Fun Times At Anchor Brewing With Google

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Jan. 13

Today, I had an amazing time. My team and I visited Anchor Brewing with Google! You might recall that I recently watched the SF Giants game at Google’s Luxury Suite. Our Google account management team is truly unparalleled. Not only do they provide the highest possible level of service, but they have made a tremendous effort to build a lasting relationship with us on a personal level. That’s what it’s all about in my opinion. Successful networking and business relationships are all about the long-term.

Anchor Steam San Francisco

Have you heard of Anchor Steam before? Here in San Francisco / Silicon Valley, Anchor Steam is quite the popular beer. They have been making amazing beer since 1896. Importantly, they make beer the old fashioned way, and it’s absolutely some of the best tasting beer you can find.

Today at Anchor Brewing, we enjoyed a really great tour of their facility. It’s super impressive. The facility is huge and is the central location where Anchor Steam makes all their beer, right in downtown San Francisco. Aside from seeing the facility, I enjoyed learning about Anchor Brewing’s history. The company certainly faced challenges over the years. However, despite all odds, they made it due to persistence and of course quality. This is an important lesson for any business, and is quite the motivational story. The tour ended with some great beer tasting, with my favorite beer being the “Breckle’s Brown Ale”.

Anchor Summer Beer

I also enjoyed today’s tour because it was the perfect excuse to take it a little easy. Pay per click is a very intense career path. Since the beginning of the new year, I have been working around the clock. I’m thankful for that, it has been fun. That said, I need to remind myself to take a little time off. The Anchor Brewing tour provided the perfect opportunity to do so.

Of course, the best part of today was spending quality time with friends. I couldn’t think of a better group to spend time with outside of our normal work environment. Thanks so much Google for arranging this event and making it happen, you are the best! Want to visit Anchor Brewing yourself? Make sure to make reservations in advance, it’s a very popular tour and fills up quickly.

Anchor Steam Google Trip

Images in this post © PPCIan.com

Posted in: Networking | Tags: , | Comments: 3 comments so far, join the discussion!

Hearst Media Services Has a Neat PPC Strategy

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Jan. 11

Hearst is one of the largest traditional media empires around. I’m talking about major brands such as Car and Driver, ESPN, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Hearst owns newspapers, magazines, TV stations, and more. As a savvy media company, Hearst is now involved in online marketing. It makes perfect sense, the statistics are staggering. More and more online media is being consumed each year. Of particular interest, Hearst now operates an online marketing agency and I feel that the way they are marketing their agency via PPC is quite unique.

In the screenshot below, you can see that I searched for “PPC Ian”. I like to search my own name from time to time to make sure my PPC ad is displaying properly. You can never sanity check things enough, and that’s why I have Six Essential Campaign Checks that I run multiple times each day.

The search results in the screenshot show both myself and SF Gate showing up. What is SF Gate? It’s a cool, local website here in the SF Bay Area. I’m quite familiar with SF Gate and have been to the site before. I was surprised to see SF Gate displaying on a PPC-related term and I assumed the SF Gate ad broad matched to the “PPC” in my name. After seeing who was advertising, I started reading the ad and it piqued my interest. I had no idea that SF Gate offered online marketing services.

Upon clicking the ad, I landed on a page within the SF Gate website illustrating the Bay Area Hearst Media Services agency (you can check out the landing page here). I guess SF Gate is owned by Hearst. I personally feel the landing page could target a higher conversion rate, maybe with a prominent email capture. However, that’s not the core takeaway here.

Hearst Could have just sent this traffic to their core website for Hearst Media Services. However, they instead decided to send the traffic to a local brand, SF Gate. I think this is quite the strategy. Here in the Bay Area, I’m sure more people have heard of SF Gate than Hearst Media Services. They are leveraging their well-known, local brand name to draw the user in and then introduce them to Hearst Media Services. I really like this strategy and feel like it’s a great way to leverage an existing portfolio of local brands for improved click through rates. Way to go Hearst Media Services and I hope to run into you at one of the upcoming industry conferences!

SF Gate

Posted in: Offline Marketing | Tags: , | Comments: 4 comments so far, join the discussion!

Download The 7 Habits of Highly Effective SEM eBook

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Jan. 09

I’m a huge fan of SEM eBooks and whitepapers, I try to read them all. Today I’m thrilled to share one of the best search engine marketing eBooks I have read, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective SEM by PPC Associates.

7 Habits PPC Associates

PPC Associates, one of the top SEM agencies around, is on a roll. If you work in the Silicon Valley like me, make sure to keep an eye out for the PPC Associates Billboards on 101 near Palo Alto. They absolutely rock.

PPC Associates co-founder and CEO David Rodnitzky wrote the 7 Habits of Highly Effective SEM. This 25 page eBook is quite detailed, it’s single-spaced and offers specific strategies on how you can improve your paid search campaigns. In my opinion, this is a must-have guide for both beginners and advanced SEM gurus alike. It’s truly in-depth, one of the most comprehensive around. Following is an outline of the 7 Habits that David covers.

  • Habit #1: Choosing the Right Search Engines
  • Habit #2: Choosing the Right Keywords
  • Habit #3: Creating the Right Ad Text
  • Habit #4: Setting the Right Bids
  • Habit #5: Creating the Right Landing Pages
  • Habit #6: Setting Up the Right Reporting and Tracking
  • Habit #7: Creating the Right Targeting

It’s the beginning of a new year. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective SEM includes great strategies and tips that will spark ideas to grow your search marketing program in 2012 and beyond. After clicking this link, you simply need to enter your name, email, company, phone, and monthly budget. Upon doing so, you will be able to download the 7 Habits guide immediately. I hope you enjoy this great eBook as much as I do!

Image of 7 Habits eBook © PPCAssociates.com

Posted in: Whitepapers | Tags: , | Comments: Be the first person to comment!

An Example of Great Ad Copy On Google AdWords

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Jan. 08

Ad copy is one of the single biggest campaign levers on Google AdWords. Optimize your ad copy and you will experience an increased CTR (which means more traffic). Ultimately, that higher CTR will translate into a better quality score and therefore decreased CPCs with increased ad position. Increase the effectiveness of your ad copy and your ads will also display more sitelinks.

I’m always testing new ad copy. Today, I wanted to share the competitive landscape from the people search vertical (check out the screenshot below). I used to work at Inflection, one of the hottest startups in the Bay Area and a leader in the people search space.

In the screenshot below, check out the first ad for Intelius. Intelius is leveraging the “1) 2)” ad copy strategy. I really like this ad because it illustrates the simplicity of Intelius. I’m definitely not the only one. The fact that Intelius has four sitelinks displaying on a generic term like “people search” means that their CTR is quite high. If your company offers a streamlined service, I highly recommend testing the “1) 2)” ad copy yourself.

Posted in: Campaign Tips | Tags: | Comments: 3 comments so far, join the discussion!

Blogs With Top Commentators Are Now Rare

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Jan. 05

One of the most popular posts on PPC Ian is my Blog Commenting Strategy. I’m a huge fan of blog commentating for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it’s fun! It’s great to be part of the conversation. Second, it’s a great source of traffic. Write an insightful comment and you will quickly gain new readers. Third, blog commentating can be a great source of SEO-optimized dofollow links. That is, if the blog you comment on has a top commentators widget (like the one I have here on PPC Ian in my footer).

Comment

I used to do a ton of commentating. I originally purchased my iPad so I could commentate on the go. I would write comments on the train to and from work. I would bring my iPad to lunch and would write comments during my meal. I would even commentate on my mobile phone while away from my computer. I got a little bit obsessed.

These days, I’m still commentating but not quite as much. Why? Many of the big bloggers such as John Chow and Jonathan Volk have done site redesigns and have removed their top commentators widgets. I used to comment on these blogs multiple times per day because I got my name in the top commentators lists. This gave me thousands of dofollow inbound links, from blogs closely related to mine by topic. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a huge fan of both of these fine blogs, it’s just that I don’t comment quite as much since there is less of a reward.

So, you may be wondering, why are these big bloggers removing their top commentators widgets? If I had to guess, it probably comes down to preserving link juice (5-10 outbound links on each page of your blog can add up). It probably also comes down to comment quality. When you have as top commentators widget, the comments can sometimes be of lower quality. I particularly saw this happening on John Chow’s blog, although not anymore now that the widget has been removed.

As a blog owner, I’m a huge fan of having the top commentators widget. In addition to my top commentators widget, I even ran a Blog Commenting Contest. I feel passionately about rewarding those readers who support my blog by commenting. It takes time to write comments and I do my best to reward those supporting my blog.

The moral of the story: My blog commenting strategy is still very viable, but it’s more difficult finding blogs with top commentators lists. They still do exist, however, and I highly recommend seeking them out. You can even search on Google for directories of blogs that have dofollow top commentators lists. Moreover, don’t give up on blogs without top commentators. You may wish to throttle back your comments, but I still write many comments to this day on blogs without the widget.

Image of comment © iStockPhoto – pagadesign

Posted in: Blogging | Tags: , | Comments: 16 comments so far, join the discussion!