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!

1. VBA Basics

To program visual basic for excel we need to define our own functions and create buttons or define actions that initiate them.

To create a new vba function for a button-click, create a button using the ‘Control Toolbox’ / ‘Developer’-'Insert’ menu and double click it. This will automatically create an on-click sub program for you to work in.  You also need to declare some variables to work with:

Dim inty1,inty2,inty3 as Integer

For the purpose of the macros I introduce you will only need the Integer (number) and String types, this allows us to load numerical and text values from Excel cells and perform functions on them without having to re-read them into excel. If you want to know more about the different number types then check out this MSDN article (essential if you plan to use numbers in the tens of thousands).

To reference an excel cell you can call the Cells function specifying the row and column i.e.:

Cells(Row,Column)

so:

inty1 = Cells(1,2)

would reference the cell B1 and loads its contents into inty1.

You will also find it useful to loop through a range of cells, for example if you wanted to perform a function on columns A & B (such as checking them against a complex criteria) and place the result in Column C. There are several loop types but to keep things simple we can work with FOR loops, for these you need to specify what criteria you wish to loop for i.e.

For inty1 = 3 To 15
  Cells(1,Inty1)=Cells(1,Inty1)+5

Next

In the above example you see that we can use inty1 to sequentially set the value of some cells, the Next keyword clarifies the end of the For loop where the program returns to the start and increments inty1. Note that the Cells function can be used to set the value of a cell as well as read it.

2. Function: Compare Two Large Ranges For Subsets

We are designing a macro that will perform the same as the excel Find() function for each cell in a column to find if the contents of that cell are in any of the cells in an adjacent column. For small data sets, especially of the same size there are easier and quicker ways of making this comparison but as soon as you hit a few dozen rows and columns of different sizes then a macro becomes handy. This macro is very simplified and will only look for occuraces of X in Y (not Y in X) but is incredibly easy to fix and modify, for occurances of Y in X simply swap the input columns around!

Create the above layout in a new sheet [click to enlarge], 4 columns have been coloured in, a button created and 2 blank fields outlined in the centre. The first 2 columns are our inputs and the last 2 columns are our outputs, the macro will explain their function more.

Private Sub Activate_Click

  // sub = sub-phrase
  // com = comparison

  Dim subRow, listRow, hashSubRows, hashListRows, outputRow as Integer

  outputRow = 2 

  // skip over the column titles and output at row2

  hashSubRows = Cells(1, 4)+1 

  // Read in the number of sub rows and convert to Row#

  hashListRows = Cells(2, 4)+1 

  // Read in the number of list rows and convert to Row#

  For subRow = 2 To (hashSubRows)
  For comRow = 2 To (hashListRows)
  If (InStr(Cells(comRow, 2), Cells(subRow, 1)) > 0) Then

  // InStr is similar to Find(), if it returns >0
  // - that’s a positive hit!

  Cells(outputRow, 10) = Cells(subRow, 1)
  //Write column1 to output

  Cells(outputRow, 11) = Cells(comRow, 2)
  //Write column2 to output

  outputRow = outputRow + 1
  // Write to the next row next time

  End If
  Next
  Next
End Sub

A seasoned programmer will quickly realise that there is room for improvement in this macro, we could easily:

• automatically detect the end of the range and not need to enter the number of rows
• automatically remove duplicates from the output
• clear the output columns before the macro starts

I leave implementing these to you!

3. Directly Call Excel Functions Within A Macro

A whiz on Excel but lost as to which VBA function to use? Most Excel functions can be called directly within a Macro i.e.

Application.WorksheetFunction.Sum(inty1,inty2)

4. Function: Substitute Multiple Different Values Into All The Cells of a Range

Does this look familiar?

=Substitute(substitute(Substitute(substitute(Substitute(substitute(Substitute(substitute(….

As far as I know Excel 2003 allowed eight substitutions if you had the patience to write them.

Let’s put point #3 into practice. As before, replicate the below template [click to enlarge] and code.

Dim subRow, comRow, outputRow As Long
  outputRow = 2
  For subRow = 2 To (Cells(1, 4) + 1)
  For comRow = 2 To (Cells(2, 4) + 1)
  If (InStr(Cells(comRow, 2), Cells(subRow, 1)) > 0) Then
    Cells(outputRow, 5) = Cells(subRow, 1)
    Cells(outputRow, 6) = Cells(comRow, 2)
    outputRow = outputRow + 1
  End If
  Next
Next

Notice how we can refer to Cells directly, although this wouldn’t be ideal for hundreds of substitutions it makes for a very short macro.

5. The Automatically Refreshing Pivot

Create your pivot and get your layout how you like it, right click the pivots sheet and click view code, from the drop down list select your worksheet and the sub “Worksheet_Activate()” which allows you to specify a function to run every time the worksheet is opened.

Private Sub Worksheet_Activate()
  PivotTables("PivotTable1").Refresh
End Sub

This works best if you play with the Pivot options to disable ‘AutoFormat’ (which resets the layout every refresh – very irritating) and enable ‘AutoSort’ on your desired field. Using this method I prefer to make “Templates” – a blank but formatted excel book with an automatically refreshing pivot on the 2nd sheet with pretty colours and large fonts which will turn your weekly input data into something fancy with minimal intervention.

A final comment on pivots: If there is only one table on your worksheet then you can let your pivot see the entire worksheet and simply filter out blanks, to do this enter $A:$Z into the range selection at the start of the pivot wizard. Remember to replace $Z with a column thats way past your last column, you can re-arrange your table and the macro/pivot will still work but inserting blank columns or renaming columns used in your pivot will cause errors.

6. Function: Create All Combinations of W&X&Y&Z

This macro will create a brute-force list for all combinations of the inputs, Create the below template [click to enlarge]:

Enter ‘1′ for blank columns and the number of rows to read for inputted columns.

Dim col1Row, col2Row, col3Row, col4Row, noCol1Rows, noCol2Rows, noCol3Rows, noCol4Rows, outputRow As Integer
  outputRow = 6

  noCol1Rows = Cells(1, 2)
  noCol2Rows = Cells(2, 2)
  noCol3Rows = Cells(3, 2)
  noCol4Rows = Cells(4, 2)

  For col1Row = 6 To (noCol1Rows + 5)
  For col2Row = 6 To (noCol2Rows + 5)
  For col3Row = 6 To (noCol3Rows + 5)
  For col4Row = 6 To (noCol4Rows + 5)

  Trim(
  Cells(outputRow, 5) = Cells(col1Row, 1) & " " & Cells(col2Row, 2) & " "  &  Cells(col3Row, 3) & " " & Cells(col4Row, 4)
  )

  outputRow = outputRow + 1

  Next
  Next
  Next
  Next

You can carefully remove some of the FOR loops to reduce the comparison to just Z&Y, Z&Y&W or insert more loops to your hearts desire but remember to create all of the necessary variables and carefully change the template if you want extra loops.

7. Some Extra Information

You may find your large comparison macros take a long time to run, Excel may be refreshing the page every single time a calculation is made, to combat this toggle screen updating at the start of your sub:

Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Application.xlCalculationManual

And then resume at the end if desired:

Application.ScreenUpdating = True
Application.xlCalculationAutomatic

Happy Macroing!

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.

1. Use Unique Promo Codes On PPC Landing Pages

This can be achieved by tagging your urls with a CGI parameter, such as “?land=adwords”. With a bit of code you can get this code printed on the page, as “Promo:adwords” in the footer will work fine. When customers call and place an order make sure everyone is trained to ask them for their “promo” code, which gets stored with an order placed over the phone.

Furthermore, you could be a little more cryptic with your promo codes if you want to hide what you’re doing from your customers. Using custom promotional codes works well if you are running large PPC campaigns with hundreds of keywords and landing pages.

2. Use A Unique Telephone Number On Landing Pages

This is a very simple but effective technique: switch the telephone number based on the referring site. If you wanted to be thorough you could get a telephone number for MSN, Yahoo or AdWords. This method is more suitable for sites offering a limited product range and bid on a small range of keywords.

3. Use A Pay Per Call Service

Set up a new telephone number and then put that number on your landing page. Pay Per Call services come with powerful stats so you can measure just how many calls you have received. Also using a service such as Ingenio means you only pay for phone call leads from new customers calling your business.

4. Track Sales With Specialist Telephone Call Conversion Software

Choose a solution such as that provided by ClickPath to track all conversions generated from your online advertising, including phone calls, and tie them back to the exact keyword or ad source.

5. Use An IVR Phone System

Harnessing the power of an IVR phone system can take the headaches out of getting your staff to record the lead source. You could add an extra menu on your phone system asking people for a promo code that is unique to the referring site.

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.

Filters

Item Type
Allows you to select the Google Base feed to analyse.

Froogle is just one part of Google Base (which also contains books, scholar, recipes, vehicles etc.) If you’ve only got a Froogle feed then this isn’t an selectable option, otherwise you’ll need to choose Products to view Froogle data.

Target Country
If you are submitting items to multiple countries, you have the option to filter by country.

Destination
Allows you to select between Click data and Impression data

Items Graph

This is a great way to see how many of your feed items are inactive compared to your total feed. Most large Google product feeds will have a few inactive items due to various reasons. We’ll definitely write a post some time about how to minimise this and ensure your feed is firing on all cyclinders.

The blue line shows your total amount of items in your feed, and the red line shows your active items. As you reduce errors on your feed items you’ll see the lines get closer together.

Performance Graph

Anyone familiar with Google Analytics will feel right at home with these graphs. You can set the date range with either the Zoom function or the familiar Google Analytics date sliders under the graphs. You can also hover your mouse over the graph to get specific values for a given day.

Froogle Clicks (set the Destination drop-down menu to Search)

The graph shows you how many people clicked on your products along a timeline.

Sharp dips are a good indication of broken feeds or competitor activity.
Gradual dips and rises are a good indication of seasonal demand or price competitiveness
Sharp rises are a good indication you are doing something right, or your competition have dropped out.

Froogle Impressions (set the Destination drop-down menu to API)

This graph is as close to genuine ad impressions as you can get. It’s actually how many times the Google API returned an item from your Froogle feed. This means the API impressions will probably include all automated queries run by scrapers and bots.

For Google, publically releasing specific values of this kind of data is almost unheard of. However let’s not look a $25 billion gift horse in the mouth – we can use this impression and click data to really optimise our Froogle feed, and monitor the changes both on-site (via web analytics) and now off-site (via the Froogle Performance Dashboard).

Performance Details Download

If you’re a data-head like me, you can download a CSV of all your performance data and load it into Excel (or your favourite spreadsheet program) for even more fun.

A quick warning about the Froogle CSV data download however…

View details about your content and its performance as an average of the last 7 days. Select an item type or data feed to download a report containing the daily metrics for the 1,000 most-clicked items.

You can choose to download by data feed or by Google Base product type (you’ll want Products for Froogle). When you view the report in Excel you’ll notice alternating columns for clicks and API impressions – it’s a little difficult to read at first until you get used to it.

The reports are a little buggy at the moment (sometimes showing clicks but zero impressions) and I’ve emailed Google hoping to get some feedback on this issue which I’ll post later – remember that it’s a new release and the Google Base team will be treating it as a beta release in true Google style.

How can this optimise your Froogle feed?

Here’s just a few ways to improve your product feed with the new Froogle Performance Dashboard:

Use the Items Graph to monitor and reduce wasted feed items.

Regularly eyeball the Froogle clicks on the Performance Graph to spot indications of competitor activity and price sensitivity issues.

Start collecting Froogle click data now so that next year you have historical seasonal performance.

Keep informed of your Froogle impressions to optimise your feed titles and descriptions for better visibility.

I love Froogle. Optimising natural search campaigns is my bread and butter, however there’s always the occupational frustration that SEO usually doesn’t produce instant results. Every marketer enjoys seeing immediate growth and revenue from their work – both for their clients and for themselves – and Froogle is a great platform to get some quick wins for everyone.

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.

Assess the damage

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.

Temporary algorithm shift

The search engine algorithms change every couple of days and often a drop in ranking is nothing to worry about. Micro-managing your search positions will just add stress and knee-jerk reactions to your digital marketing, so give it a couple of days to settle unless the drop is significant enough to hit your sales.

Check Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools will show you when your site was last spidered by Googlebot, and any problems it encountered. Investigate any errors to see if it’s indicative of a larger problem with your website. There’s also a chance it might tell you if you’ve been flagged as spam.

Have you changed anything?

Check with your designers and web developers if anything has been recently implemented. Often they roll out new code, page redirects, clever things with user-agents or IP addresses etc. and don’t think the marketing team needed to know. Find out what changed and change it back or fix the offending elements.

Make it your company policy to keep everyone aware of new website developments as a matter of course.

Check if you’ve been penalised as spam

Sometimes this is easy to determine and other times it’s not so obvious. Generally if you see your entire website drop around 30 places in Google’s search results for a number of keywords then it’s a fair assumption you’ve been given a slap on the wrist for gaming the system too aggressively. Stop what you’re doing until things settle; after that take it a bit easier in your grey hat tactics.

However, if Google decides to drop your website from the index entirely you need to act quickly, as getting back into the search results can be a slow burn. SEOmoz suggests asking yourself these questions before trying to diagnose:

• Has the site been buying or selling links in the past?
• Has the site ever cloaked or hidden content?
• Is it possible that someone’s hacked the site?
• Is the site restricting or redirecting robot access in some way?

If the answer to these is yes, here’s what you need to do:

• Check Google Webmaster Tools for any penalisation messages
• Stop cloaking your site (serving different content to humans and search engines)
• Drop any paid links from your website
• Cut loose any inbound links from your spammy blogs, microsites, and shady global footer links on your other websites
• Remove any keyword stuffing or hidden text
• Make sure your users aren’t bombarded with adsense links disguised as content
• Request re-inclusion from Google

Check your robots.txt file

It’s entirely possible you’ve restricted the friendly spiders from finding your content. Check www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt for any rules that are too wide. Sometimes you can accidentally restrict all spiders in an attempt to restrict specific spiders and bots like the waybackmachine or third-party scrapers. Google Webmaster Tools has a neat little robot.txt tester so you can develop your spider restrictions in a safe environment before setting them live.

Competition

If you’re in an industry where none of the players have a clue about SEO then be ever watchful for them getting clever. It’s easy to think you’ve got the search results dominated if you’re the only one putting any effort into your SEO strategy. A big wake-up call to one of your more formidable competitors could drop your rankings as they enter the game guns blazing.

Duplicate Content

The Google algorithm tries very hard to avoid results that have the same content. It tries to work out the canonical version and places the rest in the supplemental index never to be viewed by the majority of the public. However unlikely, it’s always worth checking if you’re running out of options.

To quote Google directly…

“… If you find that another site is duplicating your content by scraping (misappropriating and republishing) it, it’s unlikely that this will negatively impact your site’s ranking in Google search results pages. If you do spot a case that’s particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA request to claim ownership of the content and request removal of the other site from Google’s index …”

You can check by typing this into Google…
"an original sentence from your website" -site:www.yourdomain.com

Devalued inbound links

Only you and your SEO consultant knows if you’ve been a little too happy with your link buying. Check the other sites that get similar links and see if they’ve been hit too – it might be worth cancelling some regularly payment agreements and putting the money to better use like writing original and compelling content.

Whilst kind of difficult to prove, it’s widely understood that the search engines can, and have in the past, decided a particular authority website no longer carries the same level of credibility that it once did.

This is definitely more documented on cases where the inbound links were purchased or rented. Don’t be surprised if swathes of your hard-earned links are suddenly worth far less, especially if you’ve been particularly aggressive in your link building strategy; buying too many at once is a good way to raise red flags.

Hosting/server/domain issues

Coming back to your web developers changing technical things – it can be worth a quick check to see if your site has moved servers, domains or nameservers recently. Whenever you move the site be ready for a thump to your search rankings.

Make sure you redirect anything you leave behind via a 301 permanent redirect: that should pass the vast majority of link juice (page rank) over to the new location and serves as a valuable instruction to the spiders.

In conclusion

A serious drop in rankings is usually down to one of three things…

Someone, somewhere changed something
Find out what was changed and either change it back quickly, or fix it.

You’ve stepped too far into blackhat SEO tactics
Remove as much incriminating material and links as possible, and request re-inclusion.

The environment in which you are competing has changed
Check for savvy newcomers to the rankings, and assess whether any paid links have been devalued.