With 2009 quickly coming to an end, your friends at Salesworks wanted to remind you Continue Reading…

Due to Internet difficulties we weren’t able to share a few examples with you during our session at Directions 2009 Friday morning. As promised, we’ve posted them to our blog. Continue Reading…

To supplement our discussion at Directions 2009 we’ve posted some additional insight into the most common mistakes Partners make in regards to Google AdWords. Continue Reading…

Many traditional marketing directors & coordinators are just starting to dip their feet into online analytics. They have Google Analytics or Omniture setup and check their stats from time to time, but are they really understanding the metrics that are in front of them? More importantly, are they efficiently utilizing their website’s analytics to improve their campaigns results and reduce their client acquisition costs?

Website analytics are a marketers dream. We invest some money, check the results, reconstruct the campaign and then try it again, constantly refining the outcome. In contrast to traditional marketing, online marketing analytics provides a fine level of control on the results you are generating.

You can make a big impact in the success of your companies website, even if you only spend a few hours a week reviewing your website’s analytics. (Not to be confused with spending just 4 hours a week on your entire online marketing strategy!) Let’s take a peak at some key metrics and Google Analytics tips. Continue Reading…

Search engines have evolved to use hundreds of different indicators on a website to determine what, where, and when a website will be listed in search results.

Google’s Matt Cutts announced recently that the META attribute “Keyword” is not factored into their search engine ranking algorithm at all. This doesn’t come as a shock to SEO professionals who have discounted the META keyword attribute’s value years ago, but rather an acknowledgment that search engines have progressed to the point where any “easy” manual manipulation of a website’s search engine ranking is a distant past.

What about the other Search Engines?

There is evidence that other engines Continue Reading…

Gone are the days when a common response to a technical support call is “are you sure that your computer is plugged in?”  Dynamics Partner support teams are now faced with a myriad of complex questions that require an understanding of networks, communications, databases and functional areas like accounting, sales and marketing.  But perhaps the biggest challenge of all is the human factor.  The people at the other end of the phone line are rarely happy, sometimes abusive and often stressed.   Certain times are worse than others – month end, year end and first thing in the morning (they were working late trying to get things done, were foiled and then built up a head of steam all night!)

There are some steps and techniques that can assist customer support people in managing stressed customers over the phone – no matter what the time of day or nature of the incident. Continue Reading…

Recently an old colleague of mine sent an email to my Gmail account.

As you may or may not know, Gmail shows ads from Adwords PPC advertisers.  “Relevant” ads are generally displayed based on the content of the page (come to think of it, this seems like a bit of a privacy issue, but that’s another story).

Usually, I don’t pay attention to the ads but, this time, one caught my eye:
Continue Reading…

Previously, we had posted an announcement about the updates to Google’s search engine; codenamed “Caffeine”.

We’ve uncovered a new tool that we wanted to share with you. It allows you to compare your current Google rankings against your rankings in the Google “Caffeine” Sandbox. (The developmental testing server)

Compare your current rankings vs. the new Caffeine rankings for yourself and tell us about your findings.

Please note: Results fluctuate on a daily basis and the Caffeine development server may change drastically before it’s rolled out.

Google’s Quality Score system is fairly straightforward, but the Quality Score interactions at the account, group, and keyword level can be a bit more complex to get through.

In essence, account Quality Score is based on the overall performance of the account, and Google’s perceived relevance of the keywords, ads, and landing pages to each other.  The relevance of the ads to the keywords is first calculated in a similar way to one component of how search engines rank pages — keyword visibility. Continue Reading…

Google recently announced that they have been secretly working on a new version of the “World’s Most Popular Search Engine”:

Here’s what Google wrote:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

Continue Reading…