Small Business Internet Marketing Blog

Early this mroning my Google rep emailed me a well thought out and developed presentation that I strongly believe is worth sharing. The PDF is full of PowerPoint-like slides discussing the tremendous long-term value of search marketing in an economic downturn, such as what we are experiencing right now.

Although Google has a strong bias towards argumenting the value of search marketing, the underlying message of this document is absolutely accurate and worthwhile. When times get tough, marketing studies consistently confirm that while ROI suffers, those advertisers who pull out of or scale down their marketing efforts have lost market share by the time the economy rebounds. Any seasoned marketer or advertiser knows that the battle of market share is significantly won and lost during economic downturns, not in flourishing economies.

This is a true business principle for the ages, not nervous talk. Check out these essential points:

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Yes, the title is correct, but don’t hold your breath just yet. The new roll out is only going out for initial beta testing “to a very small segment of advertisers within the next day or two, so that we can gather feedback before launching to all our advertisers,” says Trevor Claiborne, a member of the Inside AdWords team.

So what is involed? What are the new changes going to do to jack up my minimum bids now? According to Google - nothing! So what’s the catch? (more…)

Say that again? AdWords Quality Scores come in pairs. Not exactly identical twins though. Strange, considering the AdWords interface only displays a single score. Can’t find it? That’s because heck, if you’re going to share the rating you might as well hide it, right? Isn’t that just Google though, to reveal as they are concealing? Growing up as an “X-Files” TV show fan, I developed a theory: if there is a truth out there that you want nobody to believe, leak it out in small enough increments and nobody will believe it or pay much attention. That’s right, Google follows my “X-Files” credo that if you want something hidden, you have to leak it out.

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Just as Google rolls out its beat-the-clock criteria to its AdWords Quality Score obstacle course, AlertSite counters (sort of) with a landing page assessment tool, allowing web developers and advertisers alike to breakdown performance. Included in the time loading assessment are several stages of the page loading process, inclusive of the DNS lookup, the connection, a redirect (if applicable), time lapsed before the the first byte loads and finally the content.

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