August 31st, 2010 admin
Some companies go to a sweat lodge for a corporate team event, but we just go to the Minnesota State Fair on a day with a heat index of 100 degrees. Here’s a few photos, and we’re working on some type of photoshop magic to get us all on the Giant Slide at the same time.
From left: Mike Grinberg, Peter Quale, Zac Stafford, Nina Hale, Leslie Gibson, Tami McBrady, Annie Bunkers, Lee Ann Villella, Matthew Knutson. Present but not pictured: Allison McMenimen, Zinda Schaefer. Not present: Rob Silas, Jenna Williamson, Sherry Karpe, Stephany Wiestling, Kelly Burkhart.
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August 23rd, 2010 admin
Recently Google changed their certification guidelines to be a Certified Partner. To become individually certified, a person has to manage an account for a period of time, and pass two tests: fundamental search, and advanced search. A Certified Partner has to have more than one Certified Individual and manage a higher spend. Under the old rules, to be a Certified Partner, the spend threshhold was $100,000 in spend over 90 days. This has been reduced to $10,000 over 90 days, which I think is wrong. The idea for being a certified company, I think, is that it should show a certain level of management, more indicative in the higher spend. For the record, as of 8/23/2010, we managed $858,856.57 in media spend for clients in the last 90 days. Between Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Facebook we manage approximately $4.5 million in annual spend on behalf of our clients.
Under the new rules, the tests are harder, and you now have to get a higher score to pass (85% and 80% respectively on the two tests). In the old days, you had to get 70% on the one test, which was still pretty hard, or at least stressful.
All the staff managing paid placement (SEM / PPC) are certified and have passed the new set of tests. That’s Nina, Zac, Tami, Annie, and Mike who are each Google AdWords Qualified individuals. This of course makes us a Google AdWords Certified Company, which we have been since 2007. Our other staff focuses on SEO, reporting, link building, writing, and other elements that don’t require them to take these tests.
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August 19th, 2010 Nina
I’m not going to be all that sad when Yahoo Search Marketing goes away, mainly because the interface is such a pain to use. But they have a great feature which is fantastic for big brands that get poached on thier trademarks all the time.
A small logo on the search ads that says “official site.” Hello! I wish Google Adwords would have this.
Posted in PPC, SEM | No Comments »
August 16th, 2010 admin
Have we mentioned how much we love being able to accurately report view-through conversions?
View-through conversions allow you to get a better understanding of the effectiveness of your display advertising. If a user sees your display ad on the content network and doesn’t click on it, but completes a conversion within the next 30 days, voila, you get a view-through conversion.
If the user had clicked on the display ad, it would be reported as a regular conversion.
Remember: When you are running display ads ALWAYS enable de-duplication. This way you’ll avoid double reporting if a user sees your display ad on a site, and converts from another ad in the search results. Then there’s no need to worry!
Another thing to note is that your conversions will drop after enabling the de-dupe feature, generally by 25-35%, but simply because they aren’t being double counted or inflated.
Tags: content network, conversions, display advertising, reporting, SEM
Posted in Google, SEM | 2 Comments »
August 12th, 2010 admin
How obvious is this best practice for social media? After you retweet / share / post something, TechCrunch added a plug-in that recommended that I follow them. It’s so basic but I don’t see it very often. And D’oh! we’re not doing it right now either.
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July 22nd, 2010 Nina
Google is rolling out a new layout for image search, and it’s nicely improved. About 7%+ of all searches are for images, and while people are willing to go deeper (considering more results before making a choice), the top results are going to be chosen much more frequently. It’s much more user friendly: with long scrolling pages filled with images and tons of options to narrow your search. I like the mouse-over the best, where it expands the image, with the originating website, size, and format.
And importantly it has sponsored links. So for home improvement, fashion and hair cuts, photography and portraits, how-to and other very popular types of searches, this can be a fantastic new avenue for advertisers.
What’s a marketer to do to take advantage of this?
- Advertise
- Always name your image appropriately so it can be categorized accurately
- Determine important searches that could relate to your products and services
- Make multiple sizes
- Make multiple colors
- Line drawings? Clip art?
- Include a watermark or product name
- Photograph your product being used
Posted in Google, images | No Comments »
July 20th, 2010 admin
It’s official. Microsoft announced testing Bing search results in Yahoo! search. (http://bit.ly/ac89Ob) From our Minneapolis office, we confirm the testing is well underway. In a handful of random searches we found exactly the same sites ranking in exactly the same position and displaying exactly the same page titles and meta description lengths.
Previously, Yahoo allowed a few more characters displayed, but now both search engines are cutting page titles at the 65-70 character range, and chopping off descriptions around 165-175 characters.
In terms of the actual size of Bing and Yahoo! indices, the numbers are reported as different– but they are close.
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July 13th, 2010 admin
Recently Google AdWords released another feature to give you insight into your account’s performance. Its goal: to show you how some of your performance metrics compare to other advertisers Google has determined offer the same goods or services as you.
Per Google:
‘Analyze competition’ examines your account’s activity over the past two weeks and lists categories that represent the products or services you’re advertising. Categories are based on actual Google.com search terms and are matched up against your keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with your account, you’ll see a bar graph, which shows your individual performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in the same category.
What it means to you? We think it has great future potential, if it includes more insight into what might help you move up the chain. Useful questions it could help you answer in the future:
- Have you forgotten major keywords?
- Are you not bidding enough?
- What about the Quality Scores of the competition?
- Is the competition getting more or less business than you as a result of their PPC advertising?
CTR is a pet metric of ours, but beating your competitors’ CTR doesn’t necessarily have much impact on your bottom line. We say it’s business as usual, though high marks in the Analyze Competition feature may give you some nice bragging rights. For now, it’s a nice way to do a reality check on your impressions, clicks, CTR and Avg. Position (the four metrics available in the report).
Posted in Analytics, Google | No Comments »
June 22nd, 2010 admin
When Google came out for a visit last month we got hints that they might be ready to kill the "previous interface" option for finding new keywords in Google AdWords. And today (tonight we think) it seems that they did finally. There is a hint of a new backend that might be better called "nostradamo" that is linked from the new keyword interface, but it’s broken right now.
Why I liked the old version better.
- I was used to it. (lame I know, but still)
- Less broad. Now I enter a keyword and I get a huge amount of synonyms and I have to go in and uncheck the categories.
- Automatic. Hear me out here. So in the old version if you didn’t add anything into the box if would automatically give suggestions on anything that was in your ad group already. SO you could enter some placeholders in Google AdWords Editor, post them, then look for suggestions. Seems like not a big deal, but it saved time, and it felt like a lot of time. If the new interface had this one option, I think I would like it more.
- This is a big one: "Don’t show me suggestions for other keywords." This allowed you to quickly get estimated monthly searches for your previously chosen keywords. So we would settle on a set of keywords to recommend to clients, and would then want to go get number of search estimates.
There are some things I do like: The ability to drop different keywords into different ad groups. That’s nice.
And of course this comes at a bad time. There are three of us tonight working on deadlines, and we’re all sending sad and frustrated IM’s back and forth about it. You can still access the open version that isn’t tied to your account. But that means that you can’t save them into the ad group. Also the keyword tool in Editor is still working, but that works only 1 keyword at a time.
So my plea to Google: PLEASE bring back the previous interface.
Please leave comments (legitimate – we’ll ruthlessly delete spam.)
Tags: AdWords, Google, keyword tool
Posted in Google, PPC, SEM, SEO | 2 Comments »
May 27th, 2010 admin
We had one of those problems that most SEM agencies dream of having. We have clients who are running display ads on the Google Content Network whose view through conversions are in the hundreds a month. We love to report on this number, but have to add the caveat that a certain % of those conversions are actually counted elsewhere in their other search campaigns. Faces turn from happy to puzzled in a manner of seconds.
So when our Google reps were in town visiting us last week, we mentioned this problem. They looked over their shoulders to see if anybody was watching before saying, in a whisper: "This doesn’t leave this room, but we are looking into a feature that de-duplicates view-through conversions."
And sure enough, the next week we ran across this blog post on Google that talks about this exact feature.
Many of you know that view-through conversions result when users see but don’t click on a display ad. They may come back later and convert through a search ad, which would count the conversion twice. Which makes reporting nearly impossible and leads to puzzled faces.
By enabling the de-duplication feature, you exclude view-through conversions that are found in both the Search and Content networks!
Do note that the feature isn’t retroactive, and that going forward, the number of view-through conversions will drop. In the first few days of testing, we saw a 35% decrease in the number of reported view-through conversions. But what we are left with is basically 65% more conversions that we can accurately report back to our clients.
We can’t wait to see their faces.
Tags: conversions, google analytics, reporting, SEM
Posted in Analytics, Google, PPC, SEM | No Comments »
