Diorex

Google wants your conversion data. If you are already voluntarily sharing this with them, shame on you.

Sure Google analytics, Webmaster Central or Website Optimizer are useful tools with powerful features that are not readily available anywhere else for free. But have you ever stopped to think about why Google is spending millions to bring you free services?

If you ask Google, you get the stock answer along the lines of : “With tools like this, we show webmasters how to more profitably spend money on Google and thus are willing to spend even more.” or some variation of this. They are very aggressive about inviting big spenders into these beta tools to help further optimize websites and thus potentially spend more.
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I see no reason why every single keyword should not be in its own adgroup. Why every single ad copy should not have its own display URL. Or why each match type should not be tracked differently.

Yes, it is a pain to set-up. Yes it is anal. Yes it matters. It can mean tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year difference.

The difference between singular and plural keywords can be huge. It is not out of the realm of possibility for the plural version to be a home run, while at the same time the singular version of the keyword could be bleeding you dry. Or the broad match is getting killed and the exact match is a huge cash cow.
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I Stumbled across Mind Meister and think this is a really cool tool.

Basically, it is a free form brainstorming tool. It allows you to create groups and sub-groups. It gives icons, and numbers, it allows you to share with others and tracks their collaborations.

I have long used tools like this on a white board drawing a fish skeleton, where invariably at the end of the meeting, someone has to copy down the idea and then try to put it into a spreadsheet and then send it out to everyone. This tool allows you to brainstorm online, and it allows you to track updates as you go. Did you try something that did not work? Hit a dead end? Discover a new line of thinking, make a few quick changes and all of that can be documented quickly and easily for everyone on the project.

Work by yourself, I have mapped out several very detailed business models and shared them with potential partners. I have also mapped out an entire new website that we are launching in 2 weeks. I am sure there are dozens of good uses I have not even considered.

This is still in a private beta, but I have a few invitations to share if anyone is interested.

Fresh on the heels of me ranking for Dave Pasternack’s name misspelled, I thought it might be a good time to talk about keyword strategy.

I used to market Dish Network. The number 1 keyword in that space by a huge margin is Satellite Tv. 1 T 2 L’s.

I just checked my spreadsheets and I got clicks for 47 different spellings of the word satellite, and actually got sales from over 20 of those.

Standard misspelling tools on the net are predominantly mistyping tools rather than misspelling ones. They will help you when someone transposes or skips or doubles a letter in a query. Unfortunately, these automated tools are not as stupid as people.

Words like satlite, sattelite, satalite, sat light, and others dont show up on any of the lists of misspelled keywords, yet they were 4 of my top 7 volume from both click and sales perspectives. Desh Network, Dish Net Work were 2 more. Sometimes it pays to take the automoation out of things and to think like a high school dropout.

Recently discovered Comment Hut and am finding its utility to be very nice.

I am sure some people will use it for spam, but we actually were able to place some good comments on relevant blogs in spaces where we have gotten both link love from Google, as well as some vistors who ended up generating revenue for us which was totally unexpected.

We have several sites that are designed to be SEO’d. They appear to be fairly non-commercial and have well written articles by experts on a wide variety of topics. The problem is we are not SEO experts and the sites were languishing in the 20’s and 30’s on Google for the keywords we wanted to rank for.
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Just found out to my major disgust that Google has eliminated bulk sheets, even for very large advertisers.

My account rep just said that we could do everything in the Adwords editor that could be done with bulksheets.

I proceeded to ask her how to do 3 different things, that were extraordinarily simple with a bulksheet, none of which she could figure out using the editor.

In my opinion, I have never seen a single good reason to use the editor. Anything it can do, I can do as quick in the main account. I guess if I wanted to make a lot of changes while flying on an airplane then the editor might be useful. The few times I have tried to use it for something it was absolutely sluggish and changes took forever to go live.

The one and only reason I can even imagine why this was done is that, we would make tons of changes in Google and then just download the bulksheet and send it to Yahoo. Maybe Google got tired of helping Yahoo drive more traffic. At the same time, they stopped helping me drive more traffic through them.

Shoemoney put me on to the guys at Crazy Egg and I have to say that I am very impressed.

We started using this on many of our sites about a month ago, with very surprising results. Keep in mind that we track just about everything about our customers interactions with our site, yet we still found amazing value from the visual heatmaps.

A few things we learned.

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As I was about to share an opportunity I found last week in Overture vs Panama on bid strategy, I noticed that the bid prices in the Overture Tool are no longer being displayed.

If you are bidding on a keyword currently, you can now see a range in the old interface, just like in the new one. Oh well, guess noone would be interested in the hole I had been using since it is no longer available.

This makes researching new niches quite a bit harder. Now you might only see the number one brand name guy who is willing to pay $6.00 a click, but you have no idea if number 2 is $5.99 or if it is $.25 per click.

I guess I knew that this gravy train was coming to an end….I am gonna miss this data.

I have yet to see anyone really mention this on other blogs, but the Overture search suggestion tool is replaced in the new interface. It is now much more Googlish, which I get very little use out of. It provides trends and graphs, but does not provide any numbers for estimated searches.

I think anyone using Overture for search stats without modifying them in some way is crazy, but at least the numbers were there and fairly easy to get at for discussion purposes.

I have used some of the other “pay” tools, and have yet to really get a feel for a multiplier on those numbers. With yahoo, experience and testing had shown me how to estimate the potential search size of a niche.

I have converted and non-converted accounts, and I still log into the dead non-converted account to see the search numbers. I am not at all looking forward to the day where I cannot go type Justin Timberlake into overture and see that 5 million searches were done for tickets and XXX done for his name, and XXX for his new album etc. That data gives me ideas. Ideas turns into revenue for Yahoo, even if it does not make me any money at all.

To me this is invaluable data in deciding which niches are deep enough to pursue. Yahoo! I would pay for this data (if it was accurate, but that is another topic).