If you’re starting with Adwords, it won’t be long before you wonder how the nuts and bolts of the pay per click (PPC) pricing mechanism fit together. What this video lacks in pizzaz, it makes up for in content. It’s 9 minutes of your life but if you’re a client using PPC advertising (or need to explain the Adwords fundamentals to a client) it’s a must watch.
The only small comment I would make is that I believe the price paid is actually 1p (or $0.01 in the US) higher than the bid that’s been beaten rather than exactly the beaten bid price as Hal says. See more detailed info on the Google Help page about what you pay on Adwords.
Adwords impression share is very useful for demonstrating how much of your target audience you’re covering. As a rule of thumb, impression share (IS) above 80% is usually regarded as good.
Take the following figures from a real Adwords account:
Impression Share: 93%
Lost IS (Rank): 7%
Lost IS (Budget): 0%
Exact Match IS: 100%
There can be a couple of reasons for the Lost IS due to rank; one of which is that the ads are being displayed on a partner site that doesn’t display as many ads as Google’s homepage so effectively the ad drops off the bottom. This is logical.
However, in the above example the advertiser is only distributing their ads on the Google search results page, so it will never be displayed anywhere other than on the Google.com/.fr/co.uk/com.au etc.
A second (and more relevant) reason for the Lost IS (Rank) is that the advertiser is missing opportunities to display ads against long tail terms. Let’s assume that the advertiser above is targeting the term “curly wigs” (phrase match type). They’ve set their CPC bid and daily budget high enough to display an ad to 100% of the people searching for “curly wigs”. But only 93% of the people searching for “curly wigs” plus a modifier e.g. “brown curly wigs” see an ad. This probably means that their website isn’t optimised for all the possible long tail terms (“curly wigs that make me look like Michael Knight just when he gets out of Kitt” anyone?).
The more content they add to their site, the more keywords they target and the more they bid the lower their Lost IS (Rank) will be. But at over 90% I reckon they’ve got the curly wig market pretty well covered!
Creating accounts and remembering passwords for every site you visit has always been a major pain. A simple way around this issue is OpenID. This technology allows you to use a single account to control access to lots of sites in a secure way.
You probably already have an OpenID account but just didn’t know about it.
If you’ve installed WordPress for your business’ website, blog or news section, you’ll need to install some extra plug-ins to really get the most from this excellent software. They’re all free (although a donation is welcome) so install them right now.
Out of the box, WordPress doesn’t insert some common meta tags in your pages. Although the importance of these (specifically keywords & description) has been reduced since the early days of SEO, they still hold some value and it is just general good practice. This plugin has a wealth of features (and documentation) to help make your site a bit more Google friendly and to get it set up properly took me about 15mins. If you only have time to install one plug in, this is the one – it really is superb.
To make sure that Google (and Bing and Yahoo!…) knows where all your pages are, you can submit an XML sitemap. However, editing the file manually every time you create a new post is a major pain. This plug in does the editing and submits the new sitemap to all the search engines automagically! Make sure that you take a couple of minutes to configure the plug in to get all the categories and tags that you want into your sitemap.
There are a whole host of ways to integrate your WordPress blog with Twitter but this plugin gives you a couple of powerful features that are really slick. Once installed, you can create your own url shortening structure (now, that looks pro doesn’t it!) and you can track clicks from Twitter in your Google Analytics account. You can also restrict the posts that are tweeted by including or excluding a specific tag/category.
Social media is a term you’ve probably heard but if you haven’t it broadly means allowing users to engage with website content and each other. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are known as social networking sites because their primary purpose is to allow people to make contact and share thoughts, comments & content. Other sites like The Guardian or YouTube allow comments to be added around their content thus making their content ‘social’. So why not let your website users comment on your content, share ideas & thoughts etc. In other words, use the features of social networking on your own website.
One of the ongoing annoyances for committed users of the web is the number of user profiles we need to create to engage with the all these websites. Fortunately, Google’s recently launched social networking platform, Friend Connect allows us to embed social networking tools into our websites without the need to ask users to create a new profile when they want to use the features.
Adding the various free widgets will allow you to create a plug & play community for your website without the barriers usually associated with setting up and using a social network. You won’t need any programing skills but you will need (ftp) access to your server to set it up.
I had to find a solution for a client who wanted to be able to upload news articles to their otherwise static website. Having looked at options like Adobe Contribute and not really seen the benefit, I thought Blogger’s FTP publishing setting must be worth a look. Sure enough, you can customise the template to simply output a list of news articles without all the usual blogger stuff on the page. So you’re really just using Blogger’s interface and article management tools…which as you’d expect from Google are very user friendly. Once you’ve FTP’d the finished pages to your server, you can then either include these lightweight pages in a news page by using a server-side script language like php or asp. If you don’t have access to a scripting language on your server, you can simply use an iframe to embed the content. Slick, free and very quick to set up – winner!
We all know Google is the best search engine available. However, it is an awful lot more too – it even helped me make dinner!
I was cooking the other day (actually I was just preparing the ingredients for Liz to do the cooking!) and I had a recipe which was written in pounds & ounces. All my ingredients were in metric measurements so I did a quick search for a conversion tool…I didn’t need to look far!
Type this into Google: 1lb2oz to g
Amazingly, at the top of the screen you’ll get: 1 pound 2 oz = 510.291416 grams
Pretty amazing huh?!
You can also try it with all sorts of conversions (distances etc) but its also a really powerful calculator too. Just type this into Google: 100/8
Obviously firing up your PC to do some simple maths is pretty silly but if the PC’s on it could be pretty handy, esp if you need to concentrate on the cooking!
