While it may seem simple, I’m amazed at how often a simple unique phone number for paid search campaigns is overlooked by clients and agencies.  At the very least, the landing pages of your B2B AdWords campaigns should have a unique phone number that can report the quantity of calls, and ideally record each call for reference, quality assurance, and training purposes.  Telecapture is a very easy and...

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a seasoned Google AdWords mentor was to “not try and serve two masters within a single campaign.” If your campaigns are like most, they have a fixed budget and are ROI driven. In this situation, we are constantly trying to ratchet down the cost per lead while still using up the budget to get as many leads as possible. But beware! At some point you...

Ok, so I’m really passionate about looking for ways to improve conversion rates - I admit it.  I’m kind of a conversion junkie. But sometimes I make the mistake of getting so focused on conversions that I can lose site of the bigger picture. I end up only staring at the trees right in front of me, without taking the time to take inventory of the forest. Such a shortsighted viewpoint can undermine a B2B...

Having been on the client side, agency side, and now the consulting/coaching side of search engine marketing, I’ve seen my fair share of success, and made (and hopefully learned from) plenty of mistakes. One mistake I think every client could avoid is blindly entrusting a Pay-per-click campaign (like Google AdWords for example) to an agency, or consultant like myself, without ‘checking in on the...

Had an interesting conference call with one of my best clients this week. It’s a B2B niche high dollar technology play. The CMO has a strong interest in testing different ads, and ad copy in their Google AdWords campaigns. That’s great because I share those same desires! I love that stuff too. The challenge is the data points are coming in so slow. Even to get a valid test of two different...