How A PPC Fraud Ring Impersonated 300+ Advertisers In May 2014

Did you know that your paid search ads are susceptible to the same type of fraud that affects other forms of digital advertising? And we’re not just talking about click fraud here.  The fraudulent tactic affecting PPC the most dramatically these days is a fairly insidious one that can be hard…

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Prioritizing SEO Strategies In 2014: Where To Focus

Although there may not be a one-size-fits-all SEO strategy — due to the fact that ideal strategies will vary greatly between industries, company capabilities and business models — one thing remains true for everyone regardless of the size of the search team: ruthless prioritization of…

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Uncloaking Keyword-Specific Organic Traffic To Your Site In The Not Provided Era

Google recently released news that it is now moving to encrypt all organic search activity. This means that analytics programs will no longer be able to report on keyword terms that drive organic traffic from Google, instead noting the data as being “not provided.” This could be…

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The Bright Side Of Not Provided

It’s been a few weeks since Google rocked our worlds and stripped keyword-level data from the referrer, so it’s time to examine the fallout and see what’s changed in the world of search marketing. Surprisingly, not much. Keywords were beacons of insight – fantastic beacons – but keywords were a…

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A Call To The SEO Industry: Stand Together For Useful Reporting

Want to measure organic traffic? Just take the number of Google Webmaster Tools clicks, average out the CTR by position across all of them, then take the broad match volume of all those terms (because that’s the only volume Google will give you), and then take your position and divide it by CTR and…

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Dashboard Series: Update An Entire Excel Dashboard With One Radio Button

In this month’s installment of my Excel dashboard series, I’m going to show you a trick that will give you the ability to control an entire dashboard with one menu — in this example, a radio button menu. For my example, I’ve put “months” in the menu at the top of…

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How To Use The New AdWords Estimated Cross-Device Conversions

A couple of months after the paid search world had to transition to AdWords Enhanced Campaigns in the name of simplified and more relevant cross-device ad management, we are finally getting some initial food for thought with regard to cross-device performance. I called it the “next frontier…

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Measuring The Effect Of Semantic Markup On Your Search Traffic

There’s a lot of buzz these days around the wonderful world of Schema, semantic markup, and rich snippets — much of it centered around the increased click-through rates from SERPs and other amazing SEO benefits such markup provides. But, once you’ve added the markup to your website, how…

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Dashboard Series: Creating Combination Charts In Excel

I’m starting a series on dashboards because I think creating sexy dashboards is a critical skill every marketer needs to know. It’s going to be a long series — but by the time we’re finished, you’ll be able to create dashboards that excel in both form and function. Why Use Combination Charts?…

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Smart Geographic Segmentation & Bidding With Enhanced Campaigns

New PPC Best Practices In An Enhanced Campaign World was one of SMX Advanced Seattle’s most engaging sessions; and, as a speaker, I have received a great deal of feedback and questions about those bid location modifiers. As it turns out, location bid modifiers are one of the (only) benefits…

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Tips for Analyzing The Impact Of Your Marketing Activities In Google Analytics

I work with a wide variety of clients across a wide variety of industries, and one of the most common issues I come across is what I call analytics forgetfulness. What typically happens is that a company will devise a plan to improve their online marke…

Analyzing Competitiveness In Your Paid Search Account

The auction-based industry we work in involves a number of metrics which help search marketers identify where they are doing better or worse than the competition. Just to name a few, the most common metrics search marketers usually look at are the Qual…

Deduplicate Your Google Analytics Reports in Excel

One of the steps in my last post on finding 404 pages worth saving involved determining if any of your404 pages received traffic in the past year. This can be accomplished by pulling a landing page report and using VLOOKUPs in Excel to see any of your …

How To Determine Your Hourly Bid Multipliers In AdWords

Since I received some solid feedback on my last column detailing how to determine mobile & geo bid multipliers for enhanced campaigns, I thought I’d share some more actionable stuff this time around. While hourly bid multipliers aren’t new, they remain a crucial tactic for optimizing your…

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