Archive for the ‘Adwords’ Category

Adwords tip: check the Geographic report

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

I have written about the importance of running your Adwords Geographic reports before, but in the meantime checking your geographic performance has become much easier, so let’s look at this again.

Nowadays, to view your campaign performance (impression, clicks, conversions) by country, you can just go to the Dimensions tab in your Adwords online interface and select GeoGraphic from the View list on the top left. Make sure to select a date range long enough to have substantial data (say the past 3 months). More »

Fighting the App Store Attitude, or:
how to get users to “ask for help” again.

Friday, November 11th, 2011

This week, in my post What happened to “asking for help”?, I wondered about a trend I was seeing regarding the user attitude in case of software problems. A short summary:

10 years ago, when users ran into a software problem, they just contacted the developer for help, resulting in a useful conversation where the user got his problem solved and the developer got useful information about possible bugs.

However, nowadays a user is more likely to just complain about the problem in a public place like Facebook, Twitter, the App Store or the Android Market. No request for help, no conversation and therefore: no solution. More »

Drinks are on me at the ESWC pre-event meeting

Friday, November 11th, 2011

In the weekend of November 19 and 20, the 11th annual European Software Conference (ESWC) will be held at the DoubleTree hotel in London.

My company Collectorz.com will sponsor the pre-event meeting on November 18 in BAR92 at the conference hotel. So if you will be attending the ESWC come say hi and have a couple of drinks on me.

BTW: I will also be speaking on the first conference day, at 1:15 PM. My topic:

How to sell more stuff to your existing customers

Attracting and converting new visitors is very important, we all know that. But don’t ignore your existing customers. There’s good money to be made selling more stuff to people who already purchased from you before.
This session will focus on cross- and up-selling to existing customers, using email campaigns, newsletters, auto-responders, Facebook, Twitter, etc…

See you there!

Android = Anabolic Steroids ?

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

WTF?

Revisiting Microsoft adCenter

Sunday, October 31st, 2010

This week, Yahoo Search Marketing has finally merged into Microsoft AdCenter.

I was quite happy when this was announced. I have been using both for a couple of years now, using a few simple campaigns on both. The extra traffic that both can bring is nice, but is still very low compared to the amount of traffic (and sales) that Google Adwords is generating.

Which meant hat I could never afford to spend much time on optimizing my Yahoo or MS ads. I am hoping that this merged system, with combined traffic from Bing and Yahoo Search, will bring enough traffic to justify more tweaking and testing. More results with less work, can’t say no to that. More »

Analyzing Adwords Geographic Performance Reports

Monday, May 24th, 2010

I was checking our Visitor stats in Analytics when I noticed that over the last 30 days, Mexico was nr. 2 in my top countries list, accounting for 8% of my visitors.

Mexico? We hardly ever sell to Mexico.

A quick peek at the Ecommerce tab confirmed that: In the same period only 0.37% of my sales came from Mexico. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if all that traffic was organic and thus free. But what if I am paying for those visitors with Adwords?

Sadly, information like that is not readily available from your Adwords interface. You will have to run a Geographic Performance report to get to the data. And even then, it takes some work to turn the data into actionable information.

But, it’s definitely worth doing. For instance, I found that for the past five months, a considerable part of my Adwords spend had been going to Mexico and a couple of other countries (Greece, Spain) that were not resulting in enough sales.

So I highly recommend that you spend some time to analyze your own Geographics Performance report. To help you do it, I have created a step-by-step tutorial on creating and analyzing this important report type. Here we go… More »

The importance of Display URLs in Adwords ads

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

adwordsA few weeks ago, I posted about my new microsites project. In short: I am creating microsites targeted at specific keyword phrases, for both SEO and PPC reasons.

Here’s some of the first effects I am seeing when using a microsite as the target URL and, more importantly, the Display URL of Google ads. More »

Adwords Remarketing – first impressions

Monday, April 12th, 2010

adwordsTwo weeks ago I started experimenting with Adwords Remarketing. As with most new advertising methods, this sure isn’t something that you can just switch on and then expect it to work. It takes time to understand it and then more time to test, tweak, test some more. Here’s an update on my findings so far.
More »

Remarketing with Google Adwords

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

adwordsLast Thursday, Adwords started offering remarketing options. I heard about remarketing first in Maui, during Jonathan Mizel’s presentation. A couple of big advertising companies were already offering it. It sounded interesting enough to put it high on my “must check out” list. But now it is available through Adwords, so I started using it right away.
More »

Pending Review or Under Review?

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Today, I created two new ads in one of my ad groups, to start a new test of two different messages.

For some reason, both got flagged for manual approval, but now look at the Status of both ads:

pending-review-vs-under-review

More »