Podcasts are the newest way to receive current news, information, and bring conference-like conversations to your MP3 player (or desktop). Being heavily involved in online marketing, search marketing podcasts are my favorite way of turning commutes into productive time. Here’s a list of my favorite marketing podcasts available today. Continue Reading »
Top 10 Search Engine Marketing Podcasts

I spend an hour on the train every day riding to and from work. While my little Vaio does have the ability to connect wirelessly to the Cingular network, I’ve found that moving so much makes my net access pretty limited during these trips. That’s where newsletters come in - offline access.

My favorite newsletters are the ones that have all the information contained in a single newsletter as I can read the entire article. The ones that have [continue this story] links are my least favorite as I often have to scan these newsletters before I hop on the train to open the fully story in my browser - or bookmark them for later reading.

Unfortunately, my later reading often doesn’t get done for months, and these articles never get read.

I’ve compiled a list of my favorite newsletters. Many have options to receive full HTML versions that can be read in entirety offline. If you’re involved in search marketing, or wish to keep up with the industry, these newsletters are for you. Continue Reading »
eWhisper’s Favorite Marketing Newsletters

Carolyn just posted adCenter’s schedule over at the MSN Blog (If you’ve not met her, Molly, and Natala, and you work with Microsoft adCenter at all, look them up at SES - great people to know) and Microsoft is speaking at quite a few events.

Jed (who’s very entertaining to listen to) is speaking about demographic targeting (an adCenter feature), so that should be a good session. Also, Doug (who’s been at Microsoft for years, and has some good stories) is doing a ‘Meet the pad search engine’ session. Usually, those are short sessions and quite a bit of Q & A. If you have questions about adCenter, there’s the time to ask.

Hopefully, they’ll also be sponsoring an event. It will be difficult for them to top Boston, but let’s hope…

Here’s adCenter’s full SES schedule.

Lycos has re-launched their PPC program with many new features. Their new PPC back-end provider is MyGeek. The new feature set contains items that have traditionally been part of a CPM program. After looking through their documents and options, I decided to re-launch a Lycos campaign and add it to my conversion test. Then the trials began… Continue Reading »
Lycos Relaunches PPC Program Powered by MyGeek

Google AdWords has recently revamped it’s quality scoring system for landing pages. The change affected a small number of sites. However, those sites saw significent changes to their min CPCs (minimum amount one must pay to have an ad displayed).

One of these accounts went from minimum CPCs of $0.03 - 0.15 to $10.00. After a site redesign, account overhaul, and some other work, the min CPCs are back down to previous levels. Here is the case study and changes that fixed the account, and the resulting impact on conversion rates. Continue Reading »
Google AdWords Case Study - Improving Landing Page Quality

I’ve seen a lot of posts and papers about the new Google AdWords quality score. Most are using a score of 1-10 or 1-100. As an FYI, the quality score is a ranking of 1-5 for their numerical purposes (as told to me by someone really in the know from Google).

So, while trying to reverse engineer the quality score, the numerical range is 1-5. Try updating your formulas with this range and you might see some improvements in the reverse engineering.

I’m working on a quick case study of a site that went from min CPCs of $0.08 to $10.00. After many changes, it returned to normal.

Hopefully, this will be finished soon to share some basic information.

[added]Google case study now available[/added]

In an effort to become more transparent with the actual click filtering that Google AdWords is performing, AdWords has launched two new options in the reporting features – invalid clicks and invalid click through rate. Now, it is possible for you to tell how many clicks your ad received which you were not billed for.

Continue Reading »
Google Adds Click Fraud Reporting to AdWords

Windows Live Expo has finally moved past beta into a full launch. It looks to combine aspects of traditional classifieds (things for sale), a dating site (find people), Craigslist (swap, general listings), and areas for job hunters. Some very interesting things are on the horizon for Expo and MSN.

Continue Reading »
Windows Live Expo Launches

Want to know where people visit on the Google network? Hitwise has just released updated stats from their visitor tracking. Continue Reading »
Google’s Local Search Lags Behind other Properties

When a website automatically posts comments to another site it is called a trackback. Essentially, Blogs and many Wiki’s automatically post comments on a website’s page (when comments are enabled) when one links to that particular page. In most cases, the trackbacks and comments are used to create a discussion around a particular subject. Hence why Wiki’s and Blogs are key to developing an internet community.

However, wiki’s are also often used in development projects, and if you are not careful with the security settings, you can give away your development secrets. Continue Reading »
Be Careful of Security Issues when Using Wiki’s and Blogs with Trackbacks