'conversion' Category

• SEO vs PPC

  Andrew Goodman has an interesting start on a discussion of the relative merits of PPC and SEO. I think he’s found an worthwhile thread, but I believe that there’s a different type of analysis to be usefully applied. It is that clicks have different meanings; here is one model for looking at what clicks mean.
  I […]

  March 16th, 2008

• AdWords Died, 2008 - Rest In Peace

  (This article has been superceded, as I’ve dug into the details more - I offer an assessment of who is affected, and how much, in AdWords Search History Permutation).
  Google has completely lost track of their mission, and is busy destroying the value of AdWords. Last summer, Google said it would be rolling out search history […]

  March 11th, 2008

• Web Marketing In Context, 2003 Survey

  Most businesses follow the Kevin Costner “Field Of Dreams” visionary model for their website:
  “If You Build It, They Will Come”.
  Annoyingly, this model usually fails. Let’s have a look at how people think about their web marketing and why they end up either ravingly happy or cynical depressives about their efforts. Web Marketing, or Internet […]

  March 10th, 2008

• Twitxr Social Networking Beta.

  I don’t usually cover new Social Networking apps. But, I’m an iPhone addict and I finally came across an easy to use posting tool that might reduce the barrier to use for me, enough to make it something that I might do. Easy to use, but a bit of a pig to install on the […]

  March 4th, 2008

• Automating Content Network Management - Part 1

  About three years ago (2005), we started efforts to automatically improve performance of the AdWords Content Network, for advertisers. We were hoping to develop a product, but we were also doing some research to see how things worked and what lessons we could learn. This is intended to be part 1 of a multipart article, […]

  February 12th, 2008

• Apples, not Turtles

  This article was triggered by unreliable internet connections, especially after upgrading to Apple’s latest Mac OS X release, Leopard. It’s a reflection on Brand, the Pareto Principle, and Perception, which is why it ties, strangely, to Internet Marketing.
  There’s an almost certainly apocryphal story that someone was presenting cosmology to a non-scientific audience. At the […]

  January 30th, 2008

• Google - Doing Less Evil

  I frequently hold forth here that Google abuses the real source of its’ wealth - advertisers. The “Do No Evil” mantra is applied to users, but Google does horrible things to advertisers, remorselessly. After years of criticism from Richard Ball and me on the AdWords Help Forum, and joined more recently by other voices, Google […]

  January 28th, 2008

• Google, Trust, Content Match, Placement Reports

  A respected peer, Richard Ball, often writes about distribution fraud, and the waste of advertising funds on Google’s domain parking. I have some evidence to back up his claim that advertising on domain parks simply wastes advertiser funds.

  This is a portion of a screenshot from an account with a content match targeted campaign. It […]

  August 17th, 2007

• Google is destroying the web!

  Adam Lasnik, Google’s missionary to the heathens, fired up to convince webmasters to use links only if they fit the citation model, wrote a few months ago that he and Matt joked that people are often bragging they have an undetectable technique to raise rank. The interview (second link in this paragraph, to Stone Temple) […]

  July 30th, 2007

• Click Fraud, Google AdWords and gclid

  A tardy response to Matt Cutts posting and Shuman Ghosemajumder’s joining in the debate… I don’t see some important stuff in Google’s approach to this issue. Maybe I’m selectively vision impaired. Or maybe I read too many other reports about naughtiness on the net.
  New (2008-03)! Google Blog article on click fraud forensics.
  And newer! Richard […]

  July 16th, 2007