Say No to FBML

I have been thinking long and hard about my disdain for FBML’s. I decided to organize my thoughts and share with you. What is FBML? Facebook Markup Language (FBML) enables business to create custom applications and pages for Facebook. In a sense, FBML allows developers to create a web page for their Facebook Fans. There are many interesting things you can do with FBML pages, below are a few. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of creative things that can be accomplished with FBML pages, but my question is always: Why? Too many marketers are still having trouble grasping Facebook and other social ...

Google Analytics Goals

Google Analytics Goals are one of the best ways to measure the success of your website. Goals are called goals for a reason. They help you measure the goals of your site. All websites have a goal, many have several. If you do not know the purpose, or goal, of your website, then Google Analytics ends up being a simple site counter. Google Analytics can be so much more. What are you measuring? The first step in setting up goals is deciding what you want to measure on your site. Below are a few examples of common site goals: Purchase Contact Form Pricing Check Check Availability Find a ...

This is me … at Connected Marketing Week

Social Media Bullshit

“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance baffle them with bullshit.“ I have heard that phrase above many times over the years, but it has never seemed more true to me than now. This social media post has been brewing with me for a while, so bare me with me as I get out my frustration. I am frustrated by the social media crap that is spewed out by “experts”. Let’s go through my hot list of thoughts from the experts, one by one: Curate Conversation What does that even mean? I assume the root of that means to have conversation with people online. ...

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5 Guidelines for Campaign Landing Pages

You have analyzed your campaign over and over. Adjusted bids, changed budget, added more keywords, researched negatives, and so much more. It is just not working. The truth is you can over analyze online campaigns (search or non-search) to death, but if you are sending the visitors to bad landing pages, it does not matter. The best campaigns are destined to fail if the landing page is not optimized properly. Below are 5 guidelines to help you customize campaign landing pages: 1. Relevance It is essential that landing pages match the message from the ad. Follow up on the promises that led them to click ...

AdWords Campaign Experiments - PPC Video of the Week

Here is a good illustration on how to setup and test and experimental test in AdWords. AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) allows users to test and measure changes within a campaign through low risks.

PPC Myths

A few years ago, I wrote an article on SearchEngineLand.com entitled “If Paid Search Isn’t Working Then You’re Doing Something Wrong”. I recently went back to read the article again, to see how current it was. It still holds up. The fact is pay-per-click marketing should be working for you. If it is not working, then it’s time to figure out why. Paid search marketing is often intimidating and downright scary for many people. Those fears can be based on legitimate reasons, but they often stem from common misconceptions of pay-per-click. Below are some of the myths I am often faced ...

AdWords Language and Location targeting

Google AdWords offers several options for those who want to target their pay-per-click campaigns to specific regions or languages. First, Google needs to know where the user’s location is before it can target the specific campaigns. Google uses a combination of several criteria to determine the geographic location of the searcher. Google Domains – Google uses multiple extensions on their domains to represent various countries. If a user queries from www.google.de, for example, that user will only see ads targeted to Germany. Query Specific – Google also analyzes the search query for information that would indicate where they are from. If a user ...

AdWords Text Ad Policies

As part of a constant education on the details of paid search, today I am focusing on AdWords' policies. Google’s paid search advertising program is guided by 3 main categories of text ad policies: Editorial, Content, and Link. Text ads describe the product or service of an advertiser and usually contain action-oriented copy to drive traffic to the website. Those 3 categories of policies guide advertisers to keep everyone level playing field. Below I will break down some of the details of these 3 categories of policies 1.) Editorial Editorial (and Format) policies handle the content of ads and keywords. Ad character limits ...