Average Position: A Distracting Lie

A great many folks spend time thinking about position on pages, both for their ads and for their organic listings. People care about position, but it’s really a proxy for what we should pay attention to: traffic volume and quality. Indeed, position itself as a KPI is pretty meaningless, and…

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What’s In Your SEM Toolbox? I’ll Show You Mine…

A question I get asked pretty often is, “What tools do you use for managing paid search ad campaigns?” I love this question, especially when there are other paid search managers within earshot. Everyone’s got their favorite tools and everyone wants to add their two cents’…

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What The Heck Is AdWords Quality Score And Why Does It Matter Anyway?

Last month, Google announced some changes in how Quality Score is being reported. While it’s been described as just a reporting change (as opposed to a change in how Quality Score is calculated), some of my respected colleagues have pointed to the news as evidence that Quality Score somehow…

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Building An Enterprise-Level Search Marketing Team: Part 2

In July, I began my two-part series on building an enterprise-level search marketing team. We left off with a review of the essentials for SEO, including all the technical and editorial factors that can hinder your website’s rankings in the search engines. If you’ve followed my…

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Attribution: Busting The Myths

As one of the hottest topics in marketing, attribution is often presented as a panacea for marketers’ dilemmas, allowing you to understand how different advertisements in a purchase funnel work together. The typical description first shows how conversions attributable to various channels…

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10 Bad Assumptions About SEM That Might Get You Fired — Part 1

I’ve been a search engine marketer (both paid and organic) for over ten years, and in that time I have made my share of mistakes. I’m not talking about pure accidents here — most of these mistakes were caused by poor assumptions on my part which turned out to be horribly wrong….

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5 Steps to Implement a Successful Bidding Strategy in Paid Search

When you set up bidding in paid search, it’s important you put a strategy in place prior to implementation. The most relevant questions that need to be addressed when developing this strategy are as follows: How many bidding strategies do I need? What cookie window should I use? Should I use…

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Google AdWords Geo-Targeting: Have We All Been Doing It Wrong?

It’s rare that a true challenge to a best practice (and a seemingly straight forward one at that) arises. But, when Marta Turek, Group Manager, Performance Media at Mediative presented case studies showing what happened when they tested an opt-out versus the traditional opt-in approach to…

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5 Secrets To Maximizing Retail Budgets For Paid Search

Over the last decade, the incorporation of search into the online shopping experience has led to a savvier generation of consumers who prefer the selection, price-transparency, and convenience of online retail to traditional brick-and-mortars. As a res…

4 New Reports To Optimize AdWords For Better Results

There have been quite a few new tools and features launched in Google AdWords (my former employer) over the past couple of months that may not have gotten the attention they deserve amidst the much more hotly debated launch of Enhanced Campaigns. Now that we’ve all transitioned and Enhanced…

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AdWords Time Comparison Data Rolls Out In Web UI, Includes Filter Options And Exports

When Google rolled-out “compare dates” functionality in AdWords, it was welcomed, but  limited to showing changes on the graph view only. Yes, you could get comparison data out of AdWords, but it was cumbersome. Good news:  Over the next few days, Google is officially rolling out an…

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Why My Optimized Landing Pages Trump Your SEO Or PPC Landing Pages Every Time!

Landing page optimization is big business for successful PPC campaigns. Google’s weighting of where a paid ad will show and how much each click costs is factored, in part, on the quality of the landing page the ad leads to. But, on the SEO side of things, you don’t hear a lot about…

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6 Ways To Leverage Merchant Feeds To Optimize Product Listing Ads

Product Listing Ads (PLAs) are the new hipster ads of search marketing, but many retailers aren’t fully capitalizing on this huge opportunity. (I guess many don’t know how cool they are yet.) But, what goes into optimizing your merchant feed for your PLA campaigns, and what best…

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Google Changes How AdWords Quality Score Is Reported

In a post today, Google announced it is updating the way AdWords quality scores are reported. The changes will roll-out globally over the next few days. The updates are designed to “tie your 1-10 numeric Quality Score more closely to its three key sub factors – expected clickthrough…

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