Calgary had the highest score in Canada at 30%. Kelowna has the lowest at 21%.

For details see article on the Calgary Herald: http://www.calgaryherald.com/health/Calgary+happiest+small+businesses/3327101/story.html

Here is one that is interesting: http://www.waxpartnership.com/

Check out “See What We’re Doing”. Lots of fun in every area of their office.

The site doesn’t work well with the search engine but they are an ad agency – they probably don’t care.

Enjoy!

Full Story Here.

Regardless if one thinks this was done in poor taste or not (I think it was), its seems people still have not grasped the power of Twitter to potentially backfire and blow up in their faces when wielded incorrectly. That is the peril of a tool/toy that encourages “stream of consciousness” narration – especially dangerous for politicians and other people in public positions. 

These tools were created under the category of (and are still labelled as such) Social media – but businesses and politicians have begun wielding these applications to broadcast business communications and political platforms to the general public instead. Of course the freedom of this medium has resulted in occasional quandaries, as people in the spotlight continue to put their foot in their mouths through poorly crafted and hastily released messages.

We’ll see how it turns out. The tools will obviously evolve over time – but for now, expect even more gaffes.

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?

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

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!

In the past, I’ve taken lots of picture on vacations using 35mm and digital formats but I haven’t ever use video. The tremendous growth in the use of video over the last few years, especially on YouTube prompted me to give video a try. I have always felt that video production was difficult, time consuming and expensive but it appears that the opposite is true. In a recent post by Gideon Shalwick of Brick Marketing: Video Tips to Use he debunks each of these myths.

So, for this vacation I thought I would try and create a video record of the cruise. Below I have uploaded a few videos to YouTube and added a link to the video from this blog. Enjoy.

By the way, before the cruise I purchased a Mino HD video camera from Flip Video for about $250 at Best Buy.  I looked at a similar recorder from Sony but the Flip Video was so simple to use that I couldn’t resist. The quality of the videos is lacking but that isn’t the fault of the camera – it is the human taking the shot (one of my sons or me). Sorry about that – this was our first time shooting video.

The first shot is of the cruise ship, The Liberty of the Seas, at dock in Miami while we were traveling to port via taxi.

The second shot is disembarking at Labadee, Haiti. Labadee is basically are resort owned by Royal Caribbean – very touristy – but the food was great.

The next video is taken by my son as he rides down the Dragon’s Flight zip line. Tons of fun and not as scary as it looks. Loved it. Great view.

Another shot by my son. This time of the swimming pools on the 11th deck of the Liberty of the Seas. Weather was great for the first half of the trip and then it deteriorated.

In Jamaica we went to Bob Marley’s grave at the town of 9 Mile. We had a great bus ride singing Bob Marley tunes for an hour there and an hour back. Wonderful. This is a shot of our tour guide, Crazy.

The next shot is of the Atlantis Submarine surfacing in Cozumel Mexico. We boarded it and went down to 120 feet below the surface. Very scenic. Lots of fish and sea creatures.

At about 50 feet we saw a stingray.

The final shot is in Carlos n Charlie’s Cafe beach side in the pouring rain. But we had fun anyway.

Overall the trip was fantastic.

Regarding the topic of using video in a blog, I learned quite a bit. Shooting video so that you get good quality footage is harder than it looks . Using Movie Maker is a little tricky. Uploading the videos to YouTube is easy once you figure out that not all formats are uploadable. Linking the videos to a blog page is easy. But all of these steps are time consuming.

Footnote, a day later:
After I uploaded all the videos, I realized that the audio was faster than the video portion in each file. As a result, anyone talking sounded like a chipmunk – not kewl. I tried and tried with Movie Maker but I was unsuccessful in fixing the audio. The raw files were fine but when I uploaded to Movie Maker the chipmunks came back. So I spent a few hours trying to find another video editing program that was free and usable. I tried a bunch and finally settled on a free trial of Corel VideoStudio Pro X3. It took a while to learn how to use the program (maybe another post) but eventually I was able to edit the videos (again) and post them on YouTube.