Internet Marketing Blog

We recently made some changes to a client’s AdWords account that reduced clicks, traffic, and spending. Several days later we reversed those changes. Over the next several days, AdWords spending exceeding our daily budget by 20%. This came as a surprise to us as we are used to seeing some slight overage some days, but […]

AdWords just announced that they will soon factor in landing page load times into the quality score that helps determine your ad’s position. The reasons for this are, in effect, to reward site owners who provide responsive sites and punish those that make users wait.
We have no idea yet how much of an impact this […]

If you’re running a national SEM campaign, it may be desirable to exclude all local queries so that you can optimize the ad language for non-geographic queries and users. To target specific locales, you could setup additional campaigns that are better optimized for those sets of keywords. The best way to exclude location-based queries is […]

We’ve just updated the AdWords Keyword Matching Options Generator so that the output can be consistent with the AdWords Editor interface for importing multiple keywords. Simply check “AdWords Editor Mode” to switch from the bracket and quote notation to the AE’s comma-delimited format.

AdWords recently rolled out a long-awaited (by us) feature: Impression Share. Now advertisers can see how much demand there is for their keywords without jumping through hoops with the campaign level “Ad Serving” options. Impression Share is available through the reporting interface only at this time.
Impression Share (IS) shows what percentage of searches that you […]

The bloggers at Inside AdWords recently posted significant information about their invalid click detection efforts. Among the most important points is that the number of “impact” clicks is less than 10% of the total number of clicks, and that this number has remained somewhat constant over time. They also state that fewer than less than […]

The 10,000 lb. gorilla is getting heavier. So says a recent report by comScore. Google sites (www.google.com, www.aol.com, etc.) increased their market share in December to 47.3%, compared to 28.5% for Yahoo and 10.5% for Microsoft.
The numbers themselves aren’t as important as the trends: Google continues to grow, Yahoo grew more percentage-wise and thus is […]

Google has just rolled out hourly reporting for AdWords participants. The most obvious benefit is that you can see what time of day your users are searching for you and clicking on your ads. This information may be helpful for your organization if for no other reason than you can now tailor dayparting to show […]

Google AdWords now includes a column in some reports that estimates the number of invalid clicks on your ads. More information can be found in the Inside AdWords blog and the AdWords Help Center.
Invalid clicks are those caught by the AdWords system that are not charged to your account. Their are a number of factors […]

The AdWords team has added the ability to browse the content network sites by category. The category list is pretty lightweight right now, with not enough specificity in many areas. It is not clear if they plan to expand the directory structure, so at the moment you will probably still find it useful to search […]