Moments ago, Google Instant search went live. If you don’t see it yet, it will roll out over the next few days. It appears to be a game changer. Google Instant gives you realtime organic (and paid) search results as you type in the search box at google.com. Here’s an animated demo (click on the [...]
Category Archives: ppc
Google: Agencies Must Provide More Transparency
August 16, 2010 – 8:48 am
Google‘s AdWords advertising division has announced that it will be tightening up reporting requirements for “partners” (i.e., third-party agencies that manage AdWords accounts for their clients) beginning February 2011. The new requirements will obligate agencies to report the number of clicks, impressions, and actual ad spend to their clients, in addition to whatever metrics the agency already [...]
Understanding New Adwords Modified Broad Match Keywords
August 2, 2010 – 7:29 am
On July 14, Google AdWords announced a global rollout of a new broad match keyword modifier feature. This new feature is supposed to create keywords with “greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match.” Simply put, modified broad match keywords lets you make selected words within your broad match keyword phrase “sticky.” [...]
AdWords Peel & Stick Keywords: The Importance of Negative Sculpting
June 28, 2010 – 8:51 am
If you’ve spent any time doing pay-per-click advertising, you’re probably familiar with the technique known as “peel and stick,” popularized by AdWords guru Perry Marshall. If not (or if you need a refresher), read the blue paragraph below. If you feel you’re pretty “up” on peel and stick, skip the blue paragraph to get to [...]
Why Do Paid Search Advertising?
January 18, 2010 – 7:47 am
If you’re a beginner at Internet advertising, or just someone who knows “I ought to be promoting my site…”, Search Engine Land offers Five Most Frequently Asked Questions About Paid Search. It’s a concise article that explains some of those acronyms tossed around so easily (SEO, PPC, etc.), and then gets down to why anyone [...]
Top 5 Tips for Getting Started with Adwords
November 3, 2009 – 7:39 am
For those of us who have been immersed in the highly-complex world of Google’s AdWords for some time, it may be difficult to remember how overwhelming and confusing (and often irrational!) it seemed when we were starting out. It’s hard enough just to learn the mechanics of using the interface along with all the new [...]
KGen Firefox Extension Shows Pages’ Potential Keywords
November 2, 2009 – 9:37 am
KGen is an extension for Firefox web browsers that displays the strongest keywords on a particular web page. Words on the page repeated more than once are ranked by “weight” (a user-tunable algorithm based on html tags and page placement), number of repetitions on the page, and “position” (which appears to be how far down [...]
AdWords Quality Score: Don’t Just Look at the Number
October 29, 2009 – 6:52 am
If you’ve got some experience managing cost-per-click (Google’s term for pay-per-click) advertising using Google AdWords, you surely by now realize the high importance of optimizing for Quality Score. Either that, or you enjoy throwing away your or your clients’ money. According to Google, Quality Score (QS) is “the basis for measuring the quality and relevance [...]
Classic Misuse of Dynamic Keyword Insertion
October 1, 2009 – 7:35 am
From a search on Google for the keyword “ball cancer” (in the Sponsored Results column): Next time I’m looking to buy cancer balls, I’ll know where to go for the best deal! How does this happen? How could Google be showing me an ad for something so far from what I was searching for (resources [...]
