Internet Marketing Blog

Search Engine Watch recently evaluated a report from Outsell Inc. claiming that as much as 14.6 percent of all PPC clicks were click fraud and that this cost advertisers $800 million last year. Danny Sullivan obtained a copy of the report and takes it apart in significantly more detail, finding that these numbers are highly [...]

Google has just rolled out Google Checkout, a new method for accepting online payments.
Some benefits of the program:

For every $1 you spend on AdWords advertising, you process $10 in sales for free. Additional sales cost $0.20 each plus 2%.
Put a shopping cart logo on your AdWords ad, making it stand out more and — presumably [...]

Google AdWords continues to roll out new features. We recently discussed dayparting and a new method for ad rotation. Now they are tinkering with the interface within particular ad groups, adding Summary, Keywords, and Ad Variations tabs. Being accustomed to the old all-in-one layout from before, I’m not yet comfortable with this new development and [...]

A recent article in SEOmoz provides a great deal of information about various SEO factors, identifying numerous on-site optimization techniques and off-site (linking) tactics and summarizing the combined knowledge of leading SEO practioners. The top 10 techniques, according to the article, include:

The page’s title tag (include keywords)
Link anchor text (include keywords)
Use of keywords in the [...]

This post is just a quick tip on getting access to complete AdWords documention. Ordinarily their support system pages display a subset of available topics, and you have to rely upon their search to serve up the right information. However, you can get a complete dump of AdWords documentation here. Note that this trick works [...]

AdWords now has dayparting, or as they refer to it, “ad scheduling.” This means that you can now run or pause campaigns at any time of day.
A few important details:

Scheduling is managed at the campaign level, not ad group, ad, or keyword.
Time can be specified in 15 minute increments.
In Simple Mode you can pause your [...]

ClickTracks has an interesting article that talks about the Google AdWords settlement and whether or not to participate. The short answer is that it’s not worth your time. They do a quick “back of the envelope” calculation to demonstrate how for all of the hassle you might have to go to receive advertising credits, you [...]

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) recently announced that Internet advertising revenues surged 38% over Q1 of 2005 and 6% over the previous quarter. While the year-over-year numbers are not that surprising in light of the upward trends of participation and pricing, we were taken aback by the growth over what is [...]

Today I was conducting some keyword research on specific health topics, and I was collecting data from the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. As noted in previous posts, the tool’s stemming can result in significant ambiguity. Another big problem is that the data comes from Yahoo’s search network which Search Engine Marketers like us often request [...]

I’ve been doing keyword research for a client and found this little gem of a bug (feature?) in the Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. Try searching on “space background” and compare the results to what you find with “space backgrounds”. Note the first result in each case (as of May 31, 2006) shows 70,799 searches. Well, [...]