“Should I renew my Yahoo directory listing?”

Good question – here’s how to decide:

1. Take the amount of money you make every year from people clicking that link.
2. Divide that number by $300.
3. If the result is less than one, don’t renew it.

Most people will find that the result of that calculation is zero.

Spend your extra $300 a year wisely folks.

Listen in as Dan and Andrea speak with Rich Stokes of AdGooroo.

Founded in 2004, AdGooroo is the original Search Engine Intelligence company. Their services help over 2,000 global advertisers excel in PPC, SEO, and Display Advertising.

AdGooroo offers several products. Their most popular product, SEM Insight, provides competitive intelligence to search engine marketers and is typically used by search marketing agencies, consultants, and large, brand-name advertisers. SEM Insight can also be integrated with Google AdWords.

One of the most exciting features of Adgooroo is that they have insight into Google’s Product Listing Ads.

Title: Digital Marketing Intelligence – AdGooroo
Date: April 9, 2013
Author: Rich Stokes, Dan Thies & Andrea Warner
Run Time: 00:42:22 (0 hour, 42 minutes, 22 seconds)

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Leslie and I have a coaching call with a group of long time clients, every Wednesday, at 2pm Eastern… except the last Wednesday of every month, it’s at 7pm.

I can’t set up a recurring event in any kind of online/cloud/sharable calendar system that has these properties. Not on Google, iCloud, any of them. Is it written in iCal that I can’t do this?

I can set up a 7pm on the last Wednesday of the month. I can set up a 2pm “every Wednesday.” This is how I have it set up now.

But on the last Wednesday of the month, I get a “false alarm” for a 2pm call that isn’t going to happen, and all of the automatic calendar syncing that I have means that 2pm-4pm will still show as “busy” on my calendars, even though I am actually available.

Fix it, Internet.

(Yes, I know I could schedule them all by hand, but that makes changing the schedule a mess, and another expense, on top of the “by hand” thing.

Shouldn’t this be possible, and if it’s not, doesn’t iCal or CalDAV or whatever the heck governs this sort of stuff – doesn’t that need to be fixed?)

That, plus the fact that she does consulting and helps small businesses, is an incredibly valuable combination for all of us.

Vanessa is the author of “Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy”, which has been called the “first must-read-to-survive business book of the twenty-first century”.

She’s also been named one of Seattle’s “Top 40 Under 40″ & “Top 25 Innovators and Entrepreneurs”.

Title: Vanessa Fox Interview
Date: April 18, 2013
Author: Dan Thies, Vanessa Fox and Andrea Warner
Run Time: 1:11:55 (1 hour, 11 minutes, 55 seconds)

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This means that little ol’ advertisers like you and me will be able to target folks based on their behavior across the web, not just Facebook.

Think about that for a minute…

Keep thinking…

It’s HUGE!

Let’s focus on what this means for us marketers (rather than how creepy it might be for facebook users).

Just think of the opportunities to be had by savvy marketers. I had a fun five-minute brainstorming session with members of our BrainTrust community for things you could sell to Stay-At-Home Soccer Moms who are known Online Buyers.

You target them like this:

And sell them things like this:

The targeting possibilities are mind-blowing.

To make this happen, Facebook teamed up with Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon. (So far, Datalogix is my favorite.)

The rules of engagement are:

• You have to do Partner Targeting from within Facebook’s Power Editor.
• You can only use one partner’s targeting capabilities at a time. (You can’t use data from Acxiom AND Datalogix at the same time. Just one at a time per ad.)
• **You CAN layer other targeting demo/psychograpics on top of the Partner Categories for even more precise targeting. (e.g. In the example above, we added a minimum age of 25.)

Go as fast as you can to Power Editor and have a delicious time using this huge new data set for targeting your customers.

Something like that. It’d be amazing. You’d be able to advertise your products to people who were likely to buy them, targeting in ways never before possible.

I got excited. Marty got excited. People stared at us, not comprehending any of it, because once you get past the handshaking process, Marty is capable of running his brain at amazing speed.

Well, with one announcement after another over the past 9 months, that weird hypothetical future has come to pass. First through agencies and FB partners only, and now this:

Facebook Partner Categories.

Want to target people who buy breakfast cereal, or diapers? People who are likely to need a new mid-sized sedan in the next six months? Any of about 500 other things (and that number is sure to rise)?

Now you can, via Facebook, using the Power Editor or API.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks.

The future is starting to look pretty cool for marketers. Maybe we’ll be able to afford that flying car after all… and it’s a pretty good bet that the flying car company will be showing us ads via Facebook once they have one ready to ship.

Free Texas Holdem Says:
“I am much pleasing to be reading your excellent blog. I will visit repeatedly again you mighty site in the future.”

Nobody wants the Texas Holdem Guy to be dropping comments on their site.

WordPress has been pushing the Akismet plugin forever. Akismet has the following amazing features:

• Dumps lots of legitimate comments into the Spam bucket
• Lets lots of complete spam right through
• Requires you to use a special magic key on every site

Great, eh? No, not so much.

If you’d like to simply have less spam to deal with, without losing real comments, then don’t use Akismet. Use Anti-Captcha instead.

Although it hasn’t been updated in a while, Anti-Captcha still works like a champ. It uses some cool Javascript trickery to block automated comment spam, while allowing real humans in a real browser to post comments.

You will still have some comment spam to moderate, but it will be a trickle, and you won’t ever have to go into the spam folder to look for real comments any more.

Everybody wins, except the Texas Holdem guy, of course.

For sites with a lower volume of traffic, the $9 per month plan is back – with a “pay as you go” model:

• Pay $9 per month for up to 2000 tested visitors
• Pay an additional $9 to test an additional 1000 visitors
• Includes split testing and A/B testing, but not multivariate tests

This is a great way to get your conversions “up to snuff” at a low cost. You’d probably want to to use this for testing your primary conversion actions – things like email optins, add to cart, etc.

Anyway, there’s no secret link to follow or anything, it’s right there on their pricing page now:
http://www.convert.com/pricing/

If you’ve been using phone numbers in your ad copy, now would be a good time to read up on using call extensions.

Personally I am happy to see this definitively answered, with a real solution from Google. I haven’t found much to argue with in the call extensions feature, but would like to hear from advertisers who have. The only way we get bad things fixed is by getting everyone to bark loudly and in unison.

Google has been doing a lot of cleanup in the Adwords system, and this is just another one of those things that had to be resolved.

By the way, if you do so much business by phone that you felt a need to put a phone number in your ads, you almost certainly want to dive deeply into the improved capabilities of call extensions within the new Enhanced Campaigns. Tracking conversions is a good thing – the #1 advantage of online advertising is how well we can measure the effectiveness of our efforts.

UPDATE: My thanks to Adwords professional/consultant David Rothwell for pointing out this page, which clarifies that ads will be disabled in July, and that “in the next few weeks” is when it will no longer be possible to create ads with phone numbers.

Google has just announced that one of the BIG gaps in the capability of “enhanced” has been closed. Soon, Adwords advertisers will be able to specify bid adjustments for mobile devices on an ad group level.

This is important, because every ad group will perform differently on different devices – some will need higher bids, some lower bids, and some will need the mobile bid adjusted all the way down to “do not show my ads on mobile devices, you greedy bastards.”

Big kudos to Bhanu Narasimhan and the team at Google. If they can maintain this kind of responsiveness, advertisers are going to really love the way Google does business with them. Like we used to.

Here’s that link again: (Google Adwords Official Blog) http://adwords.blogspot.com/2013/04/ad-group-mobile-bid-adjustments.html

P.S. If you missed the memo entirely, you’ll want to read up on the change to enhanced campaigns, and start preparing to transition now. Google will move everybody over in a couple months, and you want to make the switch before they do it by force. You will *not* like what happens if you let them do it for you.