Internet Marketing Blog

After recent news from Yahoo Sponsored Search and Microsoft adCenter that both programs are shifting to draconian trademark protection policies, it is a quite refreshing to hear Google breathe some reason back into search advertising. For years trademark owners have objected to the use of their marks in competitive advertisments, some going so far as [...]

Increasing bids in a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) / search engine advertising campaign improves ad position, which usually increase the number of impressions and clicks. However, if you have a fixed daily budget that is always being spent, you will get more clicks if you decrease bids. Here’s why: The total number of clicks you can get [...]

Yahoo! has just announced new ways to target particular users: Demographic Targeting Ad Scheduling Enhanced ZIP-level geo-targeting All of the big three search engines have been offering some version of geographic targeting for some time. Yahoo! finally added rich scheduling functionality, a lot like that offered by AdWords. Microsoft adCenter has offered demographic targeting for [...]

This post was prompted by many discussions with clients in which we attempt to summarize SEO and PPC performance in practical, easily digestible forms. There is frequently a tendency for clients to oversimplify evaluations to “it works” or “it doesn’t” based upon summary data. For SEO, we try to summarize performance in terms of increases [...]

Here’s a tip for finding negative keywords for PPC campaigns as well as websites to link to for linking campaigns. Set up Google Alerts for those keywords your advertising on. Depending on the popularity of your keyword(s) you should start receiving emails from Google pretty quickly with links to various articles, blogs and websites. It’s [...]

Recently we blogged about AdWords account hijacking, and one of our clients forwarded us an email message that shows the phishing scam that is most likely the cause. The email looks like official communications from AdWords that is notifying the user that their most recent payment did not go through properly. The email contains a [...]

Suppose you have several landing pages for your AdWords campaign or other advertising program, and you want to know which such page is most effective at generating e-commerce transactions. You have Google Analytics reliably tracking e-commerce transactions. You won’t find this information in the e-commerce section, but there are several ways for Google Analytics to [...]

In recent weeks we have had two client accounts on AdWords “hijacked.” Someone was able to discover or hack the passwords for two different email logins, presumably either by inadvertent disclosure or use of weak / easy-to-guess passwords. Campaigns were created that targeted keywords related to screen savers and loans, and the ads took users [...]

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 [...]