Adwords Editor 4.0 released

My Adwords Editor just offered to download a new version titled 4.0
After downloading and installing it I found some new features.
The new features I've noticed (there may be some more) are:
1. Custom date range for performance stats.
2. Ability to upload a single campaign changes and not a full post
3. Much faster campaign downloading. I downloaded a 20K keywords campaign in under 2 minutes.

This new version is so far not being advertised by Google anywhere I could find.
Even the Release Notes still refer to version 3.5

Have you tried the new upgrade? Did you like it as I did?

RSS for SEO

A little known secret that SEO experts use, is that adding RSS support to sites contributes to their inclusion in the major search engines (SERPS). As RSS has become a standard for updating users of new posts and changes of a site, it can be used to notify search engines of new content that needs to be crawled.

Even if your site is not part of a CMS (content management system), you can still enjoy this technique. The following steps elaborate how even static websites can communicate with the Google Bot and the other crawlers more effectively.

Step 1: Create a static RSS file in your root directory containing your latest pages. the format of this file should be like the one mentioned in wikipedia

Step 2: Register this feed in a feed publisher. My personal favorite is FeedBurner which has been acquired by Google recently. Feed publishers notify of your feed changes to the search engines.

Step 3: Update your feed whenever your content changes and the search engines will get notified by Feed Burner.

New version of Google analytics

Have you seen the new Google Analytics interface?
Although it takes time to get used to, the new interface offers very nice and customizable reports.
It hasn't been deployed in all accounts yet and some of my managed Adwords accounts still haven't been implemented, but I think it's going to make the users far more comfortable using it to understand how their website visitors behave

New company website

Most of my posts in the past few month have started with "It's been a while since my last post..."
I think I can blame my new job. Having founded a new company by the name of Inlight, most of my time now (24/7) has been put to use around it. The company provides our customers with SEM and SEO services focused mostly on the Israeli market with some international customers to make things more interesting.
I've just uploaded our new website and would love to get some feedback from you on how it looks (warning, the site is in Hebrew, so if you can't read it, feel free to compliment me on the smooth design). Just drop me a line here to let me know what you think.

Using the content network

Yesterday, I received a mail form one of my contacts that included the following sentence: "So you are Ohad from the blog. It's about time you updated it". I've taken this advice and this post is for you Alon.

Google Adwords allows advertisers to use the content network in addition to the search network, but most advertisers complain that they can't justify using the content network as it brings very low conversions. What I found was that if you separate your content network into another campaign and manage it as a different entity that does not behave like the search network, it can become a very useful channel. While this does not necessarily work for all my clients, for some of my campaigns the content network brought a better ROI then the search network.

The next campaign you open, try the following process:
1. create a campaign for the search network only and run it for a week.
2. optimize this campaign as you go along adding keywords and modifying ads.
3. After a week, copy this campaign into a new campaign targeted only at the content network
4. When adding a new keyword to the search network, make sure that it is also added to the content network

Let me know if it works for you

Google analytics videos

I came across a series of 3 posts in the Conversation Marketing blog about using Google analytics.
If you are not using it yet, Google analytics is one of the best free web statistics software available on the market. The 3 posts include videos on the setup and usage of the analytics.

You might want to check out all three:
1. Setup
2. Essentials
3. Content and navigation

Adwords Editor 3.0 released

If you are managing multiple adwords campaigns, then you are probably using the Adwords Editor application. The adwords editor is a windows application that allows mass changes to be performed on adwords accounts. The new version of the adwords editor has just been released for download and contains several features that were really needed in the past such as: word count and CPM campaign management.

If you are already using it, just upgrade your version.
If not then now is the time to start and get better control of your campaigns