Internet Marketing Blog

We will be attending SMX Advanced here in Seattle tomorrow and Wednesday. We’ll try to post some highlights that we observe. Please let us know if you plan on attending and would like to meet us there, or if you have a particular question that we can try to pursue with attending vendors.

After recent news from Yahoo Sponsored Search and Microsof 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 to [...]

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 Sponsored Search provides tracking URLs if you click on Administration, then Tracking URLs. When enabled, they append various parameters to your ad URLs so that downstream tracking will show information about ad clicks. The two most useful parameters are OVKEY and OVRAW which together provide substantial insight into how well your campaign focuses on [...]

Seattle, WA (AFNews) April 1, 2009 — Web 1 Marketing, Inc. has purchased the web search business of Yahoo!, Inc.
“We are pleased to welcome Yahoo! Search to our team,” said Josh Freedman, President of Web 1 Marketing, Inc. “We look forward to the synergies of our two organizations to combine effortlessly, providing our customers and [...]

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 some time, and AdWords [...]

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 in [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]