Recently, a number of AdWords campaigns I’m working have been sailing very close to the limits of what Google will permit in a single AdWords account. Anyone who is a subscriber to the ‘long tail‘ principal will know that generating variations and combinations of keywords is good practice to find lots of niche little terms [...]

Google AdWords includes a wonderful, often unused feature for negative keywords. This allows you to filter out the unwanted irrelevant traffic that would still cost you money in clicks, but not gain you anything in sales. Using the example of a campaign selling hubcaps, if you don’t sell Renault hubcaps, make sure you use “-Renault” [...]

A colleague posted me this article about the online marketing economy. Big Bubble? Maybe. Big Trouble? Definitely. There’s nothing like a bit of Google-bashing, huh? Bill Gates must love it! It certainly takes some of the usual negative attention away from Microsoft. If Google is squeezing the AdSense partners, and I don’t especially advertise on [...]

Initially, I was a little sceptical about this change, and I still am. As Google suggests in its post, we’ll have to monitor campaigns over the next few days or weeks (depending on the number of clicks you usually achieve) to see what difference this makes. Actually, I have established a circumstance where this is [...]

There’s a change coming to the way that Google currently chooses the position of your ad in the pecking order. The whole post makes confusing reading and I’d recommend reading it a couple of times. It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out. Right now, the placement of your ad is not just based [...]

Google has this clever way of presenting results that are most relevant to the searcher. I completely agree with this policy – a searcher wants to find the most relevant results. This helps you to build campaigns that acquire clients for the lowest cost. However, there’s a downside: what if you’re searching for a product [...]

Google has just added a new report to the range available on the AdWords platform, the Search Query Performance report. I know that many people struggle with the choice of keywords to get the performance that they want from their campaign. In my experience, this is typically where many businesses form the opinion that Google [...]

So, how useful is it? Not least the whole Harry Potter thing, but we appear to be in a wizard-driven society, or at least much of the online experience is. That’s all well and good and many times, like this, it can work well. What it doesn’t do, is give as much flexibility – it’s [...]

Why does search marketing work? Seth Godin describes in his post, Permission, Junk and Spam, how marketing has changed since 1999: The result of Google and the prevalence of search means that people are far more forgiving of things that need to be sought out, and less patient than ever with selfish marketers that insist [...]

Being in business development and marketing for as long as I have has turned me in to a bit of a cynic. Google has made its online office tools, Docs, Spreadsheets etc. available as a hosted solution free for educational organisations in the US, and announced in this post, (Official Google Blog: Nonprofits mix it [...]