Internet Marketing Blog

Here is a quick checklist of commonly missed tasks that should be undertaken when setting up an AdWords account and new AdWords campaigns. Determine if you’ll use pre-pay or post-pay. We only recommend pre-pay for those cases where you need precise control over the total budget consumed over the life of a campaign. Note that [...]

Just last week we looked at Yahoo’s Ad Placement Report, how it can help optimize your Yahoo PPC campaigns and how discloses the huge number of sites included as part of the Yahoo Search network. Does Microsoft adCenter offer a similar report? Yes, the Publisher Placement Performance report. Running the report is extremely easy. Access [...]

Google has just announced DoubleClick Ad Exchange and provided more details for advertisers in the AdWords Blog. For advertisers, this means more sites will be available through the content network, many of them large, marquee brands that were previously difficult to reach for many small advertisers. Ad space purchased through the DoubleClick Ad Exchange will [...]

Finally Microsoft adCenter has an ad preview feature so that you can see if your ad is appearing in Bing, and how it will look. The tool only works from within the Campaigns tab, and it doesn’t support testing by location (yet). You also can’t click on the ad to test it, so there’s no [...]

AdWords used to provide nearly instantaneous launch of new ads, ad groups, and campaigns. However we recently uploaded a new campaign into an existing account (one campaign had already been running for several months). The new campaign was uploaded in paused mode from AdWords Editor several days in advance of its launch to replace the [...]

Bounce rates are commonly used as KPIs for all kinds of websites since they show the “stickiness” of a site for new visitors. If people leave the site right away (high bounce rate), either the landing page is under-performing, or the wrong kinds of visitors are going there. However, having a low bounce rate may [...]

Over the years we have managed a lot of pay-per-click campaigns for a variety of clients. Some of them have a thorough understanding of conversions, while there are still a lot that don’t. It is still surprising to find companies that only measure the success or failure of their AdWords campaigns (or less often Yahoo! [...]

AdWords has added the ability to see what keywords are triggering ad impressions without running a Search Query Report. Simply open up an ad group to view the keywords, and a button will appear above the keyword list that says “See search terms….” Clicking on it will present you with two options where you can [...]

We’ve found several bugs in Microsoft adCenter, usually related to their web interface. This is a keyword addition bug. When entering keywords, either through the online interface or CSV import, certain keyword combinations are ignored if other variations with conjunctions exist, such as those containing “for” or “on”. Example: If “butter for toast” has been [...]

I’m glad to have attended SMX Advanced here in Seattle over the last couple of days. What did I learn? Mainly that the old cliche still applies: The more things change, the more things stay the same. As noted in my last post, SEO is still a collection of best practices, most of which have [...]