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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I’ve been asked this question several times over the last few years and so I’d like to do a run down on the initial aspects of PPC that any new account holder will have to go through. Of course there are particulars that apply to specific industries or goals which I do not touch on. So – in some semblance of order here you are:

1. Goals – Set your goals. Read More

The day has arrived – Yahoo! has finally given more control to their advertisers with day parting. This has been a long available technology in Google, and a long desired option in YSM. Day parting essentially allows an advertiser to block their ads for showing during certain times of the day or from entire days. This is great if you only want a campaign running during business hours, or when you notice a trend that your cost per conversion skyrockets on only Saturdays. Of course, this could always have been done manually, but just setting it up in the interface itself does give advertisers and PPC managers more peace of mind that this is consistently being done.

Check out some instruction and Yahoo! day parting screenshots.

In Google AdWords there are many options and settings which you can tweak for different effects and for different purposes. One such feature is found in Edit Campaign Settings under Scheduling and Serving: Ad Serving. This allows the user to choose from 1 of 2 options – Optimize (which Google recommends), and Rotate. Read More

I’ve been around a while in this hot search marketing industry and I can proudly say – without any hesitation – that I’ve learned as much, if not more, from mistakes as I have my successes. That said, I’d like to share my latest near-blunder with readers.

While using AdWords Editor tonight I nearly “find (myself out of my position) and replaced (myself with someone else) some bad URL tracking codes.

While the “F & R” feature is made to save time, it can also become a crutch to facilitate sloppy work. I haven’t pulled this hat over my own eyes in a while, so I thought it might be time to revisit the subject on the DTC blog. Just a friendly reminder to always check and recheck your work – whether it be in Excel or a similar program, or with AWE, or with any other work that matters. There really is never any substitute for good quality assurance.

The human touch is what makes a campaign great, but the human touch is also apt to err. So please – Recehck.

While managing PPC for clients one question comes up more than any other: “Why can’t I see my ads”? A few years ago this had a few answers – Keywords being bid on, time of day ads were being shown, IP address exlusions, etc. But more often than not, it has to do with budget constraints. Ads will not show up for every query possible – especially in the more competitive verticals (this would likely even prove to be unprofitable). While all of these reasons still exist, a whole new dimension has come into play and, unlike before the answer is, “well, where are you looking for your ads”?
Read More

Over the last couple of years I’ve noticed a couple things in the search space: 1. keyword tools are unreliable 2. PPC traffic can show some valuable search trends. Well here’s the point: PPC and SEO help to inform each other consistently.

There are reasons why SEO and PPC should always be in cahoots: On the SEO side, a simple look at the analytics queries that come through and spend time on site are usually from keywords that are relevant and have a value. If there is evidence that some terms that show up organically on page 2 or deeper in the SERPs are getting hit are are converting, then these are that have value for PPC. We can immediately pay PPC to be seen next to the top ranking organic sites showing for these competitive terms. Of course, because this is PAID traffic, and because CPCs can be so wildly different for each industry or vertical, ROI calculations should be applied constantly.

Now it gets interesting. Read More

Check out our friend Jeff Hudson as the guest star on this week’s episode of PPC Rockstars. There are some great PPC tips on this episode like using Speed PPC, building effective campaigns from scratch, and much more so make sure you give it a good listen.

How fast does your website load? You can test out your pages with this web page speed test tool.

There has been a lot of attention on page load speed lately. There used to be more focus on page load speed back when everybody was on 56k modems, but it seems a lot of the best practices from those days have gone out the window since high speed internet came along. I’d like to remind people that it’s still important to optimize the speed of your pages. It can affect how much traffic your site receives, how many vistors stay on your site after you get them there and the bottom line…how much money your site makes. This is especially true for ecommerce sites that naturally get more browsing and page views per visitor.
Read More