Boston Web Consulting
Search Engine Optimization and Adwords Reporting

Google Adwords has just announced demographic bidding which came out of beta/testing.  So what is it?

It’s a feature that helps you target your ads to users of a particular age group (such as ages 18-24), by gender, or to combinations of those groups. You can use demographic bidding whether you are using contextual or placement targeting and with both CPC and CPM bidding. You can refine your reach based on users’ gender and age on certain sites in the Google content network such as MySpace and Friendster, whose users provide that information about themselves. AdWords receives the data in anonymous and aggregate form from participating partner sites, which means that users can’t be personally identified.

This is all very good for advertisers and should help you increase your conversions since you can target a specific audience now.  You will have to assume that the data which is collected from participating partner sites is accurate which I tend to doubt but you have to test it to see how it works out.

Google has recently announced that it will now take into effect the page load time when scoring a landing page for quality.  There is no mention of how much it will effect the score but this is a good reason to look for a quality web host now.  If you are serious about being a web marketer, I would suggest not always going for the cheapest web host out there.

After the one month review period, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

I think it is an interesting move and a good one overall.  But it adds another dimension on running your campaigns now.

You know when I wrote this post about the best day to advertise that I should have written the day where you will get the most impressions so perhaps you might get the most traffic if you increase your click through rate… Wow, I just wrote a very long run on sentence. Really from that simple chart it would be hard to make real changes to your Adwords campaign(s). You need to look at different angles of the data. For example, here is a chart of the impressions by hour that I was getting:

You can see the most impressions are during the early hours but it really picks up during lunch. So lucky for you that you can increase your bids to try to grab more of that traffic.

So you are looking to build a site or you have site but are unhappy with your current website host. So what is a small business owner suppose to do? Here are some very simple tips to make sure you end up with a host that you can rely on:

• Ask for Client References and Call Them.
• Don’t Always Go for the Lowest Price! You are projecting an image here with your core audience and you don’t want your site down every few hours.
• If they are local, ask for a face-to-face meeting where possible or at least a phone call. You want to make sure that you will be comfortable giving your business to the right website hosting company.
• While speaking with the web hosting company see if they can help you meet your goals. For example, if you are selling goods do they support e-commerce sites. Again ask for references.
• Don’t worry too much about the details but ask what you will getting:
  • Will your site be on a shared server with many other sites?
  • How much space will be allocated to your site?
  • How much bandwidth?
  • What are the charges if you go over your space or bandwidth allocations?

Remember you are looking for a company where you can feel comfortable and trust since it will be hard for you to learn all the particulars of how to maintain and work with a web server.

Microsoft clearly behind Google on many fronts. But they have been coming out with some interesting free tools. There is a bunch at their adCenter Labs for example say you are stuck at writing your first online text as whether it is on Google, Yahoo, MSN or other search networks?

You can try MSN’s Ad Text Writer. It is not perfect but it can get you creative juices flowing perhaps. I tried with Boston Web Consulting and here is what it looks like (click on the image to see it larger):

The search funnel is also interesting to check out. These are some nice tools to further validate some of your marketing plans. Just remember that MSN only has a piece of the search market and their searchers may be a bit different than on Google.

So what day has the most traffic? Here are some stats from one of our clients:

Monday historically has the most traffic. Therefore, you will need to compete harder that day for the most traffic to your site if you are using Adwords. You still need to track conversions but if you up your bids on Monday and then target the right hours you may be getting the traffic levels that you were hoping for.

If you can’t afford Microsoft Office, there is now a couple of choices for you. The most popular choices are StarOffice, Verion 8, and Google Docs.

I use Google Docs for some of my needs. Usually quick and dirty documents where I want to put things online so I can find it later. That is what is so great about Google Docs. Just login using your Google ID / password and you are into your account from any computer.

While Google Docs is not anywhere near to Excel, it does offer some neat features of the out the box. I like their ability to collect data :

…Create a form in a Google Docs spreadsheet and send it out to anyone with an email address. They won’t need to sign in, and they can respond directly from the email message or from an automatically generated web page. Creating the form is easy: start with a spreadsheet to get the form, or start by creating the form and you’ll get the spreadsheet automatically.

Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet. …

All small businesses need simple and reliable tools and for now Google is providing them. Don’t miss out.

Update:  Here is a good post of why Google Docs is a good thing.  You will never have to move your data from one PC to another or send another email to share your documents.  Well… as long as Google stays in business!

Google has recently announced Google Sites and they are continuing their march to cracking the business marketplace beyond just advertising.  They are positioning against Microsoft’s Sharepoint which is interesting.  Sharepoint actually can do much more but for simple things like team projects and internal sites, Google Sites can be appealing especially since it free.

You’re company / school will have to be part of Google Apps in order for you to use it though.  Google Apps has a free edition as well as a paid version.  You can check it out by using the free version first.

It is so easy to get going with Google Adwords that many jump in like a cannon ball into a pool and occasionally they can get hurt! In reality, Adwords can be a brutal marketplace where you can lose money pretty fast if you don’t know what you are doing. Google has some good tips here on the basics (which despite the heading that it is for Healthcare and Real Estate) can be used for any industry vertical or local market.

Planning is key for success. So if you are planning to dive in yourself, I would suggest reading a lot of material including Google’s Adwords blog and most of the helpful material that the Adwords team provides. I would master their material before purchasing any more material from other sources.

I think you should always to be very targeted to your local market and the local audience. The more specific the better! And then tailor a specific landing page for that targeted prospect.