Published on June 17th, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

I detest spam. I don’t like it in my email. I don’t like it on websites and reading the spam dropped into blog comments leaves me feeling tainted. I’m also involved in online reputation management for a few clients, and spam that involves the clients’ name can be very hard to work with. This issue [...]

Published on June 8th, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

Microsoft employee Michael Kordahi has a new and suddenly popular tool - Blind Search. It presents search results from the three search engines side by side, with branding removed. Until a few hours ago, you could see which search engine users were voting for - until some git decided to game the service.
As Michael himself [...]

Published on June 6th, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

Every day - or as much as I can make it so - I Tweet an AdWords Help Forum Weather Report. What does it mean? The AdWords Help Forum is a user to user - or advertiser to advertiser - help forum. Apart from the advertisers, there are a few Google staffers who spend some [...]

Published on June 5th, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

Although I registered for Twitter about a year ago, I’ve only begun seriously using it since late last year. I’m interested in how Bing has been faring, and to reply to a question in the AdWords Help Forum, I remembered that I’d seen one of the people I follow, mentioning the full path to Bing [...]

Published on May 23rd, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

Good news - Google is allowing more insight to be gathered from AdWords Search Query Reports, by exposing more search queries to scrutiny. This reduces the need to use third party click redirectors or web analytics tools to extract search queries. However, there’s strangely spurious logic - or I’ve failed to grasp a fundamental point [...]

Published on April 29th, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

When I start working with clients that want to learn about AdWords and Analytics, I often end up describing the same collection of tools and techniques, again and again. This new posting in the Analytics Blog is a great summary of the FireFox tools to troubleshoot Google Analytics, and adds tools for MSIE. I’ve developed [...]

Published on April 29th, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

In yet another US-Centric move the world leader in search engines and search marketing offers a US-only initiative for small business. If I lived in the US, I’d be tolerably happy with this. Small businesses account for a large fraction of economic activity, and are often hard hit in a recession.
However, the UK has [...]

Published on April 22nd, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

Google can now show personal information in search results, in the USA. The Google Profiles feature doesn’t appear to be fully enabled elsewhere in the world, possibly because it appears to be close-coupled to the “knol” identity verification process, which is restricted to the US for the moment.
As Google Profiles rolls out, it will allow [...]

Published on April 10th, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

My use of Twitter has increased. I’m using an iPhone with several clients while I work out which I like best, and a browser, and the browser user interface sucks compared with the desktop clients and iPhone apps. So I want a Twitter desktop client…
The big ones, according to TwitStat, are TweetDeck and Twhirl. Both [...]

Published on April 4th, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

Looks like Google may be taking action against another class of advertiser who delivers a poor experience of search. The AdWords Help Forum is showing signs that a number of advertisers, who have run multiyear accounts, are unable to improve their Quality Score from a measly 1/10 and are seeing no impressions. It also appears [...]