Google dropped the Panda of paid search with enhanced campaigns, the most radical change to managing paid search in years. Product changes are inevitable, but the value is often mixed. Consider session based broad match vs.modified broad match.
Most Tweeted: #Runnerup 4 Critical Metrics You Won't Find in Google Analytics by Alex Cohen Over the holiday period we will be counting down the top most read articles of 2012. It's always interesting to see what is the most popular content of the...
Every year, Google introduces new ad formats, changes AdWords settings and introduces a few high profile tests into the wild. This year saw a lot more aggressive monetization by Google, with several high profile changes that increased the real...
Ways Reports Suck (And How To Fix Them) from Alex Cohen The Internet has abundant information, but finding just the right information you need is time consuming if you don’t know some of the tricks. Here are 10 tricks to find the best answers to...
With every new feature, Google Analytics becomes more powerful, but also more complex. Hidden in the nest of menus are four powerful features that you might have overlooked. Page Speed How many times have you sat as your browser loads and loads a...
If you own a business that sells locally, chance are you’ve contemplated running a deal with a group buying site like Groupon, Living Social or Google Offers. The draw is obvious: they have huge email databases of known buyers in exactly the...
Google Analytics is an incredible tool that has democratized data. But, one of its weaknesses is that it’s a visit based analytics tool, instead of a person or customer based tool. If you work at a subscription based ecommerce company, you may rely...
People often think that business-to-business (B2B) marketing is cut-and-dried while business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing is a fundamentally personal and emotional experience. The truth is that we're emotional people regardless of whether we're...
The biggest hurdle in startups or new businesses is the risk of trying to sell or market something no one wants to buy. That’s followed closely by the fact that no one has heard of your company or your product.
To get the most out of hiring a paid search agency, you need to understand agencies. They’re like any other business: they need to make money, sometimes they’re the right solution, not everyone is great and they won’t magically solve all of your...
I’ve probably talked to hundreds of companies thinking about or actively buying paid search software over the years. Yet, people continue to make the same mistakes over and over when buying paid search software.
The broader you target your paid search buys, the more important your aim. Good aim results incremental top line growth at an acceptable margin. Bad aim means wasted spend. Aim in paid search is all about excluding people who aren’t likely to buy.
A great landing page can easily increase conversion rates between 100 and 300 percent. The process to getting a great landing page is deceptively simple and endlessly iterative: analyze, design, launch, test, repeat.
Aggregating consumer data for marketing is not a new idea. Direct marketers have been doing it for years, appending information to lists from a variety of sources, like warranty cards. Google's new privacy policy, which generated some negative...
The SEO world often talks about the idea of signals – data points used by search engines to deliver the most relevant results. But the paid search community almost never discusses them (a point Kevin Lee made two years ago).
When we talk about website testing, we mostly talk about what to test: unique selling propositions, headlines, calls-to-action, etc. It’s equally important to understand howto test (i.e.the process that produces better results).
No marketing department has infinite time or money. We are constantly refining our answer to the question “What is the best way to spend our time and money? And we do that: When we’re building a media plan
Regular SEW contributor Alex Cohen, said: Google has made a major change to the way secure search works for signed in users of its services. If a user is signed into a Google account, any search performed will now be done on a secure socket layer...
Poor account structure and bad campaign settings can cost you hundreds or thousands of wasted dollars every week. Like a physical for your account, good auditing helps to catch bad habits and some warning signs before costs spiral out of control.
I will continue to write for Search Engine Watch and on my own blog, Digital Alex and, of course, to tweet. The company was formed by two serial technology entrepreneurs, Lucinda Duncalfe and Craig Danuloff, with the explicit goal of finding a...
