Hot ideas for the web.
October 23rd, 2008 — Search Engine Marketing
With large PPC customers comes large problems! Manipulating keywords and producing new combinations is great when you have 50 keywords, when working with 50,000 keywords the PPC professional needs to make a choice between getting RSI and getting their macro on!
With very little knowledge you can brute force a lot of simple problems using macros, here is a quick introduction to macro semantics and some functions that PPC has called for!
September 16th, 2008 — Search Engine Marketing
How do you measure the true return on PPC ad spend when phone leads or phone sales are not being taken into account?
If we take a typical e-commerce store as an example, up to 35% of sales can be taken over the telephone. Accurately attributing these sales can make a big difference to how you optimise your PPC campaigns, and have an effect on the overall ROI from paid search marketing.
Most web analytics solutions do a great job of tracking where sales come from, be it from organic search traffic, direct type-in traffic or PPC traffic. However, the source of telephone orders is one area that site owners often choose to ignore because it’s difficult to track.
Here’s a few ways to track PPC traffic that generates orders over the phone.
July 31st, 2008 — Search Engine Marketing
Google have finally released a new Froogle Performance Tool which shows a host of useful data about your Froogle impressions, clicks and feed items. You can find it by logging into your Google Base account and clicking on the new Performance section.
Google Product Search, or Froogle as it’s far better known, is a price comparison site with a big difference – it’s completely free. This makes is an attractive channel to reach your customers; all you need is a product feed.
Like so many other digital marketers, I’ve been waiting on this tool to optimise Google Product Search for ages – I’d even gone as far as to previously develop a dirty Excel hack that queried Froogle data. The new froogle performance tool now provides all this data in a choice of slick graphs or CSV downloads.
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July 8th, 2008 — Search Engine Marketing
If your website has suffered a drop in rankings recently don’t panic, read through this guide and get a better picture of what is happening behind the scenes. Prepare yourself for any future search result hiccups with our 10 Emergency SEO First Aid Tips and avoid paying someone else to diagnose the problem.
Check site:www.yourdomain.com on Google to see if your website is still in the index.
If you see nothing at all or just your homepage then it’s serious – you need to work fast to salvage your online presence, especially if your business is e-commerce. This is a good indication that your site has been banned from the Google index… have you been a naughty boy?
If you see lots of your pages in the Google index then you can breathe a small sigh of relief – it’s unlikely to require surgery, just a course of antibiotics and a bit of physio. Search for your domain name (but without the site: prefix) and if you’re not there you’ve probably had your wrist slapped for dodgy SEO tactics. Consider it a gentleman’s warning that your rankings have plummeted, and you should take the opportunity to fix things as soon as you can.
If you are in both the index and the normal search results, but you’ve still lost significant rankings on quite a few keywords, then it’s likely Google has devalued a bunch of high profile links to your website. Check any under-the-table paid links you might have purchased. If they’re of no value anymore then put the money to better use.