I am back from a wonderful, lovely, glad-I-did-it-but-glad-to-be-home sabbatical. Seriously, if you can afford to take a month or two off in your life, do it, you will not regret it. If you are curious I went to Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Bhutan and Indonesia.
But I am back, and living the sweet, sweet search engine marketing life again. New SEMcasts will be forthcoming in the next week as well as a new article on Search Engine Land, but for now, content yourself with these two articles, published in my absence:
Go Green with Your Time Recycle Your PPC Work
Inside the Big 3 Search Engine Marketing Desktop Editors
In the second article you’ll notice a lengthy editor insertion. Yahoo released a new build of their desktop tool, with more robust features (from my article you can tell they needed to), shortly after I wrote the piece, so they asked for a correction. For future releases Yahoo, you might want to let your advertisers know a big, new release is coming, or even send them an email to upgrade once its out.
Hope you all enjoyed SMX advanced, I am looking forward to catching up on all the sessions there via live blogs this week. It was just too soon after getting back to work for me to jet up there to speak or attend.
Tip of My Hat, Wag of My Finger
SEMcast #12 - Search Marketing and Acquisitions is now unleashed on the world. If you are thinking about starting another company in your space to do more ppc or buying a competitive company, check this podcast out for some advice.
Also we’ve been poking around and noticed a site getting SEO benefit out of the AdWords ads on it. We cry unfair, not cool to take my AdWords work and give the credit to someone else’s site. AdWords advertisers beware! You can read more about our beef: Google & The Infinite SEO-PPC Loop.
Tip of My Hat, Wag of My Finger adsense ads, adwords seo, ppc adsense ads, search marketing buying a company
Quite often I have a big list of keywords to add to a paid search account. One might think that the search marketing provider (Google, Yahoo, MSN) would want to make it really easy for me to add these, after all, more kwyords equals more revenue for them. And in Google it is easy (thank you AdWords Editor). However, about a quarter of the way through a long list, Yahoo invariably kicks up a securiy issue and locks me out of the account for something like half an hour. The error looks like this:
I’ve emailed my Yahoo account rep, I’ve begged and pleaded to have this stop. No such luck. In fact Yahoo contends this only happens if one or more people are logged into the account, which isn’t the case here, its just me. And no, they haven’t been able to prevent it from occurring. Annoying!
Does anyone else experience this issue?
Wag of My Finger yahoo search marketing, yahoo security error
If you’re marketing to pretty much the entire world (or even just a few countries), Google’s new geographic report is so interesting on many levels. Depending on your level of conversion reporting, it can be a powerful new optimization tool. Just last week I deselected all the countries that haven’t generated sales and have significant costs, an easy win. Another fun exercise was to compare click-through rates and traffic percentages for some of our major markets. I wish the report showed a summary versus a daily total for a time period, but for the moment I am living with it.
There was only one major gaffe I sent along to Google, apparently my ads were showing in places that I had assumed could not be targeted (meaning they aren’t listed as countries on Google’s targeting list). The report detailed traffic from ads appearing and receiving clicks from places like Cuba and Sudan, which for several legal reasons is not good. When I sent along the report, it was universally acknowledged as not good, so I am sure the problem is being fixed.
In the meantime its easy to fix in Google’s campaign targeting. Instead of selecting all, just select the whole list of countries (or whichever ones you want). I think its the all option that is causing the issues, since I ceased targeting to all the problem has vanished.
Tip of My Hat, Wag of My Finger geo targeting, geographic targeting, google geographic reports
Some weeks ago I attended an ok webinar from Search Marketing Now, and to register I forked over some personal information, like my email and phone number. I can understand getting an email or two as a result, fair enough for a free webinar. But the sponsor of the webinar (not Search Marketing Now, but a paid advertiser of theirs) is calling me and leaving messages (yes, that means more than one message). I am not interested in their search marketing services, and evidenced both by me not checking that I was when I registered, noting that I manage the program in house when I registered, and the fact that I never return their phone calls. Isn’t this just over the line a bit?
To be fair, I have attended Search Marketing Now webinars in the past with no aggressive phone stalking after, it just seems like they got a lame sponsor for the most recent webinar. I am a little peeved they gave away my personal information to an advertiser without my permission, but probably never attending one of their seminars again is a fair response.
Tell me if I am being unreasonable here.
Wag of My Finger search marketing now webinars
I could say I’ve been too busy, or that I’m in that post-conference lull, but really, there’s no good excuse, sorry I haven’t posted in awhile.
Also I know someone looking for an agency that specializes in ideas for social media traffic driving (facebook, myspace, etc) and optimally structuring (for seo) user generated content on sites. They’re looking for a small firm or independent contractor, so if you know of someone let me know.
I am spending my days right now organizing a print media campaign, which I just wish was as easy to track as search!
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I am strolling along the SMX West Exhibit Hall, minding my own business and Yulia of MSN AdCenter (bless her heart she had no idea what she was getting into) asked if I’d mind spending five minutes making a video about what I liked and disliked about AdCenter. After trying to persuade her that she really didn’t want me doing this, and that only egging her on more that she really did want me doing this, I relented. I also said, “this is going to take more than five minutes”, and lo, it did.
Basically they asked the same things they always ask, and I answered with my same feedback about the interface and their editorial process. I won’t rehash all that, but I will say that I also got to comment on how they survey me over and over with no appreciable results. They also asked the very interesting question of what did I think about the proposed MSN and Yahoo merger (but the guy flubbed it and said MSN and Google, to which I replied, “you wish it was Google”). And my answer to the merger? I really hope MSN doesn’t fuck up (yeah I said the f word on tape) Yahoo’s interface.
Yulia and the taping guy seemed thoroughly entertained by me, or at least they appreciated the effort. They said they might send me the video so if they do, I’ll post it. Fun!
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Another note from MSN came yesterday, hopefully entreating that I would again provide feedback on their ad services. As though any of my answers will have changed. Or any of their questions will have changed. I think their client satisfaction surveys are just to create an illusion that they care about customer feedback. They ask the same questions every time and make none of the changes anyone gives them feedback about. I can’t even name a significant enhancement they’ve made to AdCenter since the last time I was surveyed six months ago. They’re not going to learn anything new, ergo, this survey is more to make me feel like I am being heard than about them actually making client driven changes. Search marketing pop psychology. Maybe I will provide my feedback in person at SMX West…
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This kind of thing drives me insane:
TripAdvisor link on Granada Public Transportation
The above link is the #1 search for “granada public transit” on Google, but the page has got zero useful content, it just has a highly search engine optimized shell. I see this all the time in search results, a page that could be helpful, but isn’t. Why doesn’t Google penalize for this? If you don’t have content, don’t have a live page. I find it a horrible user experience to click over on what looks like a quality result to find nothing there. I don’t have a problem with getting thrifty in your site architecture and having shells, just make sure there’s some meat in there!
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Sorry for not posting more, really I am, but I was in Vegas for work and had lots of catch up this week. In thought about a half-assed post, but then I decided it would be better to link to the fully baked post I wrote this week for Viator about our top travel searches in 2007. Viator had over 1.2 million searches on its website in ‘07! Search data is fascinating, I love to look at it, you get to see some tiny slice of life, and some really bad spelling errors. Anyway, enjoy this post, along with my sincerest apologies for being so lazy.
Tip of My Hat, Wag of My Finger
