Recent Posts

The “Thank You Page” is the Most Underutilized Page on the Web

January 31, 2007

If someone took the time to write your business, or checked out through your shopping cart - they haveÂ trust in yourÂ business. Don’t just serve them a standard ‘Thank you for…’ page. Use this valuable real estate to extend your relationship with their business.

Matt McGee has a nice write up about the four most underutilized pages on the web. His focus was on SEO, however, the title inspired this thought so throwing a little link love to a good read. According to Matt (who I respect) his top four underutilized pages for SEOÂ are:

Glossary
FAQ
About Us
Contact Us

While I agree those pages are generally underutilized for SEO; I think the most underutilized real estate overall comes from user engagement after they have decided to act.

If someone gave you their email address through a contact form, they trust you with their email address (and possibly a name, phone number, etc) and wish to hear from you. At this point, engage them with other conversion possibilities like a newsletter signup, an RSS feed, white paper download, etc.

If someone checked out on your site, they gave you a credit card. This is a lot of trust. There’s nothing people hold more dearly than their finances. Don’t just serve them a page with a ‘Thank you for shopping click here to print your receipt’ - use this opportunity to continue to engage those visitors.

In each of the above situations, do you give someone the ability to continue to interact with your site? Or are you saying ‘Thank you very much, now go away’? Don’t just lose that customer interaction, continue to engage them towards other aspects of your website or business.

The most difficult thing for a business todo is form the initial relationship with another party. Here’s your chance to not only form a relationship, but nuture it to grow overtime.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog | 6 Comments

Wordpress Statistic Plugins Comparisons

January 31, 2007

I’m putting together a comparison chart of several wordpress statistic plugins against some other analytics programs to see how they each record visitors, page views, query strings, referrers, etc.

The analytics programs I’m using are:

Google Analytics
AWstats
Webalizer
Feedburner
and if i have time, I’ll do some clicktracks log file analysis.

The Wordpress Stat Plugins I’m using are:

bSuite (which seems to have issues)
Counterize II
Short Stats
Slim Stats

Did I miss any WordPress Stat plugins that should be compared?

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blogging | 2 Comments

Restaurant now means Hotel on Google

January 30, 2007

A search for any geography and restaurant now brings up ads and natural search for hotels on maps.google.com.

Â I sent Matt an email last night about it, but haven’t heard back yet.

Wonder what this is doing for the user experience, the hotels being shown for restaurant queries, and the poor restaurants which aren’t being shown at all.

Google Maps Showing Hotels for Restaurant Keywords

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog | Leave a Comment

Understanding IP Targeting for PPC Campaigns

January 28, 2007

IP Targeting is one of the technologiesÂ that Google, MSN, and Yahoo employ to target searchers.Â IP Targeting is often misunderstood. It has both advantages and disadvantages; however, before those can be discussed, we must first look at how the technology functions.

Assigning IP Addresses

Whenever you logon to the web, your computer is assigned an IP address from your host (your internet access provider). This is essentially your computer’s address on the web. However, as it’s assigned from your host, your address is tied to your host’s as much as it’s assigned to your computer.

The major engines (and many others) map these IP addresses to physical locations.Â Since there is an actual location associated with your computer, ads can then be served based upon your actual location.

The advantage of this technology is regional targeting. The job of an advertiser is to connect with searchers. Connecting on a local level is one method advertisers can employ so that searchers relate to the advertisement.

However, the disadvantage is that advertisers may be connecting with the incorrect geography.

IP Targeting Map

IP targeting diagram

In this example, the grey area represents a DMA (Chicago in this example). There are three searchers, and two host providers.

Searcher 1 is located inside Chicago, and the host provider is located inside Chicago; therefore, the ads served to searcher 1 are geographically appropriate.

Searcher 2 is located outside Chicago, however, the host provider is inside Chicago; so this searcher will see ads targeted to the major city in the area, however, they aren’t as specific as possible. This most often happens in the suburbs of large cities, or when there are few host providers in an area (usually rural).

Search 3 is located inside Chicago, however, the host provider is outside the city. Therefore, searcher 3 will not see geographic ads for Chicago, however, they might see them for the location where host 2 is located.

How often are irrelevant geographic ads served?

I don’t believe there are exact statistics of this measure, as when it occurs, the technology thinks its being mapped appropriately.

Based upon what I’ve heard, what I’ve seen, etc - I don’t think it happens that often. However, it happens often enough that the limits (and advantages of connecting geographically with a searcher) should be known.

However, for those users it does occur for, it can be quite annoying. I’m a case in point here. I live in northern Chicago and my host provider is in Evanston (the city just to the north of me), so when I’m at home, I see Evanston ads, not Chicago ones. The advantage is that I often travel to Evanston for shopping as its closer than downtown Chicago. The disadvantage is that I’m downtown almost everyday, so if I’m searching for downtown Chicago locations, I see inappropriate ads. At my house, I’m searcher 3.Â

The good point is that when I’m at the office (located in the loop), I see Chicago ads; so I’m searcher 1 while in the office.

In addition, there are other geographic technologies at play. This is only one of the mappings that the major engines do to serve geographic ads - there are others which can help reduce how often IPs are incorrectly mapped.

Geo Qualified Keywords

Using geographic targeting in the engines does not mean that only those in your targeted region will see your ads. The engines use geo-keyword mappings to also show your ads. I’ll make this the subject of another article - however, it is important to note that if you only serve ads to Chicago, and someone in New York City uses the geo-qualifier Chicago (with your normal keywords) - your ads could be shown.

Drilling down on geographic keywordsÂ is an article that goes into depth about the geo-keyword possibilities.

The AOL Conundrum

For several years, all AOL users appeared to come from Virginia. This was because AOL routed all IP addresses through their Virginia servers. However, AOL is no longer a major issue for IP targeting.

There are many more AOL broadband users than dial-up users these days. Broadband users are assigned IP addresses differently than dial-up, so they can be served regional ads.

Those users still using dial-up (this stat came from someone at Google) is less than 0.5% of web traffic. It should also be noted, that the engines keep a list of providers and IP addresses that are black listed from being served IP targeted ads because of known limitations with those hosts.

Closing Notes

There are other items that are also commonly used to serve regional ads such as user registration data (Microsoft Passport accounts, Yahoo accounts, etc), geographic keywords, and others.Â

IP targeting should be noted as a technology used in PPC regional targeting, not the entire process. It’s a common mistake to refer to regional targeting (or geographic targeting) as IP targeting. IP targeting is just one technology among many that are used to serve regional based ads.

However, it is very important as advertisers to understand both the benefits and limitations of the technologies being employed. Ultimately, you should control your ad serving, and being informed is the best way to take full control of your PPC campaigns.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, PPC Info | 11 Comments

Updated to Wordpress 2.1

January 28, 2007

I updated to wordpress 2.1 today, please let me know if you see any blog problems - they’re not intentional.

I’ve found two issues so far:

BSuite plugin stopped passing stats. However, I’ve had problems with that plug-in before - so it could that issue could be related to something else.

I also had to completely rework the links section. It seems the previousÂ link categoryÂ tags I was using are no longer supported, and I had to rework some of the coding. Although, it seems its also time to update the entire link section as it’s quite outdated.

As soon as I find an easy way to export Windows Live Mail Desktop OPML; then I’ll rework the link section. I’ve become reliant on that reader since Attensa stopped syncing between their web and desktop apps.

Overall, I do like the upgraded 2.1 interface. I stopped using the rich text editor on the previous interface as it had many issues in various browsers and it was quite difficult to switch betweenÂ the code and editor interface.Â WP 2.1 fixes that entire issue (my favorite aspect of the 2.1 upgrade).

If you see any problems with the blog not rendering correctly, please let me know the problem and your browser version.

Thank you.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment

AdWords Position Preference Doesn’t Always Work

January 23, 2007

Overall, I’ve been pleased with position preference. Used in conjunction with Google Analytics; one can see the ROI of a keyword by position.

That’s powerful information to know. Do you need to be in the top positing as your offer depends on immediate response? Does your ad do well at the bottom of the page due to comparison shoppers? Do you just need to be in the middle of the page for branding reinforcement?

Whatever the answer is, if you want you ad to appear in a particular position - it’s pretty easy to do with Google AdWords.

Or is it?

The below quote is from AdWordsAdvisor2 (who I know personally, and understands many of the technical details with AdWords) in a WebmasterWorld thread that went largely unnoticed.

The lower limit on position preference is a hard limit, but the upper limit is not. The system will try and hold to the upper limit defined in your preferences, but we couldn’t make it a hard limit. In the unlikely scenario that the ads that would normally compete for the top few positions all had upper limits of position 4, for example, having that upper limit be a hard stop would cause issues for the auction.

Source: WebmasterWorld.com

For example, if there are 10 people with position preference turned on, and their top position is all 4, then if Google followed that ad serving, there would be 0 ads as no one wanted the top 3 spots.

I think in this case, its more important to inform than complain. If I were Google, in this instance, I’d do the same thing - serve the ads - don’t just serve a blank page.

So, advertisers, you’ve been informed. The bottom limit of position preference is a hard limit - the upper limit might not be.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Google AdWords, PPC Info | 3 Comments

Microsoft says Excel 07 to support unlimited rows

January 21, 2007

I get quite a bit of traffic for Excel 2007, and wanted to make sure that the old post was accurate.

In the beta release of Excel, it only supported 1,048,576 rows, which is often not nearly enough for data analysis (although a huge improvement over the current number).

I’ve been informed by Microsoft that Excel will support an unlimited number of rows.

Might want to beef up on your computer’s memory though, currently it takes a solid gig of RAM to easily work with a 75mb excel file. With unlimited rows, those pivot tables could easily break the 500mb mark.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog | Leave a Comment

Wordpress Help Files

January 14, 2007

I recently stumbled upon two nice wordpress help sites that deserve to be recognized.

The first is Tamba2.org.uk. This site has a lot of step by step help files for wordpress.

The second at headzoo is a list of all the tags available in wordpress, and separates them into the appropriate sections. Quite useful when editing files and trying to remember the nomenclature of certain tags.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment

New AdWords Seminars: Charlotte and Washington DC

January 13, 2007

The AdWords Seminars for Success were a big hit last year. We conducted five seminars with Google’s blessing and we’ve received wonderful feedback from attendees.

We’ve recently announced two new seminars:
Charlotte, NC on January 30th.
Washington DC on February 1st.

Please note, there are two types of seminars: one for beginners covering intermediate and advanced topics, and one for more seasoned players covering intermediate and advanced topics. I conduct the advanced seminars where we talk extensively about quality score, optimization, ad scheduling, split testing, etc (all the fun stuff I blog about).

The AdWords Blog recently announced three items for making 2007 a success:

Participate in the AdWords Help forum. (Of course, you can also participate in the AdWords forum at Webmaster World as well)
Review lessons in the AdWords Learning Center. (This I highly recommend).
And their number one: Attend an AdWords Seminar.

You can find more information at Google’s official seminar site here: http://www.google.com/awseminars or skip directly to the registration here: http://adwordsseminars.locallaunch.com.

If your city isn’t listed, don’t worry - just contact Google. At the bottom of this page is a feedback form to suggest a new city. Or, you can contact me and I’ll pass along the feedback.

Hope to see everyone in a seminar this year!

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog | 1 Comment

Finally responding to the blog tags

January 10, 2007

After being blog tagged by Jeff and Chris (I didn’t even know Chris had a blog), and receiving emails from others that I need to respond to the tags…I’ve finally decided to be a little bit better blogger (one can’t be a good blogger when the posts are highly sporadic) and at least respond to the tags.

So here goes…

1. I attended Penn State (go Nittany Lions). My degree is in Psychology with an emphasis on personality psychology. My goal at the time was to improve on the intelligence and personality testing methodologies and to create a new way of testing that would measure over 10% of the brain’s capabilities.

2. I grew up in Arkansas; and no I don’t have an accent.

3. I’ve been engaged for 7 years, and maybe we’re finally getting married this year. The plan is to rent out an entire castle for a week. The actual wedding might be optional

4. My first ‘real job’ was working with a mental health/mental retardation company. One of my favorite aspects of that job was the deinstitutionalization of Pennsylvania. Essentially, that means working with individuals who are in institutions and integrating them into community living (homes, jobs, members of society).

5. I actually understand, got my start, and practice: SEO. While this might not seem that interesting in a world of bloggers where everyone is an SEO or PPC person, I’m usually known for PPC, not the SEO, press release, social networking, usability, conversion, affiliate, etc that I enjoy as much as PPC.

Of course, the next option is to either tag someone else, or just let the chain die. It seems that their are several good bloggers that no one really mentions. Carolyn of the adCenter blog, Brian of Copyblogger, Mike of blumenthals, Greg of Screenwerk, and Matt of small business SEM.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog | 2 Comments