“Google Slap” – May 15th

Has anyone noticed significant changes in Google Adwords traffic patterns around last weekend?

This previously happened around April 1st, April 15th and May 1st of this year.

I come to a conclusion that twice monthly algo changes (aka “Google Slaps” ) can be considered as the norm now.

Google Adwords – The Ultimate Guide

Epiphany Solutions, a Search Engine Marketing agency from Leeds, UK has set up a free, step by step online guide to understanding Search Engine Marketing and PPC. This guide is a very useful resource for beginners, as well as for marketers who want to understand more about Google Adwords.

Google Adwords – The Ultimate Guide

Drill.com / Syntryx reviewed

The competition for traffic amongst websites has reached a fever pitch over the last year or so and taking advantage of Search Engine Marketing has become a talking point of great debate. What are the best methods? What works? What is a waste of time?

We could go on for days about the intricacies of a field which nobody quite understands completely, and that’s where the thrills and frustrations of marketing a website lay.

Drill.com (aka Syntryx) arrives on the scene looking to provide a helping hand for webmasters and marketing analysts alike. While there are many websites offering a sandbox of tools to analyse web traffic and search rankings, not many can claim to do the job as comprehensively as this new site.

Drill.com has been experimenting through a beta phase, gathering further options to present one of the best online analysis tools on the web. It is a must-have for any webmaster who wishes to keep a close gauge over the traffic of his website – and competition websites too.

Sometimes the best SEM strategies involve pinching what works from other websites, and why not? We all have to start somewhere.

By using Drill’s complex member’s suite (dubbed The Member’s Club), you can draw up a tremendous array of statistics in relation to your website’s popularity. This applies to organic search listings, traffic demographics, Page Rank prediction, and much more.

The service is broken down in to three main areas; domain dossiers, keyword evaluation and advanced link analysis.

Want to compile a list of keywords to aid your marketing campaign based on what your competition is succeeding with? It’s possible to do so with the Drill.com member’s suite. Likewise, do you want to see where those blossoming websites are stealing their traffic from? You can get exact links so as to help your affiliation plans and link building strategies. It’s a wonderfully complete package and you can spend many hours analysing the intricacies of your website’s current performance.

Admittedly, the control panel can seem a little daunting at first view. There are a lot of tabs offering many different tools and it will take a while to get used to how everything functions, especially with the use of slightly confusing icons rather than text.

Don’t be put off though. The functionality is where Drill.com excels in a major way.

It is possible to run a search for a group of similar websites and compare them in great depth. We can look at market share, traffic force, the advertisement schemes that a domain is using, and even the value of the domain itself.

If you’re thinking about splashing out on a new URL, it’s great to have Drill’s analysis at the ready. You can weigh up the competitive rating of it before you’ve spent a penny!

The ability to build keyword dossiers and export them for use with your own campaign will save literally hours of painstakingly repetitive work. Not to mention, it’s likely to hand a major boost to your organic search ranking performance.

Drill.com utilizes an unusual credits system to cater for its members. For example, compiling a list of domains may require 20 credits which will be detracted from your member account. It’s a pay-as-you-go style system and one which can end rather abruptly if you tear through your credits.

All in all, however, Drill offers a brilliant overview of just about every aspect to SEM that you could possibly want to have access to. It is great for analysing successful websites, and starting from scratch with your own. This is certainly one of the webmaster suites that delivers on its promises.
 

Adwords CPA (PPA) Beta Expanding

Google is expanding  its CPA campaigns beta. I have been officialy invited and I already set up an initial campaign. Adsense publishers can now promote my products directly for a set payment per sales conversion, rather then per click to my website. I will let it run for several days and report here if it actually brings conversions (sales).

PPC bidding wars causing CPC inflation and ROI decline

PPC advertisers continue to report a decline in ROI on PPC spending. This phenomena is caused mainly by increased competition between bidders, driving keyword cost per click up and reducing profit margins for Search Engine advertisers. The proliferation of quality keyword databases such as Spyfu  - which continuously crawl search engines and expose advertisers’ long tail keyword lists to competing advertisers cause ultimately  additional competition on Google Adwords,  a higher average CPC, lower conversions and a lower ROI. The winners of increased advertiser competition on sponsored links are obviously the Search Engines themselves.

Google starts CPA beta

Google is now officially starting the beta testing phase of their new CPA (cost per action) pricing model. Rumored to be in the works since last June, this development has the potential to have profound effects for the entire Internet marketing scene.

Quality Score updates are live

Google Adwords ad quality team have updated their Quality Score algo, affecting many advertisers as ad quality change affects keywords’ active / inactive status. It is now possible to actually see a keyword’s Quality Score on your Adwords management panel – just enable the Quality Score column. 

Google Adwords Quality Score Updates

Latest Quality Score Updates From Google Adwords: “We’re constantly working on ways to improve our Quality Score evaluation and provide you with more information about the Quality Score for your keywords. Over the next week, we’ll be releasing two changes focusing on transparency and quality”… Read On …

ScanAlert offers customers a PR8 inward link

ScanAlert (aka HackerSafe) - a leading issuer of online security certifactes (other famous certifiers include TRUSTe  and  Better Business Bureau) and a conversion booster,  is now offering its customers to be included in its merchant directory page (Google PR8). For some SEO wizards this feature alone might be a worth the membership fee.

Google PPC vs. Yahoo CPM

An interesting article on why Google’s pay per click paid search (Adwords – Sponsored Links) business model has overtaken Yahoo’s “real estate” banner ads based model.