Blog

I had a client email me this question today:
“We are digging into how a customer can find us on the web if they don’t know us. Can you shed some quick light on what we should start thinking about?”
Here is my quick reply:
- In general you need to think about Google search as a “person”, […]

When we visit our clients we are continually consulting with them on what marketing is working and what is not. We are hearing this over and over…
“10 years ago the newspaper worked, but over the last few years our ROI has declined sharply…..”
Newspapers, Radio, and TV use to be the cement that held communities & […]

We manage 100’s of web sites these days. Our team has the unique privilege to study web stats from many different industries over long periods of time and note trends. Here are a few of my observations from 2008:

A majority of our clients web traffic comes from search activity. Google is by far the biggest. […]

I have spent some time thinking about this for a while now, and I have come up with 4 reasons to explain this. My focus here today is why are Google Analytics page views are lower than in Urchin 5 or Webalizer (any other system).
1. Google uses a “on-board” javascript you install on every page […]

An interesting study shows that Google’s “One Box” (the top 5 listings on the top left hand side of the result pages) get by far the most traffic. The heatmaps show that putting your efforts and money to be listed there is the best way to get noticed - all the other listings get only […]

I was just working on Swank Martini’s PPC ads on Google. I was thinking about my experiences with buying Google Ads and Yahoo Ads. In the past, I used Overture to buy ads for Swank and our other ecommerce ventures. I learned that the “buyers” are in Google. I use conversion ruler to track the […]

Just reading some stats about online marketing and SEO.. I started thinking about the market, and how many companies are out there actively optimizing their sites for good SEO. Some of the numbers from Marketing Sherpa’s reports reflect that 74% of the market does their own SEO - same as last years numbers. This means […]

I just started managing some really large Google Ad campaigns. It made me stop and think about the best way for someone to start managing good ads. In the beginning of this new marketing medium it was simple, you just buy a few keywords, decide on a fair price, and start taking in sales. Now […]

Ok - I have posted about misspellings before. When you buy AdWords and keywords in Google, you need to also buy the misspellings. Today for the first time, we had a misspelled word outpace a correctly spelled word. Now I can’t tell you what the word is because it is for a client. But think […]

I had a client just ask us to make a Google Ad buy for his company. He asked that he be in the #2 position. We approximated the cost and made the buy.
During our conversation he asked why he was in #3 and #1 the day before.
This is from his Ad Rank changing. Google uses […]