Too many marketers take a ‘good enough’ approach when it comes to their Google Adwords campaigns.
I recently had a phone call with a client who had over 4,000 words of unorganized content on his landing page and couldn’t understand why no one was purchasing his service. When I encouraged him to change his landing page, [...]

Over at Takeitinhouse.com we have an interview with Melanie Mitchell, VP of Marketing at Folio Investments, Inc. She discusses her nearly nine years in search marketing, points out some great reasons for educating the entire company about SEO, and shares insights on in-house search marketing teams and their role in the company.

1. Buying unrelated or overly broad keywords defeats the purpose of targeted advertising. The whole point is to be able to more appropriately match your advertising to people who might buy your product/service. Because it’s unrelated you’ll almost assuredly spend more for lower quality traffic annihilating all of the advantages.
2. PPC isn’t something you can set and forget. Because it’s targeted advertising it ebbs and flows with the tide of the web. What is a relevant key word today may not seem so relevant a year, six months, or even one month from now. A year ago the word “twitter” meant: “to utter a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird.” Now it’s the hottest social scene on the web. Effective PPC takes time, a bit of know-how and a lot of elbow grease.

Over the coming months, Google will be rolling out a new way to target your ads on the content network called Interest-Based Advertising.  It’s basically behavioral targeting with a slight twist that I’ll talk about later in the post.
Up until now, advertisers could use the Google AdWords content network to target their audience in a [...]

Over the past few years, when working with clients to improve their pay-per-click campaigns, one of my first pieces of advice was to opt out of the Content Network.
From 2005 to 2007, it seemed the Content Network was just a black hole.   By default, a percentage of your spend was spent in the Content [...]

Back in the first post of 2008 on this blog, I predicted that 2008 would be the year of Reputation Management.  Given the trends we’d seen in customer referrals, it seemed like a pretty safe bet. 
Over the course of the year, we did indeed gain some buzz monitoring / reputation management contracts, which we successfully [...]

In my last post, I referenced a magazine ad from an older issue of Business 2.0 (October 24, 2000) describing how interesting it is to time travel BACK in time to get a ‘gut-check’ of the present and maybe, even look into the future.
Perhaps, more interesting than that ad, in my journey back in time, [...]

This started out as a very different post.  The plan was to just explain all of the reasons why using a tool that automates your pay-per-click decisions and changes is a very bad idea.  The plan was to explain using examples of nightmares, horror stories, as well as serious debates we had about the subject [...]

Over the past few years working with many clients to understand how effective their pay-per-click campaigns are (and often figure out how to get them to perform better), I have compiled my top 10 list of ways that many marketers blow their budgets on PPC.
1. Ignoring Match Type Options – When you just purchase key [...]

There are few places where I feel more stupid than in an auto parts store.  Because…when I am in an auto parts store that means that there is something that is VERY basic in my car that needs fixing.
I hate knowing that everyone in the store knows more about everything in the store than me.  [...]