Where Should You Spend You Money for Online Activities

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If your business isn’t in recovery yet, where can you trim money?

If your business is pulling back where can you realistically chop in your marketing plan and not get hurt?

Chop Away

Social Media – if you are paying to update Facebook, Twitter and Google+ you could easily take a break to save money.

Blogging – try not to kill all your writing as the SEO juice you get from well-written blog posts helps you in the long run, but maybe consider moving from three days a week to two or from two days a week to one.  Try to still keep the momentum up but maybe lower the word count or frequency.

Chop Not!

Google AdWords – don’t touch it unless you absolutely have to. AdWords is hands down the best way to generate new leads and start cash pumping back into your business.

e-newsletters – they build loyalty and repeat business. Newsletters are especially important to businesses that have annual renewals for service plans like pest control firms and HVAC firms.  If you chop this, your name is not kept in front of your customers and come time to renew, they may not see the value of renewing; which will hurt your sales even further.

Need some practical sense to make the most of the budget you do have or to get AdWords to work harder for you? We’re the firm to call and chat with first especially if you are looking for honest advice you can trust with no sales pressure.

AdWords Implies that Ads Will Be Stopped for DudaMobile Sites

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McCord Web Services is one of the few Google Partners in the Fredericksburg, Virginia area.

I just got of the phone on Friday with Dan, an Account URL Migration Specialist, for Google AdWords and wrote this post for Monday delivery.

Dan told me that Google will be in the “very near future” marking as disapproved, ads for any websites that have the DudaMobile script on their site. He said that there is talk that Google may allow sites that use DudaMobile to continue to show ads using Google AdWords but just as easily Google may decide not to do so.

Here’s the issue from Google’s viewpoint. If someone clicks your ad and goes to your website and the URL that is delivered to them is not your domain but rather a redirect to a DudaMobile site or for that matter even a DudaMobile site with a m.domain setting Google will be considering this redirection an advertising policy violation. Even if in your AdWords control panel the destination and display URL are both your domain.

You will now need to have your mobile site files actually housed at your domain or in a subdomain on your hosting server. The files have to reside where your main website is located.

Ouch! That is going to hurt many, many advertisers! What Dan goes on to say is that the ads will be disabled as part of a URL violation and will not be able to be turned back on except by either removing the DudaMobile redirect script from your entire website – rendering your website not mobile-friendly – which has its own serious organic impact, or quick get a mobile responsive website in place to stay an AdWords advertiser.

I hope that Google will reconsider as DudaMobile is used by many small businesses to buy time to not have to invest in a new responsive website especially where mobile maybe only 20% of their overall site traffic.

Mobile Has to Be a Part of Your Google AdWords Equation

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McCord Web Services is one of the few Google Partners in the Fredericksburg, Virginia area.

I have been managing Google AdWords accounts for around nine years. This depth of experience has given me a unique point of view.

Here are a few nuggets to share with you on the topic of mobile.

1. Advertising in the mobile space has to be a part of your Google AdWords strategy. For some clients all leads will come in via mobile, for others just a part, and for some none.

2. If you are a lawyer, dentist, or a doctor where you have a mix of patient age groups, you will see strong activity in the mobile ad space and strong conversion activity there.

3. If your product or service deals with immediate decisions such as an animal emergency room your activity will be in the mobile ad space and nearly all of your lead conversions will be by phone.

4. Even if your business is tech software, know that although you may not get leads from mobile, early decision making and research is being done initially on mobile. It is better to control your ad spend on mobile in that case instead of totally moving out of mobile.

5. There is no single combination of what works best for businesses in mobile at this time and there does not seem to be one pattern of behavior that is repeated across diverse industries. What I have definitely seen is that mobile should be a very important part of every AdWords program.

If you need help with your Google AdWords campaigns I invite you to review our services and qualifications. We may just be the perfect match for your pay per click management needs.

Mobilegeddon So Far Has Been a Bust

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What was Google thinking when they back pedaled on the mobile search release?

Fresh from doing a SEO review of five client sites, I have to say that mobilegeddon is a bust, at least so far.

Google started the roll out of this much talked about algorithm that was to have impacted over 14% of the search results in the mobile search sphere on Monday April 21st. But as of April 30th, I was still seeing sites appear routinely in the mobile search space that were not mobile-friendly.

Does that mean that there was all this hype about nothing? No, not really. I suspect that Google got scared of crashing it’s search engine and money driver if it moved too fast to chop sites that had not moved into mobile. I suspect that they will over time tweak this as new sites enter the index that are mobile-friendly, but they have already back pedaled from their previous approach.

Earlier in the year in the pending change announcement Google stated that if you did not have a mobile-friendly site you would be dropped from the mobile index. Later, Google softened this approach to say, well maybe you’d be dropped, but if your website really matched the query best and even if you were not mobile-friendly they would show your site in the mobile results as most relevant – totally watering down the first announcement.

Then, Google AdWords reps started to say, well if your site is not mobile-friendly and you are using AdWords advertising, your non-mobile-friendly website would still show in the mobile results as an AdWords ads. Note the serious conflict here? Advertising vs. Search?

I think that as it got closer to the date, Google decided that there was too much money at stake and sites had simply not upgraded as they had thought they would.

I do suspect that over time there will be a “weeding” of sites from the mobile index but for now I think the change on Google’s part is being driven by a concern for a loss of revenue in AdWords and search relevancy versus the competition.

Mobile Bid Formula Designed by Google – How to Get Your Bid Right!

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McCord Web Services is a Google Partner and Nancy McCord is a Certified Professional.

This past month across a number of AdWords accounts I’ve started to see a drop in conversions as Google AdWords more strongly serves ads in the mobile space. With click costs, impressions and click through rates nearly the same as the past 30 days when there were healthy conversions, I had to dig deep to identify what was plaguing a number of client accounts.

I found that by serving more strongly in mobile, AdWords had forced my conversions lower. By adjusting the mobile bid using a formula that my Google Rep., Kelsey Bowers, shared with me this week, I am working to boost conversions back to the appropriate level.

Kelsey told me that Google has done extensive statistical testing to come up with this formula and I’d like to share it with you.

Here’s what I do. Go to the Campaign tab, then go to the setting tab, and then go to the device tab. Make sure that these columns in your view, if not click customize columns to add them – conversions, cost per conversion, and conversion rate.

By campaign use this formula to decide your mobile bid:

(Mobile conversion rate divided by Desktop conversion rate) -1 times 100 = mobile bid adjust up or down.

Make sure that before you finish, you look at your mobile versus desktop cost per conversion. If you are spending nearly the same budget or more in mobile versus desktop and have no conversions in either space do a 90% deduction in bid in mobile or wait to get more data to make a good decision on what is right for your needs.

I found that the ad serving changes that I saw this month reflected a big increase in ad serving in the mobile space and that I was paying too much for exposure at the expense of account conversion generation. With a few quick change our clients will be back on track in no time.

If you are looking for quality AdWords help to boost conversions and troubleshoot issues in your AdWords account, I invite you to find out more about my firm.