This work by Matthew I. LeVeque is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Jan
10
Paid Search Advertising from the Velvet Jones School of Technology
January 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment
NOW AT The Velvet Jones School of Technology you too can learn how to be a paid search advertising marketer in just 6 short weeks! Yes indeed. From the school that brought you instructional courses like ‘How to Be a Ho’ and ‘Kicked in the Butt by Love’, Velvet Jones, author of ‘Velvet Love’ is now teaching advanced courses on paid search marketing. At the the Velvet Jones School of Technology you’ll learn how to pimp out your keywords for clicks and make Google and the other Pimp-Per-Click engines a lot of dough…
Nov
22
Understanding the Complexities of Paid Search Advertising
November 22, 2009 | 6 Comments
ANYONE WHO CLAIMS that paid search advertising is easy is misguided. Sure, at its core, the components that make up a paid search campaign are easy to assemble - campaigns>ad groups>keywords>text ads>landing pages.Organizing an account for Quality Score, effectiveness and efficiency is easy however paid search much more than the sum if its parts.
Adding organization of the components in a logical manner to budgeting, geo-targeting, bidding, testing, competition etc, and paid search advertising starts to become a very complex system to manage and control. There is a way to think about all this that can help you dance through your day as a paid search manager a bit easier and it begins by thinking in systems.
Jul
31
New Google AdWords Interface Is Lean, Literally
July 31, 2009 | Leave a Comment
YESTERDAY’S ANNOUNCEMENT THAT the new Google AdWords Interface is now out of beta had a nice Lean sound to it. For those of you in the search engine marketing world that are not familiar with Lean management principles and tools, as defined by the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) the five-step thought process for guiding the implementation of lean techniques are:
- Specify value from the standpoint of the end customer by product family.
- Identify all the steps in the value stream for each product family, eliminating whenever possible those steps that do not create value.
- Make the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence so the product will flow smoothly toward the customer.
- As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity.
- As value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste.
Jul
18
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising Standards Are Coming
July 18, 2009 | 2 Comments
BEFORE I BEGIN I want to make it clear that I have no insider information about standards for Pay-Per-Click (PPC, paid search) advertising but I think there is a serious discussion about standards to consider.
I’ve often said that it is very important to look outside of your primary discipline to gain perspective and engage creativity to make what it is you do better. For me I often look to the quality (lean, six sigma) industry for process improvement and analysis ideas, the manufacturing industry to better understand tactical and strategic process and to behavioral sciences to gain insight into customer connection and change management. Within industry I also keep current on how paid search work in the bigger online marketing system along with SEO, email marketing, affiliate marketing comparison shopping engines display advertising, etc. This weekend I started reading Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond by Aaron Walter to better understand the how the function of develop feeds into the extended system of online marketing.
Jul
17
Make Search Good Spotlight #1
July 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment
INSPIRED BY THE regular weekly review posts by the likes of search guru’s Adventures of a PPC Hero News Roundup and quality management guru John Hunter’s Curious Cat Management Carnival, I thought I’d start one of my own. The ‘Make Search Good Spotlight‘ will cover all things search and online marketing related that folks are doing to make the world and search industry a better place to live and play.
Living On Earth: Low-Carbon Internet Surfing - I have written a few times about Google’s efforts to minimize the carbon footprint of their data server warehouses. Last weekend on my way to Quakertown, PA I was listening to NPR and heard this segment on Yahoo!’s efforts of minimizing their own carbon footprint. The interview is with Yahoo! Director of Climate and Energy Strategy Chris Page. Both the transcript and the audio clip are available for review. An additional article written last month - Yahoo Unsealths Its Data Center Efficiency details server cooling optimization with PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of 1.21 which is somewhere close to, but not matching, Google and better than Microsoft (sounds familiar…).
Jul
14
Make Social Media Good
July 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment
HAPPY BASTILLE DAY to my distant French relatives. Just a quick note to let everyone know about an upcoming conference I am looking forard to attending.
I don’t typically write about Social Media even though it is an important part of the online marketing system. In recent posts I have been writing about social responsibility in the search digital media industries and the carbon footprint left behind by all the data servers storing all of our information. Yesterday I came across the announcement on Mashable about the 1st annual Social Good Conference sponsored by Zappos & MailChimp- to my delight, my two worlds are beginning to collide.
May
17
Paid Search Basics | Do the Right Thing
May 17, 2009 | 2 Comments
TWENTY YEARS AGO, well before paid search, SEM, online marketing or Google was even a consideration, Spike Lee released his film Do The Right Thing. I have been an admirer of Spike and his work so now, twenty years later, his film title and message is partially inspiring a paid search blog post. It must be the shoes!
At this point in my career I would, with modest distinction, consider myself an expert in paid search campaign design and best practises. I have come across a lot of paid search foul play via paid search assessments and even though every time I think I’ve seen it all, something new and ridiculous comes across my monitor. Tonight was such a time and what set me off this time was a post from the Google AdWords section of WebmasterWorld.com. The post from ‘Ember’ reads as follows: Read more
Apr
3
Carbon Offset Calculator for Online Advertising Campaigns | Local Agency Making Digital Advertising Good
April 3, 2009 | 4 Comments
CONTINUING WITH MY series about carbon offsets for search engine marketing and Google’s Green Initiatives I stumbled across a company that seems to be doing it right. But first some background… A few weeks ago I wrote a couple posts announcing a fake ‘Google GreenWords’ program followed by another post for an idea around carbon offsets for paid search impressions. While researching these ideas for a more socially responsible way to manage paid search advertising I thought I had searched thoroughly enough on the topic of carbon offsets related to internet advertising, but clearly I did not.
The gem I found today is imc²’s Clear Sky Media’s carbon offset calculator for online advertising campaigns. imc² worked with Cody Taylor (IFC International) and Jonathan Koomey (Stanford University) in developing the math behind calculating the estimated cost to offset the carbon footprint of an online advertising campaign. The working paper – Estimating Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Internet Advertising – supports their findings and is available free at the imc² website.
