few basic best practices and applying them. There will always be new ways to score links, and getting a great link is a triumph for an SEO. It’s like a new top score on Donkey Kong.Are you the King of Kong?Since... > Read more
It's Friday: Nothin' But Roundup
This weird owl turned up when I searched Flickr for "Friday." Let's just go with it.Google and Other Forms of Corporate EvilEric Schmidt Is Right: Google’s Glory Days Are Numbered – At TechCrunch, Dan Kaplan quotes from Eric Schmidt’s letter to the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights (“History shows that popular technology is often supplanted by entirely new models”) and explains why Google is headed for a downfall.
Google Freshness Update: The Real Winners & Losers – Google recently announced a new update that delivers “fresher” results for about 35% of queries. Patrick Altolft thinks will be bad for brands, whose own properties will get pushed below random news and reviews.Google May Penalize Your Site for Having Too Man... > Read more
AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 6
This is the sixth in a series of interviews we're conducting with AdWords advertisers who got unusually high scores using our AdWords Performance Grader. We're reaching out to high scorers to find out what strategies contribute to their strong AdWords performance. For more in this series, see:AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 1AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 2AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 3AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 4AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 5This week’s interview is with Jason White.
Jason is the Marketing Director for Stadri Emblems, a company that designs and produces custom embroidered patches. Like other millennial marketers, he... > Read more
Occupy Google Analytics? An Update on "(Not Provided)"
Two weeks ago, I blogged about Google’s announcement that it would stop providing keyword referral information for a portion of organic searches. At the time, people were kicking around numbers between 1 and 7% – Google claimed this wouldn’t have a big effect on marketers, and some people thought it was no big deal.
(For example, both Frank Reed and Alan Bleiweiss called SEOs “myopic” for overreacting to the news.)However, in just two weeks’ time, the situation has gotten worse, just as many of us feared. Rachael Gerson at SEER Interactive has “proof that Google’s secure search now affects more users”:Comparing yesterday (10/31) to the previous Monday, 27 of the sites had over 100% increase in ”(not provided)” traffic. We looked at the data in a second way, ... > Read more
Webinar Tomorrow! Things You Can Do NOW to Improve Your Paid Search
We're doing a joint webinar tomorrow with Search Marketing Now. Here are the details:WHAT: Things You Can Do NOW to Improve Your Paid SearchWHEN: Thursday, November 3, 2011 – 1 PM EDT (10 AM PDT)WHO: Alex Cohen, Director of Marketing, H. Bloom, and Larry Kim, Founder and CTO, WordStreamWHY: Every PPC campaign needs a regular checkup.
In this webcast, we’ll take a look at things you can do to evaluate, fine-tune and improve your paid search.Alex Cohen will cover things you can do immediately to audit your account to find hidden waste and to improve your ROI. Larry Kim from WordStream will discuss steps you can take to create and maintain a healthy PPC program while investing just 20 minutes per week.Attend this webcast and learn:How to find and eliminate wasted spendHow to identify and ... > Read more
AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 5
This is the fifth in a series of interviews we're conducting with AdWords advertisers who got unusually high scores using our AdWords Performance Grader. We're reaching out to high scorers to find out what strategies contribute to their strong AdWords performance. For more in this series, see:AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 1AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 2AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 3AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 4This week’s AdWords expert interview is with Glendon Llewellyn Lloyd, the e-commerce director at Tszuji, an online home storage store specializing in shoe storage and clothes storage solutions for the home.
Glendon manages Tszuji's SEO and SEM, ensuring th... > Read more
Best of the Month: WordStream's October Highlights
Happy Halloween to all the lovable weirdos and kids-at-heart out there who still celebrate this silly holiday. (Stupid hats? Buckets of candy? What’s not to love?)And check out our top 10 greatest hits of the month – they’re SCARY AWESOME!Facebook Wall of Shame: Facebook's Failures, Criticisms and Missteps – There’s no doubt that Facebook, by and large, is a massive success story – but this infographic detailing the company’s various flubs and snafus was nevertheless our most popular post of the month by far.
When Should You Pause Google AdWords Keywords? – Learn two reasons why you might want to pause a keyword in AdWords to halt any damage it’s doing to your account.SSL Encrypted Search: Google Deals Low Blow to SEOs – Last week Google restricted access to organi... > Read more
Occupy Google Reader: My God, Google, Why Have You Forsaken Us?
It saddens me greatly to write this post. To most people in the world, RSS may be either dead or nonexistent. But for me, and for many people I know (some only virtually), RSS – specifically Google Reader – is a huge part of daily life. I have two tabs permanently open on Chrome: Gmail and Google Reader.
According to my “Trends” tab:From your 420 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 4,022 items, clicked 231 items, starred 1 items, shared 54 items, and emailed 2 items.Since December 6, 2007 you have read a total of 227,485 items.I love RSS because it allows me to keep up with hundreds of blogs without having to visit them individually to see if they’ve been updated. I can also organize my subscriptions into categories, so if I ... > Read more
Bing's Marketing Strategy Includes Comment Spam?
Lately we’ve been getting the occasional spam comment (according to my spam comment taxonomy, they’re mostly of the “full-on-ass-kissing” variety) that looks like a typical spam comment in almost every way:It expresses some irrelevant but positive sentiment like “Thanks, this post was really helpful to me, keep it up”It’s attributed to a normal-sounding name like “Carrie” or “Dave” (much more effective than something like “Cheap Canadian SEO” which will always get you flagged)The name links back to the spammer’s siteThe difference is, instead of linking to a deep page on some spammy domain I’ve never heard of (you know, something like memphis-internet-marketing.
biz/link-building-services), they link to the Bing homepage. Yes, http://www.bing.com/. (There’s y... > Read more
AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 4
This is the fourth in a series of interviews we're conducting with AdWords advertisers who got unusually high scores using our AdWords Performance Grader. We're reaching out to high scorers to find out what strategies contribute to their strong AdWords performance. For more in this series, see:AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 1AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 2AdWords Experts Share the Secrets of Their PPC Success, Part 3This week’s interview is with David Semprun.
David is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Priority Pass, the world’s largest airport VIP lounge access program. Follow him on Twitter at @semprund or visit his website, davidsemprun.com.Tell us a bit about yourself. How long have you been using AdWords? Are you an Agen... > Read more
SSL Encrypted Search: Google Deals Low Blow to SEOs
Google made a pretty big announcement this week that is pissing a lot of people off – a lot of SEOs, that is. Namely, Google announced it will no longer reveal organic keyword referrals (search queries) for searches conducted while users are logged in. According to the Google Webmaster Blog:What is the impact of this change for webmasters? Today, a web site accessed through organic search results on http://www.
google.com (non-SSL) can see both that the user came from google.com and their search query. (Technically speaking, the user’s browser passes this information via the HTTP referrer field.) However, for organic search results on SSL search, a web site will only know that the user came from google.com.“For sites which have been added and verified in Webmaster Tools,” the post s... > Read more
Facebook Wall of Shame: Facebook's Failures, Criticisms and Missteps [Infographic]
A while back, we released The Google Graveyard, an infographic detailing Google's various flops and failures in the product department, including Google Wave and Google X.Now, following up on the release of Facebook's iPad app last week (which most people have been less than impressed with), we've created a new infographic walking through some of Facebook's criticisms, missteps and failures since its inception in 2004.
Facebook boasts approximately 800 million active users worldwide and an estimated $4.27 billion in estimated annual revenue – but you don’t approach the 1-billion-users mark without making a few mistakes along the way, right? Facebook’s errors in judgment have included:A slew of privacy snafus: Facebook repeatedly faces criticism for its user-unfriendly privacy policy a... > Read more
