Recently Yahoo enlisted the help of Mike Moran author of Do it Wrong Quickly to do an extremely poignant blog about the most common pitfalls of SEM. These ideas are perfectly on target. Yahoo is suggesting not to target by position, not to focus on clicks, and giving advice about quality landing pages. Maybe it’s […]

Dart throwing, names in a hat, coin tosses, and binge drinking are all accepted formulas for devising a list of keywords for an SEM campaign. There is however differences in creating paid search keywords versus natural search keywords.
The main difference paid search keywords have in comparison to natural search is the breadth of generated […]

While the majority of other blogs would have you read the top trends of 2007 I’ve decided to bring you the trends that are either in limbo awaiting their fate, or have moved from limbo to a fiery eternity. What happened? Where did these trends go wrong? Could we have seen this coming? Is there […]

Google’s Pay Per Action (PPA) offering has been in beta for several months. As part of the beta, we’ve been running a test campaign on Apogee-Search.com. The traffic volume has been disappointing, to say the least. The campaign has received over 250,000 impressions, and only a pair of conversions. We’re using the same ads that […]

With last week’s inclusion of the Conversion Optimizer tool, Google Adwords is finally reaping the benefits of bid management automation through its DoubleClick acquisition. Sorry Microsoft, but at least you still have Vista: the next best thing since sliced arsenic bread. Albeit overwhelmingly useful that Adwords can now specify a maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bid for […]

In the history of monolithic number two companies there have been a variety of innovations that have shifted the market place’s attention from the leader. Pepsi made clear cola, Reebok put a .002-psi pump in a shoe, Burger King concocted some sort of Chicken French Fry, and now Yahoo is creating a social networking site.
With […]

We extended the previous test for Client B so that the data for the same time period was pulled down over a number of days. The hypothesis is that the data might change over time as Google performs analysis on invalid clicks and such. This theory did not hold up in the test:

Day
Time
Clicks
Cost
Impr

1st
2am
199
$759.52
128,242

1st
3am
200
$759.52
762.14

2nd
4am
200
$759.52
762.14

3rd
4am
200
$759.52
762.14

3rd
11am
200
$759.52
762.14

4th
4am
200
$759.52
762.14

4th
11am
200
$759.52
762.14

5th
4am
200
$759.52
762.14

6th
4am
200
$759.52
762.14

7th
4am
200
$759.52
762.14

8th
4am
200
$759.52
762.14

9th
4am
200
$759.52
762.14

10th
4am
200
$759.52
762.14

11th
4am
200
$759.52
762.14

12th
4am
200
$759.52
762.14

13th
4am
200
$759.52
762.14

We also ran […]

Only a few writers have mastered the art of keeping it short and sweet. It took Dickens only 52 characters to sum up the French Revolution. Luckily for novices, Google and Yahoo! offer a total of 95 characters to create an ad for online products and services. However writing for character limits instead of content […]

Continuing our series on Google AdWords API Data Consistency, we repeated yesterday’s test this morning, this time with a B2C lead generation client (hereafter Client B). Unfortunately, the results from this test were infinitely worse.
Fortunately, the results were still pretty darn good:

Time
Clicks
Cost
Impr

2am
199
$759.52
128,242

3am
200
$762.14
128,715

4am
200
$762.14
128,715

5am
200
$762.14
128,715

6am
200
$762.14
128,715

7am
200
$762.14
128,715

8am
200
$762.14
128,715

9am
200
$762.14
128,715

10am
200
$762.14
128,715

All the stats had settled out completely by 3am, and were quite close to […]

For some time, we have seen a rumor floating around that data downloaded via the Google AdWords API can fluctuate for the first day or so after it is created. One theory is that it takes time for all the data to be registered from the various data centers.
To test the validity of this theory, […]