Small Business Internet Marketing Blog

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? Read the rest of this entry »

Consider for a moment that thought process is required in landing page optimization. That’s right, think about thinking.

Before I present a partial list of items to work around, the main exercise encouraged here is to question every single aspect of your existing landing page process - or lack of process. Several unoriginal caveats are powerful to online marketing strategy. Among those are “If you build it, they will come” and “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” The latter can be challenging to argue or justify, but will be revealed to be the crutch of the less creative.

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As a PPC specialist by trade, I plead for users to choose the right. The right side of the screen that is. At the same time, as a SEO enthusiast and practitioner I cheer on the left side of the screen, the real reason people flock to search engines. Users are looking. Beyond that, they search intently with purpose. Because the act of searching typically transcends casual electronic lolly-gagging, accurate data reflects the general perception about where people are clicking.

As Gord Hotchkiss so clearly debates (7/17/08) the deeply psychological programming of the human brain, making human interaction with machine meaningfully predictable, the answer comes. No surprise. Bummer. I like surprises.

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Browsing is perhaps two parts aimed search, plus three parts waiting to be blindly surprised. Discovery on the other hand, I would argue, is four parts aimless search and one part purposeful exploration. Seem like a concoction of misrepresented and confused concepts? Sure, I planned it that way - to get you to think about what users are doing out there in their flat-paneled universe.

While browsing is far more common among in search, it leads to far less satisfaction. Browsers often get up from their computer feeling largely empty, having accomplished little if anything. They are largely without meaningful purpose. They are actively being passive. Like passer byers at a county fair, they are hollowly walking past adventurous opportunities utterly dominated by their practical nature. They pretend to themselves and their audience that if the right attraction comes along they will bite on it. The reality however, is that one side of their brain is starving for fun, stimulation of entertainment and the buying of goods. The problem is that marketing to this bunch of browsing consumer yahoos is waiting for something that the other side of their brain will never allow.

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Don’t despise the words “test” or “testing” in the context of your search marketing campaigns.

Thank goodness search engine marketing for small business is not like traditional print advertising. For anything professionally printed, there is a saying that “We didn’t release it, it escaped,” or something to that fashion at least. Usually this is said because the end product could have benefited from perpetual optimization and improvement. Once in print, it cannot be altered. New versions can be released, but the older versions live in infamy. The problem is that at some point the ad needs to go to print, and by then the avenue for publishing, whether it be a newspaper, magazine, mailer or anything else, has been determined and at least partially paid for. There is no turning back; something needs to printed, so it might as well be your latest version of the ad.

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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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