PPC Competitive Analysis Reply

Presented at SES San Francisco on August 17, 2011.

An essential component of any search marketing plan is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. This knowledge helps you comprehend what links to gain, ad prices to pay, content to offer and customers to seek. In this session, we take a close look at what tricks you can use with search engines to analyze your competitors’ game and also what free and premium tools are available to deep dive into their strategy. Join us for a candid discussion as panelists reveal their secrets for monitoring competitive forces and threats while sharing tips that can be successfully applied to any business intelligence effort. After attending this session, you’ll have the skills to easily discover what keywords your competitor is targeting, how much your competitor is spending on ads, and be able to identify opportunities your competitor is missing.

Back-to-School PPC: A+ Tips and Expansion Ideas Reply

Originally posted on ClickZ.

Aww, back-to-school already? Yes, it’s that time of year again when retailers’ minds turn to reaching parents and students of all ages purchasing supplies, clothing, and electronics. According to the National Retail Federation, combined K-12 and college spending will reach over $68 billion this year, serving as the second biggest consumer spending event for retailers behind the winter holidays.

The flexibility and real-time nature of paid search and PPC campaigns make them ideal tactics for the back-to-school marketing mix. In recent surveys, more people say they will shop online and will comparison-shop online than last year. With this audience more available online, it will be critical to be visible and offer unique messaging to entice shoppers.

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Example of “Google Offers” in Adwords Ad? Reply

Google Offers, in beta, recently launched tests for online coupons to compete with Groupon. In looking through the Google Offers documentation, I didn’t see any direct mention of incorporating into Adwords. Google Offers is intended to be pre-paid, however, this offer just showed up in Adwords and led to a Google hosted landing page with “Google Offers” in the page title. Or is this the old coupon product being transitioned to Offers?

The Landing Page:

More info…

Google Offers beta launching in New York City and the Bay Area

Google To Tie Google Offers, Shopper to Google+

Google Offers Launches Test in Portland