This article is about Google Product extensions which are putting an end to the 70-character ad text which is incredibly restricting, the ‘one landing page per keyword’ rule and the fact that image ads are not available on the search network.

Amazing! Unfortunately, this product is only available in the U.S. for the time being but I am sure Google will roll it out world wide once all the bugs have been dealt with.

So, what exactly are Google Extensions? Simple! Instead of simply one ad being displayed for a company/product, the ad appears with a + sign inside of a box underneath it which can be expanded and displays a list of other products featured by this same company. Brilliant!

Where does this extra information come from? The company needs to enter information into Google’s Merchant Center and the information is pulled from there. If a customer then clicks on one of the products listed in the expanded product extension, they are taken to the appropriate page (specified in the Google Merchant Center).

The article goes into great detail about the strategies, costs involved, tracking and whether there will be an impact on SEO (since once all of the extensions are expanded, the first organic listing falls well below the fold) but for sake of simplicity, I have just covered the basics.

Check out the full article here (with a subscription), on Google or contact us at Anduro for more information on this. Remember though, this is only available in the U.S. for the time being.

I was definitely intrigued by the post which is why I am sharing it but the more I think about it, there are a lot of missing components here. The article How Much is a Google Top Spot Worth? posted on the SearchEngineWatch blog is definitely interesting.

To sum it up, there are some graphs and pictures and stats that show how important the first spot is and how much more traffic a company gets if they are in the first spot as opposed to the 2nd and 3rd etc. While it is our goal in life to get people in these top positions on Google, there are definitely some things to point out here.

I am in no way, shape or form trying to diminish this article or argue with it. It is definitely important to be in the top spots in Google – if it wasn’t, Anduro wouldn’t exist how we do now. And I agree that the top few positions are where the eyeballs are but there is a point that is being overlooked.

What about conversion rate?  I agree that you want traffic but if it is unqualified traffic because everyone is just clicking on the first result since we all trust Google to know what we are looking for, maybe it is better to be a bit further down on the page and catch those people who are really, truly searching. Maybe those people are more qualified. Of course, it makes sense that the chance of getting a conversion increases with more traffic but I think this study is inconclusive. There are other factors to consider – conversion rate being one of the biggest ones.

Have a look at some of the comments under the post. Pretty interesting to see the different reactions from people.

What do you think?

I was complaining to my co-workers about this because the only way for me to check a site is to go through EVERY SINGLE PAGE of the site and check the html code to see if Analytics is there. This is, as you can imagine, incredibly time consuming. SEO-Browser makes this a bit easier because you can click through the pages of the site and it checks the html code for you.

Still though, you have to click on every link to every page of a site. Now you can imagine, this is no easy task if you are looking at a 100+ page site.

So while I was complaining, Jeff sends me a link to this great tool. I was skeptical at first but thought I would try it out. It is called SiteScan by EpicOne and it does just that – it scans any site and spits back a report letting you know if any pages are missing the code, and if they are, it gives you the URL of the page! Brilliant! The free version let’s you run 11 or 12 tests a day!

I have gone through all of my clients and checked. Luckily, there has only been one who had a bit of code missing. Phew! This tool saves me hours of time. Maybe it can help you as well!

There are many reports available to the AdWords advertiser – some helpful, some just a lot of data on a page with no real value. One of the helpful ones is called the Search Query report. This report spits back, essentially, a list of keywords users have used and have seen your ads. The reason this is helpful is if you are using different match types (which I hope you are!) there are a lot of variations of keywords that you may or may not have included making this list incredibly helpful. You can also see which words your ads showed up for that you may not want to show for and you can then add these words as negative keywords.

A big one I have been seeing a lot is a local company selling their product only in that particular city, with the geo target set to that city. So for example, if I have a jewelry store in Calgary and I am only interested in local customers, I can set the target to Calgary only. But if someone in Calgary searches for ‘jewelry store in vancouver’ my ad will show up if one of my keywords is phrase match ‘jewelry store’. This will show up in the report and I can add vancouver as a negative keyword.

On the flip side of that, maybe someone typed in ‘calgary jewelry store’ and my ad would have shown. If I have broad match terms, I could add calgary jewelry store as a phrase match term and slowly eliminate the need for broad match terms which often have high impressions and show the ads for some pretty interesting combinations of words! They are also very good at using up your budget quickly.

When you run the search query report, you can specify which campaign or adgroups you want to run the report on.

With this new feature, you can log in to your account and while you are looking at each adgroups keywords, click the “See Search Terms” link and it will show you all of the keywords used for that particular adgroup. This is so much easier than running the report every time and then having to sort by adgroup etc.

The real time saver though, is the fact that you can add keywords right there. With a click of the mouse! You can also add negative keywords just as easily.



You can either select specific keywords and see what variations users have used or you can simply click on See search terms… and then select All. This will give you a complete list.

Fantastic tool that has already saved me a ton of time! Give it a shot and let me know what you think!

While I didn’t really find any that would be useful to me that I am not already using but I found some interesting ones that I didn’t know about. I wanted to share the Wikipedia list of Google Tools.

This is an INSANE list!!! I wanted to paste it here but this would then be the longest Blog post ever! Hopefully there are items in there that you haven’t used and can use to make life easier!

Enjoy.

Try it out for yourself! You’ll be amazed.

-Stefanie-

This is an excellent question because even though social media is “free”, the time needed for a successful social media campaign is the real hurdle. So where do you start?

It is really just about time management! There are different approaches to this obviously, one being just hiring someone to do it. Fair enough! But if you don’t have that kind of budget, there are a few things you can do to get it under control.

Once you have the strategy in place – I need to pause here for a moment and just stress the importance of the strategy step – you need to decide how to move forward. Are you going to be the one in charge, Tweeting, YouTubing and Facebooking your way to business success??

OK, so once you have that figured out and have decided that it is in fact you that will be in charge of all of this, take a deep breath and put together a plan and FOLLOW it! Here are a few little tips that I use:

1. Dedicate one hour every day to social media. Whether you spend that time updating your blog, tweeting, or brainstorming a new video for YouTube is up to you. But don’t let anything distract or interrupt you unless it is an emergency. Sit down and do it.

2. Part of the strategy step would involve figuring out your message. Of course you don’t want to just blast your community of followers or friends with spammy, pitchy sales stuff so come up with some clever ideas to give out information that is interesting and useful to the ‘user’. You would be amazed how many people will stop following you on Twitter if you just blast sales pitches out there. It is bad form!

3. If you have some down time, use this time for social media. Come up with ideas etc so that on days when you are REALLY busy, you can just grab an idea, post it up and be on your way!

4. Use the tools available online – TweetDeck, HootSuite – the list is endless of great helpful tools.

Those are a few of my suggestions. I found a great blog post with some of the same ideas and some new ideas. Have a read here! It’s a pretty helpful post!

-Stefanie-

He has done some research and has come to the conclusion the Tweeting less and posting a fewer number of  links actually gets you better results in Twitter.

Read his first blog post here and the follow up one here. The follow up blog post talks about which times of day and which days of the week are most effective. Really interesting blog post!

-Stefanie-

They titled it “Is This Stamp-Worthy?”. Seth Godin did a blog post about the evolution to email marketing campaigns from mail outs. When companies still used physical mail-outs more readily than they do now, the marketing team would have to think twice about who they are going to send the mail to since it cost them per piece of mail. Now that email is essentially “free”, it is much easier to hit send.

His example was that he received an offer to buy diapers online from Drugstore.com. He explains, “I’ve never purchased diapers online, since my diaper purchases predate online diaper shopping and my hope is that I won’t be buying Depends for another fifty years or so!.”

This is now a completely irrelevant product for him but because email doesn’t really cost a company anything, he got the mail out anyways. Now he has become an un-subscribed customer!

So next time you think about sending out a big email blast, think about whether you would pay for the stamp that would have to go on the mail out!

Anduro Marketing is excited to help Calgary Council for Advanced Technology (CCAT) organize and execute another event! Register soon! This event promises to be great and sell out quickly.

The Leading Edge of Hardware

Dell’s New DNA: Intertwining Technology Trends and Marketing to

Better Address Customer Pain Points

CCAT is presenting an exciting dinner event featuring a presentation by Jeff Hamlin, Dell’s Director of Marketing for Medium Business in the United States. Jeff’s presentation is entitled: Dell’s New DNA: Intertwining Technology Trends and Marketing to Better Address Customer Pain Points.

In this presentation, Jeff will discuss the key technology trends in IT and how Dell is marketing its solutions utilizing a mix of both traditional and social media marketing. He will address virtualization, cloud computing, Microsoft Windows 7, productivity applications and other new technologies, providing his viewpoint on where these technologies are likely to take us.

He will also discuss how Dell is communicating via traditional advertising, social media, and experiential marketing, and how Dell is using its customers to reinforce and expand the marketing message.

EVENT DETAILS:

Date: Oct. 21, 2009

Time: 5:00pm to 9:00pm

Location: The Westin Hotel, 320 4th Avenue SW

Cost: $70 (includes dinner)

Register Here!

For more information please contact:

Matthew MacPherson

Anduro Marketing

Ph: (403) 410-3855

Email: admin@anduro.com