PPC Best Practices (Part 3 of 4)

This is the third installment of the 4-part series on key PPC best practices (PPC Best Practices Part 1, Part 2). So far we’ve introduced the basics in the planning and measurement involved with the setup of a PPC campaign in addition to conversion path analysis. This week we’ll get into testing, demographic targeting, and vertical engines.
Don’t Guess… Test
With a PPC campaign, testing is the campaign manager’s best friend. Testing is a constant, iterative process that must be followed to refine the effectiveness of your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns. Multivariate testing can be as complex as developing a multitude [...]

Search Behavior: I Don’t Know What I Want or Where to Find It

In the last two columns, I looked at how search plays a part when we’re in two information gathering states: I know what I’m looking for and where to find it; and, I know what I’m looking for but not where to find it. Today, I’ll look at what happens when we don’t know what we’re looking for or where to find it.
In the first two states, our intent is pretty well defined. We’re looking for a piece of a puzzle and we know the shape of that piece when we see it. In information foraging terms, we’ve already defined [...]

PPC or SEO: Which Should You Invest Into First?

Article wriiten by Jody Nimetz and Kyle Grant
While attending the SMX Advanced Tradeshow in Seattle a great question was asked and sparked an interesting debate: “Where do you invest your first marketing dollar? In SEO or PPC?”
This is a very interesting question and not an easy one to answer. The answer basically comes back to performing a gap analysis. A Gap analysis is simply a measure of where you are now and where you need to be. Looking at your campaign objectives and goals we can easily determine what your end goal is. What is it that you are looking to achieve [...]

Search Behavior: I Know What I Want but Not Where to Find It

Last week I looked at search behaviors when we knew what we were looking for and where to find it. This week we’ll look at what happens when you know what you’re looking for but you’re not sure where to find it.
Judging a Patch by its Scent
 
In the first instance, when you know what you’re looking for and where to find it, you have defined your patch and you have a pretty good idea what route to take to find your specific piece of information. In the second instance, you don’t know which patch you’ll find the piece of information [...]

Key PPC Best Practices (Part 2 of 4)

Last week, I started wrote a post on some of the key PPC best practices (Go to Part 1). This is the second installment of the 4 part series.
 
Plan to Measure; then Measure the Plan
As you move forward with your PPC campaign, ensure you are able to effectively measure your KPIs through your analytics tracking. With several of our clients, we are using keyword-level ROI to ensure we can accurately spend the budget where we are making the highest returns. This measurement includes being able to merge data from several sources in order to accurately measure the effect of each [...]

Want to be a Top Notch Analyst? Add these Skills to your Repertoire

If you are looking for a career in web analytics and want to establish a solid foundation of skills as a part of your overall analytics training, then I recommend adding the skills below to your tool-set to help you become a very well rounded analyst before you enter the field. Taking a course on web analytics, reading a book on web analytics or subscribing to a web analytics blog are a good start, but frankly, are not good enough by themselves.
 

Search Marketing: I always think of Web Analytics as a tool to help your search marketing strategy. Without an [...]

Search Behavior: I Know Just What I’m Looking For

WE SEEK INFORMATION TO FILL gaps in our existing knowledge. The extent of that current knowledge and how we’ve structured it will play a large part in determining intent. It will help shape our knowledge requirements, our strategies for retrieval and how we will evaluate information scent. As stated in my previous two columns, we’re generally in one of three states when we turn online for information; we know what we’re looking for and where to find it; we know what we’re looking for, but not where to find it; or, we don’t know what we’re looking for or where [...]

Key PPC Best Practices (Part 1 of 4)

Stop Thinking PPC, Start Thinking Consumer-Initiated Marketing
Over the past year, several new options (and the list keeps growing) have been made available for online advertisers to create more sophisticated online marketing campaigns. We’ve seen the implementation of display advertising through Pay Per Click (PPC) providers as well as a significant movement towards local and mobile advertising. This movement in the market represents a paradigm shift, from simply a PPC-focused strategy, to thinking about all the channels associated with consumer-initiated marketing conversations.
Several of these options include display advertisements, paid inclusion, local listings and Pay Per Action (PPA). With each of [...]

Website Redesigns: A Hot Topic in the Business to Business (B2B) Space

Last week I wrote a piece on planning a site redesign in the Web 2.0 World.  The good folks at BtoB Magazine were good enough to include the post in the B2B posts of the week on BtoBonline.com.  It just goes to show that website redesigns or the ideas of conducting one are a hot topic especially in the B2B arena.  At Enquiro, we work with B2B clients every day and lately almost every one of them has either just completed a website redesign or is contemplating a site redesign in the next six to twelve months.
The great thing about [...]

Foraging for Information with Search

In the last column, we looked at berry picking as an analogy for gathering information. The theory was put forward in 1989 by Marcia Bates. Then, in 1995, two researchers found even more inherent behaviors demonstrated in the way we seek information. It turns out that we may literally hunt for information.
The Genetic Case for Searching
 
We didn’t come equipped with a inherent strategy to pull information from a web search results page. There is no genetic coding specific to Google. But as two researchers, Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card, at Xerox’s PARC research facility really started to explore how humans [...]