Category: News & Trends

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Bleeding Cash With Google AdWords

I see this too frequently to think of it as a fluke; clients using extremely general keywords for programs and then spending their whole budget on a term like gas or American sound. Wow, Google is really getting rich at the expense of some clients who are tickled to death at the volume of totally untargeted clicks they are getting.

I have now seen two clients in less than seven days who were spending $100 to $175 per day and did not have website statistics or AdWords conversion tracking set up! If you are going to spend serious money on AdWords, you must make Google accountable by having metrics to determine the program’s success in place. You should be using Urchin or at the minimum Google Analytics – AWStats doesn’t cut it! You should have conversion tracking installed and a scripted contact form that has a thank you page (not a return to the same form page) so that you can install the AdWords script in the code of the thank you page to be able to track micro-conversions or completions of your lead form.

Google AdWords can really work for some businesses, but you need to be a smart consumer or Google will allow you to spend and spend and spend and spend without any conscience of your real success or lack thereof.

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Jeremy Zawodny Leaves Yahoo and So The Exodus Starts

If you don’t know who Jeremy Zawodny is, he is Yahoo’s mouthpiece to the professional world of webmasters much in the sense that Matt Cutts is for Google. Jeremy is a search engineer and Yahoo uses him to disseminate information and his blog allows professionals such as myself to get an inside picture on what is happening with Yahoo.

Well, it is news that he is leaving Yahoo after 8 years. I didn’t expect otherwise. His blog has been very somber lately and he had written recently in angst about the Microsoft Yahoo bid. After having been in the corporate world myself and having a top management change affect my job drastically, sometimes quality people need to jump ship before new management puts the hammer down and squelches their creativity or changes the corporate culture to an unworkable model where they are no longer welcome. Clearly such is the case for Jeremy.

With all the changes Yahoo has experienced in the last several months, it is very hard to think that it is really business as us usual. I expect there will be other high level team members that will take their own exodus in the weeks to come leaving Yahoo ripe for the picking. Microsoft would be very foolish to not be looking carefully at acquisition of Yahoo.

 

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Google AdWords Going for the Gold Ring!

Since September 2007, I have been watching the cost per click escalate in Google AdWords. I have seen nearly a 20% increase in this period in the cost per click to achieve the same position on the page. Part of the increase in click cost is due to the number of advertisers moving into Google AdWords and part is due to the philosophy that many business owners have that they want to own the number one spot in sponsored search. Both have created a market where for some white collar business sectors we have seen clicks move from $6.50 to over $10.00.

As the cost per click increases, the budget needs to increase or the number of clicks per day and month shrinks. For many of the accounts we work on, the budget cannot be increased, so what can you do? I have found that by dropping the cost per click and lowering the expectation of ad position on the page we can double or triple the number of impressions and in many, but not all cases, we can increase the number of clicks from 10 to 30%. For many businesses this increase in activity can generate more selling opportunities, micro conversions, and be a very savvy strategy, but it requires owner buy-in and careful account monitoring.

Most people will agree that more clicks are better than less clicks in the top positions. Not always do ads higher on the page in Google convert better than those lower on the page. For some businesses, it is all a numbers game, more clicks means more sales. But I have found from experience that this strategy does not fly on Yahoo and is not valid for every business, every client, and every market sector.

If you are tired of escalating click cost, now is the time to take a careful look and test dropping your CPC to see if you can squeeze out more activity for your program.

 

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Safari Browser on Windows Operating Systems

Surfing the web.Don’t you hate that Apple tries repeatedly to install the Safari Browser bundled with iTunes and QuickTime! I have resisted downloading Safari as I really do not like the intrusiveness of anyone trying to bundle software and install it on my computer, and now Microsoft has released an alert about Safari.

You can read the full alert from Microsoft here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/953818.mspx. It appears that Safari allows executable files to be installed on the desktop and take over your computer once you visit an infected website. Don’t think that could happen to you? The Google AdWords client who had his account hijacked was sending clicks to a poisoned website where malware was installed.

In some cases poisoned sites will install malware that your virus software won’t even detect. You do have to be careful of the neighborhoods you surf in. Using Safari on a Windows system simply keeps you open for problems. It also appears that Safari lets certain types of files be downloaded automatically without asking the user, a very dangerous protocol.

My recommendation is that if you are using Windows, stay away from Safari until Apple gets with the program in regards to security on Windows systems. By the way Apple, stop the bundling with QuickTime and the repeated nag boxes if we want your stuff, we’ll find you and download it, don’t try to shove it at us.