So I get an email tonight from the VP of Marketing at Panorama, for whom I have done a bit of SEO. He tells me that Panorama has partnered with Google to offer pivot table functionality in Google Spreadsheets as well as on top of Google AdWords.
WHAT? Surely this is some sort of weird spam I am thinking; a Google search returns nothing… Well he did mention the partnership was just announced today so perhaps it has not made it to the organic listings yet - after all, SEO does take time. So I search Google News…and sure enough there are a couple of press releases indicating there is some truth to this email.
The really weird part is that I don’t use Google Spreadsheets because they can’t filter or do pivot tables - seriously… I am geeky enough to do pivot tables to analyze clients Google Analytics or WebTrends data. It gets more weird…. just tonight I was speaking with Jacques, one of our WebTrends configuration guru who is currently doing work at AUCC for me this week, and was mentioning that I’d like to learn dashboarding as I think it would be a sexy alternative to pivot tables for some clients.
Perhaps this new Panorama feature within Google Docs and Google AdWords will mean I don’t have to learn dashboarding?
Wow… I can’t wait to check this out!

We all know that you should create customized landing pages for your various PPC campaigns.

Google (a while back) implemented a quality score but just recently incorporated landing page quality into the algorithm which provides this quality score. Sites with poor landing pages will be forced to pay more per click than another site with a “quality” landing page.

What is a quality landing page? Google AdWords Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines offers a few pointers such as:

• Provide relevant and substantial content
• Treat a user’s personal information responsibly
• Develop an easily navigable site

Google does go into a bit more detail on each of these pointers, but there are various other conversations going on around the internet that elaborate on landing page quality as well including Analyzing the Google AdWords Landing Page Algorithm at Search Engine Watch.

One of the more interesting items I have taken out this is the privacy policy, which I will discuss in a separate post :-)

In today’s issue of SearchReturn, Detlef mentions a post on SEW entitled New Landing Page Quality Score Announced for Google AdWords Advertisers.

The essence of this announcement is that some advertisers will be faced with higher minimum bids to keep their campaigns running on AdWords, as a result in changes being made to the landing page quality score algorithm.

Out of the various readings, including the Google Blog, what stands out to me is something that has long needed to be addressed: advertisers who buy inexpensive pay per click traffic, only to lead the visitor to a landing page which contains additional links. These links are often just higher-paying ads (often Google AdSense or Yahoo ContentMatch), which generate income for the website owner and a lack of relevant content for the visitor.

I personally have stopped looking at ads on the Google search engine results page because they are so often what I consider spam sites with nothing but additional paid links to be clicked on.

Hopefully this will open up the market for legitimate advertisers!

I am starting a new series here - how not to do PPC!

Today I started looking for a “range extender” to expand my wireless network into my yard so I can work under the gazebo when I feel like it.

My Google search term was “buy wireless range extender canada”. Here is an example of how not to do PPC:

Sears has the following ad:
Sears.ca: Canada’s Store
Great prices, great variety, great
products. You’ll find it at Sears
Sears.ca

Ok so they are targeting Canada, that is good…but I am not aware of Sears selling computer equipment and nothing about that ad says networking. I wonder to myself if by range they are referring to ovens/stoves?

I click on the ad and land on this page. Part of the URL contains the phrase “generic-store-buy”. Heaven forbid but are they bidding on the word buy? If so, good luck getting an ROI on that one ;-)

Stay tuned for more “how not to do PPC” case studies!

Up until yesterday the forums were very noisy with people complaining that they could not see their stats yet on Google Analytics.

I was able to see the stats for myself and my clients this morning even though the status column of my account says “waiting for data”. Clicking on view reports will bring up your data even though the status column says “waiting for data”. See the screen shot below.

Thoughts now that it is up and working? Well it truly is Urchin on Demand….nothing is different about it except some of the colours on the screen. A couple of the same irritants:

• When viewing reports, the data takes up more than the width of my 1024×768 screen. It really should not exceed 800×600 and certainly not 1024×768.
• Goals: Even though you give each of your 4 goals names (such as Contact page, PPC Landing Page, Converted, etc), these labels or names are not visible in the onscreen reporting:
  
  This is highly frustrating when you manage multiple campaigns and can’t recall what G1, G2, G3 and G4 are!
• Inability to bookmark frequently used report. Once I select the profile that I wish to view reports for, it is 3 clicks in to get to the “Medium Conversion” report and then another click to collapse the pie chart. It would be fantastic if the program could remember my settings for me or let me bookmark the report for fast access another day.

Ok so the whine fest is over. I am truly happy to have free tracking that provides this data and am happy to be able to track all of my clients in one location.

There is a great deal of discussion going on as to whether people should use this free software service because it gives a great deal of control to Google - your userid for the software is connected with your AdWords id meaning they have full access to everything about your website analytics from your PPC campaign to the conversion results. Some feel it is worth paying a third party to be able to maintain control of your data.

Google Analytics could be a blow to Conversion Ruler, which many people were using as an inexpensive option for tracking PPC Campaigns.