Internet Marketing Blog

Google has just rolled out Google Checkout, a new method for accepting online payments.

Some benefits of the program:

• For every $1 you spend on AdWords advertising, you process $10 in sales for free. Additional sales cost $0.20 each plus 2%.
• Put a shopping cart logo on your AdWords ad, making it stand out more and — presumably — adding a perceived level of sophistication and trust with searchers as they become more familiar with it.
• Once users have registered for Google Checkout, they only need to enter their username and password on any site that uses Google Checkout, ala Microsoft Passport.
• Chargeback protection shields sellers from some fraudulent of invalid transactions.

Google AdWords continues to roll out new features. We recently discussed dayparting and a new method for ad rotation. Now they are tinkering with the interface within particular ad groups, adding Summary, Keywords, and Ad Variations tabs. Being accustomed to the old all-in-one layout from before, I’m not yet comfortable with this new development and don’t find much real utility in it, plus they have made the date range options less visible. Fortunately for luddites like me, there is a link near the bottom to view all tabs, so now my mouse wheel won’t gather dust.

I’m sure that part of the impetus for this change is usability and standardization of controls. I also wonder if these changes presage new features, ones that I can’t even guess at right now.

A recent article in SEOmoz provides a great deal of information about various SEO factors, identifying numerous on-site optimization techniques and off-site (linking) tactics and summarizing the combined knowledge of leading SEO practioners. The top 10 techniques, according to the article, include:

1. The page’s title tag (include keywords)
2. Link anchor text (include keywords)
3. Use of keywords in the document
4. The accessibility of the document (can search engines see it and read the content?)
5. Internal linking (linking within your site from one page to another)
6. Primary subject matter of your site (consistent use of your markets language, focus on content)
7. Links to external sites (quality links may reflect upon you, but don’t overdo it)
8. Link popularity in topical community (do other sites about your topic link to you?)
9. Global link popularity (do all kinds of sites link to you?)
10. Keyword spamming (a negative factor, don’t overuse your keywords)

Much more detail is provided in the article.

This post is just a quick tip on getting access to complete AdWords documention. Ordinarily their support system pages display a subset of available topics, and you have to rely upon their search to serve up the right information. However, you can get a complete dump of AdWords documentation here. Note that this trick works for other areas of the Google help systems, like AdSense and Google Analytics.

AdWords now has dayparting, or as they refer to it, “ad scheduling.” This means that you can now run or pause campaigns at any time of day.

A few important details:

• Scheduling is managed at the campaign level, not ad group, ad, or keyword.
• Time can be specified in 15 minute increments.
• In Simple Mode you can pause your campaign for specified periods.
• In Advanced Mode you can specify a percentage of the normal bid to use for specified periods.

Prior to the feature’s release, a Google representative indicated that the time selection would apply to the timezone of the searcher, not your time zone. This is no longer the case. The times are with respect to the time zone you have set for your account. You can read more here.

ClickTracks has an interesting article that talks about the Google AdWords settlement and whether or not to participate. The short answer is that it’s not worth your time. They do a quick “back of the envelope” calculation to demonstrate how for all of the hassle you might have to go to receive advertising credits, you would receive on the order of $4.50 for every $1000 you have spent. There are many other variables that could increase or decrease this amount, but you can see that unless you have spent a considerable amount on AdWords, you’re unlikely to find that the refund justifies the effort.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) recently announced that Internet advertising revenues surged 38% over Q1 of 2005 and 6% over the previous quarter. While the year-over-year numbers are not that surprising in light of the upward trends of participation and pricing, we were taken aback by the growth over what is widely considered to be the most expensive quarter of the year due to holiday spending.

The fact that the slow first quarter growth beat out the holiday quarter may result from various factors, the two most obvious being that the overall growth exceeds normal seasonal variation and that non-seasonal businesses provide a significant portion of overall spending.

Today I was conducting some keyword research on specific health topics, and I was collecting data from the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. As noted in previous posts, the tool’s stemming can result in significant ambiguity. Another big problem is that the data comes from Yahoo’s search network which Search Engine Marketers like us often request search engine rankings for our clients’ keywords. Sometimes our activity (alone or collectively) can signficantly sway the numbers. Here is an example:

How likely is it really that people are searching on some form of “autoimmune disease glyco.com”? Are there really twice as many as those searching on “autoimmunce disease”? This is either a rather significant bug or someone in the month of April 2006 was running a huge number of such queries on the Yahoo network.