Follow-Up To Atlanta – How Things Multiply

Before I spoke in Atlanta, I was rather nervous.  I woke up at 5AM, and I knew my dad was with me.  And he was telling me – you’re going to do fine.

And he was right.

Sure I was still nervous, but I knew he was there standing right next to me.

And now I am an official member of the speaking circuit. – at other conferences that I pitched, and some I didn’t even pitch for.    Next week I will be speaking at ClickZLive in California.  Wow.

All I can say is – thanks Dad.

Speaking at SES Atlanta – And Giving Credit Where It’s Due

There is nothing like getting an email asking  – would you like  to speak at a conference?

As my dad would have said – does a cat have a butt? (well, he used a different world there)

It’s been great writing for Search Engine Watch, and now it’s giving me the opportunity to speak.  And yes, I woke up early this morning thinking about points to cover, how to engage the audience…

And by the way, it’s not till July!

Getting excited too early  – not a great idea.  But oftentimes, I get great thoughts and ideas during the night, which of course wake me up – and I can’t go back to sleep.  Which makes for a long day (gotta start drinking my tea now to keep going), but it’s nice to have those middle of the night inspirations and thoughts.

But with the excitement – I also have some sadness.  My dad would have loved to have been here to share this with me, and would have been so proud.  I wish he was here to share the news, but I know he’s with me, watching over me and guiding me along.  He is truly the reason I have been able to get where I am, and his encouragement and love helped me carve out a career that I dearly love.  I know he would also be beyond thrilled at my new job as well.  He always taught me to have a strong work ethic and I always wanted to be like him.

This one’s for you, Dad.

 

Being Behind…..

Yes, I have not kept my blog up.

And sure I have excuses, but don’t we all?

In addition to working on my company’s blog, I was also asked to write for Search Engine Watch.  This was an exciting opportunity for me, and I have loved it. It’s great to provide Paid Search insights and discussing with other marketers on best practices, thoughts about new changes, and learning from others.  Recently I was asked to become a monthly contributor (I was writing about every other month), so my schedule is a bit fuller.

On top of that, I changed jobs! I am now an Inbound Marketing Manager for Cisco at the end of April.  I am now working on marketing activities (focusing on the paid side of things) to help drive customer leads.  Coming from a very small agency to a large company has been a bit of an adjustment – to say the least! But I absolutely love it.  Moving away from the agency side to working for a client has been a very welcome and refreshing change.  And Cisco is an amazing company – every day I am just amazed.

I also have been working on a more personal blog that deals with my parents and their battle with dementia.  My mother lost her battle last Thanksgiving, and I felt the need to document the journey – as a way to help others who are dealing with aging parents or relatives, and how to navigate the waters.  I still have some work to do before I can publish it, but I am hoping to get it completed very soon.

With that being said, I realize that getting behind on your  blog is not a good thing, and even tougher to try to catch up.  So my promise to myself is to keep my blog updated more – so hold me to it!

 

AdWords Now Has Paid And Organic Data – Together!

Inside AdWords announced a very exciting report yesterday – in AdWords, under the Dimensions tab, you can now see paid and organic data.

Here at Archology, we like to be pioneers and try new things.  So we immediately linked our AdWords accounts with Webmaster Tools to take advantage of this.

The process is very simple – if you click on the My Account tab in your account, you will now get an option to directly  link your account with Webmaster Tools:

One thing to note – the data is not instantly populated.   After we linked our accounts, we received this message:

“This table shows how your paid and organic results performed for every search that triggered an ad or organic listing. There are no statistics for the selected date range or there were no sites linked for this period of time. You may need to select a different date range or ensure that you have one or more sites linked from Webmaster Tools by visiting the Linked Accounts area within AdWords”

My guess is that the data will begin to populate ongoing, and not historically.

If you look closely at the same report in the Inside AdWords post, you will notice in the organic statistics the headings are a bit different than the ones defined in paid:

Image Credit: Ginny Marvin, http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-adwords-paid-organic-report-see-organic-and-paid-query-data-side-by-side-170379

Queries is equivalent to impressions in Adwords, and clicks/query is equivalent to CTR in Adwords.  Listings/query is the number of organic listings based on that query.

From a PPC perspective, this report is very useful because it gives you valuable insights of how your paid and organic campaigns are affecting each other.  And with having the data in one place, you don’t have to use multiple tools or combine data into spreadsheets to get this data to analyze.  You can also look at the data by different date ranges to see if changes over time have had an impact. From an SEO perspective though, we see limited value in this data.

The paid search team at Archology is looking forward to using this new report, and will bring you updates later after we’ve used it.

Enhanced Campaign Deadline Is Today – Or Is It?

As we all know, today is THE DAY that Google has required all Legacy campaigns to be migrated to the Enhanced format.  On July 18th, in a rare move by Google, they announced that only 75% of the total 8 million active Adwords campaigns had been migrated to Enhanced.  It was interesting to see there were still  2 million campaigns that had not been migrated.  Ironically Google’s Q2 earnings were also released on this same day, and they missed their earnings estimate.  As quoted in the article:

“There were many questions about the impact of enhanced campaigns and its effect on revenue. Most of Google’s executives’ responses were very general. Google was pleased with the migration to date but it was still too early to make definitive statements about the full impact.”

However Google said enhanced campaigns would help advertisers through simplification and have a positive revenue impact “in the long term.”

Not really sure that having 2 million campaigns that had not migrated would be a pleasing statistic, in my opinion.

Today, in the Inside Adwords blog, Google’s SVP Ads and Commerce posted an article that was interesting:

“Since we introduced enhanced campaigns, advertisers have upgraded over 6 million legacy campaigns, representing almost 75% of active campaigns. And starting today, we will begin upgrading all remaining campaigns automatically, bringing everyone onto the new AdWords platform. As with many product launches, the rollout will be gradually completed over several weeks.”

It appears that there were a lot of holdouts until the very end – and there would be no way Google could upgrade 2 million campaigns today.  Even if there were some migrations over the weekend, it would still mean a lot of work for Google to do today.  So now it will be several weeks before these campaigns will be upgraded.  And perhaps if you have held out, you might have some extra time after all.

But will that message still keep displaying every time you log into Adwords to update by today? Let’s hope not.

Enhanced Campaign Countdown in On!

So – have you done it?

You know what I mean.

Upgraded your Adwords campaigns to Enhanced.

The deadline is July 22nd, 3 weeks from now.

It’s kind of like going to the dentist to get your teeth pulled – you know you have to go, you have an appointment set, and you can’t change it.  And you really, really, don’t want to go.

Is the upgrade process hard? No, Google has gone to great lengths to make the process as streamlined as possible.

Google has been doing a lot of recent updates to provide us with more new features that Enhanced Campaigns offer.  But there has been a lot of negative feedback, especially around a lot of press about the recent rise in CPC’s and loss in performance.  I’m sure this is causing a lot of people to hold off until the last minute.  Google isn’t really admitting this is the case, but right now they are pushing out as much positive PR as they can to encourage everyone to upgrade before the deadline. Maybe that’s why if you do a search in Google for the term “Enhanced Campaigns”, Google has a paid search ad  encouraging folks to upgrade, while the other ads are to help people with their upgrades:

 

Like it or not, you have to upgrade.  Here at Archology, we upgraded our accounts early on, and although we have seen some CPC increases, we have seen some performance improvements that we feel are tied to the new structure.  However, as everyone else, we are still watching very closely to see how as more and more clients upgrade, how things will be affected.  Stay tuned!

Change…And Making The Most Of It

Back in 2011, I wrote a  post about making the right choice.  Being at the proverbial fork in the road, so to speak.  And I was at a crossroads on several fronts – both personally and professionally.  There were some hard decisions that had to be made, and at the time they were daunting.  And in the moment I thought – how am I going to get through this? There was no light at the end of the tunnel, and that path that I was going to be putting myself on seemed very difficult.

Looking back two years later, I gained many insights.  And learned that no matter how hard things get, you can get through it.  And become a better and stronger person.

Change is always hard.  It puts us outside of our comfort zone at times.  And having to do things that might not expected that we would have to.  Or never dreamed we would have to.

I found during this turbulent period of change,  there are certain things that are always constant:

1) Family – they are your backbone, your foundation.  And they are there to support you.

2) Faith – no matter how shaky things get, keeping the faith – keeps you going.

3) Dogs – yes, dogs! (bet you were not expecting that one!) No matter how rough of a day you have, when you come home, your dog or dogs are thrilled to see you.  To them, you are their world.  And seeing those happy faces and wagging tails – how can that not make you feel better?

4) Friends – there are “friends” , and there are true friends.  Those who listen to you, provide a shoulder to cry on, and help hold you up when you are falling down.

And when you get past that tough period, you gain a new personality.   The change changes you – you are now different, but you are stronger and better than before.  And then you learn how to pay it forward – some of my most rewarding times were helping people who were going through things similar to what I had.  Providing advice, and giving them a shoulder to cry on make me realize that that is life is about – helping each other.  Using what we have learned in the past to help others in the present.  And it makes you realize that you not have only survived change, you are thriving.

Who Moved My Adwords Editor Cheese?

Google announced on 5/21 they will be launching new flexible bid strategies in June, as part of the new Enhanced Campaign changes.  I was really excited about this until I read an article in Search Engine Land  that pointed out this new feature is only available in the Adwords UI, and not in Adwords Editor.

Adwords Interface 1, Adwords Editor 0.

My cheese is getting moved once again.

Those of us who have managed PPC accounts for a long time – we  love Editor.  It’s our tool of choice to create and update campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords.  Changing URLs can easily be done across campaigns, with bid changes made in one step.

With many of the new announcements from Google, Adwords Interface is taking on a lot of the same Editor functionality, and making it easier for users to do all updates in the interface.

OK, that’s great – but it would seem logical  that Adwords and Editor should be in sync then, right? The features and functionality should be the same.

With the introduction of  Enhanced Campaigns, they seem to be getting further and further apart.

On 5/22 Google announced another new versions of Editor – so I was excited, but then disappointed once again…

1) Value track for Enhanced Campaigns – just announced today that version 10.1 will now support this.  Bravo! However,  it would have made a lot more sense to have built this support in before the Value Track parameter availability was announced back in March.  We made the decision to upgrade to Enhanced campaigns early in the game, and it was necessary for us to update the Value Track parameters to ensure proper tracking of mobile and desktop conversions. Which required us to do this through the interface, which was much more cumbersome and time consuming.   When the 10.0 version of Editor was released, it should have included this functionality, as 10.0 was designed to support Enhanced Campaigns.

2) Mobile bid adjustments at the ad group level – good.  This was just rolled out on 5/8.

3) Site Links – in looking at the new release notes, I was really hoping to find support for Site Links, and alas, there still is none, except for Legacy campaigns.

Meaning if you  that if you use Editor for the vast majority of your account changes, you have to use the Adwords Interface to update Enhanced Site Links.

Which begs the question – what happens when in mid July when all accounts will be upgraded to Enhanced Campaigns? Another new version of Editor? Per Google, you are required to upgrade to version 10.1 by September, which is just a few months away.

It seems that with the push from Google to get Enhanced Campaigns out there, they have not kept Adwords Editor updated with the necessary features to ensure better account management.  It’s important with such a major change that we have the proper tools in place to be able to manage paid search accounts effectively. But announcing more new features such as flexible bid strategy without having the support in Editor forces us to toggle between two systems.  Hopefully once the Enhanced Campaign festivities are over, Google will get Editor functionality where it needs to be.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my cheese won’t get moved again.

Adwords New Site Links Changes And Their Impact On SEO

Google has been on a full-on push to get clients to upgrade to the new Enhanced Campaign format before the July 22nd deadline. It seems like every week they are coming out with new features to get clients to migrate.  And they dangled another carrot out there this week.  On  6/18, Google added a new and interesting Enhanced Campaign  site link feature.     The latest version of site links allows you to create specific text to describe each site link in further detail.  The goal of this change is allow users to make better more informed decisions because they are being provided with more useful information.  Promotions and offers can be included in a description to be more relevant to customers.

Below is an example of what the new site links will look like:

My first thought when I saw this was – wow, that is a lot of real estate on the page! A total of 11 lines of text (including the two blank lines). For a standard paid search ad with no site links, extensions or review information, it’s more than twice the size.

As Google customarily states with site links, ads will not always show site links, and the type of site link you see will vary – you may see the older format without the descriptions, or you may see the full descriptions.  And various factors also determine if your site links will display at all, such as quality score of your keyword, the landing page, and the relevance of other ads, just to name a few.

But there is also something else.

This type of ad will push organic (SEO) rankings down on the page.  A lot.

Let’s take a look at results for “floral beach towels” (yes, it’s Friday and my mind is on the beach today!):

Since the first ad would be in the new site link format, and the two other ads remained at the top, it would push the one visible organic result below my visible screen.  Which would mean the only visible ads would be paid results.

My guess is that if an ad is served in the new expanded site links format, the number of sponsored ads on the right will be less.  However, it’s not yet determined how these new ad formats will change the current paid search ad space.  But it could potentially give paid ads more page real estate, which is not good for SEO.  Although we have yet to see these new formats,  it will be interesting to see how much SEO natural results are indeed impacted.  A lot of clients are waiting to upgrade their accounts to the Enhanced Campaign format, so we will probably not see many of these type of site links until after July 22.

We upgraded our clients to Enhanced Campaigns back in February, and have seen some strong positive increases in conversions and performance. In the meantime, I’m adding them to some of my clients who are using Enhanced Campaigns and waiting to see what happens.  Stay tuned!

Think About Your Online Reputation

My 15 year old son and I were having a conversation in the car a few days ago about Facebook, and what things people did on Facebook that we either found strange, weird or downright annoying.   Thinking a teenager’s perspective would be very different than my adult opinion, I was quite amazed to find out his views were very similar to mine.   The things that his connections did that bothered him were not too different from the very same things that I found to be bothersome as well.  Granted – everyone uses Facebook in a different way – for some people it has business elements mixed in with social, others it’s a more personal forum for keeping up with friends and family.

While Facebook is a tool that allows people to have a bird’s eye view of your day to day life, it also can give  the online world a perception of the kind of person you are.  The saying “perception is everything”  is just as important as meeting someone in person or trying to establish an online reputation in your industry.  Your online persona is important on both social and business sites.  When someone is looking at you through LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter – how are you perceived?

So here are some personal thoughts on Facebook posting (and special thanks to my son for providing his thoughts as well):

1) Posting everything  you do all day every day  – do you really think your friends are interested in that level of detail about your life? And if you have that much time to be posting, maybe it’s time to be doing something more productive with your time…

2) The accidental post – yes, the person  too much detail about their Saturday night escapades.  Nothing can ruin your online reputation quicker like a midnight update after having a few too many glasses of wine.

3) TMI – if it’s something that you wouldn’t share in detail with your best friend or your mom, then don’t put it on Facebook.

4) Reaction posts – it happens to all of us.  Something happens or we see something, we get angry and upset, and what do we do? Post it without any kind of “filters”. Not a great thing for your online reputation.  Before your fire off that post to the world, take a minute

Remember – when you post something, it’s out there for everyone to see.  Your family, your coworkers, your friends.   Online reputation management is not only important for companies, but for you as well.