I watch our company’s current Adwords account very closely and yesterday I was surprised to see that all of our campaigns had stopped running. Drilling down into the ad groups, each of the keywords were “inactive” for search. Our maximum CPC is usually set to $.40 per click, but Adwords was recommending that we increase my Maximum CPC to $10.00 per click!

I spoke with a Google Adword’s support specialist and she explained that it was my quality score that had affected the Maximum CPC. I assured her that our ads were well targeted, but she was insistent on trying to “enlighten” me how Google Adwords quality score works. By the end of the phone call she had agreed to have a technical team member look into it further, but I would have to increase my Maxiumum CPC if I wanted my ads to appear.

This morning I checked our Adwords campaigns and they were back up and running without any changes. A few hours later I received this email from Google: Read more…

Google Adwords adwords, CPC, Google Adwords, Maximum Cost Per Click, page ranking, Quality Score

Everyone wants to increase traffic to their website. They have heard a lot of the marketing buzz words, SEO, adwords, RSS, social media, blogs, et cetera but have no way of determining which will have the greatest impact on increasing website traffic. So it is no surprise that I am often asked, “What are the Top 5 ways to drive traffic to my website.”

Here is my typical response:

1. SEO: Search Engine Optimization is the best, long term strategy for increasing qualified traffic to your website. Pick two-three keywords per landing page and optimize!

Read more…

Marketing adwords, Corporate Domains, increase web traffic, Out Bound Syndicated Web Marketing, RSS, Search Marketing, SEO, social marketing, Social Media Marketing