This is the first article in a three-part series on business basics, and how the apply to digital advertising. When we began our agency in 2005, some of the best advice we received was this: the first goal of business is to stay in business. And, to stay in business: have a plan, and avoid...Read More

This post is about a geeky — but important and often overlooked — tactical aspect of PPC management. Rarely do advertisers have unlimited ad budgets, even if they get a very high return on their ad spend, or great cash flow. Rather, most businesses have a fixed, planned maximum budget. And even if their business...Read More

Marketing on the web, in some ways, is still like the Wild West. It has frontiers and exciting opportunities for profit, labor saving tools, and reliable experts. We also see well-intended but inept operators and a growing number of scammers and business perils. There are enough moving parts to overwhelm anyone who is not actively...Read More

As we wrote in our May 2008 blog post, there are some very good reasons and best practices for having your company name as keywords to trigger search engine PPC ads. However, there are also some potential “gotchas” that online advertisers and buyer of leads should be aware of. Essentially, you want to make sure...Read More

Have you recently calculated the marketing or advertising cost of generating an incoming telephone lead or purchase? If so, were you surprised? This post explains tracking phone numbers and recording of incoming calls. The three main benefits of call tracking are: 1-to determine the source of business, 2- to monitor lead quality, and 3- to...Read More

In our experience with search engine advertising, one of its unique aspects is that, in addition to directly generating online sales or leads, its robust settings provide an excellent tool for business research and planning. In the creation and management of search engine ads, the campaigns, ad groups, and more granular settings gather a great...Read More

It takes more than an attractive website with a good content to be efficient at converting web visitors to customers. Lately we are seeing clients put more focus into conversions from their website. For our purpose, a conversion is defined as the desired action we want the customer who is visiting the website to take....Read More

Before going further, we should describe what we mean by local businesses. Some have asked us, “isn’t every business local to some place?” The answer is yes, however, for this discussion, a local business sells products or services to customers or clients in their local geographic area. In contrast, an e-commerce site that sells products...Read More

I first got into search engine marketing and advertising as an employee for a corporate team building consulting company. There, we observed a predictable pattern on which teams were more successful in team building scenarios and back at their jobs. Teams that take time to make a plan before taking action consistently perform better than...Read More