AdWords Bid Management And Account Structure Mistakes To Avoid
On my one-year anniversary of working as an AdWords practitioner instead of a Googler, Brad Geddes interviewed me about Quality Score for his WebmasterRadio.fm show, Marketing Nirvana. He asked for my thoughts on AdWords now that I’m a user rather than someone building it, and I thought that…
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A Paid Search Christmas Carol: Learn From The Ghosts Of SEM Past, Present & Future
‘Twas the night before Christmas in the search marketing department and SEM Director Scrooge was heading out hours before his staff. “Director Scrooge,” said one of the young SEM analysts, Tiny Tim. “It’s Christmas Eve. The gang and I wanted to know if we could get a paid search management tool for…
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4 Trends Marketers Must Address In 2014: Audience, Relevance, Social & Mobile
Upon revisiting last year’s post on this topic, a couple of our bold predictions flopped and a couple turned out to be more reality than fantasy. Though we didn’t see Apple monetize the search results served up by Siri, we did see ad formats evolve to increase relevance and user…
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Default Campaign Settings In AdWords — The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
Fellow SEM experts, how many times has this happened to you? A newbie joins your company (or a company with which your SEM agency is working) and is convinced that he is an SEM master. He’s read a few SEM books, attended a conference or two, and gone through the AdWords tutorials, after all….
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Staying Competitive In PPC: Learning From Black Friday’s Most Popular Offers
The five-day Black Friday weekend from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday provided an insightful glimpse into how retailers are running their PPC strategies for the holidays. Particularly interesting are the variety of offer types run by retailers, ranging f…
3 Components Of Geo-Targeting Excellence For 2014
Smart use of the geo-targeting controls through Enhanced Campaigns in AdWords will prove to be the single largest opportunity for paid search marketers in 2014. Geo-targeting is nothing new. It has been a foundational element for local and regional bus…
Don’t Dismiss Broad Match: It’s Come A Long Way
A red car is a red car. Unless it’s a maroon sedan. Or a crimson convertible. Or a burgundy truck. Or, for that matter, a red car. Search marketers know that bidding for exact search terms — a [red car], for instance — yields a high degree of precision, reaching searchers who are…
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3 Ways AdWords Scripts Will Make Your Holidays Merrier
The holidays are officially upon us, and if you’re reading this, I must give thanks to you for your time. When I still worked at Google, this was the time of year when new product launches came to a crawl since most advertisers were too busy to deal with change, and only the most persistent…
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Will Big Retail Rule Paid Search On Black Friday, Cyber Monday Again This Year?
Here we go, just over a week until Black Friday and Cyber Monday. All hands are on deck, budgets are ready to be unleashed. The big box retailers appear poised to yet again dominate paid search results for queries related to these all-important retail …
Optimizing For Seasonality: 4 Critical Paid Search Strategies
November and December are the most seasonal months for search marketers. For retailers, this holiday shopping period continues to be the most profitable time of the year. In fact, in 2012, over $42 billion was spent online by consumers in these two mon…
Bing Ads Introduces Refined Broad Match Keyword Targeting
In an effort to help advertisers attract more click volume from the Yahoo Bing Network, Bing Ads has rolled out Broad Match keyword targeting. The company says that with refinements and ongoing updates the “Bing Ads platform is able to deliver Broad Match conversion metrics that are 85% of…
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How & When You Can Turn SEM From A Checkbox To A Core Business Component
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is no longer a “nice to have” for businesses, but rather a “must have.” This wasn’t the case 10 years ago, when SEM got dumped into the “test budget” if there was any money left over after TV, radio, print, out-of-home,…
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Getting A Better Read On The Value Of Smartphone Paid Search
The increasing ubiquity of mobile devices has been a mixed blessing for paid search advertisers. On the one hand, most industry stats show smartphones and tablets driving nearly all Internet traffic growth, while volume from traditional desktop and lap…
Google Updates AdWords Opportunities Tab With New Opportunity Types
The Opportunities Tab in Google AdWords relaunched today with several new types of opportunities displayed in one view. The campaign suggestions include where to add sitelinks and where to raise bids to show your ads more often than some of your compet…
New AdWords Editor Version 10.3 Now Available
Google released the latest version of AdWords Editor yesterday to all AdWords users. Here is an overview of what is new in version 10.3. Sitelinks: The new version supports enhanced sitelinks, allowing you to add two lines of text, and a new Sitelink I…
How Recent Organic Search Changes Will Affect Paid Search
Search marketers were pitched not one but two curveballs recently which have forever reshaped the landscape of search engine optimization (SEO). The industry saw the first one coming a mile away as Google began encrypting organic search queries two years ago. Now, there’s almost zero…
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Case Study: How Should You Be Using RLSAs?
If you were paying attention, you might recall that Google launched Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs) at the end of June this year. Now that we’ve had a few months of experimenting with how to best make use of this feature, we’ve managed to come to some interesting preliminary…
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3 Tips To Fine-Tune Your Paid Search Program For The Holidays
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday around the corner, it is high time search marketers got their paid search program ready to scale up efficiently. In this column, I’ll outline and dive into three tips you should consider to get the most from the holidays in paid search. From my experience,…
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5 Conversion Tracking Tips For AdWords
Last month, I covered how to use call tracking for AdWords to shed some light on how to track phone calls as conversions. This month, I’d like to continue in that vein and share some more tips for tracking and optimizing by conversions, whether they are of the call or online variety. When I…
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New AdWords Ad Ranking Formula: What Does It Mean?
AdRank in AdWords is a key AdWords marketing concept that plays a huge role in determining how prominently your ads are displayed in a SERP and also your cost-per-click. So, when Google quietly announces huge changes on how AdRank is being calculated, …