Through a convergence of recent events, local small businesses (SMBs) are beginning to flock to online advertising. Businesses and consumers alike are making substantially less use of the Yellow Pages and other print directories to discover local merchants, in favor of more efficient tools search tools such as Google and Bing. Traditional rating and review [...] →
Marketing technology is becoming increasingly important in organizations as online marketing becomes a larger part of the overall marketing strategy. Yet getting anything done for marketers in many of these organizations is becoming increasingly difficult. Marketers typically do not have insight into the technical underpinnings of the systems they rely upon and the IT department [...] →
Assuming you are already running AdWords campaigns, you are probably looking for opportunities to improve your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). Since AdWords is a mature marketing channel now, you’re going to have to be efficient and run optimized accounts whenever possible, simply to stay profitable with your ads. Fortunately, there are a few things [...] →
Optimizing a site can mean many things. If you’re an eCommerce site, probably means optimizing your landing page, hiding your navigation so as not to distract, and pushing visitors toward the goal of a transaction receipt page. For small business and service professionals, it may mean getting someone to fill out a form. Or if [...] →
Ah, quality score! We’ve all probably had that experience of creating AdWord campaigns, spending hours teasing out our keyword lists into proper ad groups, and waiting for Google to start sending us traffic. We check back the next day only to find the traffic did not come. But what happened? Provided that you didn’t violate [...] →
For many years now, it has been pretty good business to setup an online store, source a few products from China and sell them in the US. But are those businesses about to get killed? I saw something this evening that took me a little bit by surprise and could spell trouble for the small [...] →
There is a common expression in tech entrepreneurship – do things that weren’t possible 3 years ago. The reason for this is the accelerated innovation and thus the accelerated commodization of technology. A product might go from ground-breaking and unique to absolutely commodity in 10 years or less. If you accept that, then you must [...] →
Anyone that has had a conversation with me about Google in the past few years is surely aware of my paranoia that they want a direct advertising relationship for all marketing that occurs on Google in the coming years. In other words, affiliate marketers and lead generators should be weary of what Google is up [...] →
A site called SocialCode recently did some research on how age is affecting Facebook usage patterns. In a nutshell, they found they younger users were more likely to click on the like button whereas older users (50+) were more likely to engage with advertising and click through the ad campaign. I found this a little [...] →
When building a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign, it can be very useful to know what your competitors are doing. Imagine if you can see exactly what terms they’re bidding on, what they’re spending, how long they’ve been running those campaigns, and even what A/B tests they’re running. You could save immense amounts of money [...] →