To make your life easier, we’re introducing Google Ad Planner, a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan.

You can read more here.

Notice that you can fine tune your ad purchased by demographics and related searches. This is obviously good news for advertisers as it should help them target their ads. Let’s not for now question how Google is collecting this data - can you say toolbar? Privacy Issues? Does Google have an unfair advantage in the market? Is search heading down the utility path of being regulated? I think regulation is down the road - probably far down the road. But in the mean time, it is great to be an Google Adwords advertiser.

Post from: Boston Web Consulting

Google Ad Planner - New Tool

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.

Post from: Boston Web Consulting

Demographic Targeting Now Available

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.

Post from: Boston Web Consulting

Page Load Time Effects Quality Score

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.

Post from: Boston Web Consulting

Impressions by Hour Analysis

• 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.

Post from: Boston Web Consulting

Small Business Web Site Hosting

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.

Post from: Boston Web Consulting

adCenter Labs - Interesting Tools

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.

Post from: Boston Web Consulting

Best Day to Advertise

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!

Post from: Boston Web Consulting

Google Docs

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.

Post from: Boston Web Consulting

Google Sites

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.

Post from: Boston Web Consulting

Targeting Your Prospects