We here at Digital Third Coast are looking forward to a great 2010. We’ve expanded, we’ve retooled, and we were recently accepted into the Google Advertising Professionals Program. While DTC has always employed qualified individuals, this expanded company-wide status is a welcome credential and solid building block for an establishment as young as ours.

Digital Third Coast looks forward to taking full advantage of the new growth opportunities afforded to us through this qualification. We are even more excited about the opportunity of being able to pass on tips, promotions, marketing tools and more than ever before to our current and future pay per click client base.

A few weeks ago, DTC was selected as a “Favorite Place” on Google. Based on information gathered from user behavior and local listings, this means that we have been selected among the Top 10% of businesses, calculated by the popularity of our local business listing.

Google informed us of our status with the following letter:

Dear Business Owner,

Congratulations! You’re a favorite Place on Google. Between July 1 and September 30. Google users found your Digital Third Coast Internet Marketing business listing xxxx times, and requested driving directions or other information about your business xxxx times. Read More

My fellow rich and famous, the wait is over! For years Google has kept us all down by only allowing public transportation options in Google Maps. Take a bus? You’ve got to be kidding me! Subway? Isn’t that a restaurant? What about the dozens of us hard working Americans that have access to a private helicopter? Aren’t we people, too?

In between sips of champagne from this diamond encrusted glass, Read More

Last week, a few of us here at Digital Third Coast attended the first-ever Stratigent Google Analytics User Conference at the Field Museum in Chicago. The conference brought together a variety of users of GA and gave us all an opportunity to interact with many of Google’s top Analytics engineers. During the days’ presentations and discussions, one exciting (and soon-to-be-released) feature kept coming up: Google Analytics Intelligence.

On a basic level, GA Intelligence will provide alerts whenever there is an unusual spike in activity from virtually any user location, page section, referrer, and so on. The feature will have customizable settings for sensitivity, meaning that users will have the option to determine with precision just what level of activity will trigger an alert.

Read More

There’s been a lot of chatter about Google’s latest augmentation of their local map results. Earlier this year, there were many additions of map results to local search queries (explicit or implied). Then Google announced new Local Listing Ads that would show above the natural map results – currently a regional trail only in San Francisco and San Diego. Most recently, we’ve seen a change to local map results in every region – a reduction in the number of local results from 10 to 7. In this reduction Google also made an addition – they took away 3 “natural” maps listings while adding 4 paid listings above.

There are a few interesting things happening here: Read More

Looking at some local search queries this morning, it appears as though Google is testing a new 7-pack of results as opposed to the 10-pack we have all gotten used to.

Here is a screenshot of the new layout:

The results are still in the same order as yesterday for the searches that I performed, just missing the last 3 on the list. For those businesses rounding out spots H, I and J this is definitely a big blow in larger markets, but a great reason to work that much harder to improve visibility!

Will this move from 10 to 7 listings create a more authoritative appeal to searchers?

For businesses that have taken the steps to sign up with Google’s Local Business Center, Google has a new offering available – Local Listing Ads. Unfortunately it is only currently available in San Diego and San Francisco as a trial! While they are not intended to compete with AdWords in any way, I can see there being some overlaps in the positions used to display ads, as well as by the businesses who choose one platform over the other. It all seems very easy to set up and a good value add to customers that are taking advantage of Google Local already (even more value add to those that aren’t!). Ads are displayed based on the following:

• Business location
• Search categories
• Where the user is performing their search


Here is a video explaining the program: Read More

Obtaining a listing that shows up in the prominent Google one-box or local 10-pack is becoming increasingly important for any business looking to compete in a local marketplace. Where the print Yellow Pages used to dominate the local advertising dollars, the big 3 search engines, local and national vertical directories and IYP’s are on the rise, full steam ahead.

When Google one-boxes first started popping up years ago, it was few and far between for most local based searches without a great set of tools to further improve the visibility and rankings short of adding keywords to your business name. Read More

Today I saw an interesting notification from Yahoo!

Dear Product Submit advertiser,

From November 2, 2009, until December 29, 2009, Yahoo! will be making a seasonal rate adjustment by increasing the cost per click (CPC) by 25% in all categories. This means that during this period your actual billed CPC will be 25% higher. This adjustment reflects the increased consumer buying activity during the holiday shopping season, which is typified by increased leads, better conversion to sale, and increased revenue for our merchant partners. The 25% adjustment to your billed CPC will be reflected on your Click Report and in your invoice.

Please Note: You will not need to make changes to your account before or after this period.

I get the mentality here, though I don’t agree with it.25% seems like quite a hike to blanket all categories. Usually, CPCs are determined by the competitiveness of the market and bids of others in that market. Raising everything off the bat is an interesting tactic as it could be seen as gouging their current customers rather than increasing profits through expanding their market share.

Are you trying to get your site to come up or rank higher in the Google “one box”? The “one box” is the Google local listing that comes up with a map and 10 local listings on the right side of the map when you do a search that has a local intent such as “Chicago Locksmith”. One of the best things you can do to improve your Google Local ranking is increase the amount of websites mentioning your company name and address. Google indexes these mentions on other websites and sees these mentions as “citations”.  I know what you’re thinking…what exactly are “citations” and how do I get more of  them?

Read More

Internal competition, or duplicate content, is not just an SEO problem. Over the last 2 years I have probably inherited as many PPC campaigns as I have actually created from scratch. This has its pros and cons, but one of the biggest repeated mistakes I come across is accounts having duplicate keywords across campaigns targeting the same geography. Read More

In case you haven’t heard Microsoft recently launched their new search engine called “Bing” earlier this week.  This is their 3rd attempt at stealing some search market share from Google and honestly I think it’s going to fail…again.

I’m not saying that the new Bing search engine is a poor attempt by any means.  I think it’s a well designed search engine with some great new features.  The user interface is clean and the added features like the hidden flyout on the right side of each listing with site info are a nice addition. Read More

Earlier this week Google updated their Local Business Center. Now included is some analytics data including how many impressions (how often your listing was shown), actions (driving directions to your business, clicks to your website, etc.) and which search queries triggered your local business listing.

If you don’t already have a local business listing, you can add one here – www.google.com/local/add.

While doing some general research for the home I noticed a couple of headlines that were longer than the stated 25 character limit.

Since you still can’t create ads like this in the Adwords UI or in AW Editor, my bet is that this is happening because the ad copy was created using dynamic insertion – which can change a section of ad text to the keyword the searcher used to trigger the ad. In this same way advertisers have also been able to sneak in superlatives like “best” into their Adwords ad copy. In general, ads with the keywords a searcher actually used will have a higher click through rate. I’m guessing Google is allowing these longer ads for the sake of a higher relevancy for their users. Read More

If you’ve clicked on the “conversion tracking” button in your AdWords account you may have been greeted these 2 different conversion metrics. What do they mean? Read More