PPC Updates We’re Thrilled About:

LinkedIn Introduces Conversion Tracking.

LinkedIn Conversion Tracking is now a reality. Similar to Facebook and Bing, LinkedIn now provides a UET tag that can be placed universally on your site.

Within the LinkedIn Ads dashboard, you’ll create the rules (based on a ‘URL contains ____” structure) that will tell the code when to fire. It’s simple enough that anyone should be able to set it up, regardless of coding background.

Bing Introduces Comparison Metrics.

Until last week, the only period-over-period comparison that you could see in Bing was through their line graph feature. It was nearly impossible to compare individual metrics over time.

Thankfully, they’ve introduced the ability to expand each metric to display the previous period stats and percent change (something that we’ve taken for granted in AdWords for years).

Podcast We’re Listening To:

Reply All episode 76: Lost In A Cab. Reply All is a Gimlet Media podcast that features excellent journalism related to technology and the internet.

One episode features a story about how many people, with no other place to turn, used online medical crowd-sourcing to find an accurate diagnosis for a rare disease. In another, the hosts investigate a glitch in the Find My iPhone software that was causing thousands of people to flock to a random house in Atlanta, thinking the owners stole their phones.

This week they did a story on people that are exploited and duped into spending money on scammy services, and how companies got these people to do this via, you guessed it, Google AdWords.

The episode can be found by searching for Reply All on iTunes Podcasts, or if you’re some weirdo that listens to podcasts on your desktop computer, find it here.

My takeaway is this: Although Google AdWords is an effective way for people to find goods and services that they’re looking for, and also an effective means through which small and mid-sized business can compete with the Amazons’ and Walmarts’ of the world, it creates an opportunity for shady characters to take advantage of people in situations such as those mentioned in this episode. This is no different from any other business vertical.

When you listen to this podcast, you’ll probably get angry at the people that are doing this. I did. And I know that Google is making great strides to stopping these jerks, but part of the responsibility falls on us, as advertisers, to put our foot down and maintain a level of integrity with respect to our work and those that are affected by it.

The episode also features an interview with Ginny Marvin, one of our favorite reporters for Search Engine Land

Remarketing Strategy We’re Using:

Excluding Blog Post Visitors. This might sound crazy, but the hard work that you’ve put into your blog might be negatively affecting your Remarketing / Retargeting efforts, and it might serve you well to exclude some of your blog traffic from your remarketing ads.

Congratulations on your awesome blog that is attracting tons of organic visits! But if you’re remarketing to All Visitors, then you’re showing ad impressions to many people that checked out your blog post and have no interest in ever buying your product. Many of these people might even be your competition!

So if your remarketing campaigns are lacking, and you see decent traffic to your blog, you might want to create an audience of users that visited a blog post but did not visit anywhere else on your site (you know, the areas of your site where you actually sell stuff).

Here’s how to set it up:

• Open up Google Analytics and head to your Admin tab
• Under property, select Audience Definitions, then Audiences
• If you do not have remarketing enabled, do so now. Select +New Audience
• Select your AdWords account as the destination, then All Users under Define Audience
• Change Membership Duration to 360 Days, then select the pencil icon to edit the audience
• Under Advanced, select Conditions and fill out the rules that meet your needs.

For example, the rule state to include users that “Page contains ‘Blog’” AND “Page does not contain ‘Shop,’ OR ‘Pricing.’”

Save this audience, head over to your Remarketing campaign in your AdWords account and add this audience as a campaign-level exclusion.

Book We’re Reading:

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, by Phil Knight. Knight’s story is not only fascinating, but his writing style is so personal and engaging.

As a 24-year-old with a hunch that Japanese-style running shoes would generate buzz in the U.S., Knight found his way into a conference room in Kobe, Japan where he convinced officials of a shoe manufacturer to agree to a partnership. When they asked the name of his company, he hesitated and spat out, “Blue Ribbon Sports.”

It was a lie. There was no company, and he came up with the name on the spot. He literally lied about being the owner of a non-existent company and convinced the manufacturer to ship samples to his headquarters parents’ house in Oregon. The rest is history.

Knight does an incredible job shaping the cast of characters that were crucial to Nike’s success, including the eclectic management team that would forever be known as “The Butt-Faces.”

The book has spread through our office and is being talked about in the same way that you might discuss a new Netflix series… partially due to the fact that it’s incredible, but also because it’s hilarious to determine which colleagues most closely match up with each of “The Butt-Faces.”

Find it on Amazon here.

Quote We’re Loving:

This quote is great on so many levels. It’s a knock on the terabytes of terrible content that is published to the internet each day, but also a line in the sand about how many people view digital marketing practices.

Take it from us – This work isn’t easy. There’s no quick-fix or cookie-cutter solution that will solve your problems. To make it in this industry, it takes grit, patience, and an understanding that what works for you today will probably not work for you tomorrow. Your competitors’ greatest idea might be your biggest waste of money, and sometimes there is no reasonable explanation for it.

We’ve worked with clients that have had arguably the ugliest websites on the internet, and yet they converted like crazy. We’ve seen others that have invested thousands in usability testing only to find similar or worse conversion rates.

The death and taxes of digital marketing is that you need to be persistent about testing new, creative ideas if you want to continue to grow. There’s no such thing as a Best Practice.