Poor PPC Budget Control will Kill your Search Marketing Efforts

June 2, 2010

An easy way to screw up a paid search campaign is by neglecting the daily budgets. The daily spend budgets are not merely a “set once” task, but part of the optimisation process just as much as keyword bid management and ad copy testing.
Let’s say you’ve got a brand new campaign to launch in a [...]

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AdWords Quality Score – Not all CTR is created equal

May 20, 2010

It’s very clear that CTR is the dominant factor when Google is deciding the adwords quality score. Therefore it’s key to frequently monitor and optimise the CTR. If you’re using the standard Adwords interface, you are however treated to a blended CTR column that doesn’t provide much granular insights.

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Speaking at SMX Advanced London

May 14, 2010

A quick note to share that I’m speaking at SMX Advanced London on Monday 17th May. I’ll be on the panel for the session Search ad Quality, under the microscope. Looking forward to it!

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A bold step towards Affiliate Commission Attribution modelling

May 12, 2010

Analysing the true value of each affiliate that contributed towards a sale is not a simple task. Great effort has been put in by a team from Vodafone, Top10 and Affiliate Window, lead by Julia Stent, to analyse the Vodafone affiliate program in an effort to develop a better system compared to the existing last click model.
Attribution models for affiliate marketing is [...]

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Google Modified Broadmatch Initial Analysis

May 11, 2010

Google just launched a fourth keyword match type to it’s pay-per-click platform adwords. Why?
The latest addition is called “modified broad” and sits neatly between phrase match and the traditional broadmatch keyword type. By using the modifier “+” in front of a specific broadmatch keyword in a phrase, it will only show against searches that include that keyword (including [...]

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Mobile Paid Search Marketing – The Wait is Over

May 6, 2010

We’ve heard it several years before – this is the year of the mobile. Whether or not 2010 is it, the fact of the matter is that with the iPhone and Android platform, mobile search is quickly becoming a most-do tactic.
At a recent IAB UK seminar focusing on Mobile search, between Google and Yahoo, there [...]

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A Google Doodle Rant on Pseudo News

April 23, 2010

Warning: Friday rant. Lately I’ve noticed that the Google doodle is frequently featured in articles listed in the Google one-box news results. How relevant are these pseudo news?
For example today is St George’s day, which is celebrated in typical Google fashion with a doodle on the home page.

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McAfee Update Failure a Missed PPC and Social Opportunity

April 22, 2010

As the news of the Windows-crashing McAfee update is spreading across the globe, and the bad publicity is rising to the top of the organic results and Twitter is getting negative updates every few seconds*, there is little to be heard from the company. Wouldn’t this be a great opportunity to use search for communications?

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Google Webmaster Tools and Social Search Mess

April 12, 2010

The top search queries report on Webmaster Tools just became fairly useless due to the social search functionality. Just logging into my account I see that I’m supposedly ranking as number 13 and 14 for the keywords “analytics google” and “google analytic“. That’s a truth that requires definition.
In the regular results, I would have been [...]

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Should you take the Google Adwords and Analytics Exams?

April 7, 2010

Google is rolling out updated exams for its popular adwords platform, and also analytics package. But do you actually learn anything worthwhile?
The short answer is – it depends. At the moment of writing the only two exams publicly available are the AdWords fundamentals exam and Google Analytics Individual Qualification exam.
Update 2010-04-12: my public test record [...]

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