Are you the one who transferred an entire Google AdWords account into Bing Ads? But do you actually manage your new Bing account? It’s now easy to copy an account from Google to Bing, but that doesn’t mean that your account will be performing the same in the Bing sponsored results.Bing Ads is a completely different system with its own set of rules, and it is doesn’t matter how thoroughly you work inside your Google AdWords account – that won’t necessarily help you in Bing.

As a Paid Search Specialist at WordStream, I work with many accounts and I hear all the time: “Do your work on AdWords and we’ll move it to Bing when you’re all done.” Yes, that is easy but it is not the right approach to utilize the different networks. When I actually log in to Bing accounts I can see m... > Read more

Back in December, Rich Griffin created a Google Remarketing Cheat Sheet which laid out a “how to” on setting up a remarketing campaign. For those of you who are not as familiar, Google remarketing allows advertisers to engage with users who were once on your website, giving you the opportunity to serve them with an ad as they browse the web.

These remarketing campaigns have proven to be effective in capturing those visitors who were once interested, but never completed the desired conversion we hoped they would.Piggybacking off of Rich’s post, Google has made setting up Remarketing campaigns easier and smarter by allowing us to use our Analytics tracking code and Analytics data to set it up. Here’s how to do it.New Remarketing CodeThe days of creating new remarketing codes for each... > Read more

I can’t tell you how frequently I receive frustrated emails from clients who encounter surprises in their geo reports. Why is Google showing their ads to people in India if their geo targeting is set to New Jersey? Geo targeting seems like one of the easiest decisions you can make when setting up an AdWords campaign, but it’s not as straightforward as it may seem.

Let’s say I run a website that sells baked goods within Maryland. By default, my geo-targeted ads would be eligible to show to searchers who:Are physically located in Maryland: This one is pretty straightforward. As long as the searcher’s IP address is located within my target region, Google can show my ads.Are located outside of my target area, but are looking for products in my area: This searcher could be in Boston, but... > Read more

You might be thinking two things to yourself when you read the title. One, “I don’t sell flowers or hallmark cards - why should I have a Valentine’s Day game plan for my PPC account?” Or two, “It’s definitely too late to create a PPC campaign for the holiday coming up. It’s next week for crying out loud!” Well, think again!According to Google, this year’s projected Valentine’s Day sales are expected to hit $18.

6 billion with about 40% of smartphone owners doing shopping research online and 46% of tablet users joining the party. From my years of independent field research, I have concluded that there are two types of shoppers out there: Slackers (of which are mostly males) and planners.As an advertiser, you have 18.6 billion reasons to put some effort into setting up a f... > Read more

When I was in high school, my geometry teacher said his favorite saying to live by was “KiSS - Keep It Simple, Stupid.” No matter what topic we were covering, he usually tried it squeeze it into the lesson plan. Although it might not apply to every situation, I find that applying it to landing pages always works wonders for my clients.

All too often I come across landing pages or websites that are overloaded with text, images, forms, animations, and so on and so forth. It becomes overwhelming and often times confusing – “What’s going on here? What am I looking at? Where am I?” Potential customers or leads take off before completing any actions because they don’t know what action they are supposed to take.What?Six Tips for Keeping Your Landing Pages Nice & SimpleWhenever cr... > Read more

Google today announced a bold and sweeping set of changes to their AdWords PPC management platform in a bid to greatly simplify mobile ad campaign management – at stake is the future of Google’s advertising business itself. All of the new AdWords Enhanced Campaign features – which I believe will greatly increase both mobile advertising adoption and Google’s revenues from mobile search – will become available to customers by the end of the month.

In this article, I’ll walk through AdWords Enhanced Campaigns in detail. If you’re interested in the growing mobile search space (and you all should be!), pay close attention. These changes will affect all advertisers before the end of the year.Table of Contents:Enhanced Campaigns IntroductionNew Bid AdjustmentsRIP Tablet TargetingSma... > Read more

Everyone wants to know the "magic formula" to set up and manage your AdWords account. To put it simply, you're out of luck. There really is no "right way," but there certainly are ways that are "more right" than others.Figuring out how to spend the limited time you have in AdWords can be a daunting task.

Since no two accounts are the same, it is equally difficult to put together a workflow that will encompass every account. Keeping that in mind, below is my guide to optimizing and then maintaining your AdWords account in minimal time.Ensure Your Ad Groups Are GranularGoogle recommends keeping Ad Groups between 20-30 keywords. I find this misleading. The single most important thing I stress to my clients is to keep your ad groups small and defined. That means keeping every keyword in an Ad ... > Read more

About six months ago, I proposed a conspiracy theory that Google created the Knowledge Graph in order to "train" Google users to pay attention to the right-hand side of the SERP. Google can't easliy monetize informational queries, but the Knowledge Graph could be a way to increase ad revenue across the board, by proactively changing the heat map so searchers start to view the whole page as useful, not just the organic results in the middle.

Remember when Google said "Ads are just answers"? They are subtly reinforcing that viewpoint with Knowledge Graph, by providing rich "answers" right where the ads usually go!What Is Google Knowledge Graph?Knowledge Graph, launched in 2012, is basically Google's version of Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia (ha ha), "The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge bas... > Read more

Look how much light these WordStreamers have in their eyes: That’s because January is a time full of promise and hope. So much potential! It’s the bright, shining morning of the year. You could go snowblind from all of the promise. For god’s sake, put some sunglasses on!Seriously though – we had an amazing year in 2012, and we’re betting that this year will be even better.

Here are our greatest hits of 2013 so far.25 PPC Tips & Tricks to Try in 2013 – I enlisted the help of our customer service team – 100% Google certified and 100% PPC badasses – to put together this list of tips for pay-per-click advertisers to try this year. Try one a few or all of them and watch your results go up!3 SEO Tactics We're Easing Up On in 2013 – As Google evolves, our SEO strategies ... > Read more

New keyword research from WordStream suggests that buffalo chicken dip – apparently a dip designed to taste like buffalo chicken wings – owes virtually its entire existence to Super Bowl Sunday and the NFL season.WordStream conducted extensive research into the seasonality and trends of keyword searches on Google corresponding to chicken wings and hundreds of other popular Super Bowl snacks including:GuacamoleChiliNachosPulled PorkPigs in a blanketDoritosSeven Layer DipThe astonishing results revealed a near perfect correlation between the demand for chicken wings and buffalo chicken dip with the NFL season.

The results are illustrated in graphical form, here:Note that for the last 9 consecutive years, search volume for Buffalo Chicken Dip followed a similar pattern, increasing signifi... > Read more

 Imagine you’re managing a campaign for a product that sends videos over optical fiber. Would you think to set “Justin Bieber” as a negative keyword? I know I wouldn’t. As it turns out, this is one of the best moves my client, Rolands, has made.Rolands oversees paid search for AD Net, a Taiwanese manufacturer of Formosa cables.

A few weeks ago, as he was mining his search query data, he noticed that his ads were showing to searchers looking for videos of Justin Bieber—not exactly his target audience!He quickly realized that Google considered “Bieber” to be a misspelling of “fiber,” which is one of the most prominent keywords in his account. There were so many variations of Bieber queries that Rolands found himself “cleaning Biebers for the next few weeks.”If you�... > Read more

 Whenever you are looking to improve or gain mastery in a particular area, it is always smart to carefully examine the practices of those who are already doing a top-notch job. You can learn so much just by picking the brains of existing experts – our ongoing Ask The PPC Experts interview series continues to be popular.

Social media networks like Pinterest are no exception – looking at how others successfully use social media in a creative way will help you spark your own masterful ideas.Today we are looking at six unique Pinterest accounts and assessing what these Pinterest users are doing that sets them apart from the pack. Learn from them, and you’ll probably witness improvement. With better referral rates than Google+ LinkedIn, and YouTube combined, Pinterest is a social med... > Read more

My personal blog gets a lot of traffic through Google Image Search. In fact, two of my top 10 organic keyword referrers are “jeff bridges” and “young jeff bridges,” thanks to a post in which I ask the age-old question, who’s the ultimate in “cocky-hot,” a young Jeff Bridges or James Spader circa Pretty in Pink? (Scientists have not yet reached consensus on this issue.

)Well, traffic is traffic, right? Meh – maybe for a blog that has no real business goals. But let’s pretend for a second that I am running a business and have goals to reach. As such, there are a few problems with this traffic:It’s irrelevant – People who search Google Images for pictures of Jeff Bridges don’t really care what I have to say, about Jeff Bridges or otherwise probably – they just want to... > Read more

 Half of agencies reported improved ROI from PPC in 2012.>>Tweet This!<<  That increased ROI led to more PPC spending. More than three-quarters (77%) of agencies reported an increase in investment in Google advertising in 2012.>>Tweet This!<< 32% of PPC agencies report that their clients primarily use PPC to sell products or services directly.

35% use it to generate leads.>>Tweet This!<< PPC agencies report that the three most important metrics for gauging success of paid search marketing are return on investment (ROI), number of sales or leads, and cost per conversion. (This differs from the top 3 metrics as reported by companies: return on investment (ROI), conversion rate, and number of sales or leads.)>>Tweet This!<<&n... > Read more

Join us for our next free webinar: The Top 10 Ways to Outsmart Your Competition in 2013. This webinar will take place next Wednesday, January 23 at 1 pm EST.I'll be presenting along with Amanda West-Bookwalter, Account Manager at Hanapin Marketing and writer for PPC Hero, to show you the top 10 tips, tools, and tricks to help you gain and maintain PPC success throughout the year, and stay ahead of your competition!You’ll learn how to:Improve your Quality ScoresGet through to potential customers at the end of the funnelSpend less per lead, and more!After registering you’ll receive a confirmation email with instructions to join the webinar.

Even if you can't make the live webinar at this time, sign up anyway. We'll send you the slides and recording of the webinar after the... > Read more

There’s been a lot of talk around here (and everywhere) lately about over-optimization. There’s a feeling in the air that a lot of SEO tactics that worked in the past are becoming less effective, if not grounds for a straight-up penalty. Some ranking signals are falling out of favor and others are coming into the fore.

Earlier this week, in a post about viral content marketing techniques that can help any kind of content, I posted this jokey meme with a recent quote from Larry:A couple of people took issue with this remark in the comments; Chris Mayhew said “I wouldn't say that SEO's time has come and gone.” Neither would I! “Unoptimized is the new optimized” is an exaggeration (Overstatement! Used for effect! Yay, rhetoric!). We’re not actually going to de-optimize our whole ... > Read more

 Herpes Simplex is a beautiful thingIt’s flu season, folks! Viral activity is high. And even if you got your flu shot and have Tamiflu stockpiled in your hall closet,  I wouldn’t be surprised if you or someone on your marketing team is secretly dreaming of the infographic or Gangnam Style parody vid that’s going to take off faster than H1N1.

Seriously though. I’d like to think that the obsession with viral marketing campaigns is going the way of small pox. It’s not a practical goal for most marketers, and if it happens once, you can go crazy trying to make it happen again.I may not be an advocate of viral content marketing, but I am an advocate of content marketing, the good old-fashioned non-viral kind. And I recently saw a great slide deck from Upworthy about how they ... > Read more

Tonight (January 11, 2013) at midnight is the deadline for early registration of Hanapin Marketing’s Hero Conference, a 3-day, all-PPC conference in Austin, TX, April 8-10.Three great reasons to sign up for Hero Conf todayI’ll be speaking! And I’d love to meet you. Check out the full list of speakers to see all the PPC heroes you’ll be able to learn from – including my friends and colleagues: Bryan Eisenberg, Chad Summerhill, George Michie, Elizabeth Marsten, Jeff Allen, Joe Kerschbaum, Shawn Livengood, Noran El-Shinnawy, Matt Van Wagner, and many more.

And me! :)Bang for the buck. Hero Conf has a low speaker to attendee ratio for more one-on-one time, and is less expensive than similar industry conferences. (And you get the best price if you sign up today.)Total PPC focus. A lot... > Read more

 Any questions?If you’ve been considering taking the plunge into PPC marketing, and you have some basic – very basic – questions before getting started, look no further. Here you’ll find answers to 10 frequently asked questions from PPC beginners and hopefuls – that is, people who have heard of pay-per-click marketing and Google AdWords, but don’t know much else.

Naturally, if you have a beginner question that isn’t answered here, let us know in the comments and we’ll do our best to help you.Table of ContentsWhat is PPC marketing?Nobody clicks on ads, so why have them?Why do people click on AdWords ads?Why use pay-per-click marketing?What type of businesses should be using internet advertising and why?How does Google AdWords work?Why is Facebook’s click-through rate l... > Read more

 Whoa there buddyThe changing SEO landscape was one of the most pervasive and controversial topics in Internet marketing last year. While some high-profile marketers maintained that good, legitimate, white-hat SEO has always been clear-cut, and claims to the contrary are just snake oil peddling, we believe that SEO is full of gray zones and judgment calls.

Although we’re primarily a PPC company, we’ve always believed in the power of SEO as a marketing channel, and in fact our business is highly dependent on organic search traffic, so we take this stuff seriously. Due to Google’s evolving algorithm and continuing battle against search spam, we’ve reconsidered some of the tactics that have seemingly worked for us in the past, for two reasons:Recent evidence suggests these tactics... > Read more

The gym is always extra-crowded this time of year, full of people redoubling their fitness efforts and trying to stick to their weight loss resolutions. The good news is, you can apply the same enthusiasm to your AdWords account without having to park at a crowded gym and fight for a spot on a bench or in your favorite class!Are you ready to kick some AdWords ass in 2013? Try out these 25 tips from our Customer Success team to save time and money and get better results.

Enable SitelinksSitelinks! They are quick and easy to implement (through WordStream software or AdWords), cost no additional money and can have an enormous impact on CTR’s.Erin Sagin, Customer Success SpecialistLog Your PerformanceI track my results daily. First thing I do every morning is log yesterday’s account le... > Read more

Writing! Anyone can do it (and I encourage you to) but not everyone is good at it (sorry).This is not one of those article that explains the difference between its and it’s or tells you why you’re using “literally” wrong. (Details, details.)Instead, I’m going to share five super-basic tips that will make all your writing better, including any writing you do for the web (AKA SEO content).

These tips will help you hone your writing structure and your writing style, leading to better organized, more readable writing, which will ultimately get more reads, shares and likes.1. Start with an outline.Not this kind of outline!It doesn’t matter how experienced you are. Whether you’re writing your first college essay or your 367th blog post (which I am, and that’s just for the WordStr... > Read more

Well guys, we did it! WE BEAT THE MAYANS! We got through December and the world didn’t end. Or, if it did, one can hardly tell the difference. I hope you didn’t sell all your possessions or anything rash like that. Awkward!I’m all about looking forward – 2013 Ho! – but before we rush off into next year, let’s take a quick look back at what happened in 2012, the year that was almost the end.

Our top 10 most popular blog posts this year were:What Industries Contributed to Google's $37.9 Billion in 2011 Revenues? – For our first infographic of the year, we found the top 10 industries that lay out the most cash on AdWords advertising and delved in to figure out what it said about the state of economy in 2011 going into 2012.The War on 'Free' Clicks: Think Nobody Clicks on Google A... > Read more

When website traffic drops, and it’s clear that you were not the cause of it, it’s time to point your finger at Google, rant, and maybe even cut down that 6000 word rant into an informative 3700 word blog post. This SEO is spending Christmas Eve with Google so hopefully you won’t have to.This is the type of early Christmas card you would not want from Google.

 “It’s probably that darn Google Panda,”“I feel like it’s Penguin and negative SEO!”or “It might be those directory submissions/paid links that so-and-so did in the past”Before you go on a zealous “Google is evil” blame rampage, I understand that there’s a ton of ways to blame Google (or someone else) without proof. However, empty accusations will not get you your traffic back. Attributing traffic loss ... > Read more

We created a Google remarketing cheatsheet as a take-home for a recent webinar. It’s a handy reference for anyone who is interested in setting up a remarketing campaign in AdWords. Below is the 12-step process to setting up a new remarketing list, and you can click here to download the cheatsheet as a PDF.

Thanks to our SEM Manager Rich Griffin for creating this resource!Define your remarketing strategy.Will you target all visitors to your site?Are you only interested in targeting visitors to a specific page?Create the remarketing code.AdWords > Shared Library > Audiences > + New Audience > Remarketing ListFill in all of the required parameters including membership duration, list name, and a brief description of the tag. Then click “save.”Navigate to the new remarketing c... > Read more

 As the founder of a search marketing startup, I’ve had the opportunity to interview, hire and work with some of the most amazing SEOs on the planet. I am so proud to have worked with people like Tom Demers and Ken Lyons, who not only helped me turn wordstream.com into a website that holds its own against domains like google.

com for SERP rankings, they went on to found a successful internet marketing consultancy of their own!Because WordStream’s business is in the internet marketing industry, the competition for SEO keywords in this vertical is incredibly fierce. We’re always competing against other search agencies, or search marketing product companies who obviously know a thing or two about SEO. If you think your insurance or travel industry has fierce competition, try competi... > Read more

Best practices are best practices for a reason – right?You’ve probably heard people say the same thing about stereotypes. There may be a grain of truth behind some stereotypes, but mostly they’re just an excuse for lazy thinking.Marketing best practices – supposedly tried and true guidelines – are the same way.

Some of them are at least partly true; others are based on pure assumption or are so hypothetical as to be basically meaningless to your particular company.Take, for example, the “best practice” that content for the internet should be brief. Many people assume that web readers don’t want to deal with long-form content, so web writers should always favor brevity over depth.Recently, we’ve found the opposite to be true: Our longer blog posts tend to get better metric... > Read more

Today is an important day in WordStream’s evolution. We recently completed an exercise to define our core purpose and core values and we are ready to share them with our employees, customers, prospects and followers.We have been growing fast, with over 30 new hires in 2012 so far. As we grow, having a “playbook” of how we operate becomes more and more important.

These values are the essence of our company. These are not just words on paper, but something we will strive hard to live by, and we expect you to hold us accountable to them.WordStream’s Core Purpose:To bring the power of search marketing to businesses of all sizes.WordStream’s Core Values:The below graphic illustrates our core values. Click to enlarge.How Did We Create These Values?I’ve done this a few different times... > Read more

Search queries – the words and phrases that people type into a search box in order to pull up a list of results – come in different flavors. It is commonly accepted that there are three different types of search queries:Navigational search queriesInformational search queriesTransactional search queriesIn the search marketing world, we tend to talk more about keywords than search queries (news flash: they’re not quite the same thing).

But today we’re talking search queries. Let’s go into a little more detail on what these three types of search queries are and how you can target them with your site content.Navigational Search QueriesWhat Is a Navigational Search Query?A navigational query is a search query entered with the intent of finding a particular website or webpage. For exam... > Read more