July 16th, 2008 admin
I’m getting a tad sick of old addages. ‘Content doesn’t work!’ ‘Google conversion tracking is inaccurate!’ . I hear blanket statements like this on a daily basis by people with no experience in either. It seems that the search world is a collective game of chinese whispers, because everyone is afraid of losing their competitive edge. The competitive edge is the service generally, as performance is relatively easy to achieve realitistically.
I did a little test with google conversion tracking and foudn the following; a 0.5% inaccurate over a month with Google conversion tracking for one client, and a 2% inaccuracy for another.
What do these numbers show? Well, I would definitely make bidding decisions based on google conversion tracking. I intend to take this a step further and use client back end data as a comparison. Why? Because I have a sneaking suspicion that the inaccuracy is actually with Atlas.
Additionally, I intend to perform a comparison between Atlas, TD Searchware4 (bidbuddy) and GCT. Compare these with backend data and decide which is most accurate.
After this, I will decide if I am going to incorporate Google Conversion Optimizer into one of my accounts, as I wish to test it and see how it it performs…
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July 9th, 2008 admin
So google is/has changed it’s keyword research tool, to give exact impression values for the previous month for each keyword. This replaces the temperature style ‘bar’ that gives a rough indication. This change will be widely greeted across both PPC/SEO roles for various tasks.
What’s the next step for companies to do with this data?
1. Code a crawler to push this data on a monthly basis into a sql database. Store it. Use it for pitches. (easy)
2. Or - Create some OCR app that pulls the most recent impression data via api, then pulls the google trends image for that term and extrapolates values based on the graph. Sure it won’t be perfect, but it’ll be accurate to an acceptable degree (to the 1000th impression)
Useful for pitches, analyzing terms, seo targeting, ppc targeting, competitor targeting. Costing calculations.
etcetc.
Well, I’ll start working on number two then..
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July 2nd, 2008 admin
Quick primer - this might be clear. But it works!
You can now easily make a map appear by your ad, but inserting a local business ad within adwords to a specific adgroup. Google will then decide to show it based on: Users IP, or search term of a location.
I.e.: Broad matched term + location term = Advert + Relevant LBA in adgroup.
Example-
Comet London - Suposing there is a Comet LBA ad for London in the Comet brand adgroup, then this term will cause a Comet local business ad to appear.
If you someone searches for:
Comet - And their IP shows they are in York and you have a LBA for the ad group in Yorkshire - then the LBA ad will appaer for the York store.
If someone has an IP in York, but searches for Comet London - the london term will overwrite the geolookup.
Now, when the replacement happens, the entire Local Business Ad replaces the original ad. Infact technically, you no longer need normal ads at all.
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