In my last post - How many campaigns to a PPC account? - I talked about how to expand your maximum allowable campaigns in Google beyond the default limit. The question that some may be asking is why would you want to do that?

Well the simple reason is that you may have a particular product or family of products that you wish to market differently to different locations. For example, you could have a much different branding message for product A in New York than you would in Los Angeles. You could set different campaign budgets, based on your marketing plan.

The benefit of keeping these campaigns in the same account is when you’re doing campaign management, especially reporting. Now, you can use a client center, which most of the major engines provide, which ties together a bunch of accounts under one large umbrella account, but that still doesn’t help with the reporting issue, which can be a real monster depending on how many campaigns you are running. To give you an example of the scale of the problem, in my shop we were running with over 160 (pre-Panama) Yahoo accounts. In order to do our twice a week reporting, we had to log into each account, run the report that we needed, and download it. This process was taking over 6 hours to complete, with the amount of time increasing with every client we added. With the accounts now (post-Panama) spread over 10-12 accounts, this reporting has now stabilized at less than 2 hours, and only increases with every 20 or so advertisers that we add, much better than before.

Of course there are reasons to want to split campaigns across accounts, I’ll cover them in my next post.

The simple answer is that for Google you get a maximum of 25 campaigns per account, for post-Panama release Yahoo you get 20 campaigns per account.

Now what if you want to go over that amount? Well, for Google you can go do a live request for help, and provided you explain your need to the satisfaction of the CSR on the other end, you’ll get it bumped up to 100. In my experience I’ve only had problems with it being denied by one rep, she refused to up our maximum, instead telling us how we should restructure the accounts (in a way that wouldn’t meet our business need). The solution there was to wait for a few hours and try again, on the third attempt we finally hit another CSR, who had no problem with bumping our maximum allowable category count up.

Yahoo is a different matter. I contacted them to find out their policy on bumping the max campaign number up, and received this cryptic response.

Currently as this time we show that you are a new level account holder, and the maximum amount of campaigns allows for a new level account is 20. Unfortunately this is not something that can be changed or edited.

After asking for clarification, this was the response

In order to receive more than 20 campaigns in a single account you must be a Platinum advertiser. Platinum advertisers spend 120,000 annually on their advertising with us

So for Yahoo, they only really want to look after the big spenders, and nickel and dime the little guys (those $5 account start-up fees must really add up). Despite this, Panama is still a big improvement, as at least you have the ability to manage 20 different campaigns in a single account, unlike the previous version of the software where you could only manage a single campaign in a single account. Still, this is one area that they are not leapfrogging Google in…

Most people would agree that local applies to a certain physical geographical location that has its own unique characteristics. Everyone knows that in some areas it’s called pop, in others soda, and that you shouldn’t try to sell a car called NoVa in a Spanish speaking country. So how far does that reasoning apply to a virtual world? Should people target things differently online? Yes, especially since that virtual world is used by people who live in the real world, and are looking for products / services in that same real world.

Just as your regular offline marketing dollars are spent differently in order to try and capture as much of a market share of the demographics that you’re targeting, your online dollars should be doing the same, and there are plenty of tools out there to help you accomplish that.

The first of these, for those doing a PPC campaign is geo-targeting. This is the ability to target a particular message(s), at a particular range of prices, for a particular set of keywords, in a specific location / set of locations. Simply go to your PPC engine of choice (Yahoo, Google and MSN / Windows.live all offer this option), and select the location(s) to target the ad(s) to.

The second option, for those using MSN/Windows.live, is to use their demographic targeting tool. This targeting is based on estimating the demographic that a user belongs to by the websites that they’ve previously visited.

So what kind of fluctuations can you expect when you target by location or demographics? Well, YPA (Yellow Pages Association) recently put out a study of the Most Frequently Referenced Headings in 2006 (in the regular old style yellow pages phone book). Mapped against data from three sample IYP sites / four locations, you can see that different areas most definitely have different needs, and these needs do not come close to matching the offline yellow pages usage categories. Based on these numbers, if I were in the tattoo ink supply business, I would want to make sure that I had a decent spend going into Lincoln, NE.

From YpMetro.com

Atlanta , GA

Plumbing Contractors(10)
Restaurants(1)
Attorneys(6)
Beauty Salons(11)
Hotels(28)
Doctors offices and clinics(2)
Insurance Brokers(12)
Dentists(8)
Apartments(60)
Auto Repair and Service(4)

From Windstreamyellowpages.com

Lexington , KY

Restaurants(1)
Employment agencies(41)
Air Conditioning Contractors and Systems(61)
Real estate agents and brokers(26)
Heating and Ventilating Contractors(54)
Apartments(60)
Auto Repair and Service(4)
Beauty Salons(11)
Fence Contractors(101)
Movie Theaters(17)

Lincoln , NE

Restaurants(1)
Apartments(60)
Employment agencies(41)
Tattooing(>130)
Heating and Ventilating Contractors(54)
Doctors offices and clinics(2)
Insurance Brokers(12)
Hotels(28)
Hospitals(9)
Movie Theaters(17)
Real estate agents and brokers(26)

From YpUnited.com

Los Angeles , CA

Restaurants(1)
Plumbing Contractors(10)
Limousine Service(117)
Apartments(60)
Carpet and Rug Cleaners(23)
Beauty Salons(11)
Attorneys(6)
Child Care(39)
Dentists(8)
Health clubs(>130)

The numbers in parens are the rankings from the YPA 2006 Industry Usage Study “Most frequently Referenced Headings”

I was going to write a series of tales about ‘In-house Paul’, a Search Engine Marketer that goes into different companies and encounters different problems with each. For example, the first tale would have been about Paul going to work for a large corporation, or more correctly a large collection of small fiefdoms, where co-operation is a dirty word. The second tale would have been of Paul going to work for a medium sized company where the development resources are not available to accomplish the work that he wants to get done, and the directive is that the work must go through the development team. The third tale would have been of his move to a small company, where he finally has the ability to do what needs to be done, with the problem either being that he has to do too much (the ‘too many hats for one head’ issue), or that the company simply runs out of customers / money / both.

The idea of these tales would have been to highlight the issues that face In-house search marketers can face, but obviously in an exaggerated way (or maybe not in some cases), and perhaps give people an idea of what to look for when joining a company, or in a particular situation. So this then begs the question “So why aren’t you doing that?”. A good question, and one that deserves an answer. I have written the first one, I’m just not currently happy with how it came out, so I’m going to step away from it for a few days and re-write it so that it tries to actually meet what I intend it to do.

For those who aren’t aware, l337, l33t or leet is a term (derived from elite) used primarily in online gaming in reference to someone who is (or believes they are) superior to others. There’s also a language that’s sprung up around this, also referred to as leet, where numbers that kind of look like the letters replace the letters in words. i.e. ‘A’ is replaced with a ‘4′, for more info on this you can look at the wikipedia entry on leet-speak. So where does Google fit into this? Well, they’ve put out an interface for people that speak / read leet. Take a look at their leet interface here.

As I mentioned in my last post, I met a few well known people at SES Chicago, and you can see how much of an impression I made. Over at SEOMoz.org I’m mentioned as “someone”…

I obviously made more of an impression with Lisa Barone at Bruce Clay, with her post titled “It’s all full of stars”. I’m actually mentioned by name, although she did forget to mention that I’m nice

So tonight, I hung around the restaurant and bar for a little while, and the place was full of Bears fans, with no real SEO people in sight. So I headed back to my room, to eventually head back to the Irish pub for a nice plate of fish and chips. After I ate, I walked over to the other bar and heard an Australian accent, so I made a comment about the Ashes, rather quickly I was introduced to Dave Naylor, Aussie Webmaster (Frank), ShoeMoney, Andrea ShoeMoney (his sister, who is starting up her own conference series), Todd Friesen, and a few others (such as James Fleet AKA Captain Kiwi). As the evening went on Stuntdubl showed up and, after complaining about how people kept buying him drinks (what a hard life), he bought me a couple of drinks. I met Bruce Clay, Lisa Barone, Rand Fishkin, Rebecca, and many more (Danny Sullivan, Dana Todd, etc). Of course none of them knew who I was, but by the end of the evening a few of them remembered my name, and I wasn’t the one that set fire to the table or sprayed a straw full of mudslide over Rand’s jacket…

Seriously though, this is my third conference, and it was nice to be able to stand around with people in the industry who have the recognition, and listen to what they had to say about the industry. Now I did pick up a few tidbits, but they were ‘off the record’, so I’m not going to put them in here, instead I’m heading off to bed.

Update: I just found a picture of James Fleet, Dave Naylor, Shoemoney, and myself over on Shoemoney’s site.

If you have a website and you want to put mapping information on it so that people can find out your location, how do you do it? Well, if you get a snazzy GPS system for xmas you can go to your business and find out that way. But what if you don’t? Well there are plenty of ways to find your location on the web.

Google provides an api to allow you to query their database and get your location, as long as the address is found in their system. The data that they are using appears to be a few years old, so the chances are if your street is fairly new, you might not be found. On Google it’s a 2 step process to first register and get an API key for your website, then to actually send the query to their database through a url i.e.

http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=1600+Pennsylvania+Ave,+
Washington,+DC&output=xml&key=ABQIAAAA-xQrwlLORM9lqIAYOLDFB
RQxjlcwaanVZIaMa_7hO2Evpk0tvRTOn77yY6QyLPNQmDizgSUsXhpuqQ

The return for this query is in XML format, with the co-ordinates being displayed, should they be found. Should they not, then it’s time for option 2.

Yahoo skips the need to register, and just gives you a url to query, which returns data in the same format as the Google XML.

http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=YahooDemo&
street=1600+Pennsylvania%20Ave&city=Washington&state=DC

From my experience, the data in the Yahoo database is much more current than that in the Google database, but there are still instances where I’ve not been able to find an address in Yahoo, which then leads me to option 3. This is a site by InfoSports and displays a map of the US. You simply zoom in until you find your exact location, then click on the map. This then gives you the coordinates, and away you go.

Protecting your online brand reputation is a topic that quite a few people have written about, heck there’s even a session at SES Chicago about it. Today I ran across a website detailing one homeowners lack of satisfaction with their builder. The site is aptly named CW Stinks, which states how the homeowner feels. The site is fairly new, and hasn’t yet been crawled, but the homeowner feels so strongly that he’s paid for ads on Google. I emailed the owner of the site to talk about what he hopes to accomplish, and he said that he wants to rank no.1 for CW Custom Builders, but until then he’s willing to pay for the clicks, and he wants to protect other people from the heartache that he’s had to go through. He has informed CW of his site, but has received no response from the company.

I wonder if he manages to rank above them for their own name whether CW will contact him, or if they’ll try to do some SEO to get their own site listed back up top. Time will tell, but from looking at their site now, they have the same 2 badly chosen keywords on all pages - “home & front”, and the same title on every page, so he stands a good chance of getting up there.

If you’re going to be there, I’ll be the one wearing the shirt at the top of the page, come up and say hi. I don’t bite, and I can treat you to my mostly English accent (think Dave Naylor if he’d been over here in the states for 14+ years).