Internet Marketing Blog

I took a brief look at Google Trends in a previous post. A recent blog comment over at SEOmoz has me thinking more about its potential utility.
Stemming
The comment points out how Google Trends is a great stemming research tool using this example. While the trends tool doesn’t provide absolute traffic statistics, their is substantial [...]

AdWords is about to roll out click-to-play video ads. Unlike the rich media advertisements and banners you see on Yahoo! and other content sites, the new video ads will not play until a user clicks on them.
The video ads share many characteristics with AdWords’ existing ad formats — text, image, and Flash — including:

Ads [...]

To get the best performance from your AdWords campaigns, it is important to use the keyword matching options to target the specific phrase variations that are the most appropriate and cost effective for your business. We have created the AdWords Keyword Matching Options Generator to quickly and easily create the matching variations for a list [...]

AdWords has recently added a new method for ad rotation that spreads ad impressions out over the course of a day.
Previously your ads would be shown until your daily budget ran out. If your daily budget wasn’t high enough to cover the entire day, the ads would stop running. Among other problems, this resulted in [...]

Rumor has it that Microsoft has bought DeepMetrix, a web analytics firm that competes with ClickTracks, WebTrends, etc. No press release at the moment that I’m writing this, but this post in Threadwatch suggests that it will be rolled into MSN adCenter.

Search Engine Watch has been playing with the new Google Trends tool.
I was eager to see what kinds of numbers it provides. Answer: none. Everything is shown relative to itself, no absolute numbers, no keyword versus keyword statistics.  However, if you want to know what cities, regions, or languages dominate a keyword, you can now [...]

Google has made their traffic estimator accessible without an AdWords login. The tool is a bit misnamed in that it estimates ad clicks and costs; it does not provide an estimate of the number of queries.
It may be possible to elicit some useful keyword statistics from this tool, particularly the relative popularity of different search [...]

What should be the proper nomenclature for advertising on search engines? Corollary: what does Search Engine Marketing mean? I am personally in favor of a semi-concerted effort among those of us who practice search engine advertising to call it that (SEA), not search engine marketing (SEM).
Just as marketing is much broader than advertising, search [...]

We have found reporting errors in another Yahoo Sponsored Search account that we manage. The report center reports are clearly missing the vast majority of clicks, in one case showing $11 in fees for a month in which more than $750 in charges were accrued. This is the 2nd time in as many months that [...]

What is the purpose of your website’s home page? Is it to brand, sell a product, talk about the company, direct people to the right information, or entertain visitors? Should it be colorful or stark? Simple or busy? Focused or comprehensive?
All of the other questions and concerns are acadmic if website visitors leave, which can [...]