Tag Archive for: ppc

Stephen Claridge

Fancy Frames, New Employee, & more

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The Happy Team

There’s us—joyous and excited after receiving our framed certificates (we’ve had these bad-boys for a while, but Google’s decided now’s the time to physically recognize us).

The past few months have been busy for Vantage Search Marketing. We’ve said farewell to this year’s glorious Vancouver summer, and are now, in the middle of October, beginning to embrace the very familiar rain and cold. It has, however, been a fairly warm fall, and our office heating is grateful, even if it has been put through a balancing act. It’s always a welcome challenge (or a nightmare) to try and get to that office temperature sweet-spot. As interesting as the weather is, we’ve actually been more focused on work; very focused on making the best use of our capable new employee. With a bigger workforce comes a bigger workload, and we are appreciative of both. Amongst other work, we’ve been engaged in builds for exciting new clients.

As said before, a new employee! Recruitment was a success. We’ve added a new member to the Vantage Team. Wes is our valuable new newbie. He’s been diligent thus far, and is responding quite well to our disciplinary techniques.In light of these techniques, we may have to consider expanding into an HR department as well… We kid, we kid. There have been no major issues or events that have required us to resort to controversial methods (at least not yet). We’re new to this new employee thing, but we think it’s going A-okay.

Life After Exact-Match

Maybe Google’s trying to butter us PPC people up after removing our dear exact-match. Well, it’s pretty much worked. Just look at the above smiles! We’ve been coping, we ask though, how are others doing without exact-match?

We posted a video/blog post on the topic a little while back. It’s from Rand at Moz and has a bit of Star Wars humour in its thumbnail.

http://moz.com/blog/keyword-research-and-targeting-without-exact-match-whiteboard-friday

Rand from Moz blog

There’s Rand and his enigmatic moustache!

Days of My Youth

Vantage has also had the chance to have some fun, though not with facial hair. One such chance was with our client Revelstoke Mountain Resort. They’ve made mixing business and pleasure a very real opportunity. They invited us to the “Days of My Youth” premiere. It was an exciting Red Bull ski film, which Revelstoke was a proud sponser of, that made us want to get out there and ski. Just not as youthfully as the incredible athletes in the film.

Watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxJNvnHf3QM

Days of My Youth premiere swag

Proof we were there!

AdWords Updates

And lastly, there were developments in our dear friend AdWords’ capabilities.

Custom affinity audiences are an interesting addition for display campaigns. We wonder if they’ve made it easier to move towards the ever looming goal of perfect targeting?

Check out the details from the creators themselves.

And then, there was the introduction of callout extensions. This additional room for important advertising messages opens up a new world of creativity and opportunity.

Mosey on through this post to find out more.

Tell us how the additions have affected your PPC practices!

Until Next Time!

Vantage signing out. May our fellow PPC men and women find further success in all their goals. We hope the future, as it is for us, is something worth looking forward to for everyone!

Thanks for reading.

 

Stephen Claridge

An Update on Recent Vantage Life

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This past month has been, despite a few spots of rain, a beautiful July in Vancouver. The team at Vantage Search Marketing is happy to report that the weather has improved overall company efficiency. We’ve never been working harder or more happily! Okay, maybe we’ve wanted to get out a bit more than usual and the sun-baked lunch’s outside might have slowed us down just a tad, but we’re definitely happier!

A New Hire

With all that happiness, good weather, and very good work being done (yes, very), Vantage has decided to add an additional staff member! Maybe the sun’s doing funny things to our heads, or we’re making progress. Either way, Vantage is jumping with anticipation at the prospect. We’ve already received multiple strong and interesting applicants.

Who will join the prolific sun enthusiasts that make up the Vantage team? If you’re interested and think you’ve got what it takes, then have a look here.VANTAGESM Logo

Worthwile Information

In other news, Vantage has also found some worthwhile information to share. We’ve been keeping our arms open to new ideas and, in this case, to the reinforcement of old ones. We read this informative post on the value of the frequency & reach report AdWords offers. It was written on SearchEngineLand.com It’s a good briefing on how to learn when or if you should be setting a frequency cap on your advertising. We thought it was worth a share. image for AdWords frequency

What Paid Search Should be Aware of This Year

Another important post we’d like to share is this one, also from the aforementioned site – good job Search Engine Land, you’re keeping us coming back for more. This article is a nice informational recap, it provides some insights into the developments of 2014 that paid search advertisers should be aware of. The most interesting, and possibly the most important has been the Shopping Campaign updates that AdWords is replacing PLA campaigns with. This revamp has made product listing advertisements somewhat simpler and easier to handle. It was a bit awkward having to set up everything in the online interface for these bad boys. Thankfully, that’s been solved too and Shopping Campaigns are supported by the Editor now.

top 10 paid search developments

 

Computer Education

And finally, Vantage made sure to share this educational video on the benefits of computers in the modern era. It’s either educational or a representation of our capabilities at the end of a Friday.

sesame street computOR

Compu-TOR

Vantage hopes everyone enjoys the sun as much as we do, and encourages fellow and aspiring search advertisers to keep on learning and laughing!

 

Written by Michael Pendreigh.

 

 

Stephen Claridge

Become an Internet Marketing Professional

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Wow I can’t believe it is almost March and I have not posted an article in almost 2 months. Ahh well the fact that I don’t have time for blog posts is a good thing…I have been so busy that I have had to train another person to help out. This brings me to the topic of becoming an internet marketing professional. There may not be many formal schools teaching SEO or PPC but the internet and your public library are full resources.


Step 1: Get Busy Reading

Most people think that just because a book was written 5 years ago on internet marketing that it is completely outdated, but I would have to disagree. Although, the tools may have changed the fundamentals of SEO or PPC have not really changed. To rank well in Google you still need to optimize your onpage factors and get in bound links. For PPC there may be a ton of new tools and ad formats, but the keyword is still king and knowing the difference between exact and broad match keyword is still important. You will always need to know the history of internet marketing before you can really start seeing patterns in new mediums.

I have read all of these internet marketing books. Plus most can be found at your public library.

Step 2: Take Some Internet Marketing Courses

I would recommend learning PPC because you can master it in a shorter time frame than SEO plus all of the skills you learn in PPC will help you in SEO.

PPC:

SEO:

  • The best Free SEO training I have found is the Challenge

Web Analytics:

  • I just finished the Web Intelligence course at UBC and it was awesome. Plus the analytics evangelist Avinash Kayshik had a hand it its design. It won’t tell you how to use Google Analytics but it will teach all the theory you will ever need regardless of the web analytics platform.

Step 3: Stay Up to Date

The web is changing daily so you had better stay up to date or risk becoming obsolete by reading blogs. By no means are the following blogs an exhaustive list of internet marketing blogs, but they are my favorites that I follow daily. FYI if you are saying to yourself WOW that is a lot of reading, well not shit it is a lot of reading, but that is what it takes to be a professional internet marketer in today’s economy.

PPC:

SEO:

  • SEOMoz
  • Most SEO blogs overlap with their content so pick one you like and stick to it

Web Analytics:

Step 4: Get Some In-House Experience

Go work for a web based company’s marketing department for a few years. You will learn a lot and plus it will allow you to get caught up with your internet marketing reading. Furthermore, you need time to apply all the theories you have learned from books, blogs and taking classes.

Step 5: Up to You…

At this point you can go work freelance, get into the affiliate game or find a higher paying job somewhere else. IMO I would highly recommend staying away from agency’s because the stress might just kill you and the lack of autonomy will hurt your learning…


Stephen Claridge

Social Conscious Internet Marketing

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As an internet marketing company in Vancouver, you don’t often come across a project that actually tries to make the world a better place, but I think I have found one. Sumaq Rugs is a company based in Vancouver that sells custom alpaca rugs from Peru. The thing that makes them unique is that the rugs are made the traditional way by using looms and 5% of every sale goes directly back into the weavers community.

When I talked to the owner’s Collis Verdicchio and Derek Beech, I asked them how they work the logistics of finding these families. They said that it was difficult finding Peruvian families with looms because only the wealthier families could afford them. There are no large manufacture plants for these rugs to be produced in, as they are all produced in family run workshops. Sumaq’s program is designed to increase the number of looms in each village. However, this would seem like a good business investment if it wasn’t for the fact that they pay “living wages”. This means that all the weavers are paid fare prices which allows them to provide for their families.

Another factor that makes this program a real success is the fact that it allows families to stay together. If these weavers didn’t have their own workshops they would be forced to leave their families and work at low paying manufacturing jobs in the large cities.

Getting back to the internet marketing side of things, for this project we are pushing social media, article submissions  with a small PPC campaign to try to get the word out about this awesome socially conscious company. I have only just begun on this project but I will keep everyone posted on their progress.

Stephen Claridge

Google Display Network

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The Google Display Network, formally known as the Content Network, will separate the men from the boys when it comes to managing PPC. Honestly there is no easy way to do well on the display network other than test and spend money. I have spoken to a few pay per click gurus lately and they have admitted that you have to set high CPCs to break in and get impressions.

Here are the best practices for setting up a display network account:

Read more

Stephen Claridge

Google Instant and its Effects on Adwords

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So Google is changing up the search game by giving you instant results (or so they claim). This is how it works, when you start to type in a search query the search results will change right before you eyes. The idea is that you will only have to partially type in a query and Google will predict what you are looking for. This feature will probably be tied into your search history, in the near future, which will make the predictive nature even smarter and more useful.

I find it funny that Google thinks that someone would spend 30-90 seconds to type in a search query and that was their reason for the innovation. See their page on Google instant.

Any ways lets look at how this will impact Pay Per Click advertising. I was very nervous when I first heard that Google was going to show numerous search results for a single search result. This could really hurt your quality score and drive up costs. But Google has spelled it out that it shouldn’t effect your PPC campaigns at all, which is a relief.

The following is from the Adwords Help:

“New predicted query

Although Google Instant won’t change the way ads are served, ads and search results will now be shown for a new “predicted query.” For example, if someone types “flow” into Google, an algorithm predicts that the user is searching for “flowers” (the predicted query) and therefore displays search listings and ads for flowers. Those results will continue to show unless the next letters that the user types lead to a different predicted query.

How impressions are counted

When someone searches using Google Instant, ad impressions are counted in these situations:

  • The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
  • The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
  • The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.”