Marketing Pilgrim and Other Useful Blogs

A crucial daily exercise in this industry is reading the daily news blogs. Staying informed of the latest news is critical in staying on top of trends and pulling together an amalgamation of insight when it comes time to take action. There are several great ones out there but one in particular has inspired me to lay down my list of favorites; Marketing Pilgrim. They are running a contest over there for $500 bucks not to mention a back link just for entering. (Must have ‘link-juice’! Not to mention I like the ‘link buying’ tactic Andy is using.) The question to be answered; “Why do I read Marketing Pilgrim?” Easy enough: to stay informed. I really like what Andy Beal has to say, it resonates with me and taps into what I...

Click Fraud Assistance – Yahoo Dupes Google

Looks like Yahoo! one upped Google once again in launching their Traffic Quality Center several days (8 to be exact) before a weak attempted launch by Google at the same thing. To Yahoos merit they have created a web site with more “bling” which explains what efforts they are taking to battle the prevalent click fraud issue surrounding cost-per-click programs and more importantly what you can do to prevent it as well. To put it bluntly; Google’s Ad Quality Resource Center is fairly lame. Aside from being a usability experts wet dream, Google’s center consists of a couple sheets put up by someone who probably got called into the manager’s office for a good talking to. While this project may be expanded upon, there is obviously a...

Google AdPreview Feature Update

Google has now made the ad preview feature MUCH easier to use. Instead of having to manipulate the URL of the page utilizing a ‘cheat sheet’ (which Google has now taken down but you can see below for a general idea…) you can now select from a drop down menu of choices to check the location of you ad/natural listing from almost anywhere in the world. For those of you not familiar with this tool what it does is allow you to check your ad position without incurring impressions. This is great when trying to preserve ad quality as your CTR does not suffer due to anxious repetitive position checks. (I recommend telling your clients to use this feature to check their ads!!) This preservation will help in keeping cost down and positions up. The Old Way...

Google Personalized PPC/CPC Results – Hurts Advertisers

I have been noticing something over the last couple of weeks in regards to rankings of paid search listings in Google and their odd propensity to show up differently in different browsers. Odd you say? Yes I say. Thinking of why this might be, the only logical conclusion I could come up with was cookies. So I decided to test it out. I took a screen shot before I deleted my Google based cookies and then one after. Here are the before and after screen shots. (Obviously this is anecdotal at this point!) Before Cookies Cleared After Cookies Cleared So Google is personalizing Paid Search results, thanks for the heads up Google. Good for advertisers? Not really. By doing this Google eliminates some listings all together, or pushes them to never-never land, thereby...

Google Analytics Gets a New Look

I must say I am pretty excited to get my hands on the new Google Analytics interface! It looks gorgeous and should make all the data mining a wee bit easier both on the eyes and on the time clock. If there is one thing that I am continually impressed about in relation to Google are the FREE tools they offer to the web community and the fact that they are attentive to these tools. From what I’ve seen (here too) there are some Ajax elements which allow of on the page restructuring as well as some enhanced reporting goodies that should help in making sense of the numbers… I received an email this morning and Google lists out some of the new features: Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export...