The age-old marketing question “How much should I spend on Marketing?” has recently turned into, “How much should I spend on Google?” Over the years, many different methodologies for determining budgets have been promoted, discussed and employed as different businesses try to perfect their marketing. Some of the most popular techniques are to allocate a percent of sales or an overall percent of total budget. Others go with gut instinct or a shoot-the-moon approach to maxing their credit card out. In search marketing, people often promote building a big keyword list, setting it live and ‘optimizing it to results’.

Whatever approach you have heard in the past, its worth considering a completely unique approach to Google budgeting – demand-based budgeting.
Continue Reading »

Quality Score is the measure used by Google to determine the placement and cost per click of your search ads. Quality Score is calculated using a number of factors related to your keywords, creative and landing page in each ad group. One of the most frustrating parts of launching and managing a search campaign is when keywords are disabled and require a higher bid in order to be active. It is especially frustrating when seemingly obvious terms that should rank brand or product names are disabled due to low Quality Score. Why does Google do this? And how can you avoid it?

Continue Reading »

Dear Thrivepoint,

We have received several proposals from search engine optimization providers who gurantee our listing will be ranked in the top 10 or our money back. This type of offer is very appealing because we have tight marketing budgets that need to be squeezed for maximum results. But, can SEO results be guaranteed?

-W.B.

Thrivepoint: SEO rankings are not something that can be guaranteed very easily. Beside the fact that the SEO does not own or control the search engines, there are a number of important reasons why you should dig deeper into the SEOs guarantee before buying. Here is how to get started with evaluating the guarantee.
Continue Reading »

Optmizing your website to attract traffic from search engines – or search engine optimization (SEO) – can be one of the most cost-effective ways to generate traffic to your website. On the other hand, it can take a lot of time and energy to get to the point where the traffic is paying off for your effort. Whether you manage your site yourself or outsource it to someone else, here are six ways you can increase search engine traffic to your site without breaking the bank and without a time intensive overhaul.

Continue Reading »

What is the difference between good creative and bad creative on Adwords? The strength of your testing regimen.

Great campaign results are the goal but if you do not understand why results are good or bad, then it will be impossible to scale your marketing for profitable growth. Testing provides you a framework for understanding why your campaign behaves in certain ways so that you can continually improve and scale your campaign profitably.

There is not a simple formula that you can apply to magically create great search advertising results, but here are five standard practices that you should incorporate into your Google Adwords practice to test and improve results:

Continue Reading »