As the 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street points out, sometimes we don’t make our goals or succeed on the first attempt. Hanapin Marketing’s goal for PPC Hero was to increase monthly pageviews to 91,906 by December 1, 2011. Despite some excellent blog posts in November, we finished the month at 75,149 pageviews, which was 18% away from our goal. However, we will continue working to improve our blog in the next month and year, and try to meet our goals the next time around!
Even though we fell short of goal, it’s important to celebrate what we did accomplish. We started our blog re-investment in March, and we’ve shown significant growth! Comparing the 275 days since then to the same time frame before that, we increased visits and pageviews 54% and 76%, respectively! And, comparing March to November, monthly visits are up 61% and monthly pageviews are up 76%!
POPULAR NOVEMBER POSTS
Last month, our series on How to Prepare PPC Accounts for the Holiday Season drove the highest weekly traffic in November. And, we had our highest pageview day in the history of the blog on 11/22 with 3,941 pageviews!
Our top blog post in November was a guest post by Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing. His article, If You’re Not Using This Gmail Ad Targeting Tactic, You’re Missing Out generated 1,222 pageviews in the past few days.
The second and third most read articles were written by our own Jeff Allen! Google Bottom Ad Placements Eroding CTR and 4 Questions to Ask Your Google Analytics generated 829 and 712 pageviews, respectively. Jeff writes some very introspective articles on paid search. Check out his author page for more of his Utah goodness!
Our top video post was How to Prepare a Landing Page Report in Excel by Amanda and Jessica, which generated 462 page views.
HOOSIER HILLS FOOD BANK VOLUNTEER DAY
On the Monday evening before Thanksgiving, nine Hanapin employees volunteered at the Hoosier Hills Food Bank. HHFB collects, stores and distributes food to non-profit agencies that feed the hungry in Bloomington, Indiana and the surrounding counties. Since opening in 1982, Hoosier Hills Food Bank has distributed over 30 million pounds of food. We had a great time repacking rescued meals into family-size portions for distribution, and enjoyed the opportunity to help out our community!
WEBINARS
Hanapin held our first ever webinar, Tips to Boost Quality Score: Structuring Your Account for Success on November 29. If you missed it, feel free to check out the webinar recording! Abby covered account structure best practices, offered tips for boosting Quality Score through your account structure, and included a step-by-step process for analyzing account Quality Score. We had a great turnout for the webinar and are excited to present our second webinar on bidding and budget strategy on December 15, 2011 at 1 pm EST. Registration is open, and you can get more details here. Speaking of December events…
DECEMBER TOPICS AND BLOG SERIES
The end of the year provides the perfect opportunity for reflecting about the past 12 months and looking forward to a new year. Therefore, we will be presenting a video about PPC changes in 2011 and our predictions for 2012. You can also look forward to the rest of our series on Ad Extensions that is currently running. Check out Kayla’s intro post and Felicia’s post on site links!
WIN AN AMAZON GIFT CARD!
Everyone likes Amazon Gift Cards, so we are offering $25 gift cards to five participants in our PPC Hero Readership Survey. Please take a few minutes prior to December 20th to share a little bit about yourself and how you fit into the PPC industry in order to enter the gift card drawing.
CUSTOM ILLUSTRATIONS
November saw PPC Hero and friends celebrating four holidays: Veteran’s Day on 11/11/11, Absurdity Day on 11/20, Thanksgiving on 11/24, and Cyber Monday on 11/28.
In December, PPC Hero will celebrate the anniversary of everyone’s favorite iPhone and iPad game, Angry Birds, on 12/10. On 12/25, we’ll celebrate the holiday with gift giving, family, and leaving cookies and milk for Santa! PPC Hero is also looking forward to bringing in 2012 on New Year’s Eve (12/31).
HERO CONF
We had the pleasure of announcing confirmed Hero Conf speakers a couple of weeks ago. We’re excited to hear the following speakers on April 16-17 in Indianapolis this coming spring.
- Andrew Goodman
- Brad Geddes
- Crystal Anderson
- Elizabeth Marsten
- Joe Kerschbaum
- John Lee
- Joanna Lord
- Kevin Lee
- Lisa Raehsler
- Marc Poirier
- Marty Weintraub
- Matt Umbro
- Matt Van Wagner
- Melissa Mackey
- Nate Jeo
We have a great mix from across the industry – folks who are regular speakers at SES and SMX (like Raehsler), in-house folks (like Jeo from Overstock.com), emerging influencers (like Umbro who started #ppcchat), and elder statesmen in paid search (like Goodman and Geddes). We also have folks from the paid search software industry (like Poirier) and regular keynoters (like Weintraub).
We have also confirmed two new speakers since our announcement on November 21st! It will be a pleasure to have Robert Brady, author of the Righteous Marketing blog, and Shawn Livengood, author of the blog PPC Without Pity, join us at Hero Conf. We’ll announce our agenda later this month, so stay tuned for that, as well as for further Hero Conf updates!
