Author: Dave J.

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

On May 20, 2008, a checkbox will appear on your campaigns’ ‘Edit Campaign Settings’ pages giving you access to an optional beta feature called ‘automatic matching.’ The feature will be enabled by default, although it won’t begin to affect your account until June 3, 2008.
…

Automatic matching shows your ads on relevant search queries not already captured by your keywords. It works by analyzing the content of the landing pages, ads, and keywords in your ad group. It then shows your ads on search queries relevant to this information.

The system will continually monitor your performance on these queries and adjust its matches accordingly. Automatic matching aims to show your ads only on queries that yield a high clickthrough rate (CTR) and a cost-per-click (CPC) comparable to or lower than your ad group’s current average CPC. This way, your ads receive additional targeted traffic at a similar cost to your current traffic.

Sounds like a great way to stop worrying whether your keyword set is getting all the traffic you could get. Also sounds like a way for Google to expand click-thrus, and therefore, revenue. A win-win, as long as it doesn’t bust the budget.

Google FAQ about automatic matching

I thought I was the only one who wasn’t sure when to launch my new website till I saw this post at The J-Walk Blog:

This guy posted a perfectly good question in the forum for the Organization for Professional Astrology. Seven months later, nobody has replied!

I’m reworking my own astrology website now while Mercury is retrograde. I want to relaunch it at a good time and looking ahead I obviously want to wait until Mercury goes direct (Nov 2).

However, if I wait until it’s out of its shadow (after Nov 18) Mars will be retrograde!

I’ve settled for the New Moon of November 9th between 6 p.m. (the New Moon) and 10:20 p.m. (Moon goes void of course).

Launching around 7:30ish puts Jupiter on the Desc, Uranus in the 10th, and Gemini on the Asc (new moon in the 6th). The New Moon also makes a grand water trine with Mars and Uranus.

Otherwise, I could wait until Saturday when the moon is no longer VOC after 8 p.m. Gemini Asc, Uranus on MC, Pluton on Desc and Moon sextile Venus.

Does anyone have any advice on this election?

As a follow up to my post about Noise in the B2Blogosphere, I just found this relevant post from Rex Hammock in my Bloglines: Let’s hear it for the noise:

“Using the idea of ‘noise’ as a metaphorical framework for understanding how much of a filter you want before learning something that in your world may be considered ‘news,’ is a great way to start understanding that the Internet and all this stuff we call Web 2.0 is as much about information and data and conversational flow as it is about technology.”

Rex is reacting to a post by Robert Scoble (who isn’t in my Bloglines) about why he is a noise junkie.

Filtering
Robert feeds on the noise (via Twitter it seems) and filters it to his blog. People like Rex read Scobleizer and filter his noise till he sees something worth posting about, and then I get to read and learn about it. Rex says that where you choose to get your information is determined by how much filtering you want, or need.

Notice how I have quoted and reacted to what Rex wrote and posted. He took what Scoble did and added his own take about consumption of content. Scoble is only a tiny seed, but this is how blogging is supposed to work.

Clarification necessary?
Maybe I should clarify that the B2Blogoshere has ‘noise’ and it also has ‘static’. Static has no real source or message and just clogs up the airwaves. Noise can have value, if you can tune into it the way Scoble does. Its why I post in reaction to the world around me…it has an organic message that I hope adds to the noise of the B2Blogosphere in a valuable way.

On the consumption end, I view marketing as a long-term process, and the intensity of raw noise that Scoble reads and posts doesn’t support my day-to-day needs. But I’m thankful when other bloggers are acting as filters for me.

Okay, now I can talk about ‘signal’ in the B2Blogoshere next.

I get a emails from various companies looking for publicity on my blog. Many are off target, but this one from Sertifi intrigued me:

“Closing 2.0 is all about providing your customers with the easiest and most convenient way to sign, store and retrieve mutual agreements. With our solution you can send agreement out for signatures where signers can choose to hand sign or electronically sign. Many of our customers such as Careerbuilder have seen as much as a 40% reduction in their contract cycle as well as drastic improvements in sales efficiencies.”

While our company closes deals with POs, I certainly see the value of such a service for those who close with a contract, like trade advertising. “Let me fax you an insertion order” always seemed lame and unprofessional approach (especially now, in front of the ‘facebook generation’).

This looks worthwhile at about $25/month per user. And bonus is that you can ‘manage the process’ online, instead of the additional paper trail in the office.

Sertifi – Electronic Signatures, Contract Management

Let’s start with a quote from THE top marketing blogger:

Seth about blogs, “Lately, the noise seems to be increasing and the signal is fading in comparison. Too much spam, too many posts, too little insight leaking through. “

Seth Godin has a way of being topical, personal, all mixed with great punditry. That’s why he’s tops. A long time ago I gave up posting in response to his posts, because this blog would just be one big suck-up.

But in this case, what he says sheds light on what I wanted to say. There is too much noise, making the B2B/marketing blogosphere dead-boring these days.

Jumped the shark:

IMHO, the blogosphere started to go flat when Kathy Sierra stopped blogging. The number of true guru/pundits went down by one, and that’s when blogging ‘jumped the shark’. We stopped being a community in discussion, and transitioned into a roomful of soapboxes.

Around that time there was a unrelated rise in corporate bloggers, mostly those who are marketing consultants, but especially SEO and those focused in web-lead generation. Individually, they aren’t bad, but collectively they raised the noise level.

Even worse, those starting worthwhile blogs aren’t being heard. I’ve posted articles linking to a few such bloggers, but without seeing their Bloglines subscriber number go up AT ALL. Hey, you like my blog, aren’t you interested in these guys? Has the joy of discovery of new blogs gone away? Or are you just scanning thru too many feeds to quickly to care?

Certainly the problem is too much noise. Not enough patience to see if another blog is going to pan out as worthwhile. Not enough patience to comment on a post if there are 10, 20, or 100 other posts by others to read.

What do you think? Why aren’t you subscribing, commenting, or linking to other blogs as much as you used to?

Next: ‘Signal in the B2Blogosphere’ and the inevitable signal-to-noise ratio metaphor.

Remember when all those ‘get rich on the internet’ websites were out there? The ones that were one page long and went forever? Usually selling PDF books about how to do the make your own long-winded webpage and make millions?

Well I just saw one of these done as video. Someone linked to it as a technique marketers might try.

The whole rags to riches, learn from my mistakes, blah blah blah. Now in video form. Oh, did I mention all the teasers and foreshadowing to keep you hooked to watch the rest of the video. Like a horrible infomercial, I guess.

The point is this: YouTube has created a genuine authenticity to web video. This video seems to take advantage of this credibility for its own ends.

One of our sales reps is doing a local show this week. The event had a nice party for the attendees and exhibitors last night. We got about 50 drink tickets from the show to give out, but most attendees weren’t interested in hanging around. Typical of a local show.

So what do you do with a couple dozen extra drink tickets? Besides get really-really drunk?

Our guy promised a dozen tickets to the band at the end of each set, if they said the music was sponsored by our company, “you know, the XXX test company.”

And they did. Three times! In front of a target audience. Sweet! (Beats having a hung-over rep manning the booth this morning, too.)

Wow, my web host moved all their sites to new servers over the weekend. What a royal mess. Between their problems and me having to guess how to fix things, my sites been down for almost three days.

In a nutshell, I have nine sites with my hosting account, two of which were completely unavailable. When I noticed they were down, they told me to change my DNS settings to point to the new servers. And so it started.

Final solution: I set my account at GoDaddy to use their ‘default’ DNS server, then use their ‘total DNS’ tool to point to the IP address of the new server, actually bypassing any need to set specific DNS names.

Between this and my van’s radiator leaking, I’ve been pretty distracted.

New blogging series:
All this occurring when B2Blog is turning six. I had some great ideas about a new series of posts, which has made the problems all the more frustrating. But no more!

The new series will be titled “The state of B2Blog“, which I will use to address the issues and future of B2Blog and the B2Blogoshpere.

Stay tuned!

I know I had heard about this earlier, but today read-up on this news, as reported by Kelly Abner of Marketo: Google Updates Adwords Display URL Policy: “Starting April 1, Google is enforcing a new Display URL Policy. Not everyone knows about it, and those that do are wondering what it means.” Here’s the official word from Google, too.

Well basically, that little ‘display URL’ box when creating your AdWords ad must match the domain of the actual link URL. This has been done primarily to control affiliate marketers, but folks using outsourced landing pages are being affected, too. You can use a intermediate ‘tracking URL’ that doesn’t match, as long as the final ‘destination URL’ is the same domain.

I was a little surprised by the tracking URL allowance, as that depends on using a redirect, which I thought policy doesn’t allow. Obviously, it is an exception that is allowed as defined by Google.

Rulebreakers:
So I thought I’d go check on one of my major keywords because I knew there was one major advertiser already breaking the rules. His ad is still at or near the top, flaunting the rules, including:

1. Shill account: The URL displayed, and the whole account, I think, uses a shill domain. I suspect he got caught violating the rules at AdWords and had to create this separate account and domain to get back into the game.
2. Redirecting: The ads show the shill domain, but link to his regular domain. Whether he is directly violating this new policy or using a redirect, either way it is wrong.
3. All-caps: The domain URL is in all-caps. I know this is a no-no because I used some industry acronyms in an ad years ago and had my ads suspended due to all-caps.

Surprise:
While looking at the SERPs, I noticed most of the listed results were tagged as “competition”. Turns out that because I uploaded my bookmarks to my Google Account, they were showing what folder/tag those sites were in.

For a moment I thought Google knew a little too much about me! Maybe they still do. Now if they’d only get after my rule-breaking competitor.

The finer points of desktop publishing, really. Since I need to use dimensional measurements in describing my products, this is actually quite useful.

(Online, of course, its a whole other ball-game.)

“Welcome, friends, to the brave new world of the typography nazi. Below are ten mistakes that everyone makes, an explanation of why each is wrong, and details on how to fix them.”

Ten typographic mistakes everyone makes
via Boing Boing