Entries Tagged as Google

Last week Three Deep’s Paid Search Team attended the Advanced Adwords Seminar in Minneapolis. Brandon, Jarad and I joined search marketing professionals from around the Twin Cities as seminar leader, Brad Geddes, led discussions around a variety of advanced AdWords topics such as:

• Keyword research
• Creating compelling ad copy
• Best practices for landing pages
• Increasing PPC traffic through dynamic keyword insertion
• Increasing quality score
• Conversion optimization
• Google analytics reporting

Day 1: Advanced Account Optimization

The first day we focused on best practices, tips, and techniques for improving an account’s overall performance.

Brad Geddes welcoming us to the seminar and discussing the day’s topics

Key takeaways from the first day included:

• Don’t perform long-tail keyword research until you know the specific keywords that convert. First, find the keywords that convert, then increase your keyword list by building around those keyword converting themes.
• Depending on which phase of the buying cycle the searcher is in, ad copy should emphasize features and or benefits.
  • Awareness Stage – Talk about benefits
  • Interest Stage – Talk about benefits
  • Learning Stage – Talk about features & benefits
  • Shopping Stage – Talk about features
  • Buying Stage – Talk about benefits
• Studies have shown that people look at the different parts of an ad in this order:
  1. Headline
  2. Display URL
  3. Line 1
  4. Line 2
• CTR is the #1 criteria for increasing quality score.
• Only exact match keywords are used to determine quality score.
• Keyword stuffing a landing page will not necessarily help to increase your quality score.
• Ad Group quality score only exists for display network, not on the search network.

Day 2: Advanced Conversion Optimization

The second day we focused on increasing conversions and profits in an account through advanced conversion optimization. Key takeaways from this day include:

• To determine a visitor’s lifetime value, try running a campaign that has a short term negative ROI, but a positive lifetime ROI.
• Test. Test. Test. You can test everything from search conversion rates vs. content conversion rates to conversion rate vs. total sale amount to number of page views by ad copy.
• Examining the search query report is one of the best ways to discover keywords that you’re missing out on.
• It’s important to leverage the power of Google analytics to learn ways to improve your campaign. Google analytics can reveal information such as: ROI by keyword, visitor loyalty, conversions by source, buyer geo-location, and conversion path optimization.
• It is possible to receive traffic that you did not pay for. You don’t necessarily pay for every click to your website.
• When looking to optimize a campaign, keep your eyes open for amount spent on a keyword in a day, amount spent on an ad group in a day, conversion rates by keyword, conversion rates by ad group, time spent on website, and pageviews per visitor.

After two full days of Google Adwords interactive learning and training, Jarad, Brandon and I walked away both eager and excited to implement news ideas, and reinforce some old basics into the paid search accounts we manage at Three Deep. From performing keyword research to writing ad copy to advanced conversion techniques, Brad Geddes had very useful insight and tips on everything Adwords.

Learn more about the Adwords Advanced Seminars and Brad Geddes here:

- Adwords Advanced Seminars
- Brad Geddes’s Blog

Last week I had the honor of speaking at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management for a class entitled BA 1905 — “Internet Search Economics, Google, and New Business Opportunities” - a great name for a course covering this relatively new industry, with some truly engaging curriculum around my favorite topic of conversation: Search Engines, Marketing, and creating a business model around increasing visibility on the web.

With a blank canvas to work with and many possibilities for conversation, the professor and I decided that it would be best to do an hour long presentation on Google.  The presentation pretty much wrote itself from that point on.  Here is the full slide deck:

In December, several members of the Three Deep team attended an event at Google’s offices in Manhattan, NYC.  Google’s offices made for an intimate setting, and compelling presentations from BabyCenter’s Tina Starkey and Google’s Jim Lecinski made for a particularly worthwhile event for our team to attend.  Since many of our clients tend to be in the business of marketing to moms (and we often execute these marketing programs), this event was right in our sweet spot.

Parisian Love

The event started with a quick video that was produced by Google that told a love story through search.  It was a compelling video and told a great story of a long distance relationship where the subjects are brought together through the magic of Google.

Continue Reading Moms Are Searching For YOU →

I am writing this post on the second business day of the new year, and I’m already very excited to see what 2010 holds.  At Three Deep, we have already had two great accomplishments to start off the year:

Upgrading Our Website Design

Depending on who you ask, our old website design needed anywhere from a “cosmetic refresh” to a “complete overhaul” – for this design, we chose to go somewhere in between. We updated the layout to be wider (using the 960 grid system) and make the site less cramped.  We also softened some of the corners and made other tweaks in order to make the site look more inviting.

The major change on the site is that we improved the animation/offer area on the home page to better highlight the core services we offer. Rather than our old home page focus of lead generation (which is definitely part of our business, but not the only part of our business as the graphic implied), we decided to create a very SEO friendly carousel that showcases our core services and easily understandable to our visitors.  Using jQuery, we were able to animate the features area while still keeping it search friendly; it’s amazing how well it works!

We had been talking about updating the site for months, and we finally put a date on when it needed to get done; January 1st.  We knew we had to get the site updated before January 4th, because we would be getting a lot of traffic from …

Continue Reading 2010 is Going to be a GREAT Year! →

This week, several of our team members are attending the Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) Partner Summit at Google’s campus in Mountain View, CA.  The event has been great so far, with a great combination of conceptual and technical presentations, as well as lots of Google information that is not available to the public at this point.

We also got some pretty awesome Google shirts and other swag with Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer logos on them… but the best part of the conference is definitely the presentations and the great conversation that we are having with other GAAC consultants.

Continue Reading Google Analytics Partner Summit →

Congratulations to our client Cardinal Builders for being mentioned in the upcoming issue of Replacement Contractor Magazine. Cardinal Builders will be featured in the article To Your Credit.  The story is about how contractors are quickly incorporating the new tax credits that are available to homeowners who make qualifying replacement window upgrades in 2009 or 2010 into their overall marketing strategies. View the article from Replacement Contractor Magazine featuring Cardinal Builders.

Two days after the 2009 Economic Stimulus Bill was signed into law in February, Cardinal Builders VP of Operations Mike Lelasher called Three Deep Marketing with an idea.  He wanted to put a red CNN style breaking news banner across the top the Cardinal website with the headline:

Breaking News: President Obama signs stimulus plan into law, includes up to $1500 tax credit only for windows with .30 u-value or lower. All windows Cardinal Builders offer meet or exceed requirements to earn tax credit. Click here for more information.

Continue Reading Three Deep Marketing Client Cardinal Builders Featured In Replacement Contractor Magazine. →

Google has consolidated several awesome new tracking features into a single view in AdWords over the last week (some features have been there a while, but are now receiving more exposure due to a recent interface update) and we at Three Deep are in the process of putting several of these into action. The first thing that we will talk about today is the call tracking feature that they have recently added.

Ever since Google acquired Grand Central in 2007, I knew it was only a matter of time before they would start adding call tracking into AdWords.  For good reason, as phone calls to local or 1-800 numbers on a landing page can account for a large percentage of leads generated from a PPC landing page.¬† In fact, for some of our clients, phone calls have outnumbered free estimate request forms at a 2 to 1 clip.  Even for those clients where request forms still dominate leads, adding a unique tracking number to a landing page has allowed us to truly track the number of leads that we generate for clients.

Continue Reading Google AdWords New Features – Call Tracking →

Leave it to Google to announce something big on Labor day and keep me working through the night. I first heard the breaking news on the Minneapolis Star Tribune, then caught wind of it on the Official Google Blog. After that, the news came from about 20 other sources on my Google Reader, I knew that I had to post about the subject of Google launching their new browser, which is named Chrome.

Several sources have already weighed in on the subject of Google’s new browser, but I thought I’d chime in my $.02 while it’s still fresh on my mind. While most of the feedback I have seen is negative, mine is overwhelmingly positive:

Google Chrome is awesome!

Continue Reading Google Chrome = Greatest Browser Yet? →