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RobD
awww man they took out the spam comment so now I just look like a Swedish speaking perv
Story: Fake It Til You Make It
"For more details email us at 142008@problogger.net."
hmmm... quite the e-mail address 1/4/2008 maybe? I knew being an intelligence analyst would pay off in real life some day:)
Cool trick, I added one of my feeds to my profile! I used a different app though. When I checked out the RSS app you linked to it looks like as of recently nobody is particulary happy with it.
I used one called Simply RSS:
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4915599711
The reviews are decidedly happier :)
These videos make my life so much easier sometimes... after 45 minutes of trying to explain del.icio.us to my mom who can sort of use e-mail, I showed her the CommonCraft how to and she got it right away.
You just have to remember that Google does not like to leave money on the table. If you underspend on Thursday you will overspend on Friday.
Also always check your campaign settings and turn off anything that is "helpful" or "optimized," these features are not your friends. Google measures success by CTR not conversion rates.
The only thing that I've really noticed is that the Digg gadget on my iGoogle homepage changed to show pictures, tabs and stuff like that.
Story: Should I DKI?
The one thing that I found troubling about that article is lack of mention of CONVERSIONS!!!!! That's what we all use PPC for right? I generally will not use DKI because 1 it can give you some goofy looking ads ("buy babies at target" anybody?) and 2 a high ctr is worthless if people bounce off your site right away. It's more work, but I prefer controlling the ads and building small super focused groups. When I take over existing accounts that have DKI ads we usually drop the cost per conversion in a substantial way by doing away with them and creating new ads and split testing.
That is some of the most godawful advice I've ever seen for small business owners. For most of them the internet is the best place to be competitive! It's one of the only mediums where creativity can trump cash, and even if you have a limited budget you can afford to play at least a little bit
"you can't ever stop"
That's the best advice on the page. I think that's the thing a lot of people forget about when doing their online marketing. They think you can get to that coveted #1 position one time and just stop and it will stay that way. If you're in business, marketing is like eating- you can stop... for a little while, but eventually you're going to die
that may in fact be the world's most effective birth control device ever invented
If I'm at the bar and explain that I'm into internet marketing and I make my living online people just end up assuming I run porn sites... about there is where I stop explaining
I'm impressed with how creative broad match can get sometimes. I still hate to give up broad words though. People are incredibly creative with how they phrase/spell what they're looking for and I hate missing out on these. I have a lot of accounts that are still running very well with a lot of broad words that have lots and lots of negative words.
We have one account that got spanked by broad match before we got involved and it still has lots of broad words but we do periodic negative keyword research based on the results gathered from Search Query Reports and now our cost per conversion is lower than they've ever acheived before. So broad words aren't unusable, they just require more work.
I had a numerical discrepancy yesterday with Yahoo too, but on the PPC side. According to them I spent about a half a million dollars in the last 7 days... I maybe spend $150 a month in this particular campaign.
A few blood pressure pills later I e-mailed them to remind them that I did not in fact spent a half million dollars just so we are all agreed.
I got an email back saying that basically "yeah we know there's a lot of that going around today"
funny how messing around online now has professional implications.
"I'm not playing on myspace... I'm building a traffic rich social network - Gosh!"
I think the quiz was ultimately "conversation bait"
Nobody has the answers to all this stuff, most of it is opinion based on experiential learning... good but not perfect.
I just started with a new client that was getting destroyed by broad match while running their own Adwords campaign. After a few hours of negative keyword research we managed to trim a few thousand bucks off their monthly spend.
The thing you have to watch out for is Adwords will just all of a sudden blow up on you. On a new account, once it settles in the broad match gets more lenient in its matching and if you're not paying attention it will bite you in the wallet.
If you pay attention and run Search Query Reports on a regular basis you can build an effective negative keyword list that will let you reap the benefits of broad match and block all the junk that can come with it.
@adamap
as of just recently they will tell you which queries have triggered your ad and gotten clicks (search query performance in your reports section), but the creativity/ridiculousness of the general public is too great for them to predict in advance. And when you match that with a computer trying to figure out what you might mean it can get pretty ugly unless you employ lots of negative words throughout your accounts.
I have two recent posts on the matter of the Search Query Report and Negative Keywords. Used appropriately they can save you a bunch of dough without hurting your conversions.
http://www.smsrd.com/2007/08/back-to-basics-forgotten-art-of.html
http://www.smsrd.com/2007/07/focused-expansion-controlling-expanded.html
I hate that little "other unique queries" result. It makes me wonder what they're hiding. From what I can tell though there is no threshold to showing the query. I've had results that were 1 impression with 1 click. There's some other factor blocking the results on the other unique queries.
With the accounts I'm running I've found that most of them will always give me something to work with if I run a report on a regular basis. So in a lot of accounts the first pass gave me piles of negatives, from there on out it gets much smaller but it's kind of like chasing the long tail but with negative keywords. It's not perfect, but it's the only thing that Google gives you directly. I've managed to use it to save a lot of money and hold onto some really broad words in my campaigns.
Cool, all very encouraging... I guess the hardest part is having or contracting the linguistic skills.
Story: What Does SEM Mean To You?
I'm with you guys that SEM is the catchall.
However a lot of clients don't fully grasp PPC or find it pejorative because of an association with banner ads or something of the sort. It doesn't matter what we call it if the people writing us checks don't understand it. So "rebranding" it SEM lets you start fresh as far as definitions and preconceived notions plus it just sounds good when paired with SEO. Personally I usually end up calling the paid side Adwords, kind of the same way just about any carbonated beverage is a Coke.
When I was in the car business you could tell how tight the local economy was with their money by how thick the PhotoAd was. The less money in the market the more dealerships would spend to try to get the little bit out there. I think Realtors and mortgage brokers work the same way.
A slump might actually be good for us Search Marketers because it will force businesses to consider new ways of advertising their business that they over looked when times were better. I've been seeing a big increase in small businesses looking for Adwords Services that would have never considered it a year ago. They realize that it is relatively inexpensive and trackable making for a good investment.
I've seen that happen in Adwords too. A new feature or report hits all the accounts I'm managing and then later in the day when I get a chance to try it out it disappears... poof... they usually come back within a week though. I saw it happen with the Placement Performance Report when it was brand new.
Story: Fake It Til You Make It