May 1st, 2012 by Josh
There was–quite recently–a time when we seemed to have reached a pleasant stasis: everyone had finally thrown off the limitations of the 640×480 screen, even the 800×600, and we had tons of real estate to execute beautiful, elaborate designs. However, the explosive growth of mobile browsing, as well as the continued expansion of form factors, [...]
April 5th, 2012 by Josh
Google’s remarketing ads are great for advertiser, but they can be annoying for some users. As someone who manages advertising, I’m hyper-aware of what ads are showing. Also my competitive research means that I could be remarketed to constantly for products I have less than zero interest in buying. It turns out that you can [...]
March 28th, 2012 by Josh
We have recently developed a new tool, our Google Analytics Tag Validator, to help diagnose issues constructing URLs for advertising and tracking. If you’re tagging landing page URLs for AdWords, adCenter, Facebook advertising, and so on, this tool will help make sure that your composite URLs are properly constructed. Among other things, it alerts you if [...]
February 24th, 2012 by Josh
While it’s obvious that ad position effects cost, does it effect conversion rate? For example, does the top position AdWords ad get a higher percentage of clicks turning into conversions than an ad further down the page? Google has conducted studies and developed numerical models that indicate that if such a relationship exists, it is [...]
February 13th, 2012 by Josh
We aren’t designers, but we sure like good design. Not just pretty design. We like design that helps our clients sell more stuff, join their organization, download materials, subscribe to newsletters…, to respond to their call-to-action. Whereas our focus with search marketing is to increase the size of the sales funnel’s opening, user experience design [...]
February 13th, 2012 by Josh
Andy Crestodina recently wrote a fantastic piece about content, using the periodic table as a model for the various content-types. Aside from its appeal to my inner geek, it does a great job of listing the various types and describing how they can relate to each other in ways that maximize SEO and referral benefits.
July 8th, 2011 by Josh
I’ve blogged before about how to interpret CTR and what conditions are necessary for a valid comparison of two ads. In one recent case we created two identical ads that went to different landing pages so that we could test the effectiveness of each landing page. The assumption is that each ad — being identical — [...]
March 30th, 2011 by Josh
Google is working on a mechanism for collecting and sharing users impressions of search results. The system is called +1. It allows users to give a virtual “thumbs-up” on sites that they like by clicking on a small symbol next to their listing in search results. This applies to both ads and natural results. The [...]
February 15th, 2011 by Josh
Microsoft has announced that as of March 3, 2011 they will no longer review keywords for trademarks. This comes almost a year to the day after we explained why limiting keyword usage is unfair to advertisers and inconsistent with most other interpretations of trademark protection. It also makes trademark usage roughly consistent between Bing, Yahoo, [...]
February 9th, 2011 by Josh
When Ikea wanted to build awareness of a new store in Malmö, they used Facebook as the basis for a viral giveaway campaign. This video provides the details. Basically they posted photos of “rooms” within the store, and then gave away items within each room to the first person to “tag” that item in the [...]