How to set up wordpress

Posts Tagged ‘Google Yahoo’

You might be new to PPC or perhaps would like a refesher, how many things are different about your campaigns now than 2 years ago? Are you sure you’re staying up with the latest trends? Here’s an excellent resource for those wanting to freshen up on their skills or enter the industry. You may want to stick with the old standby’s – Google, Yahoo and MSN or give ROI’s Revolution a shot.

It’s 2 am you’re asleep, and so is everyone else, so why are you paying as much for your PPC ads? Check out the ad-scheduling tool in analytics to help you pin point when your ads will run, and squeeze the most out of PPC budget. There’s several great reporting tools in Google analytics that help you maximize the performance of you adds.

Yahoo & MSN search alliance will affect PPC accounts. By June 30, 2010 PPC accounts from Canada and the US will be transitioned over. In order to bring about a seamless transition dates can be modified from the initial deadline. The alliance between yahoo and msn’s main sales pitch is that the alliance will bring about a streamlining effect for users. My advice; plan, implement and make sure your clients are affected in a positive manner with this industry move.

In search, optimization starts at the time a user sees your ad, and sometimes it doesn’t end until months after they leave your site. The most effective advertisers are able to view the whole picture and optimize each piece of it, balancing engine and profit optimization along the way. Therefore it’s important to make your data work for you from multivariate testing to pre/ post-click experiences. Spend some time understanding the data. It’ll be well worth your time and make you a more efficient marketer.

Ever wondered how bid changes would really affect your account? Do you put a lot of thought into bids when setting up your account? Well according to Siddharth Shah, subtle differences in bids are more important than people think. Check out the science of bidding to see how your bids are affecting your account.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

You’ve diligently worked to create a well-organized, well-rounded PPC account with lots of tightly-themed keywords in your ad groups. You’ve written compelling ads with lots of benefits and a strong call-to-action. You figure you’ve set up your PPC account successfully and it works well for a while. But then you start seeing your traffic drop and you know that you’re facing trouble ahead.

Here are a few troubleshooting ideas you can use to identify issues in your account:

Verify Your Tracking

If you’re managing a conversion-based account and your account hasn’t converted in a while it’s worth it to double check that you or your programmer has applied the right conversion tracking code to your landing page.

• Go to your landing page and right-click to choose the “View Page Source” option
• Using the control+F function, search for the terms Google, Yahoo and MSN to locate the conversion tags for each search engine.
• Cross-check these conversion tags with what is provided in the Google, Yahoo and MSN interfaces.

Submit A Test Lead

To further ensure that your conversion tracking is working properly submit a test lead. Click on your ad and fill out the form or go through the conversion and have your client ensure that the test comes through on their end.

Review Your Negatives

Whether you’ve inherited an account or built it up yourself, there might be some keywords in your negative list that are blocking relevant site traffic. Comb through your negatives and ensure that you haven’t inadvertently included a relevant keyword or included the wrong match type for a keyword or phrase.

Look At Your Change History

I wish all the search engines had this tool; take advantage of the Adwords “Change History” tool. This is a great way to re-trace your steps to analyze what changes you made that might be impacting your account. This is especially useful when you see a dip in clicks on leads on a certain date. Make sure to look at changes you made several days before the numbers dropped as changes take effect over time. You might have accidentally paused a word that was performing well or decreased a bid instead of increasing it, you never know.

Check for Disapproved Ads or Keywords

Do a regular check of your ads and keywords to ensure that none of them have been disapproved by Google. Typically, the disapproval message has an explanation for the disapproval, so you can address the issue quickly.

Utilize the Ad Diagnosis Tool in Adwords

This tool can be found in the Opportunities tab of the Adwords interface. You can find out which ad is showing for a particular keyword. It also identifies some of the issues that could prevent your ads from being shown such as low bids and duplicate keywords.

Monitor Page Loading Issues

You may be getting clicks on your ads, but seeing no conversions due to issues with your landing page. Subscribe to a website monitoring services such as Dotcom-Monitor and you can get notifications when your landing pages are taking too long to load or even worse, when landing pages are down so you can address the problem with your IT team and pause your account while the issue is being fixed.

It can be frustrating to identify the issues in your account, but keep in mind that there are tools out there to help you and it is thoroughly satisfying when you can finally tackle the problem head-on.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

The Google and Yahoo! Content Networks are great for capturing additional PPC traffic but if not managed, it can quickly spend a lot of money without giving you the results you are looking for. If you haven’t reviewed your network website list recently and added in exclusions, it might be time to take a look.

In both Google and Yahoo! you can exclude both domains and subdomains from your network. When reviewing your performance, make sure to choose a date range that will give you enough data so you can make appropriate exclusions. Typically you want to use at least 30 days but depending on your account, you may want to use 60 or 90 days or perhaps even longer. Keep in mind that it is important to look at the big picture. Just because a site doesn’t work for one ad group doesn’t mean it won’t work for another.

In Google, to review performance and exclude sites from the content network, go to the Networks tab and then select show details next to Automatic Placements. You will be able to see all of the sites Google is placing your ads on based on the keywords in your ad groups. Just like with all of the other Google reports, you can sort the data by spend, cost per conversion, clicks, etc. to find the sites that are spending without converting or converting at a very high cost per conversion.

In order to exclude a site, click the box to the left of the website and then select the Exclude Placements button. You will then need to confirm if you want to exclude at the Campaign or Ad Group level. In most cases, I recommend only excluding at the Ad Group level unless you are completely positive the website is not working in any of your other ad groups. Once you hit okay, you will see a red Excluded box next to the site so next time you review your placements, you know it has already been excluded.

To review all of the exclusions currently in the account, scroll down to the bottom of the Networks page and expand the exclusions section. Similar to how Google displays negative keywords, it will breakout your exclusions by Ad Group and Campaign level.

In Yahoo!, the process of adding exclusions is very similar. One big difference in Yahoo! over Google is that Yahoo! exclusions are done at the account level so keep in mind your exclusions will impact all of your campaigns. You can review sites for both the Yahoo! Content Network as well as for the Yahoo! Search Partners sites. Although Yahoo! Search Partners is not actually the content network, you can perform the same steps to help rule out partner sites that are not giving you the results you want.

In Yahoo!, go to the reports tab and select an Ad Delivery Report from the reports listed on the left-hand side. If you export the report to a csv file, you can review the domains and subdomains in a spreadsheet, which is then easy to sort and review.

Once you have gone through the data and are ready to add exclusions into your Yahoo! account, click on the Administration tab at the top. In the Account General Information box on the left, there is a section called Blocked Domains. Click on edit and you will be able to add your excluded sites, one per line, to the entire account. If you try to add an exclusion that is already in the account, Yahoo! will flag it and not let you add it. As you only get a total of 500 exclusions, make sure you excluding sites that are truly not performing. If you have a Yahoo! representative and a large account for which you want to run search partners, but need more exclusions, you may be able to request an extension for the number of blocked domains you are allowed.

Taking the time to add exclusions into both your Google and Yahoo! accounts can help control your overall spend, cost per click and cost per conversion. Especially if you rely heavily on the content network to generate your results, make sure you regularly review and update your exclusions list.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Consumers today not only want to know what’s around them, they want to be able to call with one click, access directions, and know what other people think of it. Due to the fact that 50% of consumers head to search engines first when researching local businesses, according to a joint study from Nielsen and Webvisible, you need to make sure your business is in a position to compete.

In most cases, the way to most effectively reach a local audience is to combine geo-targeted PPC campaigns with accurate local listings. No matter what the user’s intent, your presence in both the ad space and local listings will help convey that you are a reliable resource.

Geo-Targeting

So let’s start with the three options you have for setting up your PPC campaigns. The first is to create a geo-targeted campaign, which allows your ads to only show in specified locations. The best part is that you have a wide array of areas that you can choose from, including countries, cities, and even a certain radius around your location. The second option is to add geo-qualified keywords to your campaigns, which are keywords that include the location in them, but any searcher, in any location, can see them. The third option would be to place geo-qualified keywords in your geo-targeted campaign, but the strategy you choose will be dependent on your target audience, and what makes the most sense in how to reach them.

Once you have identified the best way to reach your target audience, and you’ve set up your geo-targeted campaigns, you can move on to verifying your local listing information.

Setting Up Your Local Listings

Google, Yahoo!, and Bing all have a local listing center where you can set up and claim your business. However, I prefer to use GetListed.org, because you can set up and manage all three from one interface. It’s also a great way to keep tabs on the reviews your site has received, and keep a to-do list of the items that will help your local listings rank better.

Upon entering your company’s name and zip code, you’ll be taken to the snapshot page where you can see how many, if any, of your listings have been claimed in the engines.

From this page, you can click the links to claim your listing, and you are taken through a simple two to three step process. During these steps you will be able to enter valuable information for your customers like store hours, accepted forms of payment, and a description of your products or services. Once you are finished, you will have a direct line to each of the local interfaces where you can see that your listings have been verified, and you can make any necessary changes as time goes on.

Advanced Location Settings In Google

In addition to preventing your listing from being hijacked, claiming your listing can also benefit your PPC campaigns in Google. Under campaign settings, you now have the option to show relevant addresses with your ads to searchers that are in your targeted area. When you think about it, what better way is there to stand out to your potential customers than to have a relevant geo-targeted ad along with an accurate address?

In order to turn this feature on, after your listing has been claimed in Google, click on the campaign you want to edit, and go to the settings tab. Under Locations, Languages, and Demographics click on the link that will allow you to show relevant addresses with your ads (advanced). From here you will see your location extension options.

Though it is possible to enter an address that has not been verified, the benefits of claiming your listing far outweigh the effort to do so, so I would not recommend skipping that step.

Positioning Your Business For Success

Marketers today consider local search to be the fastest growing online division. And according to Michael Boland, program director, Mobile Local Media (MLM), The Kelsey Group, “As mobile data consumption rises, we expect local marketing to be a big winner. There is a strong correlation between local search and the mobile use case, which will cause a good portion of the ongoing mobile application boom to focus on local.”

Positioning yourself with geo-targeted PPC campaigns and tying them to your claimed local listings will help you get ahead of your competition, and establish a local presence where qualified consumers are. Doing the work today will help ensure that you are ready to ride the wave of local and mobile search, and your money will be spent on the most qualified traffic.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

If I start a website on wordpress how do i put it on google or yahoo so it comes up as a link when someone looks it up!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
Please help me!

Yahoo! Just announced yesterday that they will no longer offer the free Yahoo Shopping listings as part of their API services. They are now partnering up with Pricegrabber, an online comparison shopping search engine, to provide your products via Yahoo.

Pricegrabber is a cost-per-click program just like Google, Yahoo and MSN. However instead of creating campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads you simply upload a feed of all your ecommerce products with their relative information like price, description, shipping cost etc.

So now not only will you display your products on Pricegrabber, but they’ll display on Yahoo from the same feed.

I use shopping search engines like Pricegrabber, Shopzilla and Shopping.com for some of my ecommerce clients and love them. As long as you have access to a database export of your products then it’s really easy to get an account and start advertising. Online shoppers are known to comparison shop before making their final purchases, and that’s exactly what Pricegrabber does. You type in a keyword or phrase of the item you’re looking for, and Pricegrabber will supply you with several different companies that have identical items. If there are multiple companies with the exact same item, Pricegrabber will show you the prices and shipping cost for each company allowing you to pick the best deal.

If you haven’t thought of using shopping search engines before I highly recommend you give it a try, at least for a few months. You can set your bids typically as low or high as you wish, although some categories do have minimum bid requirements.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I have clients and potential new clients ask me all the time how can they improve their quality scores in their Google, Yahoo and MSN PPC accounts. Quality Score is based off of relevance to the users search query and user experience. The higher your quality score is, technically the lower you pay for your clicks and the higher you can get in position in paid advertising. Below are my top 5 tips on how to generate a higher quality score:

1. Increase your click-through rates. No matter what, never stop testing your ads. If you have your ads set to optimize in Google, Yahoo and Bing, make sure you set them up to rotate. This will allow the search engines to not favor one well-performing ad over the other, but instead they will rotate ads 50/50. You want to rotate your ads 50/50 to test different messages. Each new message you test could mean an increase in click-through rates, which means a higher quality score.
2. Don’t Ditch your account. Ever wonder if you should just start from scratch? Well, more than likely you shouldn’t. By ditching your account and starting over you’re losing all of your account history, the good and the bad. The only time you should be ditching your account is if your current quality scores are terrible, and I mean terrible.
3. Keep things organized. One way to help achieve a higher click-though rate is to have fewer keywords in an ad group. This will allow your ad text to display the actual keyword in your ad group, which will make it more targeted and relevant to the user, improving your click-through rates. Take a look at some of your largest ad groups, and see if there are keywords that can be broken out into new, more targeted ad groups. It’s okay to only have 3 – 5 keywords per ad group. If you use Adwords Editor it makes this process of moving keywords much easier and faster.
4. Remove under performing keywords and ads. If you have a paused keyword or paused ad, Google has stated that keyword or ad does not reflect your account quality score. Therefore, pause away at under performing ads with low click-through rates and keywords with low click-through rates and low impressions all together. This will help clean up your account to where you only have some of your better performing keywords with higher click-through rates active and generating a quality score.
5. Keep your keywords in check. Quality score is essentially how well your keywords relate to your ads, and how your keywords and ads relate to your landing pages. I have several clients that have keywords that are no where to be found on their landing pages. You must have the keyword on your landing page!
6. Load times do matter. Quality score is also about creating a great user experience. Having a slow landing page load time can influence your quality scores. Be sure your landing page loads on all browers, pc’s and mac’s within 3 seconds.

Your quality scores in Google will have a number associated to them that you can see. If you have a quality score under a 7 I would make some tweaks to those keywords and ads. Whether moving them into their own ad groups or testing more compelling ad text. Keep in mind if you’re using all three match types they will have the same quality score, but could still perform very differently. Pause which ever keyword isn’t working.

Remember achieving a good quality score takes times, nothing will happen over night. I would at least give it a few weeks to a month before you begin to see positive changes and lower costs.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I want it so that many people can see posts from my website on their Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. Is there a plug in or something that will help me do that.

With all the talk about Google, Yahoo and MSN all the time, the little guys tend to get left out. By little guys, I mean second tier search engines like business.com, 7search.com, ask.com etc.

I’m currently using Business.com for one of my clients and I’m getting decent results. It’s important for PPC advertisers to realize there is more to this world other than Google, Yahoo and MSN. If you’ve exhausted all of your options and really need to generate additional leads, do yourself a favor and check out some of the more popular second tier search engines.

In this post I’ll go over the one I’m working in right now, Business.com.

Business.com is a search engine and a B2B directory. The search engine aspect of business.com works closely to how the top three work with Paid listings and organic listings. Business.com allows you to add ‘listings’ instead of campaigns. And within each listing are the keywords and ads. You have the same flexibility within Business.com as you have within Google and Yahoo; you can add keywords to your listing, edit your keywords, change their bids, write new ad texts, and pause under performing ad texts.

You can also set up conversion tracking within Business.com as well as Google Analytics. You can even set up destination URL’s for each keyword if needed. Reporting provided is more than necessary with status of your listing, CPC, position or rank as they call it, clicks, cost, total conversions, conversion rates, cost-per-conversion and conversion revenue. The one thing they don’t give you however is the impression count.

Your ad text or the actual listing in Business.com is slightly different from Google and Yahoo. Your listing title can include up to 60 characters and the description can contain up to 150 characters. You have your typical destination URL and a display URL. But then there is a multilink area where you can fill in separate page names and their URL’s. What this does is allow for more links to page of your site that you have listed directly under your main listing. This gives the user more flexibility and more of a chance that you’ll get a click to your site.

When it comes to reporting you can generate a traffic and lead report for any date range. You can view the report immediately and even export the data into Excel.

Last month for one of my clients I was able to generate a total of 19 leads at a cost of $26 per lead. My CPL goal was $55. The extra 19 leads helped me reach my monthly goal for total paid search leads at a super cheap cost. I could probably increase my keyword bids and get even more traffic which I plan to do here in August.

The point is as a PPC advertiser, we should be looking into all opportunities to increase leads and sales for our clients. If we’re only ever work in Google, Yahoo and MSN we’ll never know what kind of results we can receive from other search engines. If your client has it in their budget I would recommend giving Business.com a try!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Time to clean out the inbox again with a Pitch Log Mashup. As a reminder, this series is a collection of the sites, services, platforms and programs I get pitched by PR folks, start-up entrepreneurs and various others that I either don’t have the time or the interest in really writing full blog posts about, but are probably somehow still interesting or useful for you.

And if you’re interested in pitching me something, increase your chances and read the “How To Pitch SME” page. If you’re wondering why your pitch didn’t make it on my list, see the, “How To Pitch SME” page. If you’re still not sure, re-read the, “How To Pitch SME” page.

My Pitch Log Mashup, Vol. 9

Search Innovation From Someone Other Than Google

Innovation in search these days is generally limited to Google and some other guy down the hall at Google. The main reason is that if you’re a start-up trying to take on Google, Yahoo or Bing/MSN, well … you’re nuts. Sundar Kadayam, then, by definition, is nuts. But he might just be the right nut to do it. Zakta.com is a new search engine that offers not just keyword-rich results, but those with social relevance. It allows you to edit your search results, save them for later, share results with other users, see their culled results if they’ve shared them and more. Kadayam is calling it a personal search engine. It’s the closest thing to the next big thing in search I’ve seen. Kadayam isn’t a new face on the scene, either. He’s the former founder and CTO at Intelliseek and was also with Nielsen Buzzmetrics. If you take anything away from this post, go to Zakta.com and give it a test spin. You can learn more about why it’s different on the Zakta blog.

Need To Log It? Elog it.

Elog.com appears to be a Tumblr or Posterous like service with a couple of interesting twists. To create your own page of content, you just email them and your email is formatted and placed online. What’s interesting is that you can create as many pages as you want with whatever content you want on them and edit that content by emailing the page number (automatically assigned by elog) @elog.com. I don’t like the random assigned number and wish you could go in and edit the URL, so long as it’s unique. Here’s the test page I created. But it seems to work seamlessly and has some potential. Check it out and see what you think.

Agers Active?

There’s a new global social network for Boomers out there called ActivAgers.com. The site looks well done with plenty of connection points and features, but from what I could tell at first glance has little activity. Not sure how viable it will be long term unless they have some big membership push. They don’t seem to have a specific focus other than Boomers which have more targeted places to go, like VibrantNation.com, which is a fantastic community site for boomer women. (And it’s based in Louisville, so I’m kinda biased towards it.) Still, ActivAgers.com is out there. Give it a look see if you’re looking for those Boomer targeted sites.

DM me

There are more than a few dozen build-your-own website tools and sites out there and the one that pitched me recently doesn’t necessarily stand out. But dm-2.com just unveiled display advertising to its offering to allow users to automatically build in monetization for the blog or website they build there. It looks like a simple enough site to use if you want to whip up your own DIY small business site or blog without having to know much about the web or web tools. Of course, you could just use WordPress or Blogger, but then you’d have a “blog” not a website you can update the content for, right? (There’s no difference between the two. Just sayin’.) Give dm-2.com a look see. Might be interesting for you.

Innovation Station

And in the, “There’s a social network for everything,” category, BulbStorm.com has emerged on the scene as a social community for innovation. I kind of like this concept, though. It allows companies or creators/thinkers to test out new concepts in a protected environment, gather feedback from other users and tap into ideas from the community around the product or service they’re pitching or building. Apparently, there are already some consumer product goods companies there testing the waters and getting consumer feedback. I don’t quite get how they drive users there to provide the feeback yet other than those who have ideas of their own they want to share, but the concept has the foundation of something cool. Give it a look-see, especially if you’re looking for consumer feedback done cheaper than market research or are a VC firm looking for a cool idea to latch on to.

Logical Media?

Media Logic has a new product that promises, like a bunch of others, to make it easier on brands and marketers to monitor and participate in social media. They’re calling it a social media management solution, claiming it will make social media monitoring and engagement quicker and more efficient so brand managers can go back to the good stuff. It looks no different or less interruptive in a marketer’s day than any other number of the social media dashboard type sites out there. Perhaps its worth looking at if you’re in desperate need to spend more money for someone to tell you that you’ll need more people to handle the volume of work associated with such an animal? You be the judge.

Researching Past Tweets?

Tweetscan has announced a couple of neat product offerings for those of you so obsessed with Twitter you think that the micro-blogging service is all social media is about. For $20 a year, you can search the Twitter archives (Tweetscan allegedly has them all … who knew?). This could be useful for product research or similar historical data needs. You can also have your personal account archive for a suggested donation of $4.99. It can come to you as a wiki or a CSV file. Frankly, I might pay the five bucks just to have all of mine. My boys at LifestreamBackup.com are good, but I don’t think we have a full, global archive of Twitter … yet.

More Twadvertising

TweetMemes.com is an interesting concept. You can find out quickly what people are talking about in mass quantity on Twitter, whether it be via hashtags or a particular search term. But the service’s latest venture has me kind of scratching my head. Now companies can buy “Featured Tweets” that show up as sponsored links on the service So if you go to the website, the first few Tweets on the page are paid for by companies willing to spend $50 per day. I’m not one to say there’s a right or wrong way to use Twitter, but it seems rather disingenuous to the service in general to allow a sponsor to interrupt the natural results from what is truly getting the buzz on the website for the given day. Just say’in. They claim it can help drive a lot of traffic to your website. We sure hope so.

That’s this week’s entries. There are more pitches in the cue but this should give you all enough to chew on for now. If you have a pitch for me, go back to the top of the page and click through to the instructions. If it’s really good, I’ll devote a post to it. If it’s relevant but not earth shattering, it will end up in one of these.

And if you check any of the tools listed here out, please jump in the comments and let me know what you think.