According to Geordie from PPC Blog, last weekend several major Internet sites were hacked and had their internal documents shared to the world. HR documents, company email directories and Gmail accounts were all compromised. This happened to such Internet presences as Twitter, Gizmodo, Jezebel and Gawker. Through several case studies, this article reaffirms that it is important to diversify your passwords so if someone outside your company gets a hold of one they won’t have access to all your password-protected files. Geordie also discusses what Adwords will do to your account if it gets hacked—and it’s not pretty. So diversify! Or get hacked by this guy!
The long wait is over: Twitter is open for business! As Matt McGee shows us on Search Engine Land, Twitter has finally released a clear guide on how businesses can use the Twitter interface to advertise, whether this takes the form of promoted tweets, trends or accounts. New features include an analytical dashboard and a business tutorial, but most importantly, this service is now open for anyone to use. However, signs show that Twitter may still be favoring businesses able to spend at least $10,000. So if you have been waiting to take advantage of Twitter’s vast and, until recently, largely untapped audience, this is it!
In the spirit of the holiday season, Tina Kelleher over at the adCenter Blog is providing us with holiday PPC tips from industry experts around the world. There are insightful tips in this post concerning both B2B and B2C companies alike. The holidays can be a great time for e-commerce focused folks to maximize ROI. If your site tends to see a drop off this time of year, why not try out something kind of crazy that you’re hesitant to attempt during your peak times? Either way, making some key changes now will help you get off to a great start come 2011.
I’m not big on making New Year’s resolutions…mine are more like streaming thoughts that come and go, like, “I wish I could eat less chocolate,” and, “I really should work out more.” I’ve noticed that these New Year’s Wishful Thinking Thoughts of mine are usually health related, and I’m not the only one. Peter Haubold at the adCenter Blog discusses a report by the US government about the most popular New Year’s resolutions. Since half of these top resolutions are health related, as Haubold notes, January is usually a big month for advertisers in this industry. He offers some insightful resolution & click volume statistics, as well as some excellent January optimization tips.
As PPC managers, we strive to continually optimize our accounts. However, when you’ve been running a successful campaign, you may be wary about making any changes without knowing the outcome. Luckily, Google released their free tool Adwords Campaign Experiments (ACE) back in August. Peter of PPC Blog has written a great post on how to use ACE. With this tool you can test how changing bids, match types, destination URLs or any other campaign alterations will affect performance. Every PPC manager should use this tool to maximize the potential of Adwords campaigns.
