Small Business Internet Marketing Blog

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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