I have seen Ernest’s presentation and it is excellent. If you are in sales, marketing or website development, I would highly encourage you to attend. During the seminar Ernest will be looking at the connection between a prospective buyer and your landing page after they do a search or click on a pay-per-click ad.

What I like about Ernest’s presentation is his straightforward style, great examples and practical tips. During his presentation he uses his own custom slides that are engaging, interesting, and well designed.

To find out more details and to register please go to:

www.quickinars.com/2011/03/landing-pages-that-convert-to-prospects-customers/

I’m looking forward to meeting you at these session.

You won’t be disappointed.

Jeff Nelson

I panicked, thinking I had accidentally changed the geo-target settings in Google AdWords. After assuring that this was not the case, I started looking into what could possibly be causing this.

Let me set the stage a little bit here:

Client – Lethbridge College

Geo-Target – Most of Canada

I looked at the Google Analytics reports and sure enough, just over 100 visits from the Philippines and close to 200 from the USA. Why on earth is this happening?

I dug around a little bit more but couldn’t find anything so I did the only thing I could think of: call Google! I spoke to a very friendly individual who put me on hold while he investigated. A few moments later, he came back on the phone and assured me that all the settings were fine. This is happening because Google doesn’t only use a users IP address to serve ads. WHAT? Apparently, the IP address is used but so are geo-specific terms such as ‘Calgary’ or ‘Lethbridge’. So I dug a bit deeper into the Analytics data. Sure enough, the keywords indicated searches like “Lethbridge College” or “college in Lethbridge”.

This case is a little out of the ordinary because the ‘business name’ has the city name in it. Normally, when a business name is something like, for example, Anduro, these searches would not generally result in ads showing for “internet marketing” in Europe, when we are targeting Canada.

I wanted to take it one step further. Why would they want to pay for these people to click on the ads? Interestingly enough, a lot of these clicks resulted in conversions. This tells me that someone in the Philippines is looking to come to Canada to go to college/university and found Lethbridge College as a result.

That’s good but is it worth it? Turns out it is! The cost/conversion in the Philippines is 72.5% LOWER than in Canada. That is incredible.

Granted, there are a lot less clicks and a lot less conversions but there is no need to panic over the ads showing in different countries.

The Google rep also told me that they are working on implementing a setting that allows advertisers to turn this off. Now that I have been looking into it some more, I am not sure I would. The cost/conversion is so much lower – why not advertise there? In this case, it works out but in the future, I will really need to think about whether or not it makes sense to advertise elsewhere.

For a local painting company – not so much. But a school catering to a vast number of people? Absolutely.

As a result, we had an objective (do the video) but this was one of those situations where we had no time, no media room, dysfunctional equipment, and no one to shoot the video.  Being 2 resourceful guys we improvised. We met at Mount Royal University, snagged a classroom, set up our cameras on a tripod, hammered out a script (very loose) and shot the video. Here is what we came up with. Enjoy.

Google: 5 Myths and a Reality about Google Adwords.

I am going to paraphrase but keep in mind, this is directly from the keyboard of Google “itself”.

Myth 1: “Online advertising is not for local businesses.”

Seems to me that people think because they are a local company they don’t need to advertise locally. Did you know that you can set your target to your city/town only? The targeting ability of Google is pretty amazing. Bottom line – ADVERTISING LOCALLY is very important. There is generally plenty of competition locally and more and more, potential customers are checking online first.

Myth 2: “If your business is already on Google; advertising on Google can’t help you.”

This one is particularly interesting to me. So essentially, if you are ranking naturally, you don’t need to advertise. This is definitely not the case. Unless you are ranking fairly high up on the first page of search results, I would put an ad up. That way, people will definitely see you. The interesting part is this sentence:

“In fact, appearing both on the right and on the left side of the page at the same time increases the perceived relevance of your website and as a result even increases the number of free clicks you get to your website.”

That puts an end to that battle!

Myth 3: “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is better than paid search.”

I am extra interested in this one since I am the Pay-Per-Click specialist here at Anduro Marketing! Google deems SEO and PPC to be equally important but says PPC has a few advantages – it’s quick, it’s easy, you have more control and it is more measurable.

They do go on to say that you should definitely do both – follow the webmaster best practices and optimize your site (we can help you with that too!) and also have ads.

Myth 4: “Google AdWords costs too much, I can’t afford it.”

The beauty of AdWords is that you can spend as much or as little as you want. Start with a small budget and as you see the return on investment, you can invest some more, trying new things as you go.

Myth 5: “You need to be an expert to get started.”

So, yes it is easy to set up an account and campaigns but there are so many little things that take practice and time to perfect. We have had many clients who have set up an account and tried it for a while without great results. There are so many settings to think about and some of them are defaulted to benefit Google in that they encourage your account to spend more money than necessary. It definitely helps to at least get an audit done by our team to see if you are on the right track.

…and one reality about Google AdWords

“I am too busy to do this myself.”

I hear this all the time. Maintaining an AdWords account can be quite time consuming. While you don’t need to log in every day, especially in the first few weeks I recommend at least every second day. The account will be fine once it is set up to be left a lone for a few days and you don’t want to make too many changes too often but you definitely should at least check in. Or hire us!

Interesting article.

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.

The gist is, this man knowing that people do vanity searches on themselves in Google, created an ad asking them for a job. Genius!

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!

Here is a link for more details: Internet Marketing Conference – Calgary 2010.

Great line-up of speakers. So far 60 people have registered. Ends on St Patrick’s Day – March 17th.

Topics include Social Media, Gaming, Videos, SEO, Pay-Per-Click and Industry related news.

Anduro is offering a discount. Call our office and we will give you the promo code.

1. The importance of the tail varies tremendously
2. People search differently for different types of services/products.
3. The importance of the tail does not depend on the size of the search spend.
4. The tail is most important for SKU-based commodity retailers.
5. The tail is critically important for some advertisers.

I love the way Damon James in our company summarized the article. His conclusion is, “For bigger websites (lots of pages) and companies with lots of discretionary funds, the long-tail is a good thing. For smaller websites (limited real estate) and companies with limited dollars, (unless they want to do it themselves), not so much.”

One of our strategies is to use SEO techniques to go after keywords that are in the middle of the tail and pay-per-click campaigns to catch keywords on the long tail.

The bottom line is that most companies have to look at the value of keywords in the long tail and determine the value. More often than not setting up a pay-per-click campaign is the best way to go.

Let me outline how our company is using this tool to help our clients. We have a few clients in the industry of global positioning systems (GPS). One is a manufacture of industrial hardware and applications, www.novatel.com and the other is a retail seller of mobile GPS units for consumers, www.gpscentral.ca. For both clients we are preparing a “gap analysis” to determine how their website is ranking for terms related to “gps”.

Note: The following data is aggregated industry related data, not data specific to GPSCentral.

Our analysis for companies like GPSCentral is a typically along the following lines:

• Enter the search term “gps”
• Adjust the filters to your specific interest: Web Search / Canada /  All subregions / Last 12 months / All Categories to get the resulting page and graph
• Click on News headlines to see related news
• Click on Forecast get future trends (you must select 2004 – present for this function to be available)

If you login using your Gmail account you can get additional detail related to search volumes. When logged in, the y-axis becomes a percentage scale with 0 being zero and 100 being the highest volume during the selected time period.

For the gap analysis example, our next step is to review the Top Searches and Rising Searches and determine how the website is performing for these specific terms. For example, the top search term listed is “gps garmin”. When we look at Google.ca we can see that the website is performing well for this term – 2nd and 3rd positions. The website is also listed on the first page of Google.ca for the next 4 terms including “garmin”, “gps canada”, “magellan gps”, and “magellan”.  But when we search for the 6th term on the list, “gps review”, www.GPSCentral.ca is not listed in the first 10 pages – room for improvement.

By using the “site” command in Google we can quickly determine that a pages has not been specifically optimized for “gps review”. A few pages on the website contain this term but none of the pages have “gps review” in the title of the web pages.

At this stage we have a few options:

1. Select one of the existing pages and optimize the page for this term.
2. Develop some new optimized content and add that page to the site.
3. Start a linking campaign to improve the performance of the existing page or the new page

We haven’t started yet, but we will over the next few weeks.

Contact me if you have comments, questions or suggestions.

Jeff Nelson