Please don’t think any less of me for titling my post after a Lady Gaga song. But when I hear her sing about bad romance, I don’t think about her and Sir Gaga’s relationship (Ew!). I think about that of advertisers and AdWords.

Every advertising medium has always had its share of challenges and frustrations for advertisers. Back when there were only 3 major television networks, advertisers were complaining about monopoly, prices and rules. Before we knew it, cable came along and fragmented all that, making it harder to reach your audiences. I bet there’s still people out there reminiscing about the good old days.

It’s true that history repeats itself. Because if you fast forward to today, you can still hear the same frustrations and concerns by advertisers. Common complaints include costs, campaign structure issues, AdWords user interface, better client management tools, etc.

They say the first step to recovery is admitting that there is a problem. So when asked about their main frustrations with AdWords, we weren’t surprised to find that top industry experts like Andrew Goodman didn’t hesitate to share.

(P.s.- you can look at content and search CTRs separately in Acquisio SEARCH )

The fact of the matter is, people have always had problems around some of the measurements of the advertising mediums they use. Sure, 3rd party vendors in the PPC management software space have offered amazing features like campaign automation and more user friendly interfaces and continually improve their offerings to reduce the complexities of maintaining effective campaigns. Even Google has been working hard on making Analytics and AdWords play nice. Sure, some of the metrics you are shown are still not necessarily as complete or accurate as you hope. You are forced to work with averages and have to dig deep to find the right data to pull insights from and that gives you every right to complain. But remember, in the good old days of TV, we had to rely on panel measurements. So if given the choice today, which would you rather have?

Last week, someone told me they wish AdWords would just know what they want and do it. And while full automation is possible, that doesn’t mean it is ideal. You certainly need the human touch to make the final decision and work in semi-automated mode.

Be careful what you wish for. Yes, part of our frustrations are high costs and ambiguous rules, but at least it’s easy to reach audiences who are seeking solutions to their problems NOW. While AdWords doesn’t offer your the option of buying your way to success, you can certainly work hard enough to achieve it.

I say bad romance is better than no romance at all. What’s your bad romance story with AdWords? What are your AdWords frustrations? Have you found ways to put the spark back into your PPC romance?

No, no,  I’m not referring to the 1997 computer game, though I know it surprises you that I played it.

I’m referring to Google, who announced last November that speed will be added to the algorithm determining a site’s quality score. In simple words, the slower your site loads, the more your ads will cost you. If you are way too optimistic, you’re thinking that there are hundreds of other factors in that algorithm and so the weight placed on speed can’t be tremendously significant, right?

Well, yes and no.

Even if you don’t end up paying through the nose for ads, you are still leaving a ton of money on the table. Last week, results of a study conducted in the UK revealed that almost 50% of all people surveyed cited slow loading time as the main reason that turned them away from a site. Simple but scary math translates this to 5.5 abandoned transactions per consumer over the last 12 months. Could this have been happening on one of your clients’ sites?

If that’s not sending chills down your spine, consider this- not only will traffic continue to increase, but more and more people are browsing on their cell phones. You cannot afford to be slow… literally!

Our good friend Bryan Eisenberg suggests 2 very simple but valuable ways to speed up landing pages.

1.       Running a Speed test using tools like Web Page Analyzer, Yahoo! YSlow for Firebug, or Google’s Page Speed. This will help determine how slow the site or pages are.

2.       Slimming down “fat” images with tools like Smush.it, Dynamic Drive, or Web-Resizer. To state the obvious, this will speed up the loading time.

In my Conversion Optimization Certification course, I learned that telling someone their website sucks is like telling them their baby is ugly. So as an agency, how do you break the news to your clients? what initiatives can you take to educate and help them? Should this even be your responsibility?

Whether or not you think its your responsibility, the lurking guilt of knowing should drive you to take at least a small step towards helping your clients. For starters, you can run those testing tools on their sites and send out some suggestions and recommendations with next month’s report. Shed some light on the issue and work hand in hand with them to keep that quality score solid, so that their users can have a better online experience and you can manage their campaigns more smoothly.

I consider the use of a solid modern analytics solution a basic necessity when running any type of search campaign, paid or otherwise, and require it of all the websites I work closely with. In the past it was much harder to gain actionable insight from these tools, but now I spend as much of my time helping people learn how to fish, as I do fishing for insights myself.

My preferred tool, and what essentially enables this, is Google Analytics. I value ease of access to interesting and useful data, and how quickly novices can become familiar and productive with the tool.

Google Analytics can be the lazy webmaster’s best friend (and I like to be lazy in bulk, it keeps me busy) without any tinkering, but can also be an extremely of an insightful tool for people who decide to go beyond looking at numbers, towards an interpretation of them, with a wee bit of config (and there is craziness beyond the basics, but let’s not go bonkers just yet). [Read more...]

Most politicians are old; it’s basically a job requirement. It makes sense. The accruement of knowledge takes time and learning what to do with it takes practice.

Not many politicians would be classed as outright ‘ignorant’, but I’m afraid that if you can’t tell me, generally, the difference between Facebook and Google, you’ve got some modern learnin’ to do. And let’s face it, we can’t learn ourselves any younger, so it’s all politicians really have. The fact is the Internet, search engines, keywords, and link graphs are all areas of knowledge that politicians, or at least their right-hand-peeps, need to get their over-educated heads around, right about now. [Read more...]