Online Marketing, SEO, & Web Design Blog

There are many ways to generate interest and sales to your company these days. Outside of typical marketing strategies there are many ways, both offline and online, to drive highly qualified leads to your business. One of these ways is through using a lead generation company. These companies usually specialize in driving your company highly qualified and ready to buy prospects. Depending on your company and business objectives leads can even be passed to you directly through a telephone call. For companies that have high close rates over the phone this can be a huge advantage to their business. If done correctly, not only are they getting leads that are qualified, they are receiving leads that are ready and willing to buy now. Companies such as water damage and restoration companies, plumbers, lawyers, and doctors are just some of the types of companies that can profit from lead generation.

So far this may sound no different than a typical marketing campaign. While this is somewhat true, lead generation is different as it is usually outsourced to an outside firm that specializes in driving companies leads your particular industry. For example, if you are a water damage company you can drive leads via seo, paid search, google maps, and yellow pages. However, if you where to employ a company that specializes in water damage leads you can increase your target reach without changing your current marketing strategy. The particular site drives leads from a site that specializes in water damage.

Lead generation companies can use many different methods to drive high qualified and hot leads right to your business. If you are looking for a lead generation to your company feel free to reach out to us for help!

It happens more than you think – and no you are not alone – when creating a new campaign or adding new keywords, ads or even landing pages your ads may not appear right away. However, before you start lobbing emails and phone calls into Google support understand that there is a review process for new campaigns. The review process can take up to a few days, however while you are waiting make sure that it is not your fault your ads are not appearing.

Here are a few reasons that may effect your ads:

1) Campaign, Keyword, Ad – Paused

Yes it happens to everyone (including the pros) – make sure that everything is running correctly and not paused. It is easy to forget about this simple aspect espsically if you are in the interface making changes to your account.

2)Budget Issues

Yet another simple fix. Make sure that you have set your daily or monthly budget for your campaigns. This happens alot if you are using the Google Adwords Editor to create and manage your campaigns. Also make sure that your keyword bids are not higher than your daily budget.

3)Disapproved Ads / Keywords

To make the web a much more user friendly place for you and I, Google does not allow you to bid on certain keywords or place certain words in your ads. Most of these have to do with particular keywords that are prohibited, for a full list take a look here.

Ads can also be disapproved if you use similar prohibited terms or copyrighted phrases. Make sure to double check everything before you launch your campaign.

4)Low Search Volume

While it is always a good idea to bid on long tail keywords that you competitors are not biddng on, Google will not let you bid on terms that receive very  very low search traffic. If this is the case you will be notified in the Google Adwords interface in the status column that your ads are receiving ”Low Search Volume.” While this is sometimes disappointing – Google can not make people search for certain phrases.

5) Billing

This is yet another simple fix – make sure that you have added your credit card information and that Google has verified your card and billing address. And to answer your question – unlike everything else Google does, Adwords does cost money. (Now you know why your gmail account is free!)

Remember, most of the time your ads are not showing because of the review process. But it is always a good idea to double check that it is not your fault.

With more and more companies starting paid search campaigns everyday, as well as more emphasis placed on SEO, many question whether it is worth it or not to bid on branded keywords. From a per-cost standpoint, it seems very cut and dry – people searching for your branded term are going to click on your organic link, so why give them a choice to click on a paid link? However, this high level outlook is not as accurate as it may seem. (more…)

Lets face it, most small and even large businesses simply do not have the funds to use advanced Analytics software such as Omniture or WebTrends. However, with Google Analytics, these companies gain access to a very powerful tool for free. Although this is great, many users quickly find that because it’s so powerful, it’s not as easy to learn and use as one may think.

One of the problems that many e-business owners run into is tracking Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo search marketing visits in Goggle Analytics.

The good news is that you can use Google Analytics to track paid search for Adwords campaigns because Adwords automatically tags keywords. Unfortunately, Yahoo and Mircosoft do not automatically tag paid keywords. While the process is not ‘automatic’ it is fairly simple… at least in theory. (more…)