Amplify Interactive

Quick and Easy Way to Start Advertising on Google’s Display Network

Ryan Campbell — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:00:04 +0000

Last month I was asked to speak at an SEMpdx event on PPC and Landing Pages. I’ve been attending SEMpdx events since 2007 but this was my first time presenting, or presenting at any event for that matter. I was excited and nervous and I’m sure several other emotions. I presented on a “Quick and Easy Way to Set Up a Campaign on Google’s Display Network.” I wrote a blog post on the same topic last year. If you’re not advertising on Google’s Display Network you’re missing out on valuable impressions, clicks, and conversions. Here’s my presentation from the event.

How to Set Up Campaigns on Google Adwords Display Network

View more PowerPoint from Amplify Interactive

Thanks SEMpdx for having me! I hope I get more opportunities to present in the future. I really enjoyed it.

Ryan’s PPC Playlist: Staying Creative In Paid Search Edition

Ryan Campbell — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:49:40 +0000

Paid search has constantly evolving features and changes in the space combined with shifting needs of clients and business. Effective PPC managers are flexible and creative to adapt to this landscape. Take the Bear Grylls approach to PPC management and ensure your campaigns don’t die a slow death in the internet wilderness with this edition of the playlist.

Amplified Gold Posts

How to Steal Killer Sales Copy Straight from Your Prospects’ Mouths: Great tips in this post on using words your potential customers use for effective ad copy. I’ve also mined LinkedIn Q and A for customer discussions to find ad copy ideas.
Using Google Analytics To Collect & Benefit From AdWords Position ROI: Good article on how to find the optimal ad position for your ads.

Amplified Platinum Posts

How to Turn Display Ad Clicks into Conversions: Read this case study on how ion Interactive developed a 47% conversion rate on a display campaign.
PPC Warfare: Get Out of the Trenches & Gain a New Strategic Perspective: Joseph offers great tips and ideas on how to step back from your campaigns and identify areas to optimize.

Amplified Diamond Posts

How to Identify Google AdWords Quality Score Problems: Brad shares some great ways to identify opportunities for improving your quality scores. The video is 17 minutes long but I’d highly recommend taking the time to watch it. Your campaigns will thank me later.
Project Management for SEO: I know this is a “PPC” playlist but this post from Tom is applicable to anyone working in a search marketing agency. Tom offers great tips from tools, inbox zero, and I LOVE his tips on communication with clients. I’ve found communication with clients to be a challenge in agency life.

What did you read in the last 3 weeks that you’ve shared or referenced lately?

My personal playlist…

I’m loving this new song, “It’s Only Life” from The Shins newest album:

Overwhelmed by Social Media?

Ben Lloyd — Thu, 10 May 2012 21:09:07 +0000

I was recently interviewed by NeighborhoodNotes.com on the topic of “Choosing the Right Social Media Platform For Your Business” for their “Indie Business” section.

Infographic on Social Media . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The premise was that a lot of small business owners feel overwhelmed by social media. This is not a new theme when it comes to social media – it can be overwhelming and we know it. But I think a lot of people feel compelled to do it all and do it all at the same time. I know I am guilty of that from time to time as well. This article covers several tips and other advice for finding the right social media community(ies) for your business and how to get started.

About NeighborhoodNotes.com

NeighborhoodNotes.com is a fantastic hyper-local news site and business directory targeted at the various communities and neighborhoods within Portland Oregon – definitely check it out. Got an business in PDX? Make sure it’s in their directory – get yourself a link out of it.

Christian Reads… (So You Don’t Have To) – SEO Edition – May 2012

Christian Bullock — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:41:32 +0000

It’s time to wake up from your haze due to those pesky April showers and smell those May flowers because I have some fantastic SEO articles and news items I’ve been reading from about the middle of April until now to share. So let’s get sniffing (that doesn’t really work… but we’ll go with it anyway)!

Spring Flowers in Portland, Oregon – courtesy OregonLive.com

We’re Hiring!

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We’ve recently announced that we’re looking to add an experienced account executive to our team. Amplify is a great place to work at and we work & play hard. Apply today!

How to Move Your Content to a New Location

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Straight from the Goog’s mouth – some best practices when you’re looking to move your site content. This might be the understatement of the year so far: Google says it’s “worth doing it properly.” Uhh, yeah, because if you don’t you risk:

Losing if not all of your current organic rankings most of them
Providing users a poor first impression when they click on your result in search engines and hit a 404 error page or a mislead 301 redirect
A rat’s nest of technical issues

SEO Analytics, Middle Earth-style

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Ian Lurie decides to go all Middle Earth on us and shows how to collect lots of data about your SEO efforts and present it in a simple yet very effective way. Because that’s super important when it comes to showing wins: lots of numbers can be seen as confusing. Show a nice line graph with a positive upswing with minimal data (but have the “big data” ready to go in case you need to show it). From the tools needed to collect and organize the data to producing an opportunity map – Ian hits on all of it.

6 Changes Every SEO Should Make Before the Over-Optimization Penalty Hits

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Rand walks us through – in video form – how overly optimized pages could get your sites in trouble with Google when they start penalizing over-optimized pages. My favorite item he hits on? Those huge footers that contain links to all of your site’s pages AND THEN SOME. Basically, trim those down to links you’d like to present to your site visitors instead.

Normally, 43rd Place Isn’t Anything to Brag About

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This was a blog post we produced in which we highlighted the fact that we are 43rd in Cison’s top 100 social media / Internet marketing / SEO blog 2012 list. That’s not what we’re hanging our hats on; it’s the fact that we improved 42 spots from last year!

There are a ton of great blogs in this list. Luckily, we’ve generated a content stream of all of these resources onto one page. Check it out: Live Stream of Social Media Content from the Cision Top 100

How Your SEO Communication Affects a Client’s Perception of Success

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Stoney hits the nail on the head here: you can produce amazing SEO results for a client but if you present your wins in a confusing or overly-complicated way, they won’t truly know how great those results are. He states that you can’t over-communicate with a client… but you’ll get a feel for how much they would like to communicate after a few weeks of working together.

My Own Personal Christian Reads…

Haven’t had a ton of time to do much personal reading, unfortunately. Still trying to make my way through Game of Thrones and actually get through the beginning of the Hunger Games.

Readers Read… (So I Don’t Have To)

What have I missed? Did you read anything really awesome in late April that you’d like to share? Please let me know in the comments!

Amplify Interactive provides SEO services to businesses of all sizes. Contact us to see if we can help amplify your online marketing efforts or download our SEM Secrets whitepaper.

Labels and Other New Features in Google Adwords

Ryan Campbell — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 21:13:39 +0000

Google Adwords released a few new features this week that got me pretty excited. I can already see multiple ways these new features can be used. If you’re not excited enough already let me show you why you should be. I’m most excited about the addition of labels to add another layer of organization to campaigns. Here are three new features released this week starting with my favorite, labels:

*All of the sub headings are links to the blog posts on the Adwords blog

Slice and dice your data using AdWords labels

I’ve been using label type hacks for years. I will append information to campaign names to help me quickly identify different campaign parameters or settings. Labels are an easier and cleaner way to sort and filter campaigns. Here’s a screen shot of labels in action:

Here’s a few applications of labels:

Sales cycle – You can label campaigns, ad groups, or keywords based on what part of the sales cycle this group falls into. This is useful to personalize ad copy and landing pages based on what stage of the cycle you estimate the user is at. I’ve seen sales cycles/funnels with anywhere between 3-7 different stages. Here’s an example of one:

Geo targets – Label cloned campaigns that are geo targeted differently.
Divisions – Label campaigns to group campaigns based on different budgets or key performance indicators.
Networks – Label campaigns with either “Search” or “Display”. I like cloning campaigns from Search and then modifying for the Display network.

I realize you can filter and sort by a few of these but labels brings these to your dashboard to quickly sort or group by label to analyze. Or you can download with the label column and analyze labels deeper with an Excel pivot table.

Making campaign planning and build-out faster and more accurate

Google Adwords made some changes to both the Keyword Tool and the Traffic Estimator. Here’s a couple features that will start saving me time right away:

Seamless Traffic Estimator integration – I’ve always wondered why these tools are separate. Historically I’ve created an Excel spreadsheet with a VLOOKUP that would combine data from these tools for campaign forecasts. Combining the data in these tools means one less tab and one less VLOOKUP in Excel for me.
See keyword ideas grouped by themes – I like to use the Keyword Grouper tool in Adwords Editor to help me identify patterns in keywords and organize campaigns and ad groups. I’m excited to see similar functionality in the Adwords online interface.

Another gem from Google’s blog post, “We’re also improving the quality and accuracy of the traffic estimates”. I’m a little skeptical on this claim but we’ll see.

Increasing transparency in Quality Score

This one isn’t as exciting to me but it’s a step in the right direction. On my Adwords wish list is historical quality score. To track historical quality score we take a snap shot of quality score with this spreadsheet from Wordstream each month. We then compare and measure how quality score is changing each month to guide optimization efforts.

Releasing new features like these are one of many reasons Adwords is miles ahead of Adcenter. How do you plan to use the new Adwords labels? Or some of these other new features?