Search Engine Marketing

Marketo's Marketing Automation Buyer's Kit

Two Practical Landing Page Tips That Will Save You Money

Let me tell you a story about how I used two easy landing page optimization tips to reduce my cost per conversion by $10.67 and improve my quality score at the same time.

Shorter Forms Reduced Cost Per Conversion by $10.67

As you know, Marketo provides on-demand marketing software including lead management and landing page optimization. One of my jobs as VP Marketing is to generate qualified leads for the sales team by finding prospects using Google AdWords (as well as other…

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Why Mobile Search Is Irrelevant To B2B Marketing

Mobile search is a hot topic these days, especially since Google AdWords is showing text ads for free on mobile phones for the next 46 days. Since I focus on helping business-to-business marketing professionals drive revenue and improve marketing accountability, I naturally got to thinking whether B2B companies could take advantage of mobile search. My conclusion: mobile search (especially mobile paid search) is basically irrelevant for most business to business marketers.

This is…

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All I Really Need To Know About Search Engine Marketing I Learned In Kindergarten

The following is an excerpt from my recent column about search engine marketing at Search Engine Land.

All I really need to know about search engine marketing I learned in kindergarten. Or something like that.

The goal of search engine marketing is to get your pages to show up when target customers make relevant searches. As search engines get better at finding relevant content and preventing SEO-spam, Search Engine Marketing success comes not from tricks known to only a few, but…

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Tip: Manage PPC Spending With Bids, Not Budget

Many companies take advantage of the Budget control in Google AdWords to limit their daily and monthly spending to their desired goal. What not everyone realizes is that this can result in higher cost per click (CPC) and fewer clicks! This is because the way that AdWords ensures you don’t exceed your budget is by limiting the number of times your ad is displayed (which limits clicks).

Here’s a simplified example to illustrate the point.  Say you have only one keyword and it has the…

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How Marketo Uses A Test Drive To Give Power To Our Prospects

I’ve written before about how today’s B2B buyer avoids interruption marketing and uses the Internet to take control of the buying process. I’ve also talked about how the modern B2B marketer’s job is to enable and facilitate the buyer’s research by providing the right thought leadership, the right product information and the right tools at the right time.

Not surprisingly, at Marketo we try follow this advice in our own marketing. That’s why I’m pleased to announce the availability…

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B2B Pay-Per-Click Links for Beginners

Some of Marketo’s customers have asked me where they can go to get basic information for optimizing their B2B pay-per-click campaigns. Here are some links I’ve found that provide practical tips for optimizing your campaigns.

If you know of any other great sources of information for beginners, please let me know!

AdWords Learning Center

One of the best sources for learning about PPC is the AdWords Learning Center. You don’t need to look at everything, but spend an hour there and…

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Better B2B Landing Pages – A Case Study

If you want to make Google richer without making any money yourself, then stop reading. You don’t need to worry about conversion rates or landing pages. But if you want to grow your own revenue using search engine marketing, then you must pay attention to converting your clicks into leads.

This is the topic of my new article “Better B2B Landing Pages – A Case Study“, now available as part of Search Engine Land’s Strictly Business column.

Here’s a summary from the article of some of…

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An Inconvenient Truth: What PPC Agencies Don’t Want You to Know

I just published a new article, called “The 5 Secrets PPC Agencies Don’t Want You to Know“. This article is part of  Search Engine Land’s new Strictly Business column, which covers topics related to B2B search marketing.

In the article, I argue that success with pay-per-click search marketing requires business expertise and search marketing expertise. You have more business expertise than any outsider could have (especially since most agencies don’t specialize in the unique needs of…

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Links – 15 February 2007 – Pay-per-Click Special

In this week’s installment, we focus on pay-per-click management:

Search Is the Best Performing Online Marketing Tactic
MarketingSherpa and ad:tech surveyed online marketers about what worked in 2006. eMarketer.com reports that for the second year in a year, marketers voted paid search ads as the best performing tactic.

Google Now Displays Keyword Level Quality Score
Users can now see the Quality Score for each keyword on a 3 point scale (poor, ok and great). (You may need to…

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Competitive Keyword Research with SpyFu and Others

What keywords are your competitors buying? Knowing this can help with your pay per click search engine marketing, organic SEO, and overall competitive positioning. Fortunately, there are some useful tools available to help you figure this out.

SpyFu

SpyFu is my favorite tool for competitive keyword research. It is the second generation of the popular tool GoogSpy. It lets you find what keywords your competitors are buying, what they’re bidding (sort of), and what their ads say.…

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