Google AdWords Management & Pay Per Click Marketing Blog

Internet Marketing & Consulting by Windy City Strategies, Chicago Illinois. A full service Internet Consulting company specializing in Pay Per Click Management, PPC, Website Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Local Business Listings, Shopping Portal Management, SEO, and Social Media Marketing, SMM.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Stats Put Android Ahead Of iPhone In Eight States

There's some news on Google in the Android vs. iPhone war. Even though the iPhone has delivered more than one billion applications, games, ringtones videos and wallpapers to mobile users is behind the Android in terms of user concentration in eight states. The eight states are: Arizona, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.

The data states that Android gained a lot of ground within a certain sample group, causing it to slip ahead of the iPhone.

According to Myxer, "A total of one million unique users from both the Android and iPhone operating systems were used to make this comparison."

Labels: pay-per-click-management

posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:14 AM

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Cambodia Lambastes Google Over Border Portrayal The governments of France, Germany, and Italy are all a little upset with Google. China’s a bit upset

The governments of France, Germany, and Italy are all a little upset with Google. China’s a bit upset with the search engine giant as well. Because of the way Google has portrayed a dispute border, Cambodia’s angry as well.

According to Reuters, Secretary of State of Cambodia’s Council of ministers, Svay Sitha, wrote a letter to Google to make a complaint about its interpretation of the area where Cambodia and Thailand touch.

According to Reuters, Svay Sitha, the secretary of state of Cambodia's Council of Ministers, wrote a letter to Google complaining about its interpretation of the area where Cambodia and Thailand touch.

"(The map) is devoid of truth and reality, and professionally irresponsible, if not pretentious," Sitha said. "We therefore request that you withdraw the already disseminated, very wrong and not internationally recognized map and replace it.

It’s safe to say that Google won’t just swap in Cambodia's favorite map, because then Thailand would be upset. This isn’t Google’s first time that the company was in a border dispute.

A good guess would be that Google would come up with three maps. One will be for those in Cambodia, another for Thailand and the third for everyone else. The first two will show borders favoring their respective countries while the third is going to use dotted lines to illustrate the dispute.

Labels: pay-per-click-management

posted by Angie Rentmeester at 6:51 AM

Monday, February 8, 2010

Google Runs First Super Bowl Commercial

Millions watch the Super Bowl and millions of people pay close attention to the commercials that appear during the big football event. This year Google ran their first Super Bowl Commercial called “Parisian Love.” Did the commercial look familiar to you? Well, that’s because it was one of their “Search Stories” ad that was uploaded onto YouTube back in November.

Watch the video here.

With millions watching, Google ran their first Super Bowl Commercial entitled "Parisian Love". If it looks familiar, that's because it's one of their "Search Stories" ads, which was uploaded to YouTube back in November. You can check it out below...

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, tweeted yesterday..."Can't wait to watch the Super Bowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said "Hell has indeed frozen over.")"

Labels: pay-per-click-management

posted by Angie Rentmeester at 10:06 AM

Monday, February 1, 2010

Chrome OS Touch Rumors Restart

The new iPad seems to be dominating this week, but there’s still some excitement about Chrome OS responding to touch, as a Google employee set off the hubbub.

Here is the disclaimer: What was said today didn't come near a definite "yes, we're working on that." It might have just been a sort of spoken misstep, and the most promising-sounding part may have been a sign of optimism not meant to signify any definite product plans.

Senior Product Manager Anders Sandholm had an interesting response when asked about Chrome OS and touch. According to Dan Grabham, Sandholm looked at a PR rep and “chuckled nervously,” and said, "I can't . . . I mean . . . right now we are targeting netbooks, that's what we're focused on, but I expect it to work well . . . we expect it to target everything up to desktop computers."

Labels: google-adwords-management, pay-per-click-management

posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:51 AM

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Details About How Google Handles Natural Language Search

Google has posted a piece to the Official Google Blog discussing Google's system for understanding synonyms in search. Author Steven Baker said, "An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers."

Understanding human language has been one of Google’s biggest issues in artificial intelligence and they key to returning the best possible search results. Even though it’s far from perfect, Google has spent a good amount of times into this.

Here are some things that has to do with Google’s handling of synonyms that people should keep in mind:

1. Google routinely monitors its system for handling synonyms with regard to search result relevance.

2. Google says synonyms affect 70% of user searches across over 100 languages.

3. For every 50 searches where synonyms significantly improve search results, Google has only found one "truly bad" synonym.

4. Google doesn’t fix bad synonyms by hand, but rather makes changes to its algorithms to try and correct the problem. Baker hopes this will be fixed automatically in the future.

5. Google has recently made a change to how its synonyms are displayed: in SERP snippets, terms are bolded, just like the actual words you searched for.

6. Google uses "many techniques" to extract synonyms. Its systems analyze perabytes of data to build "an intricate understanding of what words can mean in different contexts"

7. Some words or initials can have tons of different meanings, and Google uses other words in the query to help determine the correct ones. For example, there are over 20 possible meanings for the term "GM" that Google's system knows something about.

Labels: google-adwords-management, pay-per-click-management

posted by Angie Rentmeester at 10:20 AM

Friday, January 22, 2010

Google's Stock Falls Despite Strong Numbers

Google's latest earnings report came out and the search giant is doing well during the fourth quarter of 2009. The only thing is, many people were hoping, or even wanting, it to do better because the stick has taken a plunge in after-hours trading.

Now here’s the good news. Google generated $4.95 billion in net revenue, topping a consensus estimate of $4.92 billion. The company reported $6.79 in terms of earnings per share, even though they were estimated to hit closer to $6.50.

Eric Schmidt thinks the company is right on track. "Google had a strong fourth quarter, with 17% year over year revenue growth," he said in a statement. "Given that the global economy is still in the early days of recovery, this was an extraordinary end to the year. As we enter 2010, we remain hugely optimistic about the Internet and are continuing to invest heavily in technological innovation for the benefit not only of our users and customers, but also the wider web."

Anyone who bought Google’s stock just before the closing of the market and earnings report coming in came out has lost a good amount of money; Google’s stock is down 4.33 percent in after-hours trading at the moment.

Labels: google-adwords-management, pay-per-click-campaign-management, pay-per-click-management

posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:38 AM

Monday, January 18, 2010

Yahoo Shows Interest In Yelp

Carol Bartz is showing quite a bit of interest in acquiring Yelp. She was recently interviewed by Brian Womack and was asked about buying the site that’s known for its fast-growing collection of local reviews. Bartz, who’s known for speaking plainly, didn’t give a definite “yes” or “no” answer.

Instead, YAHOO!’s CEO said, "Local is extremely important. People do some outrageous percentage of their commercial spending five miles from their home." Even though Bartz’s answer isn’t exactly affirmative, the odds favor anything happening. The rumor mill later year indicated that Google is trying to acquire Yelp, with Google’s popularity & deeper pockets couldn’t secure a deal, it’s difficult to imagine YAHOO! succeeding.

This isn’t a definite “YAHOO! will acquire Yelp” announcement so much as an exercise in parsing CEO’s sentences.

Labels: google-adwords-management, pay-per-click-management

posted by Angie Rentmeester at 7:38 AM

Friday, January 8, 2010

Expand your keyword list to gain more traffic

Looking to gain more traffic to your ads? It’s time to consider expanding your list of keywords by adding variations of your best performing keywords. Keywords will increase your traffic, which in turn, will help your pay per click management campaign be more successful.

Here are a few helpful tips for expanding your keyword list:

• Add product names, brand names you sell and model numbers that are specific to your business
• Include plural and singular forms of keywords
• Add common misspellings that users might search for
• Try relevant variations and synonyms
• Use Google to search for your keywords and check out the list “search related to:” at the bottom of the page. This will give you even more relevant keywords that aren’t in your list already.

Here’s an example on how you can expand a keyword:

Original keyword list:

• chocolate gifts, chocolate gift, gift chocolates

Expanded keyword list:

• chocolate gifts, chocolate gift, gift chocolates, chocolates gifts, chocolate gift basket, chocolate gifts online, chocolate gift sets.

Just these simple steps can make a huge improvement to your pay per click campaign management.

Labels: pay-per-click-campaign-management, pay-per-click-management

posted by Angie Rentmeester at 8:37 AM

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

About CPC and CPM Bids

In campaigns targeted to the search network, a cost per click (CPC) bid is set for each ad group or keyword in your pay per click management campaign. The CPC bid is the amount you are willing to pay for a click on your ad when it appears on Google or one of our partner sites.

With pay per click marketing campaigns targeted to the content network, you have the option to make it a CPC bid of a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) bid for each ad group, keyword or placement. The CPM is the amount you are willing to pay each 1,000 times your ad appears on one of Google's partner sites. You pay when your ad shows, no matter if a user clicks on the ad or not.

With CPC and CPM pricing, you're in control of your bids. With AdWords, it will help keep your costs down to a bare minimum using AdWords Discounter and Smart Pricing.

Labels: pay-per-click-management, pay-per-click-marketing

posted by Angie Rentmeester at 9:12 AM

Friday, December 4, 2009

The Two Biggest Internet Marketing Mistakes Companies Make when they launch A New Website

So, you’ve decided that it is time to invest in a new website or drastically upgrade your existing website – that’s great, however there are some best practices when it comes to Internet marketing that you might not have thought about that you should consider before you go live.


One of the biggest mistakes that Internet Marketing Consultants notice from clients who launch new websites is that they completely forget to check their organic positioning and the existing pages that have managed to place well in the organic search results. Chances are good that your new website will not have the same file names for web pages. When the search engines “bots” come back to look for an old file name like “blue-widgets.asp” and it no longer exists, they will remove that page from their index and with it any organic positioning that it managed to achieve. The fix is simple, have your designer use 301 redirects to the appropriate new pages. Better yet, if the old page has placed well for important keywords, I would recommend copying the text and other page elements as close as possible and keeping the same file name. It’s amazing to me how few web design companies actually bring this to their client’s attention. Take charge and make sure you don’t lose any hard earned organic positioning.

The second common mistake is forgetting to notify your pay per click Management Company to update your ads with the correct new page locations or URLs. There is nothing worse than having a brilliantly designed new website with well targeted landing pages go live only to have your sponsored search campaigns still point people to old page names. The often embarrassing result is that you pay for clicks that lead people to error pages. You not only lose money on the clicks, you fail to gain new visitors, and subsequently lose leads/sales. Remember, it is not your marketing person or pay per click management companies responsibility to constantly check destination URLS. It is the responsibility of the company to update any necessary individuals or companies to the new landing pages.

Sure, these concepts seem obvious; however you would be surprised how many people fail to consider either situation before launching their new website.

I always recommend that BEFORE you even start to design your new website or landing pages, that you contact your Internet Marketing consultant and ask for their input. Often, very basic landing page elements and Internet Marketing “best practices” are forgotten in new designs, and your fancy new website could become an expensive step backwards. Unfortunately, while many web design companies tell you that their websites are “SEO Friendly” or “take Internet Marketing into consideration”, almost all of them fail in this regard.

Your Internet marketing consultant should be kept in the loop during the entire build process. His/her advice can make a huge difference in the conversion rates of your new design.

Labels: pay-per-click-management, website-design

posted by Windy City Strategies at 10:46 AM

A New Internet Marketing Focus in 2010

It’s easy to become comfortable in the success of your online marketing efforts, however true growth and expansion require leaving this comfort zone and experimenting with new ideas and possible avenues of lead/sales generation.

It doesn’t matter if you are a do-it-yourself type of Internet marketer, or you have graduated to using a pay per click management or search engine optimization Company, you have to take the initiative and investigate the many new possibilities than a business has online to generate leads or sales.

Back in the day, you pretty much had only 3 options for Internet marketing; Sponsored Search, Search Engine Optimization, and mass email.

Today you still have those original concepts, although your options have expanded to include; Local Business Listings, Mobile Marketing, Social Media, Video, etc.

The big question that many of my clients ask is “Which avenues of Internet marketing are we not using that could possibly work for us?”

The unfortunate truth is there is no magic bullet or direct answer to that question. As you might expect, different types of business will each receive different results. The only way to truly know is to try it and find out. You should experiment with the different possibilities, track the results, modify as needed, and focus your resources and budget accordingly.

The easiest way to begin is to acquire the consult of an expert in the field. Just as a pay per click management company can save you unnecessary grief by avoiding common mistakes and pitfalls that might not be as apparent to somebody with less experience, a social media marketing expert can provide some very good insights into best practices. Having the right Internet marketing expert/consultant in your corner can often make the difference between success and failure.

Experience is the key.

Some Internet marketing companies are quick to promote that they only focus on one aspect of Internet marketing. This never made any sense to me. As a business owner, I would want an Internet marketing consultant who was very well rounded in every aspect of Internet marketing with the deep resources and experience needed to provide the answers to all of my questions. Just as it would be foolish to think that relying only one aspect of Internet marketing is a solid foundation to grow a business, it would be just as unwise to acquire the consult of a Internet Marketing company that had such a narrow focus of skill sets and experience.

Clients of Windy City Strategies are fortunate in that our consultants are experienced in almost every aspect of Internet marketing and become a great resource to business owners looking to jumpstart 2010. Our clients enjoy the fact that we are experts in Pay Per Click Management, Sponsored Search, Search Engine Optimization, Shopping Feed Management, Social Media Marketing, Mobile Marketing, and many more.

Labels: internet-marketing, pay-per-click-management

posted by Windy City Strategies at 10:21 AM

Monday, November 9, 2009

Easier Google AdWords Conversion Tracking Provides PPC Help

Google AdWords is providing even more PPC help with a new even easier conversion tracking interface. Implementing, monitoring and troubleshooting the way you track conversions is now as easy as it has ever been. With conversion tracking being so important to quantify your results it is no wonder that Google decided to make it as easy as they possibly could.

Now let's take a look at how Google decided to make their Google AdWords marketing even better by updating the Google AdWords conversion tracking interface.

First, let's login to your account. At the top of the page you have several categories. Go over to reporting and then scroll down to conversions, and click on it. Once you are on the conversions page, you are going to see 3 new tabs pop up. Conversions, webpages, and code. Let's discuss these.

1. Conversions - This is where you can see all the information about the Google AdWords conversion tracking you implemented, but there are other sections to discuss. "Tracking Status" is where you can look to see if you are tracking properly. "Tracking Purpose," which let's you know what you are tracking. A lead, signup, purchase/sale, or view of a key page. Lastly there is "Action Name," which you can name the conversion you are tracking.

2. Webpages - This is where you will see where on the website the conversion tracking was placed and coming from. This is great information for a PPC management company, because we do not place that code on the site most of the time, so now we can see where it came from.

3. Code - Lastly, but certainly not least, this is where the code is. Without the code, everything we have talked about does not work. Here you can also change the value of a conversion based on price increases or decreases.

If you are not currently utilizing conversion tracking in your Google AdWords management campaign, now is the easiest it has ever been to do it right. If you ever need help or have questions, please contact Google and they can help you, call Windy City Strategies and we can help you, or get more information from this Google blog post.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization, website design and development and pay per click management.

Labels: conversion-tracking, google-adwords-management, google-adwords-marketing, pay-per-click-management, ppc-help, ppc-management-company

posted by Bjorn Torling at 4:24 PM

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Why Utilize A PPC Management Company?

More and more companies are turning to a PPC management company to help jump start an online advertising campaign. Building, managing and staying ahead of the ever changing search engine marketplace takes time, and if you don't have the proper knowledge, you can spend a lot of money without any return on investment.

Hiring a PPC management company is extremely cost effective for most companies too. If you were to hire someone that knew how to build and maintain a pay per click management campaign, you are looking at around $60- $70K minimum in salary. Now a PPC management company normally charges a percentage on budget spent, for example, Windy City Strategies charges 13% of budget, so if you spent $50K per year, which is a healthy budget, you would only pay $6500 for the year. How can you beat that? This includes two certified account managers and several assistants at your disposal.

Certifications are extremely important when looking for a PPC management company, because you want to make sure they know their field. These certifications currently are utilized by Google and MSN, while Yahoo had one, but at this time has decided to stop. These certification logos should be placed on the companies website showing that they are a certified AdWords management company or Microsoft adExcellence Member and clickable. The click should take you to the page at Google or MSN showing the companies certification. Stay away from companies that do not have that link. That means they are not certified and most likely took the logo from someone else's website.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization, website design and development and pay per click management.

Labels: adwords-management-company, pay-per-click-management, ppc-management, ppc-management-company, search-engine-optimization, seo

posted by Bjorn Torling at 10:19 AM

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Prospective Twitter and Google Deal Can Affect Search Engine Optimization

Currently, there is a prospective deal between Google and Twitter to show "tweets" on their search engine results. This could change search engine optimization in many ways if the deal goes through.

According to reports, the two media giants are negotiating to create a feed from Twitter.

With Google already responding to the real-time search queries from Twitter the deal seems logical, but what will this mean for Internet marketing companies in general?

From a Search Engine Optimization prospective, Google will be able to get its hands on millions of web pages and create even more competition on the search engine giant, but can it keep up? Well Google Caffeine will speed up the Google indexing speed, but it probably is still not fast enough with the millions of tweets that happen every day.

This seems like it could really cause problems with some companies, because they could get spammed by millions of tweets daily, so we'll see if this deal goes through.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization, website design and development and pay per click management.

Labels: internet-marketing, internet-marketing-company, internet-marketing-consulting, pay-per-click-management, search-engine-optimization, seo, website-design

posted by Bjorn Torling at 1:41 PM

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Website Design And Content Guidelines

Most companies are putting more and more budgets towards Internet marketing, so today I wanted to discuss website design and content guidelines.

Having a website is critical, but is your website design good for the search engines? Let's take a look at guidelines that Google offers.

1. Have a website design with clear hierarchy and text links, and every page should be reached from one static text link.

2. Make sure you have a site map. This site map should contain the important links throughout your website. Most sites have less than 100 links, but if you have more, break them into separate pages.

3. Create a site that is useful and full of information. The content should clearly describe your service or product. Do not plagiarize from another site and just change the name or product, you will get caught for duplicate content.

4. Make sure to use words on your pages that searches might look for to find your pages. This is basic search engine optimization, but many many web designers do not offer this information. If there is one thing to remember in this blog post, it is that search engines rank web pages, not websites. One common mistake is a generic services page. You should really have pages for each service you have off the home page.

5. Make sure your title and alt attributes are descriptive of the page. This is another thing most web designer will not do. Most web designer will have the same title and description throughout the website. Not good. Remember search engines rank web pages, not websites.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization, website design and development and pay per click management.

Labels: internet-consulting, internet-marketing, pay-per-click-management, search-engine-optimization, seo, website-design

posted by Bjorn Torling at 4:39 PM

Monday, October 12, 2009

How To Get Traffic To Your Website

So you have this beautiful website for your business, and you need to get traffic to your site, but how? Well there are many things you can do, but when we do Internet marketing consulting for a client, we always advise them that the Internet is a great place to quantify your results, so we need to setup a program that we can do this.

To start, you must implement Google analytics on your website. This is a java script code that gets placed on all pages of your website, and lets you know how your website interacts with your users. So why is this a must? Well, to quantify your results, would it not be great to be able to see what keywords are bringing in traffic naturally and through paid search? We will discuss each shortly. How long users are staying on your site and what keywords brought them in? Which keywords convert your product, service or information? Where they are coming from, and what browser they used? This is information that can be used to quantify your results, and bring your rate on investment up.

Once you have implemented conversion tracking, we need to get the traffic to the site. Now what? Well, we always recommend our clients to start with a pay per click management program over starting with a search engine optimization program, because what are you optimizing? I know there are keywords you want to show for, and I am not against doing that because you will optimize them anyhow, but I would not go much further than that, because what you "think" works, is not always what works, and we can quantify results quicker with a PPC management program.

With a pay per click management program, you can blanket a community with keywords that pertain to what you sell. With a properly setup PPC management account, you will be able to quickly quantify your results to not spend too much money on keywords that do not convert, but spend money on keywords that do. Now when I say quickly, each account is different, but give it a least 2-3 months, which will give you quite a bit of traffic to make good choices on your marketing. Now during these 3 months, you will be able to see keywords that perform well, and implement a search engine optimization program to supplement your pay per click management program. Now do you see why you can't start to optimize a bunch of keywords? I have seen it a bunch of times that a client wasted 6 months going after keywords like foreclosure, because that is what they do, but save my home or buy my home were the keywords that they were actually converting on.

I am a business owner too, and I know that I can't waste 6 months of blind marketing. Can you?

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet consulting and pay per click management.

Labels: internet-marketing, internet-marketing-consulting, pay-per-click-management, ppc-management, search-engine-optimization, seo

posted by Bjorn Torling at 4:27 PM

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Google Wave Beta Release

Today, Google released a product called Google Wave as a beta to 100,000 beta testers Wednesday that they believe will change online communication.

The idea is that a "wave" or "hosted conversation" is created through Google's new web application that combines blogs, photo sharing websites, email, Wikipedia and online chat to form a new way to communicate. According to Google, they want these 100,000 beta testers to find the glitches in the web application before they release the product to the public at the end of the year.

Created by the Rasmussen brothers, Jens and Lars, who also developed Google Maps, hope to replace email as the dominate way people talk on the Internet.

In Google Wave, communications that are like email can be edited by users at the same time. You can also chat about certain documents in real time where users can see what someone is typing as they are typing.

So what happens if you come in to the conversation late? Well you can replay everything that you missed.

The Rasmussen's want Google Wave to be a new real time communication system for today's fast paced, multitasking Internet.

The application does have its share of glitches currently, but it is getting better, and based on all the great applications that Google has put out already, I have no doubt that they will get the glitches straightened out and they will have a great product.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing strategy with our top of the line Internet consulting, pay per click management, and search engine optimization.

Labels: google-wave, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 4:39 PM

Monday, September 21, 2009

Inside Google AdWords: Bid like a pro with the new bid simulator

Inside AdWords: Bid like a pro with the bid simulator

Labels: google-adwords, pay-per-click-management, ppc-bid-management

posted by Windy City Strategies at 9:39 AM

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

AdWords Conversion Tracking Setup For Optimal Google AdWords Management

Continuing where we left off on our last blog, we are to the point where we are setting up the Google AdWords conversion tracking. The first step is deciding on the conversion tracking security level and language settings.

Let's start with the security level for your Google AdWords marketing campaign. This is simple. What is the security level of your conversion page? It is either https:// or http://. Most carts use the https:// level, and you can check by going to your conversion page and looking at the address bar in your web browser. If you are not sure, it does not hurt to just use the https:// security level. If you have any questions on this, a Google AdWords consultant could give you tips, so you do this properly.

Now the last step is setting up your language. For most people reading this blog, you will select English, but this is really up to what language the vast majority of the visitors to your site are. There will be a link on your conversion page that says "Google Site Stats Link," and whatever language you choose is what users get information about conversion tracking. Not a huge deal, since most people won't read it, but still should be done properly.

On our next blog, we will discuss the conversion types you can utilize to make the most out of your Google AdWords management.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords management with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: adwords-conversion-tracking, conversion-tracking, google-adwords-consultant, google-adwords-management, google-adwords-marketing, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 4:56 PM

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Understanding Conversion Tracking For Optimal Google AdWords Management Performance

Today, we are going to help you to understand conversion tracking, which will in turn make your rate on investment increase and make your Google AdWords management campaign perform better.

First we should define what a conversion is. A conversion through your Google AdWords account is when a user clicks on your AdWords ad and performs a behavior on your website that you deem as a sale or lead. A conversion could simply be someone purchasing something off your site, filling out a contact form for a quote, or downloading a white paper.

As you can see conversion tracking is extremely important, because it quantifies how well your pay per click management account is doing, and did I mention that this is free too!

So how do we set Google AdWords conversion tracking up? Well it is quite simple. All you need is a Google AdWords account and access to your website's HTML. Log into your account, and click on the Conversion Tracking link on the Campaign Management tab at the top of your account. From here you can start the process of setting up security levels, colors, type of conversion and other features, but we will discuss all of this in our next blog.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords management with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and AdWords management services.

Labels: adwords-conversion-tracking, adwords-management-services, conversion-tracking, google-adwords-management, internet-marketing-consulting, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 5:44 PM

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Google AdWords Image Ads

Today we are going to discuss image ads that can be placed on Google to supplement your Google AdWords marketing, their features, how to create them and guidelines. First off, image ads are a great way to differentiate yourself from your competition because many companies don't do them, but more importantly they look better than a regular text ad.

Image ads are only shown on the content network, so you can either use a placement or keyword targeting. If you use keyword targeting, make sure you opt yourself into the content network, and is in a separate campaign, so you can track results better. This is important when using the content network versus search, because Internet marketing is quantifiable, and you want to know what works and what does not, and proper organization is extremely important. Please consult with an AdWords management company to get this right

Now, image ads are graphic ads that can be motionless or animated, and are shown on content sites that have opted into the Google AdWords image ad program. Static (motionless) image ads can be formatted in .gif, .jpg, and .png, while animated image ads can be in .gif or Flash. Make sure you image ads reflect your site, and advertise your product or service.

Here are the sizes your Google AdWords image ads can be in for static and animated:

* 250 x 250 Square
* 200 x 200 Small Square
* 468 x 60 Banner
* 728 x 90 Leaderboard
* 300 x 250 Inline Rectangle
* 336 x 280 Large Rectangle
* 120 x 600 Skyscraper
* 160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords management with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: adwords-management-company, google-adwords-image-ads, google-adwords-management, google-adwords-marketing, image-ads, internet-marketing-consulting, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 5:07 PM

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Google Caffeine Update

Did you know that Google currently is testing a new web search called Google Caffeine, which is an upgraded version of their current search engine. Google wants this new web search to be able to crawl a big chunk of the web, index those pages and compute their quality and then rank and return those results to users as quickly as possible. Google Caffeine is essentially going to be able to increase the index size, speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness of their web search.

This new infrastructure is currently is beta testing, but Google has opened a preview, so you can go in and look under the hood so to speak. Now a lot of the systems are not currently working, but they want feedback on search on the current system compared to the new Google Caffeine. They would also like to know if you notice certain web sites rank better than others or if a site should not even rank for a certain query.

Well, here is how you give feedback. Go to www2.sandbox.google.com, and search for something. If you are displeased with something, scroll to the bottom and click on "Dissatisfied? Help Us Improve." Click on the link, enter your feedback in the text box, and make sure you enter "caffeine" somewhere in the text box.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords management with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: caffeine, google-adwords-management, google-caffeine, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 8:08 AM

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Google AdWords Management Quality Score

If you are doing any Google AdWords management you are quite familiar with the term "quality score," but do you know what it means? Well today we are going to discuss what Google's quality score is and how it affects your AdWords account.

Quite simply, quality score is Google's way of measuring keyword relevance. It is based on your keyword's click through rate, ad text relevance and landing page among other things. This quality score is calculated every time your keyword matches a search query made at Google.

Now how does Google use this quality score? Well, they use quality score to influence how much your cost per click's (CPC) are going to be, along with first page bid estimates. They also use it to determine if your ad is even eligible to enter the ad auction, so essentially the higher your quality score the better your ad position, and the less you pay per click.

Google says this helps that only the most relevant ads show at Google and its search partners.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords management with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: google-adwords-advertising, google-adwords-management, google-adwords-marketing, google-adwords-quality-score, pay-per-click-management, quality-score

posted by Bjorn Torling at 1:05 PM

Monday, August 17, 2009

Why Do Google AdWords Management?

So why would you utilize a Google AdWords management program? Well, it is quite simple. 80% of Internet users see Google AdWords ads each month in the United States, and hundreds of thousands more across seas. That is what you call instant access to a large audience.

Now some of the benefits of doing Google AdWords marketing is that you can target your ad to an audience looking for your product and service. This is critical because every day people are looking for your product or service and you want to engage those customers at that exact moment. This also means that a proper setup of your Google AdWords management is critical, so you make sure you do not stray from your target audience, which will impact your overall return on investment.

Google AdWords is also extremely cost effective, because you can set your own budget, the amount you would like to pay per click at a keyword level, or you can pay based on impressions. The choice is up to you. Of course, all of these can be changed at a moments notice.

The Google AdWords management system is quite flexible also. When you edit your ads, you can see the change online within 20 minutes. The system is available to you 24 hours a day, and you can see your listing on Google almost immediately after you have entered your credit card.

Now remember that if you chose to outsource your AdWords account, make sure you find a certified AdWords management company, as they have the knowledge to take your account to the next level.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords management with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: adwords-management-company, google-adwords, google-adwords-management, google-adwords-marketing, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 1:11 PM

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Organizing Your Google AdWords Management Account

Today we are going to discuss how to organize your Google AdWords management account better. The way you setup your account is the difference between success or eventual failure. So here are some tips to organize your Google AdWords account more logically at a campaign and ad group level.

Google AdWords marketing gives you the basic structure to work with, so really it is up to you to decide how you want to organize your campaign and ad groups.

Every keyword targeted account starts with a campaign. Each campaign, whether you have one or more needs to reflect a goal. Ask yourself, "What you would like to gain from this campaign." Are you trying to sell more product, a service, information, a certain audience, or more leads?

Well, here are some ways to organize your campaigns:

1. Product or Themes - safety vests, specific vitamin, etc

2. Use your website structure - Use the categories you have on your website as campaigns or ad groups.

3. Brands - If you sell jeans, use Levi, Lee, Gap, etc

4. Geography - Organize by the city or state that you target.

5. Language - Target the different languages that you target.

6. Distribution Preferences - Separate your search based keywords from your content network.

7. Budgets - Have different budget based on your campaigns.

Try mapping your account structure on paper first, and then you can get a good game plan when you translate it over to your Google AdWords management account.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords advertising with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: google-adwords-advertising, google-adwords-management, google-adwords-marketing, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 1:26 PM

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Local Business Advertising and AdWords Customized Targeting

Using customized targeting on Google AdWords for local business advertising is a great way to reach more qualified leads if you have an audience in a specific area to target. If you do choose to use the customized targeting option for your campaign, your ad will only show to searchers whose ip address are within the area you have defined.

Customized targeting is nice, because it does not limit you to cities and regions, so if you own a restaurant in Chicago you can target only the North Side. Here at Windy City Strategies, we recommend that you pick cities also if you choose to use the customized targeting, so you don't miss an area, and is recommended by Google too.

When you setup customized targeting, you have three options:

1. Enter a physical address - Enter your street or business address along with the distance, and it will show the radius of a circle around the address you entered. Now you will want to have at least a twenty mile radius as ip addresses are sometimes further away than you think. Google also recommends this. Only users in this circle will see your Google AdWords management ad.

2. Select a point on the map - Here you can define your own radius by dragging the interactive map to place a pointer on your place of business. This point will then automatically create a longitude and latitude, and Google AdWords will target your ad based on this. Not an ideal situation for advertisers. You probably want more control than that.

3. Multi point - This is great as you click on three or four points on a map to create the outline of a region that you would like to target your pay per click management ad. With this feature you can create any kind of size or shape. Have used this many times, and again we recommend to click cities also.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords marketing with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and ppc bid management.

Labels: adwords-customized-targeting, google-adwords-management, google-adwords-marketing, local-business-advertising, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 12:44 PM

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Using Conversion Data To Improve Google AdWords Management

To improve your Google AdWords management account we need to analyze conversion statistics, determine your rate on investment or ROI, and improve your campaign performance by analyzing this data.

Once you have activated conversion tracking and implemented the code on whatever page you would like to track, two new columns will appear on your campaign management screen. The two columns are cost per conversion and conversion rate. These two columns will give you a quick rundown, but nothing like the report center will get you.

The conversion rate will let you know the percentage of clicks that become conversions in your Google AdWords marketing account, while the cost per conversion lets you know how much it cost to get a conversion. Again this data only gives you an overview of how your account is doing. The next blog will discuss how to utilize the report center to get specific and detailed information on your conversion tracking.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords management with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: adwords-conversion-tracking, conversion-tracking, google-adwords-management, google-adwords-marketing, internet-marketing-consulting, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 1:34 PM

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Local Business Advertising and Your Website

So lately I have been discussing the many flaws that I believe are the case for using Dex Knows, Yellow Pages, Yellow Book, Super Pages, Reach Local or Yodle for local business advertising, but this one cuts the cake for me. They don't use your website!

I am going to use an example in this blog, so you can see what I mean, but let's discuss what a business owner would do once they have a website. This is simple. You want to brand yourself in your local area, and offer information to potential or current clients. Now how do you get traffic to your site? Well as most may know, there are 3 main search engines to use, Google AdWords marketing, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter. With many local business owners trying to stay as lean as they can, most do not have the time to do their own advertising, so they hire a professional Internet marketing company to get traffic to their site. For as low as around $400 a month for management fees, you can't hire an in-house individual.

Now all the R.H. Donnelley companies are out there like Dex Knows, Yellow Pages, Yellow Book, and Super Pages advertising on the TV, Internet, radio, and even call you on the phone, and with the phone books being so popular for years, people still flock to get service from them. That is fine as long as you understand what they are doing to you.

Let's look at an example. Search on Google for Algonquin Illinois dentist. Many searches will come up, and it will change constantly, but let's see if you can find this ad:

Overmyer Brian DDS

Need a dentist in Crystal Lake?
Help with all your dental needs!
www.overmyerbrianddsyp.com

This a Dex Knows ad, and you know that because they add yp or dex to the end of the url. Now, let's go to the website they are promoting; www.overmyerbrianddsyp.com. Right off the bat you will notice this is a Dex Knows storefront page, because of the logo at the top left. I believe the storefront is great for people that do not have websites, because it does provide some good information, but it is not personable. Now in blue, there is a link for website, which is Dr. Overmyer's real website that he paid for. Click on it and you will see that it goes to www.crystallake-familydentistry.com. A beautiful website that Dex Knows has decided not to use. Why? I don't know. In fact once you leave Dex Knows you lose that storefront, and now you are back to a site that most likely has not gotten a lot of clicks, because they did not use that site. You pretty much wasted advertising dollars, and now may be soured on ppc bid management.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: google-adwords-marketing, internet-marketing-consulting, local-business-advertising, pay-per-click-management, ppc-bid-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 6:59 AM

Monday, July 20, 2009

Internet Marketing Consulting Your Website

As an Internet marketing consulting firm, we get clients that come in and want their website "optimized, or "SEO'd" but they are not actually sure what that means. Like most fields, people know enough to be dangerous, but are not experts. It's a little like calling an investor banker, and telling them you want to invest your money. That could mean a lot of things, and they will advise you the right way to go.

So when Windy City Strategies consults a client like this, we give them a run down on the different types of marketing and why this would work better than something else. Now most clients want to show in the natural listings for terms they believe to be their main audience, and we always ask, how they know this, and it comes down to beliefs, but no real concrete results. Now I have no problem with that, and who am I to say that is not correct, but with Internet marketing we can get quantitative proof just like an investment banker will show profits or losses. This is why we always recommend to our clients to start with ppc bid management and implement analytics and track your results. Within a month or two, you will have a pretty good idea of what is working and not working.

If you went the route of going with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) right away, you may not get this data for another 4 months, and that is not good if it did not work. You must supplement your advertising with Google AdWords management, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN/ Bing, and work on the natural listings at the same time based on quantitative results.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: google-adwords-management, internet-marketing-consulting, pay-per-click-management, ppc-bid-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 8:52 AM

Monday, June 29, 2009

Google AdWords Management Contexual Targeting Part 2

Let's continue discussing how to properly do contextual targeting. We will discuss things you should do to make sure you are doing Google AdWords management properly.

1. Create separate campaigns for search targeted ads and content targeted ads. We discussed this in our previous blog post.

2. Set your bids at the ad group level. Remember that the search terms you have in your account are "themes," so it does not help to change bids at the keyword level.

3. Base each ad group on a single theme. If you are going after cat supplies, go after that theme. Do not stray into pet supplies. That should be its own theme in another ad group.

4. Test different ad formats. With Contextual targeting you can use text, video or image ads. Different sites allow different things, so make sure to at lease upload and image and text ad. Video is a little tougher to create.

5. Point all ads in a specific ad group to the same destination URL, and the more specific the better. This is self explanatory, like creating specific landing pages in search.

6. Create short theme lists. You don't need to have hundreds or even thousands of keyword to make your point. Use 10 - 15 words to get your theme across.

7. Use negative keywords. This is a common misconception. You still want to add your negative words, so they can best place your ad on proper content pages.

8. Write specific and compelling ads. Same as search. Make sure you entice the customer to click on your pay per click management ad. Of course, do A/B testing to measure success or failure.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords management with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: contextual-targeting, google-adwords-management, internet-marketing-consulting, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 1:28 PM

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Google AdWords Management Contexual Targeting

The key to a successful Google AdWords management account is to understand the key differences between search and the content network. Today, we are going to talk about content network targeting and strategies for building and tracking your contextually targeted campaign.

Contextually targeted ads appear on content pages and properties, while search targeted ads appear on search sites. For contextually targeting, Google AdWords marketing looks for themes of the keywords in an ad group, and then decide whether they will show your ad for relevant content. If your theme matches the content theme of a page, then your ad may show.

Since keywords for search and content are analyzed differently, it is best to separate your Google AdWords advertising two campaigns - one for search and one for content. Remember that Google AdWords automatically activates you for both when you turn on your campaign. You manually have to turn off content or search depending on the campaign you have created.

In our next blog, we will discuss the do's and don'ts for content targeting.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords management with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: content-network-tips, contextual-targeting, google-adwords-advertising, google-adwords-management, google-adwords-marketing, internet-marketing-consulting, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 12:29 PM

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Pay Per Click Management and Writing Targeted Ad Text

The key to a great pay per click management account is being able to write targeted ad text. A clear and compelling ad is needed to drive a potential customer to click your ad, or you are just one of the other ads, and you do not want that.

Let's take a look what is needed to write a clear, well-written, specific and compelling ad.

1. Make sure you have a call to action like buy, purchase and order. Try to stay away from find or search, because that implies that the customer is in awareness or interest mode, and does not encourage the potential customer to click the ad.

2. Include the searched keyword in the title, since that is what the customer is looking to find. The search engines will bold it also, which will help your pay per click management ad get noticed.

3. Have the ad relate to the landing page that they will go to, because you do not want to mislead the customer. Doing this right will help in your sales cycle and help with Google AdWords advertising quality scores.

4. Make sure your ad gets to the point and fast. You have limited space, so make sure you say what needs to be said.

5. Write more than one ad, because you want to do a/b testing to see which ad performs better, and keep improving on this every couple of months.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: google-adwords-advertising, internet-marketing-consulting, pay-per-click-management, targeted-ad-text

posted by Bjorn Torling at 12:43 PM

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Google AdWords Marketing Daily Budget

Your Google AdWords marketing budget is the amount of money that you want to spend on a specific campaign daily. Google will make sure to show your ad as much as possible to maximize your budget.

Now to make sure you maximize your daily budget Google AdWords advertising gives you a recommended daily recommended budget to within your account. These numbers are based on Google's historical data that they have on the search terms that you are bidding on. This recommended daily budget is only a recommendation, so it is not set in stone. Searches continue to increase every year, so if you need help with this, try to utilize some AdWords management services.

If you don't utilize the recommended budget, you can still advertise of course, but your ad may only show intermittently. Google is great at budget smoothing, which means they will not show your ad sometimes, so you can show for the whole day, instead of spending all of the budget immediately.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords marketing with our industry leading Internet marketing consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: adwords-management-services, google-adwords-advertising, google-adwords-marketing, internet-consulting, internet-marketing, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 6:18 PM

Microsoft Bing Tries To Unseat Google AdWords Advertising

You have seen the ads lately with Microsoft attacking Apple, and now Microsoft is trying to unseat Google AdWords advertising's stake in search engine marketing with Bing. The software giant is set to launch a $80 million to $100 million campaign to try and gain back some online marketing share. This is an extremely large budget for a national roll out, so Microsoft is putting in a lot of effort to make waves in the Internet marketing world with the budget being spent on radio, TV, print and online.

To compare advertising dollars, Google spent a total of $25 million dollars with almost half of it going towards recruiting, so this is by far the largest assault they have ever seen. Now the problem is how they are going to get consumers to change, and insiders have said that Bing is not going to attack Google AdWords marketing and Yahoo directly, but convincing people that search is not working as well as thought and Bing solves this problem. A big challenge for Bing indeed.

So the question I have for everybody is, "Do you think search sucks?" If you don't, will you still try Bing? Well the latest statistic says that 65% of people are either satisfied or extremely satisfied with online marketing. Good luck Bing.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: bing, google-adwords-advertising, google-adwords-marketing, internet-consulting, internet-marketing, microsoft bing, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 5:35 PM

Monday, June 8, 2009

Google Adwords Advertising and Google Adwords Link Policy

The Google AdWords link policy pertains to the display URL and destination URL, and more specifically how your website performs once someone is on there. Now when we say perform, that could mean a lot of things, but here we are talking about functionality with your Google AdWords advertising and website.

First off your display URL should give potential customers a clear idea of where they are going once they click your ad. Don't sell books and say you are amazon.com or sell insurance and be allstate.com. Google AdWords advertising will stop the ad your are running, which means unless you have another ad with the correct URL, you are not showing.

Now let's say your display URL is fine, but your destination URL is not. Is the page they are landing on not working or under construction? If so, you are paying for clicks that are useless. Also make sure that you don't need a program to open the page.

Now once they are on the page, is there a pop-up? If you do, you can get around the Google AdWords marketing editorial team for a little while, but you will get caught, and your ad will be disapproved. Pop-ups are annoying and most people have software to stop them anyhow, so don't use them.

Make sure the back button works once customers are on your site. The customer should make it back to where the Google ads are located within one or two clicks. If not your AdWords management services are going to be disapproved again. Remember not to mislead customers.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords marketing with our industry leading Internet consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: adwords-management-services, google-adwords-advertising, google-adwords-link-policy, google-adwords-marketing, internet-marketing-consulting, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 2:08 PM

Pay Per Click Management and Yahoo Search Marketing Keyword Matching Types

Today, I am going to discuss Yahoo Search Marketing keyword match types. Yahoo is very different from pay per click management with Google AdWords and MSN AdCenter, as there is a lack of control with keywords, because they try to automate this on their end. Google and MSN believe that you should have several different variations on keywords, and each will bring a different result, and they are right. For example Jackson Hole real estate and real estate Jackson Hole are the same customer, but real estate Jackson Hole has a lot less traffic, and you can really capitalize on this. Yahoo believes these are the same keywords. They are wrong. We will get into the two keyword match types they use, but here is another example. Safety vest and safety vests are considered the same word. If you were a business selling safety vests, with Google AdWords advertising and MSN AdCenter we can keep safety vests higher than safety vest, because we want the bulk orders over the single order. With Yahoo Search Marketing you don't have that option.

Well let's get into the two keywords variations that Yahoo Search Marketing offers:

Standard Match Type: A standard match happens when a customer enters a search term that is the same as the term you have bid on.

If you advertise on the keyword “safety vest,” your ad may be displayed for the following search queries:

* safety vest (same)
* safety vests (singular/plural variations)
* saftey vests (common misspellings)

Advance Match Type:

The Advanced match type displays your ads for a broader range of searches related to your search terms, titles, descriptions, and/or web content.

If you advertise on the keyword “safety vest,” your ad may be displayed for the following search queries:

* safety vest (same)
* safety vests (singular/plural variations)
* saftey vests (common misspellings)
* buy a safety vest (in a phrase)
* safety or economy vests (separated by word(s))
* vests for safety (in a different order)
* economy vests (sub-phrase query)
* vests (general/broad query)
* economy safety vests (specific query term)
* ‘Brand A’ safety vests (specific query term)

As you can see Yahoo Search Marketing takes away most of the creative that you need to have a successful Internet marketing campaign. What would happen if safety vest converts well, but only single orders, so you have to lower bids, but economy safety vests converts great? You can't split those keywords up which Google AdWords marketing and MSN adCenter allow you to do to make your rate on investment increase. This is why Yahoo is losing more and more share in the pay per click management world.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: google-adwords-advertising, google-adwords-marketing, internet-marketing, internet-marketing-consulting, pay-per-click-management, yahoo-search-marketing

posted by Bjorn Torling at 9:47 AM

Monday, June 1, 2009

AdWords Editor 7.5.1 For Windows and Mac

Google AdWords has released version 7.5.1 of AdWords Editor to make your Google AdWords marketing much easier to use. Let's take a look at several of the new features that is now being offered.

1. CSV File Imports - You can now import csv files directly into AdWords Editor after you have downloaded a file and done changes on a spreadsheet.

2. Downloading or Updating Selected Campaigns - Sometimes you just need to do a few things to a campaign or more, but you had to download your entire Google AdWords advertising account and that just takes a long time if you have a large account. Well Google AdWords Editor to the rescue, as now you can download the campaign or campaigns that you want to edit only.

3. Keyword Opportunities Tool - This is by far the best part of the new update as you can now view and organize new keywords by categories, so you can quickly find keywords that are relevant to your Google marketing account in the search based keywords tab. Also volume and competition are now included when you export or copy keywords, and you can add terms as negative keywords, keywords or campaign negative keywords.

Well that is the main updates for AdWords Editor 7.5.1, and if you have more questions on some of these great tools, please visit this Google AdWords blog post.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords marketing with our industry leading Internet consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: google-adwords-advertising, google-adwords-editor-7.5.1, google-adwords-marketing, google-marketing, internet-consultant, internet-consulting, internet-marketing-company, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 5:41 PM

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Understanding Internet Marketing Consulting

As an Internet marketing consulting company, our job is to give our clients goals they can understand and why they need to do it to grow their Internet presence. We constantly get clients that call us, because there are so many different internet marketing avenues they can go down, but they don't know if it is what they should be doing at that time.

Each company tries to sell what they are good at, like search engine optimization, pay per click management, blogging, press releases, etc, but at what point does it become overwhelming for you to deal with so many companies, and each of them telling you different Internet marketing consulting tips to make them look better?

At Windy City Strategies, we sit down with you as a client and find out exactly what you have done in the past and currently doing to find successes and failures. From there we create your customized online marketing strategy to suit your needs keeping you the client involved the entire way.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet consulting, search engine optimization and pay per click management.

Labels: internet-consultant, internet-consulting, internet-marketing, internet-marketing-company, internet-marketing-consulting, pay-per-click-management, search-engine-optimization

posted by Bjorn Torling at 1:59 PM

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Internet Consulting Tips

When we are doing Internet consulting with clients, we try to help them understand Internet marketing by putting them in real world situations. Let's pretend you walk into a Target store, which is like entering a website. When you look around you see navigation or way finding like men's, women's, small appliances, sporting goods, auto department, toys, etc just like if you looked at a website. Now if you walked into the electronics department or clicked it, you would find new navigation showing computers, video games by console, Cd's, DVD's, etc.

If you walked into the CD area, or clicked into that new navigation, you would find country music, rock, r&b, pop, etc. You can go into each of those sections and find titles in alphabetical order, and pick the CD up and read about it. Each of these are clicks on your website.

After you have found the CD you want, you should be able to purchase this product easily, which is why the check out counter is in the middle of the department. Of course, being able to purchase should be everywhere on your website too.

Now what if a customer wants help or has a question about a product, well the store has employees that you can find, your website also has employees. This is why you must have a phone number or contact information prominently displayed on all pages of your site.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet consulting and pay per click management.

Labels: internet-consultant, internet-consulting, internet-marketing, pay-per-click, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 4:10 PM

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Pay Per Click Management and Google Adwords Advertising

As a pay per click management firm, we have to analyze a client's website and industry and create a customized account to bring in relevant and qualified traffic. The problem is that most people don't understand why pay per click management is so important to them.

Let's say that we are going to advertise for a dentist in Algonquin, Illinois. We know that the most popular term for this client would be dentist, dental clinic, etc, but what good would it be if you were showing all across America? That obviously would not bring in relevant traffic. Google AdWords advertising allows you to set up a certain mile radius and/or pick specific cities in the area that you would like potential customers to see your ad, which in turn will bring in qualified customers to the website. This seems simple enough to do, but this is only for keywords with no location targeting associated to the keyword. There are many other factors to look at when creating a local Google AdWords advertising campaign, but this is one scenario that will improve your marketing greatly.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords marketing with our industry leading Internet consulting and pay per click management.

Labels: google-advertising, google-adwords-advertising, google-adwords-marketing, google-adwords-professional, internet-consultant, internet-consulting, internet-marketing, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 1:25 PM

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Google Adwords Advertising Navigating The Tabs

After you have logged into you Google AdWords advertising account by entering your email address and password you will notice that you have 4 tabs at the top. They are campaign management, reports, analytics and my account. Each can have one or more sub accounts, and will be listed underneath the main tab once it is clicked. Now if you have a signed up to be a Google AdWords Professional, you will notice that you also have a pro center tab, but for the most part most Google AdWords advertising accounts will only have the 4 tabs.

Let's take a look at what information each of these tabs offer you when you are advertising on Google.

1. Campaign management - Here you will see a summary of how your account is performing. There are also some great tools that are offered to you to help make the account run more efficiently, and you can edit your campaign and ads throughout this tab. The sub section that you will use the most is campaign summary, which will allow you to see the campaign details along with the corresponding ad groups once you click into the google advertising campaign.

2. Reports - Here you can create reports based on your account. Very important section as you need to know how the account is performing, and there are many reports to give you as much detail as you would like.

3. Analytics - Google analytics is a free tool that will let you know your website performance and rate on investment (ROI) with an easy laid out platform. You will know where your traffic is coming from, where they go, and how much time is spent on the site and/or web pages.

4. My Account - Here is where your billing information is located, along with account login information. Here you can see when you have been billed, along with updating your credit card if needed. This is also the area where you can allow access into your pay per click management account, and disable access too.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords marketing with our industry leading Internet consulting and pay per click management.

Labels: advertising-on-google, google-advertising, google-adwords-advertising, google-adwords-marketing, google-adwords-professional, internet-consulting, internet-marketing, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 11:38 AM

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Google Adwords Advertising Account Structure

When creating a Google AdWords advertising account you need to understand the structure of the account, and what each part does. Think of the account as being structured as a pyramid, which is broken into 3 main levels with account being at the top followed by campaign and lastly ad group.

Let's take a look at each level:

1. Account - This is where you have you have all the Google AdWords marketing information like unique email address, passwords, billing information and the preferences you have for the account. The preferences could be another email you want notifications to go, language, time zones, and administrative access that you allow for clients.

2. Campaign - The campaign is the most important part of the pyramid, as this is where you set the daily budget, targeting preferences, start and end dates, Google advertising network preferences, and other advanced options. A Google AdWords account contains up to 25 campaigns. The campaign is important, because you want to make sure you are targeting customers in your area with a budget that you can work with, and making the most out of it. This means finding your best converting keywords and placing them into a Google AdWords advertising campaign with a specific budget, while you brand or test in another.

3. Ad Group - This is where your ads and keywords/placements are located along with the bids. For the most part this is where you will be managing the account, and seeing how much you spend on a certain keyword. Of course all the keywords and ads in the ad group are shown based on what you have setup at the campaign level, which is why the campaign is so important. You can have 100 ad groups in a campaign.

Hopefully this rundown of the account structure helps your pay per click management account go to the next level by understanding how each level works with the other.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords marketing with our industry leading Internet consulting and pay per click management.

Labels: google-advertising, google-adwords, google-adwords-advertising, google-adwords-marketing, internet-consultant, internet-consulting, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 7:34 AM

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Google Adwords Billing Cycle And Google Adwords Marketing

As more and more people are moving their advertising dollars to online marketing, I wanted to take a moment to help you understand the Google AdWords marketing billing cycle. At Windy City Strategies this comes up as a fairly confusing topic to clients, because it is based on thresholds for the most part, but like any business owner you want to know when you are billed.

You are billed based on a Google AdWords billing cycle, which starts when you create and activate your Google AdWords marketing account with a debit card, credit card or direct debit. They will now charge you every 30 days unless you reach a certain threshold. The first time your account reaches $50 within 30 days with either clicks or impressions depending on what kind of Google AdWords marketing campaign you are running, Google AdWords will charge you. Then they will allow you to reach $200 within that same 30 days before charging you again.

If you do reach that $200 in the 30 days, you will be charged again, and now your threshold is raised to $350. Now if you accrue $350 worth of clicks or impressions, you will be charged again, and now your threshold is raised to $500 in your Google AdWords marketing campaign, which is the maximum.

You won't be billed exactly $500 because you will still accrue clicks in your account between the time the billing cycle is triggered and the time the charge is processed, but it will always be around $500.

Your account will now stay at this $500 threshold, and you will not have to repeat the other thresholds the next billing cycle. Google AdWords wants to make sure you can pay for your clicks, which is why they have implemented this system.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your Google AdWords marketing with our industry leading Internet consulting and pay per click management.

Labels: google-adwords-billing-cycle, google-adwords-marketing, internet-consultant, internet-consulting, pay-per-click-management

posted by Bjorn Torling at 1:38 PM

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Internet Consulting Google Analytics Tips

So you have created a website, it's active, and you are starting to get traffic to the site along with sales. You want to get more relevant and quality traffic to your site, which will then get you sales, but how? When Windy City Strategies does Internet consulting for a client with these exact problems, which are very common, we recommend to implement Google analytics to your site to start. Google analytics is a free tool that lets you see how visitors interact with your site. Once the Google analytics is implemented, we will start seeing data almost immediately.

If you have an ad that directs people to all the brands of hats that you carry, let's take a look at some things Google analytics can detect.

1. Which types of hats do potential customers view the most? Do they prefer baseball hats to visors?

2. In what order are these visitors viewing the pages? Are they looking at the cheap hats, but then purchasing more expensive ones?

3. What pages are visitors leaving on? Is your sign up page too long and confusing? With proper Internet consulting, these trends can be found.

4. Do you have a high bounce rate for a page that you are landing potential customers? We can advise you on how to change this to get optimal results, or land them somewhere else.

These are just a few tips that Google analytics information can help you with to make better decisions about your website.

Windy City Strategies account managers have been in the Internet marketing industry for over 10 years and will improve your online marketing with our industry leading Internet consulting, pay per click management, and search engine optimization.

Labels: google-analytics, internet-consulting, pay-per-click-management, search-engine-optimization

posted by Bjorn Torling at 12:05 PM

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– Manis, Automotive Tools and Equipment Company