Google announced yesterday that they’ll be changing how they track users across all of their different sites, including YouTube, Gmail, and the big G’s search engine. There is some concern from various places (including the Washington Post)  that this is tracking that can’t be opted out of, but the truth is, you still have that option. It goes live March 1st, you can see all details here.

Google tracks for advertising purposes and associates your activity on the web (and multiple sites they run) with different demographic information. In this way they can personalize ads and limited content based on what you watch, search for, +1 on Google Plus, and so forth. You can find out details on how exactly this is done by checking out Google’s Advertising and Privacy page. Previously this was not done in a consolidated way for all different sites and businesses run by Google, but this change is what Google announced on Tuesday.

The Washington Post had an article yesterday about this new change from Google and included a major comment on how there was no option to opt out of the revised tracking methods. Not to fear – Google’s slogan of “Do No Evil” seems to keep true, even when there is concern that they are straying from it.

To opt out, simply visit Google’s Ad Preferences page. Here you can choose to remove different demographics and categories Google has determined you are part of, edit them, or even just opt-out completely. Google keeps a cookie stored with your browser to track everything. By opting out Google will disable the cookie and no longer associate your interests and demographic info with the browser you’re using.

Keep in mind you’ll have to do this for each separate browser you may be using if you really want to opt out completely, but the concern that there is no way to opt out of their tracking methods is simply erroneous. You may have no issue with the tracking Google does (I’ll admit, it does tend to make the ads a little more digestible when they’re things that actually interest you instead of not), but if you do you can simply opt out.

For full details on Google’s revised Privacy Policy you can check out their new Privacy Policy page. On this page there are links to the areas where you can adjust your preferences and find out more details.

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So Paul Christoforo and Ocean Marketing have gone viral.  But even though they say bad marketing is good marketing, I think this particular instance is an example of bad marketing being bad marketing.

It appears that Paul had a lovely email exchange with an individual who wanted to purchase an XBox 360 controller modification.  Paul is the PR man for the company who makes these controller mods, so he was the one to talk to the customer.  And I use the word “talk” lightly.

The email exchange went for a while.  The customer, Dave, was rather upset by this and decided to CC a few major players in the gaming industry, including Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik and Kotaku.  Well PA’s Mike found this noteworthy and posted all of the drama on Penny Arcade.  It’s since gone viral, and hugely viral.  It’s also been posted on Kotaku and several other major gaming sites as well as on Reddit and Twitter.

One of the newest developments is he’s since removed his Twitter account (@OceanMarketting, yes that’s spelled right) and it’s been snatched up by someone who says they’ll use the account to promote indie games.  Update: He’s now using @OceanStratagy (go figure, @OceanStrategy was open and available).  The controller mod manufacturer is @Tatterr, and he’s only acknowledged this hubbub, saying that he’ll detail more soon.

As for Paul Christoforo, his name and company name are now all over the internet forever and not in a good way.  If you want to keep a good name for yourself and your company, it’s best to treat your clients well.

Especially if they are ‘net savvy.

Update: Looks like Examiner.com has quite a few details on the huge mess this is turning into, as well as finding out more information on Paul Christoforo and his lack of marketing expertise.  They’re adding continual updates on this.

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In the effort to get links and spread word of your business online, many people can get a bit overzealous.  Ryan Sammy put together an excellent list detailing the 7 deadly sins of content promotion.  I’ve summarized them here, with my own input on it.

1) Greed (Excessive promotion)

Some people think that putting everything that they have written or available and putting it online to link back to themselves is the only way to do it.  However, when doing this a lot of the content you put out is useless.  Spammy.  This will not do well for your image and can get you a bad reputation, and in some cases get you banned from the sites you submit content to for a temporary or even permanent amount of time.

Try to submit only quality content.  This will make people look forward to seeing your information, and if it’s not seen all the time, it also raises impressions of quality.  Plus it cuts costs in time and/or money to send information out.

2) Sloth (Trying to save time too much)

Doing good promotion work online takes a LOT of time.  This means early mornings, late nights, and details details details in order to do the job right.  A lot of people think, “I’ve got this content, let’s just fire it off using my easy-to-use software to all the social networking sites and we’re set.”  Well, there’s a major difference between Slashdot, Digg, Facebook, and Fark.  The same content will NOT do well on all of them.

Find out which sites would work well with the content you have.  Submit to them separately, not all at once, and uniquely, so you have different titles for your posts.  Identical titles will hurt chances of going viral.

3) Wrath (Attacking competitors)

Most sites have a way of reacting to posts.  By either giving it a thumbs up/down, making comments, or voting on the quality of a post, you can give a response.  Some people try to increase their post rankings by down-ranking all of their competition.  This can give a little bit of help, but will generally produce only bad long-term results.  You’ll make enemies, and some of these people WILL target you and retaliate.

The better way to do this is to not attack, but try to make contacts with others, even your competitors.  Sometimes this can help you work with each other to promote your content mutually.  And it’s better to avoid making enemies, so any attacks on you are best ignored.

4) Envy (Taking great content as your own)

This is one that I see a lot of.  There’s some amazing content that’s right in your market.  So why not use it?  And claim it as your own?  Since you can’t seem to create equal quality yourself because of time or talent, the best choice is to use someone else’s, right?  No.  It’s the web.  People will find out if you steal, and find out quickly.  This will get you banned very easily from the networks, and if you do it enough people will place you on their “enemy” list, which can have a variety of ramifications.

If you find content you think is great, give credit where credit is due!  (Note: check out my credit to Sammy for his excellent outline on these issues, with a link in place and all.)  By posting credit to the original author and/or a link, you’re helping each other.  And this causes no ill will when you respect the author.

5) Pride (Bragging about black hat achievements)

Some people try to gimmick the system with certain sites and find ways to get their posts elevated or as a front page listing, but by using nefarious tactics.  Even if you weren’t caught originally, talking about doing it and how you were tricksy with your techniques will get you caught.  The penalties for this can be drastic and long-lasting.

It’s better to play by the rules.  This way you keep your reputation and recognition for legitimate information.  The focus should be on providing quality content, not on gaming the system.

6) Gluttony (Single site promotion)

There are times when you find great success on one specific site.  Then when you learn how you succeeded, you can get more and more success by using the same methods you used originally.  The problem is when you forget about using other sites and focus ALL your energy on the one site.  It only takes a minor change to their system and site setup (or even the site to disappear) to ruin everything.

Try to distribute your time to multiple sites.  It will help get it to more markets and crowds, plus if one site makes a major change, it won’t hurt you nearly as much.  Keep up with the way each site works, and adjust when needed, without pouring all your time into a single channel.

7) Despair (Breaking the rules)

If you try everything and nothing seems to work, it can get frustrating.  Sometimes it seems like the only answer is to try dirty tricks, in some cases a lot of the same mistakes listed above.  Well, it may not happen immediately, but playing these types of tricks will get you into a bad place.  A lot of them will get you banned from sites, networks, and even search engines.  Then you’re dead in the water.

If you’re having problems, try looking around.  See what other people have been doing with legitimate methods, try some of them.  Ask people in your industry what they’ve been trying or have them look at what you’ve been trying.  You need fresh eyes to revise your approach.  Doing this will help.

Conclusion

Even though it may take a lot of time and get frustrating, playing by the rules of sites and social networks will pay off.  Create unique quality content to put on the web in a variety of ways and it will reward you.

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In the past, most local businesses never thought they could compete with major companies.  The marketing budget needed to really make a similar impact was usually way out of their capabilities.  However, with Google’s latest updates, it’s looking like the smaller business has a much better chance of staying within the public’s eyes.

Today being Black Friday (and considering the upcoming Cyber Monday), a lot of local businesses are starting to worry a bit more about keeping afloat in the offers that come across from major companies, often available online.  So how can local businesses compete?

The latest change from Google was the merge between the organic search results and Google Places.  This means that in order to have a good shot at sitting inside the Places listings on the front page (now appearing like any normal organic listing, with some minor differences), you need to have a local address.  This means that any business can have a good chance at being found by people looking for them if they’re in the same area and they’ve set up some basic internet marketing adjustments.

So before, when the only companies appearing online for a specific market were the monster firms that had huge sites and have a marketing budget that’s astronomical, local companies didn’t really get a lot of attention from the people in their city that were shopping online.  Now that Google’s made some changes, a lot of those monster firms (with no local address to compete) are drifting farther down on the front page or are even on the second page.  The Google Places profiles for the local businesses are showing up above them.

For any local business that wants to be able to get this new attention that’s available, ideally you need a web site ready (one that people will actually be willing to hang around on and not leave immediately) and a Places profile that’s been properly tweaked.  If you have both of these, it gives you a good chance at quick jumps in traffic.  This is a type of shortcut for SEO – it works quickly if you do it right, and doesn’t need to cost the same amount as it would for straight SEO.

So do it right, and you can even survive Cyber Monday.  If you don’t know the exact details on what to do, it’s best if you find qualified experts who can produce results for both the web design and the Google Places profile.  Just be careful about who you choose – do your research to find out who’s been able to show real results, and isn’t just talking it up.

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This was something that had been coming, but it was unknown exactly when the date would be.  Yahoo and Microsoft have made an alliance.  It’s called the “Search Alliance”.  Originally it was intended as a unification for paid advertisements, but it’s clear now that the unification is for both paid and organic listings; do a search on both Yahoo and Bing for a keyword phrase, and the results are now identical.

It’s clear from a bit of research that this change means that Yahoo’s search algorithm is no longer being used, and all Yahoo results now mimic Bing’s results.

This does greatly affect SEO, since the way Yahoo used to rank differed from how you could rank on Bing.  Now all strategies are moving towards the Bing search engine algorithm for ranking on either engine.

Whether or not this is a test or a permanent change we’ll have to see, but it’s clear that both engines are now united, perhaps in an effort to make a dent into Google’s crown over the search market.

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I’ve been taking a look at some of my competition lately and seeing their bragging about achieving first page ranking for keywords, and in some cases top position ranking for keywords.  Well, for people who are looking to get SEO services from a company or an individual, be sure to keep some things in mind before being impressed by achievements such as these.

There’s a good list of things to double check (or to ask) when you see rankings like this in a portfolio:

1. How many results do you get for that keyword in the search engine? If you do a search in Google and get under 200,000 listings, there’s a good chance it’s very easy to rank for that keyword.  There are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, if no one’s competing for the keyword, it’s easy to rank for.  But again – if no one’s competing for the keyword, chances are it’s not worth ranking for.  We’ve got a few clients with keywords that are ranked on the first page that have search results numbering over 6,000,000.
2. What kind of traffic does that keyword get? There are different ways to learn about this, but you should see if the keywords that are being ranked highly actually get good traffic.  You may have a number one position, but if it only gets two searches a month – is it really something that’s worth it?  As always, there are exceptions to this rule (if you can close on one of those two searches and it’s worth six figures, that’d be worth it), but usually getting no traffic means the keyword is not worth as much.
3. What other keywords are ranked for that site? So they have shown a single keyword phrase for their SEO’d site.  Is it the only one that’s ranked?  A good SEO should be able to rank highly for multiple keywords.  Ideally, multiple targeted keywords.
4. Is the SEO company’s site ranking for keywords? If the company claims to do SEO, it would make sense that they would rank for keywords themselves, correct?  If you ask and they can show no good results for their own site in the search engines, be very cautious about trusting them with your own site.

When you hire someone for SEO work, they should be able to provide information on what keywords they are targeting and show you the results that it’s bringing.  Having a particular ranking is worth nothing if you don’t see results from that position in the search engine listings.  Check this list to see what those results are really worth, and if it’s good SEO or just easy SEO to put something into a portfolio.

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Apple has recently revealed news on the iPhone OS 4 update.  The more interesting part of this news for marketers is the new development of iAd – an advertisement opportunity to allow ads to be created and used within apps on the iPhone.

What the difference between this and ads being served by Google and Yahoo is is that the ads are allowed to be developed similarly to applications.  The ads will be served from inside of apps on the iPhone without ever leaving the app.  They will be stand-alone interactive experiences, so a creative advertiser could make an ad with videos, sound clips, even an independent app like a game.  The other detail that makes this interesting is that Apple is offering 60% of revenue from the ad sales to the developer of the application hosting the ad.

The potential for this is staggering.  iPhone application developers could put in ad opportunity inside of their app, and then give away the app for free, getting revenue fully from the ads in their application.  Google may have some new competition to worry about stepping into their established advertising territory.

We’ll have to see how iAd works when OS 4 is released.  For more details on specifics of the ad potential, you can check out this Gizmodo article.

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I got an email from Microsoft adCenter promoting the new alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft.  They’re calling it “Search Alliance“.  The aim is to have their online paid advertising fully unified before the 2010 holiday season, although they did say that they’ll wait until 2011 if they “determine this will be more effective”.

Microsoft bought out Yahoo, so now the primary tool behind both search engines will be Bing, and behind the pay per click (and other paid online advertisements) will be adCenter.  The Search Alliance has stated that each company will “continue to have differentiated consumer search experiences”.  Not sure exactly how they’ll pull that off with the same search engine for both, but they may just mean the search interface.

The support will be broken apart, Yahoo supporting the bigger advertisers, and Microsoft will provide support to “self-service” advertisers.  They are combining their platforms for the advertising audience, so ads put together under this new alliance will reach consumers using either search engine.  The Search Alliance brags that advertisers of all sizes will now be able to have access to a combined audience of nearly 577 million worldwide searchers.

At any rate, this is pretty big news – Yahoo and MS pulling together to battle the mighty Google.  I expect this may be an epic battle.

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Google just upped their record from the 4th quarter of 2008 by 17%.  So how much is that, exactly?  Revenues in the 2008 4th quarter: $5.70 billion.  And they’re only improving.  Revenues in the 2009 4th quarter: $6.67 billion.

The fact that this is only for one fourth of the year blows my mind.  If that stays consistent, then that’s in the neighborhood of $25 billion a year.  They’re doing okay.

If you want to get more of the details on these numbers, check out this article from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land.

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Google’s made a little tweak to AdWords, so now you can put an ad that will show on cell phones that lists a business number.  If the owner of the phone calls that number, that counts as the click that is paid for.

The benefit of this is that it’s a very quick hot lead for anyone who advertises on the mobile network.  And it’s easy to do, since it defaults to all devices in AdWords, anyway.  To make sure you’re listed, check to see that mobile devices are checked in your settings in the campaign settings in AdWords.

Also, to have your phone number listed, you can either have the business information synched up with your business account or enter it manually, both done inside of the AdWords campaign settings.  Make sure whichever you do that you include your phone number.

Then to see the results, just choose the “Filters and Views” drop-down list and choose “Segment by”->”Click Type”.  This will show which clicks were URL clicks, and which were calls, from either the Ad Group or Keywords tabs.

It’s just an addition Google’s made to AdWords, and sent out an announcement through email to Google advertisers.  This could be a good change for people who use AdWords for markets that actively use their cell phones.

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It looks like holiday shopping this year has moved even more heavily online.  As companies are realizing that more people are actively searching online for their commercial searches, they’re starting to see the value of search engine optimization.

Because of this, the IT industry is starting to anticipate a high demand for SEO skills in 2010.  (Yay for us professional SEOs!)  In Great Britain alone, demand for SEO and online marketing skills went up by 40% last year.

The skills of SEO, pay per click management, social media marketing and web design are all being looked for, ideally in a combined package.  SourceWire has all the details in an article based on this story in the UK.  (And I have to add a little something something here – Tulsa Marketing Online does in fact do SEO, PPC, social media and web design.  Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.)

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Google’s changes lately have been quite thorough.  They’ve made changes for AdWords, they’re changing the way the search engine itself operates, and now they’re coming out to take a stand against online scams.

In particular, the schemes for how to “work-at-home” to use Google and make a ton of money are starting to get shut down by Google.  Google is starting to file lawsuits against these companies to bring them down.

For most people, these are familiar schemes – you see them in banner ads, with text like “Use Google to make 1000s of Dollars!”.  They generally operate by having a kit you send out for and then have you set up for automatic billing once a month (and many people don’t realize there’s automatic billing).

CNN has a bit more detail in this story.  I did find it rather amusing that under this story in their sponsored links, one of the ads said “I’m glad I lost my job! Jobless Dad makes $6493/month working online from home. Read how he…”

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It seems like the focus for a lot of internet marketers is finding that top trafficked keyword.  However, this can be a mistake by not focusing on the true marketing involved.  In some cases, the top traffic keyword is not one that will bring conversions.

Putting focus purely on the traffic numbers for keyword research is the reason many internet marketers are not able to pull the profit numbers many others do.  Making sure you focus on the consumer and their intent more than the pure traffic size is key.

This can be done more quickly using PPC, but at a price.  And in SEO, solid keyword research must be done to target proper keywords – a mistake here will cost a lot of time and money.

Evan LaPointe goes into a bit more detail about all of these factors at Search Engine Land.  At any rate, it’s good to remember that the focus should be on the human experience, not just the analytics numbers.

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It looks like with the latest AdWords update, they’re starting to put any local advertisements in Google AdWords into Google Maps.  You can see images of some examples of that here, in Search Engine Land.

The ads appear almost the same as Google Local listings, only with blue numbered pushpins instead of red lettered pushpins.  I’ll most definitely have to look further into AdWords to see exactly how to take advantage of this new update.

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It looks like smaller cities are starting to see their businesses move more online with web sites, online marketing and social networking.  This would not surprise me too much to see, as the demand here for Tulsa SEO has increased, as well as for Tulsa website design.  I’m willing to bet it’s very similar in other cities.

In this case, it appears that Columbus is definitely on the list of cities rising in their online presence, and it’s showing for several different types of markets.

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So Google made a few major updates this last weekend to AdWords.  I manage several different accounts, so I’ve seen first-hand what kind of impact this has had.

First of all, they updated the AdWords Editor – a great tool, by the way, I highly recommend it.  You can find it here: AdWords Editor.  But yeah, they made a few tweaks, in particular I noticed changes to the Campaigns tab.  You can now affect the ad schedule from here, location changes, so forth.  And if I remember right, the “Keyword Opportunities” option in the Keywords tab is new, as well.  It’s the Google machine offering suggestions on keywords that might be relevant to your ad group.

The other big change I saw was Quality Score.  The Quality Score on a lot of my keywords dropped.  In some cases, heavily.  Google is getting tighter when it comes to looking at relevance between keywords, ads, and landing pages.  In particular, the landing page.  The average QS used to be around 7, you had to be pretty far off to drop much below that.

Well now I’m seeing an average closer to 5, and only very relevant pages are getting 7 or higher.  A page has to be completely relevant and contain a lot of solid info (as well as be on a high quality site) to get a 9 or 10 now.

Not sure how this will affect advertisers, but it may be interesting to watch.  It does mean that I’ll have to be a lot more careful with the quality of pages I point my ads to.  I recommend you do the same.

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I found a very interesting article today, through NPR.  It’s talking to Bob Garfield, and references to his book The Chaos Scenario.  Essentially, the article was covering the changes in marketing we’re seeing today.

The world as all advertisers knows it is changing.  Changing drastically.  Marketing is not dying – it’s being reborn.

Most people are moving online.  Using the internet for almost everything now.  I know that I can count myself in with this – if I’m looking for an address to meet with a business, where do I look?  The internet.  If I want to find out when the next showing of the new movie I wanted to see was out is going to be at, where do I look?  The internet.  If I want to BUY a ticket to said movie without worrying about waiting in line?  The internet.

Everything is becoming available online, so it is becoming apparent that everyONE is going to move online.  Newspapers are losing customers, magazines, even TV as we’ve known it.  (Ever heard of Hulu?)

For companies who advertise in any sort of fashion to keep up, they’ll have to go where the people go.  This means moving their marketing online.  This is also going to also mean a change in the people using online advertising, and the difficulty it will be to be seen in different markets.

As Bob stated in the article, the times, they are a’changin’.  If businesses don’t start changing with the times, then it’s only a matter of time until they go extinct next to the old forms of marketing.

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This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, but it’s looking like newspaper advertising sales are dropping, and dropping hard.  The fact is that more and more people are turning their advertising online.

The reason for this is because more people are using the web now for almost everything – if you consider it, it makes sense.  If you want to check to see when a movie’s playing, you go online.  If you want to find directions to a new address, you go online.  If you want to find the best place to buy a new set of speakers, you go online.  If you want to check your bank account, you go online.

More and more people are starting to turn towards doing everything online – it makes sense, since you can do a large variety of things in one place.  Since this is where things are going, more companies are starting to turn their marketing budgets to the online world to connect more with people.

It makes me excited to see, mainly since I feel like I have an inside scoop on what’s going on for marketing online (since I spend every day working with it).  I do think it’s going to mean more and more businesses will be turning to put their focus online.  The drop in advertising sales for newspapers means it’s a sign of the times changing, and it’ll be interesting to see where things progress from here.

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As anyone who’s done any serious work with Google AdWords knows, Quality Score plays a major role in ad expense in AdWords. Understanding how it works and improving it can reduce your costs by major levels.

To start, what exactly is Quality Score?  Quality Score is a figure between 1 and 10 set by Google.  It’s set uniquely for each keyword in your AdWords account.  1 is very, very bad, and 10 is as good as it gets.

So how’s this number set and what effect does it have?  The exact way it’s set isn’t really known for sure, except by those who wrote the algorithm in Google.  But the basics of it are known.  By understanding exactly what goes into the score, you can then increase your QS (Quality Score) for any of your keywords.

The main part of the QS is based on the relevance the keyword has to the page that the ad in your ad group is sending the user to.  If you’re bidding on the keyword “dog food” and are sending them to a page about diesel engines, chances are your QS will be a 1 and you’ll have to pay at least $10/click.  Google likes relevance, because it makes visitors happier with what they’ve found.

So basically, the more relevant your landing page is to the keywords in that ad group, the higher your Quality Score will be.  Ideally, the keywords you’re bidding on actually appear somewhere on the landing page.  This will help a lot, but is not the only part of a good QS.

To get a solid QS, you need to also have a solid web SITE.  Not just the landing page, but it appears that the whole site has to meet certain needs.  I’ve actually talked directly to Google about this (through AdWords reps) to make sure of this – but there are a few things you want your site to have to get a good QS: A contact page, a privacy policy, and at least three pages of solid content.  The contact page means that there’s really someone there to talk to, that it’s not all automated.  This means, in Google’s eyes, a higher quality site.  The privacy policy is just to cover everyone’s butts and is just a good idea.  And the pages of content just shows that there is actual material on the site and it’s not a single page affiliate redirect for pure profit.

Google cares about the quality of the site – this is why the QS is called Quality Score.  So as long as you have a good, high quality site, and the page you’re sending the searcher to matches with what they’ve typed in, you can get very high QS’s.

On average, a basic QS will start at 7.  If you have the keywords you’re bidding on specifically mentioned on the page, this score begins to go up.  How this can affect cost is amazing.  I have some examples:

• On one of my client’s AdWords campaigns I have an ad group with a mix of keywords.  In this ad group the lowest QS is 7.  The CPC for the keywords with the QS of 7 is ranged, but the higher costs are around $0.20-0.50.  I have several keywords in this ad group with a QS 10, and the highest CPC for ANY of these is… $0.01.  You can do the math on how much this can save.
• On another client’s account I have an ad group with mixed keywords.  I’m paying a default of $0.30/click on these keywords.  For the keywords with a QS of 7, the average position is 3-3.5.  For the keywords I have the QS of 10 with, I’m paying no more, but the average position is 1.5.  This means I can drop my CPC for the QS 10 keywords and pay much less for the same position as the other keywords.
• And for a third client who has an AdWords campaign with particularly pricey keywords, I have one ad group with a mix of keywords.  The keywords with a QS of 7 require a price of $1.50-2.50 per click to appear on the first page.  The keywords with a QS of 10 have a first page bid of $0.55-0.85.  This is about one third of the cost.

Now that you have an idea of what kind of impact a proper QS has, you should be motivated to make sure you’re sending searchers who type in certain keywords to the appropriate pages.

To check and see what the QS is for your keywords, you want to go in to customize your columns in your ad group.  In the new beta AdWords interface, you click on the button on the far right above your keywords inside of the ad group that’s labeled “Filters and views” and then click “Customize columns”.  Here you’ll activate the “Quality score” column and then arrange it to where you want it.

If you still are using the older AdWords interface, then when you’re inside the ad group, you click on the “Customize columns” text on the far right side, above the keywords.  Then click on “Show Quality Score”.  In this interface the QS column will show things like “Poor”, “OK”, or “Great”.  To get the exact figure for your QS, mouse over the icon with a magnifying glass and a triangle right by each keyword.  Then a display will come up giving you the exact figure of the QS for that word, as well as information about whether or not your ad is showing for that keyword, and why.

By properly breaking your keywords into appropriate ad groups, you can put up ads to send the visitors to appropriate pages.  This will help your conversions, reduce your cost by increasing your Quality Score, and also help you customize your ad copy appropriately to increase your CTR.  Trying to increase your QS is good for various reasons, but I’d highly recommend understanding all of this to improve your AdWords experience.

Related Posts

1. Basics on Quality Score – What It Is
2. Some Recent Google AdWords Updates
3. AdWords Basics – A PPC Tutorial

Brad Callen is an SEO guru and a PPC guru (as well as one of my heroes).  He’s released a new product for Google AdWords.  It plugs into Firefox as a plugin and allows you to do a few things.

It works any time you do a Google search, and it affects the “Sponsored links” results.  One nice perk he’s put in is an option to show the destination URLs for the paid ads.  Now not everyone realizes this, but every time you click on one of these ads, the person/company who placed that ad has to pay a certain amount.  Hence the term “pay per click”.  The option he put in lets you check out their pages without making the advertiser pay.  This is just polite, but lets you learn from other marketers who may be bidding on your terms, when you can check their landing pages.

But the nice thing, the huge perk of this tool is a little “View Keywords” button underneath every ad.  When you click this, it displays every keyword that that advertiser is bidding on.  I’ll let that sink in a moment.  Yes, every keyword – this means that you can see all keywords that any one advertiser is bidding on.  You can use this information to add new keywords to your own PPC campaign, use those keywords to test out for conversions in a particular ad group.  There’s a good chance the keywords that experienced advertisers are bidding on are converting keywords, and you can learn quickly from this.

Yes, it’s a little sneaky.  You’re taking all the work that the other advertisers did to do their keyword research and learn what keywords convert, and you’re just jumping past all that work and getting a list of keywords.  But it’s legit – and there’s nothing illegal about it.

Brad’s decided to go ahead and give this tool away.  I’ll go ahead and forewarn you, he does do an upsell, but the basic functionality of the tool are all present in the free version.  If you have Firefox and do any PPC at all (or just want to see what kind of things PPC advertisers are bidding on), it may be something you want to check out.  The name of Brad’s new plugin is PPC Web Spy.

If you do check it out, let me know what you think, and if it gets you new conversions.  I already got it myself, and I’ll definitely be using it to try advancing my own AdWords campaigns.

Related Posts

1. How To Improve Quality Score For AdWords
2. Some Recent Google AdWords Updates
3. AdWords Basics – A PPC Tutorial

At a start, Google AdWords looks like an advertising dream.  You put in your keywords, choose what you’re willing to pay per click, and then let the traffic come flooding in.  In reality, most people don’t know what they’re getting into; often not until it’s too late, and a lot of money has been spent.

One of most basic elements of AdWords that you need to be aware of is the different keyword matching options.  To begin, you need to make sure you have your ad groups broken into separate categories (so you can have targeted ads and keywords), but that’s a different topic.  For each ad group, you’ll want to have your keyword matching options carefully selected.

There are four different keywords matching options in Google AdWords: broad match, phrase match, exact match, and negative match.  They can all be used together, but don’t need to all be used.

The broad match is what the “default” option is.  If you enter a basic keyword or keyword phrase, it’s shown in your list as a broad match.  This means any match to any of the words in your keyword phrase will cue that keyword.  Your ad will show.  The search phrase can have the same words in a different order, the same order, or in some cases, even contain completely different words (based on what Google thinks the words are related to).  So if you’ve put in the phrase “buy dog food” (with no quotes), the search phrases “buy dog food”, “dog food buy”, “buy Alpo dog food”, and “where to buy dog food” will all trigger this keyword.

The phrase match is entered by using quotes.  So you put your keywords in with quotes around them, this is known as a phrase match.  It will only be triggered by searches that have that exact phrase in the search, uninterrupted.  If there’s an extra word in the middle, it won’t be cued.  So “buy dog food” will be triggered for the phrases “buy dog food” and “where to buy dog food”, but not “dog food buy” and “buy Alpo dog food”.

The exact match is entered using brackets.  You put your keywords inside brackets to look for exactly that keyword phrase, nothing more, nothing less.  For [buy dog food] in your keywords, only “buy dog food” in the search will trigger it.  “where to buy dog food”, “dog food buy”, and “buy Alpo dog food” will NOT be caught by that keyword.

And a negative match is done in one of two ways.  You can either put in your negative keyword with a negative sign in front of it, or else put it inside your Campaign’s negative keywords group.  Either way, a negative match works the same way as the other three – you can either have broad, phrase, or exact.  Just put a dash in front of them.  So if you entered -”buy dog food” (with quotes), any search with that phrase in it will NOT show your ad.  This is something that should be done often, especially if there are particular words you don’t want your ad showing for.  Common ones people tend to use are “free” and “crack” (the latter especially for software).

This is just a basic tutorial on PPC with Google’s AdWords, but they’re some of the most crucial details in making sure your own pay per click campaign is set up properly.

Related Posts

1. How To Improve Quality Score For AdWords
2. Basics on Quality Score – What It Is
3. Some Recent Google AdWords Updates

Google themselves have actually gone on and approved of this.  For anyone sitting on an empty domain, paying the yearly fee and having nothing but dreams of what giant business you’ll build on it can get old.  Google’s gone and offered to help out with parked domains using AdSense.

For anyone who isn’t completely sure what AdSense is, Google AdSense is one of the easiest ways to put advertisements on your site.  You sign up, set up your ad banner specifications, then place the code where you’d like the ads to appear in your site.  You earn money for every click a visitor to your site administers to the ads you’ve placed.

However, it isn’t all perfect – Google gets rather upset if you put AdSense on your site and then click on it many times yourself or have your friends do it.  Repeated clicks from the same source will flag a warning to them, and they can ban you from AdSense.  Permanently.

That, and any time someone clicks an ad, sure you earn money, but you also lose your visitor.  They’ve gone off somewhere else, and you’ve lost that potential client/customer.  Some people are fine with this, thinking that if the person clicked an ad they were leaving anyway – but there are often instances where an ad catches the eye of a visitor who would otherwise have spent more time on your site.  If you don’t want to distract your visitors from your own site content, I’d recommend minimizing your ads, be it through AdSense or otherwise.

However – having a domain that is unused is not going to lose you any visitors to a quality site.  So why not earn money through it?  If you have some domains that you’re not using and want to earn a bit of money from them, you can check out Google’s domain parking AdSense option.  As it IS Google, they’ll walk you through the how’s and to’s of everything, it’s pretty straightforward.

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