Archive for September, 2006

• Google AdWords Conversion Tracking - The Good, The Bad and The Rest

  If you use Google AdWords, and you have online activity that you want visitors to do, then AdWords Conversion Tracking is probably what you want. Before you leap in to gleefully use it, you need to know what works and what doesn’t… Here’s an outline that should help you to work out what is happening […]

  September 29th, 2006

• Comparing AdWords and Overture (Yahoo!Search Marketing) Part 1

  Yahoo!Search Marketing (previously Overture, previously Goto) is the grandaddy of paid search. Despite “first mover advantage”, it is number 2 and looks headed to be number 3, at least in the US and Europe, to Google AdWords and more recently MSN AdCenter.
  It’s still an important source of leads though. Just as you shouldn’t ignore the […]

  September 28th, 2006

• Snippet control

  Search Engine “snippets” are those little bits of descriptive text that appear with your site name. To get the maximum benefit from organic search, you should be trying to manage your snippets. Some of the Search Engines make that easier.
  Google offers several controls:

  Don’t index this page (
  Page Control
  So you’ve now manipulated the content on […]

  September 27th, 2006

• AdWords Toolkit 2.5.1

  We’re pleased to announce the release of the Merjis AdWords Toolkit 2.5.1. This version supports the new developerToken/applicationToken headers, which will be required starting 1st October.

  September 26th, 2006

• Google AdWords, Seen WorldWide

  Google AdWords can be used to target adverts in a named language (one of dozens) to one or more countries, or the whole world. So if you are looking for specific buyers, such as expatriate Japanese language buyers in Argentina, you can advertise your services directly to them.
  However, if you are in the UK or […]

  September 24th, 2006

• Free search engine listing

  Search engines return two sets of results, for the most part. One section, often called “Sponsored Links” are adverts paid for by the advertiser and usually payment is made each time that someone clicks on the advert. The other section is free listings. This is the list of sites that, in the opinion of the […]

  September 22nd, 2006

• Measuring Paid Sources By Phone

  If your web site exists to inspire visitors to call you, then standard web analytics packages are useless. All that standard web analytics will tell you is that people visited, not that they called.
  Very small businesses, where the owner is likely to take the call, can make sure to ask the caller how they found […]

  September 14th, 2006

• AdWords Budget - Overrun

  Is your daily spend exceeding your daily AdWords Budget? Worried about Google spending too much? You should be able to relax.
  Multiply your daily budget by the number of days in the month. If you spend more than that amount in the month you should find a compensating “Account Budget Overrun” payment from Google, to bring […]

  September 14th, 2006

• Emergency Assistance: Zero or low impression keywords

  Perhaps because we spend a lot of time researching the odd parts of Google AdWords, Yahoo!Search marketing (a.k.a Overture), etc, we are often called in to rescue an advert or an account, or at least explain why AdWords or some other paid search program is behaving as it does.
  One of the problem types we’ve been […]

  September 12th, 2006

• AdWords Toolkit 2.5.0

  If you read the Adwords API newsgroup regularly, you’ll know that I race Patrick to be the first to release our toolkit when they make another release of the API itself.
  Usually that’s quite easy - just download the WSDL files and recompile and OCaml picks up any place that code needs to be changed (yay […]

  September 11th, 2006