December 2010 Posts from the Internet Marketing Blog
PPC VLOOKUP: How to Use VLOOKUP for Paid-Per-Click Marketing
VLOOKUP is one of a number of handy Excel functions for PPC. For grizzled PPC campaign managers this function is likely very familiar, but as a former philosophy major who fulfilled his math requirement with a class in logic (taught by a philosophy professor) I think it's helpful for non-Excel ninjas who are new to PPC to understand: How the Excel VLOOKUP function works How it can be applied to pay-per-click management As a result in this article we’ll walk through some specific applications and resources offering more information on using the VLOOKUP function for PPC.
How to Do a VLOOKUP Before we dig into the applications of the VLOOKUP function for PPC I want to go over how to actually use the VLOOKUP function. Here are a couple of videos that should help you to learn th... > Read more
AdWords for Beginners - Explaining Pay-Per Click (PPC) to Clients & Novices
I have failed to effectively communicate "what PPC is" to people on numerous occasions. Some of that may be that I talk unnecessarily fast, but I think most of it was a result of my approach. My more recent efforts to explain to people what PPC is, how it works, and why it's important to their business have been more successful (from what I can tell and from what I've been told) and since this is an issue every PPC consultant is likely to face in some capacity or other, I thought it might be useful to talk about what has been (and hasn't been) effective for me in communicating to non-PPCers on the topic of paid search marketing.
Think About Your Objective I think that your objective should always be education. Whether you're selling PPC services, PPC software, or just tryin... > Read more
WordStream's Best of the Year: Our Top 10 Blog Posts of 2010
2010: The year of the link? At least here at WordStream it was. Six of our top ten most popular blog posts of the year had the word "link" in the title. That's great guys – I'm glad you understand the value of the link when it comes to Google and SEO. However, there are only so many creative-commons images of chain-link fences I can put in these round-ups, so let's make 2011 the year of something pretty, OK? Can we do for kittens what we did for links? Without further ado, here they are, our 10 biggest hits from the entire year! And a huge thank you to all our readers – we couldn't, or at least wouldn't, do it without you.
How to Create Amazing Backlinks – Why settle for ho-hum backlinks when you can have amazing backlinks?! Amazing backlinks, of course, t... > Read more
Quick and Dirty Google Analytics Custom Reports, Part 2
I recently wrote up a short, actionable custom report from Google Analytics to help you get at some useful SEO and keyword level analytic data in a few short steps. This time we'll try to keep it equally short and just as sweet, and walk through a custom report that can help you to understand how different types of content perform.
Getting Unique Visitor & Goal Data on Content Segments with Custom Reports SEO Moz had a couple of great posts on benchmarking and analyzing different segments of your site's content. Those posts do a really nice job of explaining exactly why comparing various types of content are important, and what we'll do here is walk through how you can get a bit higher resolution look at exactly what's going on with different types of content. First, we need to set up ... > Read more
AdWords Campaign Experiments Adds Ads: Why I'm Disappointed
This is a guest post by Chad Summerhill, author of the blog PPC Prospector, provider of PPC tutorials, and in-house AdWords Specialist at Moving Solutions, Inc. (UPack.com and MoveBuilder.com). Was anyone else a little confused and let down when Google launched AdWords Campaign Experiments back in August without the ability to test ads? Instead of the obvious new ad testing features, Google focused on split testing across ad groups and campaigns for changes to keywords and ad groups.
For example: The first test I ran was a keyword reduction test. I paused low impressions, low Quality Score keywords, etc. for an entire campaign. ACE worked great for this type of test. But why not start with the ads? Ads are the single most tested element of anyone’s PPC campaign, and yet they wer... > Read more
The Year in Review: A Look Back at Online Marketing in 2010
Time flies by in such a blurry fashion these days, I can no longer remember without assistance what happened in the past year and not, say, three years ago—it all feels roughly equidistant somehow. But luckily, thanks to our blog archives, I have a handy reference of everything major that went down in 2010.
Looking back through roughly 50 weeks’ worth of Friday roundups, here’s what stood out in terms of big news and milestones in the online marketing space this year. Facebook f*cks around with our privacy Facebook changed its default privacy settings so users would be required to opt out of sharing everything with the whole world; Zuckerberg defended the decision by claiming that society was moving toward more openness and people want less privacy. Many didn’t buy ... > Read more
Exporting AdWords Campaign Experiments: How to Report on ACE
We recently did a post on how to use AdWords Campaign Experiments and why they have the potential to be so powerful. In that article and in Joe Kershbaum's post over on Search Engine Watch, one of the biggest complaints was what a hassle it is to export AdWords data and report on it from Excel. It certainly is significantly more work than it needs to be, but because I think this is such an amazing tool (it can be as valuable to a PPC campaign as Website Optimizer, in many ways) I think it's worth walking through how you can actually get at the output of your campaign experiments so that you can act on the insights.
Defining the Problem - Why AdWords Exporting of ACE Needs Help Let's imagine we've set up a nice AdWords campaign experiment. How do we view this data? Well, we can start by cre... > Read more
Is the Internet Hurting Our Environment? (Infographic)
So we pulled together this infographic about how the Internet is impacting our environment and whether or not the benefits outweigh the consequences. If you like it, share it! Also, be sure to take a look at the full-sized version and our infographic case study!
Infographic by WordStream Internet Marketing... > Read more
Why Did My AdWords Account Get Suspended?
There are few things as frustrating in the world of internet marketing as having your Google AdWords account suspended. Many people are surprised when it happens. Google essentially has a policy of no tolerance. If you violate their terms of service, you will not be able to get a new account under the same name, and you will not be able to drive traffic to the same domains through AdWords ever again.
The only way to avoid a suspended Google account is prevention. Here are some of the reasons that an AdWords account might get suspended. Your Site Displays Only Ads If your only goal in using AdWords is to drive traffic to your site so that you can make money off of advertising, Google will not consider your site to be an appropriate landing page. The reasoning behind this is that when a user... > Read more
10 Great Corporate Blogs and What Makes Them Work
This is a guest post by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant to iAdvize, a live chat support tool. Corporate blogs have a reputation for being nothing more than another way of distributing press releases. This is because most companies just don't understand how blogging is supposed to work, and they view it as a way to talk to the public rather than with them.
While corporate news, sale announcements and product launches are all important things to have in a corporate blog, they don't have to be the focus. A good corporate blog offers readers a reason to subscribe and can keep customers connected and interested in a company, even when nothing in particular is happening. But while creating an engaging corporate blog is not complicated, very few companies seem to have mastered it. However, som... > Read more
Advanced Search Query Mining Part 5: Acting on Your Insights
This is a guest post by Chad Summerhill, author of the blog PPC Prospector, provider of PPC tutorials, and in-house AdWords specialist at Moving Solutions, Inc. (UPack.com and MoveBuilder.com). This is the last post in my series on Advanced Search Query Mining. Here is a list of the previous posts in this series just in case you missed one.
Part 1: The Power of Search Queries Part 2: Getting the Right Data Part 3: Preparing Your Data for Analysis Part 4: Mining Your Data for Insights In my previous post on search query mining I showed you my technique for creating an ad-group-level negative candidates list and a keyword expansion list from your search queries. In this post I’m going to show you a method for acting on those insights. I will also include a link in... > Read more
10 Super-Quick Link Building Tips for Bloggers and Site Owners
Whether you're a novice at link-building or an experienced link-builder, you could always use learn a few more tricks for quick and dirty ethical links. Use absolute links, not relative links, in your blogs posts. That way, if a post gets scraped, the links in the content are preserved. When you write a guest post, send the bio along with your preferred links and anchor text already coded in.
This makes it easier for the hosting blog, so it's less likely that they'll mess with your link(s). If someone sends you a guest post, ask if you can return the favor by writing a guest post for them too. (If your sites are relevant to each other, this won't look like a suspicious reciprocal link.) Keep track of keywords you'd like to improve your ranking for. When guest post opportunities pop up, w... > Read more
Quick and Dirty Google Analytics Custom Reports, Part 1
There are a lot of great Google Analytics hacks and a myriad of ways to get at some terrific data in Google and other analytics packages. This can be a great asset for veteran analysts, but the different ways available to slice and dice data inside of these analytics packages can often overwhelm small businesses and those new to analytics.
In this post and in a follow-up post, we'll walk through two very simple custom reports that you can set up in Google Analytics to get actionable insights surrounding keyword-driven traffic and subsequently traffic to certain types of content on your site. Creating a Google Analytics Custom Report Setting up custom reports is very simple. First, you select Manage Custom Reports: Next, you can create a new report: Google has a nice overview of how to cr... > Read more
Google Changes Algorithm to Appease Media ... Or Not
On Black Friday, the New York Times ran one if its oh-so-savvy pieces about Google, demonstrating once again its deep understanding of SEO. </sarcasm> The article, titled "A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web," tells the story of DecorMyEyes, an eyeglasses business with an ungrammatical brand and a bad attitude.
The owner, whose name, believe it or not, is Vitaly Borker, claims that horrible service – we're talking criminally bad – is his business strategy, because (ex-)customers leave negative reviews on the Internet, driving up his rankings: "I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven." Danny Sullivan did a long write-up of the article, calling it "great." But I was immediately suspicious of the NYT bla... > Read more
How to Build a Killer Local AdWords Keyword List with the Best Local PPC Keyword Tool Ever
Once you've thought through your PPC geo-targeting strategy, how do you go about effectively building out an AdWords keyword list for local PPC? This is a tough question because the same keyword tools you use for generating generic keyword lists are often insufficient for local keyword research (I think this is a particular frustration with UK advertisers).
So what's a local business to do? Step One: Generate Keywords (Make an Educated Best Guess) Since a lot of keyword tools struggle to unearth local keyword suggestions, I find that you want to rely less heavily on them. That said there are a few tools that can be useful here: Aimclear had a great post on ScrapeBox, which is a really nifty tool that can give you some suggest data from various IPs. Google's insights for s... > Read more
Google Insights for Search Categories Are Largely Useless
Seeing as 2010 is winding to a close, I had the idea to do a sort of year in review for keywords, using Google Insights for Search to find patterns in the year's keyword trends. However, I got so distracted by the screwed up categories, I abandoned the post. Instead I'm just going to complain about how useless they are.
When you filter your Google Insights results for a given time period (I used 2010), the default results call into "all categories," but you can further sort those into 27 (by my rough count) categories, including "Business," "Entertainment," "News & Current Events," "Shopping," "Sports," and so on – sounds potentially useful, right? Unfortunately, whatever method they're using to sort the rising search qu... > Read more
Advanced Search Query Mining Part 4: Mining Your Data for Insights
This is a guest post by Chad Summerhill, author of the blog PPC Prospector, provider of PPC tutorials, and in-house AdWords specialist at Moving Solutions, Inc. (UPack.com and MoveBuilder.com). In the last post in this series, I showed you how to prepare your search query data for analysis. We had some specific questions that needed to be answered and that shaped how we transformed our data.
These questions included the following: What search queries have high impressions but no clicks? What search queries have resulted in a conversion? What search queries have a below-average CTR for the ad group? What search queries have an above-average cost/conversion? Do I have a problem with ad poaching and duplication? For the most part, these questions are focused aro... > Read more
