Pretty good article here at the Huffington Post (be sure to watch the video.)
The gist is, this man knowing that people do vanity searches on themselves in Google, created an ad asking them for a job. Genius!
Using Google Adwords To Find A Job…
May 13th, 2010 by damon
Site Scan for Google Analytics
May 13th, 2010 by Stefanie
We keep coming across the same problem – we work with clients, get Google Analytics set up and at some point, the web developer makes a change to the site and all of a sudden the Analytics code is gone! It’s not exactly obvious when this happens either. This has led to issues of certain pages not being tracked and the Analytics data to be inaccurate. Very frustrating. This is definitely not meant as a stab at web developers – we are all human. These things happen. Nonetheless, it is frustrating. It becomes obvious when the code is removed off the homepage as traffic drops immediately, but if the page in question is deep in the site, it is difficult to spot.
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!
Cowpuncher Band
May 11th, 2010 by jeff
Anduro Marketing isn’t only about marketing and great customer service. Matt Olah, who leads our sales team, is the lead singer in his band, Cowpuncher. They play funky country music. Have a look at their recent video on Vimeo. They also have a MySpace page. Enjoy!
“See Search Terms” Google Tool
Apr 29th, 2010 by Stefanie
Google has added another tool to make PPC maintenance just a bit easier. It has been there for a little while now but I just recently realized the time saving power of this tool.
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!
Best Vacation Ever on Liberty of the Seas
Apr 28th, 2010 by jeff
I just got back from vacation. I went with my 2 sons on the Royal Caribbean’s cruise ship called Liberty of the Seas. It was the first time for each of us. We had an absolutely wonderful trip traveling to Miami, Haiti, Jamaica, Grand Cayman and Mexico.
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.