'marketing' Category

• AdWords QS is BS

  Google has just announced a number of the factors that affect Landing Page Quality Score in the Inside AdWords Blog. This article needs heavy revision in the light of Google’s new information. The main thrust – that QS is composed of several different factors, some of which affecting initial MinCPC and others affecting longer term [...]

  November 24th, 2006

• Misleading advertising by Precision Marketing, perhaps.

  What does “Updated database offers DIY lovers” mean for you? A list of inflatable adult toys you can make at home, or a mailing list of home improvement enthusiasts? You have to be so careful with language to avoid double meanings or unintended interpretations. This example came in some email offering us mailing lists… but [...]

  November 7th, 2006

• Google Blog for Advertisers and Agencies

  New Google blog for consumer packaged goods agencies and advertisers. Their main mission, at present, seems to be to encourage and promote brand advertising videos. I wonder if this has anything to do with the YouTube acquisition by Google? Duh.

  November 7th, 2006

• WSJ, Google, Content Match, Advertisers and Abuse

  A social comment article about Gmail advertising in the WSJ a few days ago was interesting. It blamed Google for irrelevant adverts. Now, I’d take this problem and turn it on its’ head. What can advertisers and agencies learn from the article?

  November 3rd, 2006

• Click Fraud Reconstructed – keyword search

  I’ll state it clearly – we do not claim to be click fraud specialists. Our research into improving internet marketing, part of which is given here, illuminates click fraud mostly as a side effect of trying to identify user behaviour on web sites, in order to make sites work better for users and advertisers. There [...]

  October 23rd, 2006

• Someone else is annoyed by Google’s duplicity

  A YouTube Video Critique of AdWords Arbitrage shows some great examples of just why this is so damaging:

  October 19th, 2006

• Has your web store crippled your sales?

  Maybe you started as a bricks’n’mortar store and you’ve added an online operation, or perhaps you had the idea of going online from the beginning and went straight online? You picked out some store software, or were forced to use a package, perhaps supplied by the manufacturer or distributor. Chances are strong that when you [...]

  October 10th, 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 (

  September 27th, 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 [...]

  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 [...]

  September 12th, 2006