By doing away with the Cross Conversion Tracking, I’m sure they hope you choose to engage more with their products by becoming a Google Analytics user which allows the site owner to set up “Goals,” which can measures conversions from “non-Google pay-per-click services.”

From the beginning I’ve done both. Using Cross Conversion Tracking I enjoyed be able to see conversions and traffic from MSN adCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing by only having to log into one interface, AdWords. Although, that pesky extra tracking code had to be added to every destination URL in every ad from other ‘”non Google” ppc platforms was cumbersome for someone who uses multiple tracking URLs and creates new adgroups often.

Unfortunately I bought these domains the day I heard Google was starting a pay-per-action platform will go to waste. I also renewed this year. $60 gone. Luckily I didn’t buy them for more than one year at at time (which you should always register for at least two years at a time if you have a site you are actually developing, according to Rand Fiskin’s interpretation of one Google algorithm patten).

Entrepreneur’s Domain Graveyard
R.I.P. : ADWORDSCOSTPERACTION.COM
R.I.P. : ADWORDSCPA.COM
R.I.P. : ADWORDSPPA.ORG

I probably would have received a cease and desist for using AdWords in the domain anyway. Read Google’s PR Spun “Dear John” letters in here:

Death to Google AdWords Pay-Per-Action

Subject: Service Announcement: AdWords pay-per-action beta is being retired
Hello,

Thank you for participating in the pay-per-action beta. We’re writing to let you know that in the last week of August 2008, the AdWords pay-per-action beta test will be retired. Pay-per-action campaigns and all related data will be removed from all AdWords accounts the last week of October. We appreciate your patience during this transition and want to update you about the following changes in your account and campaigns in the coming months:

* Starting the last week in August, your pay-per-action campaigns will no longer be active, and any ads in your campaigns will stop running. As a result, you will no longer be able to edit or create pay-per-action campaigns.

Important note: You will still be charged for conversions that occur up to 30 days after a click on a pay-per-action ad. To learn more, visit http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6349.

* Starting the last week in October, your pay-per-action campaigns and all related data will be removed from your AdWords account. This includes pay-per-action reports in the Report Center. After this time you will no longer have access to your pay-per-action campaign data. If you wish to retain a permanent record of your pay-per-action campaign data, please export your data from the Report Center using the directions at http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=97265.

Why is this happening?

Google is constantly working to offer features that will provide a better experience to our users. As part of Google’s recent acquisition of DoubleClick, the Performics affiliate network is now a part of Google and has been renamed Google Affiliate Network. To consolidate our offerings, we will be phasing out the AdWords pay-per-action beta in the last week of August 2008. As an alternative to pay-per-action advertising, Google offers two products that allow you to manage your advertising on a CPA (cost-per-acquisition) basis: the Conversion Optimizer and the Google Affiliate Network. To learn more about these options, visit http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=97264.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

——————————————–

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about the retirement of an AdWords feature.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Death to Google AdWords Cross-Channel Conversion Tracking

Subject: Service Announcement: AdWords pay-per-action beta is being retired

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

We regret to inform you that we will no longer be providing cross-channel tracking in your AdWords account beginning August 25, 2008. As of that date, the feature and its related data will be removed from all accounts. If you’d like to keep a copy of your cross-channel conversion data, please make a record of it for yourself before the removal. AdWords conversion tracking will not be affected by this change.

As an alternative to cross-channel tracking, we encourage you to use the free Google Analytics service to track all your online marketing efforts. Analytics offers the same functionality as cross-channel tracking, plus much more. It shows you how people find and explore your site, which keywords are really working, which ad text is the most effective, and where your visitors are dropping off during the conversion process. To get started using Analytics, visit http://www.google.com/analytics/features.html.

If you already have an Analytics account and would like to track your non-AdWords online advertising campaigns, you’ll need to tag your destination URLs with special variables. Visit http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55518 for instructions.

Once cross-channel tracking has been retired, we recommend that you remove the cross-channel tracking code from your site.

We apologize for any inconvenience this change may cause you. If you need further help transitioning from cross-channel tracking, please contact us at http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/request.py?ctx=cuffhelp.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

——————————————–

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about the retirement of an AdWords feature.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Google plans to syndicate the program using AdSense on the already thousands of websites specifically targeted for Mr. MacFarlane’s target audience, typically young men. Instead of placing a static text ad on a webpage, Google will place a “Cavalcade” a drop down video clip.

Advertising will be incorporated into the clips in varying ways. In some cases, there will be “preroll” ads, which ask viewers to sit through a TV-style commercial before getting to the video. Some advertisers may opt for a banner to be placed at the bottom of the video clip or a simple “brought to you by” note at the beginning.

MacFarlane is receiving a percentage of the ad revenue and the series will be served up in 50 two-minute episodes a whole slew of new characters.

In an interview, he described the installments as

“animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier.”

Read the whole article on The New York Times Website

Follow me on Twitter.com

The FBI and other government agencies have been using handwriting analysis to profile criminals as well as determine forgery for over 50 years. There are certain attributes that show up to the trained eye that reflect a person’s honestly level, whether he or she is self-consciousness, a good diplomat, depressed, likely to have sarcastic humor, or just an outright sociopath. On the other side there are common traits that exist among the top performing people in the world in the areas of business, leadership, and even in their own personal lives.

Bart Baggett started the educational site HandwritingUniversity.com and has become an online marketing success story on top of helping 10s of 1000s of people start their own business as a handwriting expert.

I read two books on the subject five or six years ago and even ordered some “grapho deck” flash cards for the common traits through Bart’s site. One of his bonus giveaways was an eBook on common handwriting traits of the world’s most financially successful people. As Tony Robbins and other NLP practitioners would say, if you want to have success in an area of your life find “models” in that area to fashion your behavior.

Does what your handwriting reveal about your personality determine if you will be successful or not? Many say it could since it is a manifestation of your brain. Everyone was taught to write a specific way, but we change from person to person based on our personalities.

One trait you look at is your “T” bars, lower and upper case. When written in cursive. Don’t say you haven’t written in cursive since 3rd grade or forgot, because that reveals something about you as well.
People who have high “T” bars have high self esteem and goals for themselves. You can figure out what the opposite would mean. Is this predestination? Yes and no. Yes if you don’t change certain characteristics of your writing, no if you do. My one tip: Raise Your “T” bars. You can change your writing to change certain aspects of your personality. Sound like voodoo? Just like with any personality reflection test, it’s hard to determine empirical evidence.

What reminded me of this time in my life was a recent email I received from an newsletter I joined six years ago that I found particularly interesting.

Learn What Barack Obama’s Handwriting Says About His Leadership Skills.

The second he took his seat and looked down the long table at Mrs. Graham, Mr. Temerlin knew he was in deep trouble. ‘I could not keep my eyes open. I’m biting my knuckles, pinching my skin, bending my toes back – I literally had bruises the next day to prove it.’

‘I thought I might be able to fake it by covering my eyes and holding a pen like I was taking notes. But the next thing I knew, my head was on the table. God knows what sound it made when it hit.’ Read the rest of the story at the Dallas Morning New’s site.

According to Google:

“Automatic matching is an optional feature that helps your ads reach targeted traffic missed by your keyword lists. It works by analyzing the ads, keywords, and landing pages in your ad group. It then shows your ads on search queries relevant to this information.

When automatic matching is first enabled, it dedicates a short period of time to gather information about your campaign. During this period, you won’t see any change to your traffic levels. Once automatic matching has evaluated your campaign, your ads will start to show on additional relevant search queries.

The system will continually monitor your performance on these queries and adjust its matches accordingly. Automatic matching aims to show your ads only on queries that yield a high clickthrough rate (CTR) and a cost-per-click (CPC) comparable to or better than your ad group’s current average CPC. This way, your ads receive additional targeted traffic at a similar cost to your current traffic.

Automatic matching won’t allow your spend to exceed your budget, and it also won’t affect the traffic you’re currently receiving. For example, say your campaign’s daily budget is $10, and on average you accrue $8 in traffic in a day. The automatic matching system may add $1 of relevant traffic per day, meaning it will not prevent your ads from accruing the traffic it normally does. Note also that automatic matching will not affect your campaigns if they already capture the majority of relevant traffic.

Here are a few more details about the feature:

* Opting in and out: Automatic matching is applied at the campaign level. You can opt your campaign in and out of automatic matching on your Campaign Settings page.

* Google Network: Automatic matching does not affect your ad delivery on the content network. It does affect your ad delivery on Google and the search network.

* Quality Score: The traffic accrued by automatic matching won’t affect your keywords’ Quality Scores or minimum bids.

* Ad position: When ranking your ads on search queries acquired through automatic matching, the cost-per-click (CPC) bid will approximate the current average CPC of your ad group. Learn more about ad rank for automatic matching.

* Performance statistics: Aggregated performance statistics for automatic matching will appear in each ad group’s Keywords tab, in a line item labeled Automatic Matching Total.

* Search Query Performance report: You can see the search queries that triggered your ads due to automatic matching by running a Search Query Performance report. The queries will be labeled Automatic in the Search Query Match Type column.”

What does Automatic Matching Mean to Me?

In essence, this is a way for Google to extend even further what was referred to as “extended match” type. It makes sense for them because the account holder will get more traffic and spend more money. At the same time they are motivated to only show your ads where is a likelihood of a good CTR. With the broad match type Google will show your ad if the user’s search query has the keywords in the query string even if surrounded by many other irrelevant words. With phrase, the two or three words must be in that order, but can be surrounded by others. With exact match, it is supposed to be the exact words bid upon.

This takes it a step further and your keywords do not even have to be in the query, but Google will experiment in order to find similar or cross-correlated words on the same subject that a user maybe likely to click your ad. For the experienced user this isn’t a bad thing, but for the novice he/she may be lead astray by thinking some of their keywords get searched more often than due by looking at the number of impressions. This reinforces a tip I have been recommending for a long time — bid on all three match types ( I can’t take credit though. I learned it from Perry Marshall). With this new information, stay opted into to Google’s Automatic Matching, BUT make sure you mind your raw query strings.

Some people ask, why not just bid on exact and phrase match? The reason is you might be missing great opportunities for Google to show you keyword research that you can use to base decisions for new adgroups as well as new pages on your site. I have personally added dozens of new adgroups to accounts that ended up performing very well based on studying the raw query strings of broad and phrase match type keywords.

Google AdWords Tip: Bid on all three match types & stay opted in to Automatic Matching
-Study the Search Query Report (which only tells part of the story).
-Mind your raw query strings

How Can you See Keyword Ad Triggering Query Strings “In the Raw”?

If you want to see the actual query string in Google Analytics that triggered your ads for broad, extended, or automatic match type, follow these instructions.

In the following article Goodman gives some sage advice on what to do with when you inherit a bad AdWords account. This quote seems to appropriately reflect his point..

“No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back.” -Turkish Proverb

Individual account history combined with Google’s own historical assessment of keyword success gathered from advertisers over the last seven years (since 2001) plays a role in AdWords Quality Score. So does those crucial first 1000 impressions for getting a good click through rate.

So what do you do when your account bombs or you inherit one with bad set up/history? Start over with a new account or you will be facing an uphill battle for a long time, and possibly forever. Start by creating tight adgroups and bidding higher than you normally would in order to obtain a high Quality Score. Don’t expect the account to instantly pay for itself the first week or even month. If you follow the path of the diligent and knowledgeable you will outlast the lazy and uninformed and eventually be rolling in ROI bliss.

Read the rest of Goodman’s commentary on his Monday Search Engine Land column.

I’ve heard this advice before from two other Gurus whom I follow.
Micheal Reining of MindValleyLabs.com in his The Coming AdWords War ebook.
SEOChat Forum posts by the legendary GarytheScubaGuy.

Edit:
Jon Rognerud from Entrepreneur.com also mentioned this technique today.

Read the whole story here at the Houston Chronicle ironically.

What is Article Marketing?

Wikipedia defines Article Marketing as:

“A type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry. These articles are made available for distribution and publication in the marketplace. Each article contains a bio box and byline that include references and contact information for the author’s business. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the authoring business’ credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients.”

Over the last few years it has become harder and harder for those starting fresh in the Internet Marketing arena to separate the wheat from the chaff, the noise from the signal. Of all the 100s of techniques and gurus touting the latest trends, it’s hard to know what works and what’s a waste of time.

Learning SEO wasn’t hard. What took me the most time was learning what sources and advice to listen to and which to ignore. Does article marketing still work? In my opinion, and from anecdotal evidence, yes it does work. Just as most other Internet marketing tactics, it doesn’t work as a magic bullet and its purpose is not for the reasons you might think. It works best in the realm of SEO for relevant link building, not traffic or lead generation. If Google didn’t exist, article marketing would be used differently.

SEO Benefits to Article Marketing

1. Controlled anchor text backlink in byline
2. Deep interior page backlinks
3. Associated relevant, on subject, content

Other Benefits

1. Positions the author as an expert in the industry
2. Provides value to the reader to enact law of reciprocity
3. Generally free, except for time cost

Problems with Article Marketing

1. It’s hard to know which directories/sites are worth your time.
2. Creates duplicate content
3. Time consuming to create high value original content
4. Better for SEO than actual lead generation
5. You’re building other people’s network content, not your own

I first learned about trading content using expert-style articles for links in 2004 when I read the now legendary Yanik Silver and Jim Edward’s guide. There are still a lot of other tactics that work in varying degrees suggested even back then. Yanik is an excellent copywriter, so don’t get sucked in if you visit his link. I’ll get you a free copy of his ebook if you want it by contacting me here.

Using a little more direct method, Silver suggests calling webmasters up on the phone and offering to write content for them either in their ezine (newsletter) or website in exchange for links.

Article Marketing Verses Guest Blogging

If you are savvy to current Internet Marketing methods, you might say article marketing is in essence “guest blogging” — you trade your unique content that builds another’s site for an author’s byline linkback. This is true, except in article marketing you typically do not get to pick and choose where your article lands if being placed on an article directory or publisher’s site. The trade off is that your article is exposed to a lot more potential publishers without you having to call them up individually and negotiate. With guest blogging you have to have offline relationships and network with high powered bloggers. With article marketing not much offline communication has to be done.

I should clarify my question “Is Article Marketing Dead?” by adding “Is Article Marketing via Article Directory submission dead?” Without knowing the right directories, the answer is yes. By knowing the places worth the time, article marketing can be an extremely effective method of building backlinks.

Two Authoritative Article Directories

After spending literally weeks in SEO forums, and after reading many veteran SEO opinions, I have come to the conclusion there are, much like search engines, only a handful of article directories are worth the time. One has taken years to aggregate 1000s of other directories so far as your article continues to get published for years in the future by different content seekers added to their directory. The second authority site has done very well because of its strict editorial policy and no duplicate content guidelines.

1. ArticleMarketer.com
2. EzineArticles.com

Tagging is a fancy word for naming something unique to identify its origin, and it’s highly important to tag your ads through AdWords. For most analytics or web stats programs you have to tag ads manually in which you should use a dynamic string attached to the destination URL. Google Analytics makes it easy on you (in exchange for being Big Brother) and will tell us the difference between paid and unpaid traffic automatically IF one default setting is changed through AdWords.

Here are the easy steps to making this change:

1. Login into AdWords

2. Go to the “My Account” tab, 4th Green Tab on the right

3. Then go to “Account Preferences”

4. Under “Tracking” on the right side, edit and set “Auto-tagging” to “Yes”

By default it is set to “No.”

In the future if you decide to use Yahoo! Search Marketing or MSN adCenter (which I recommend you do), you have to manually tag the ads (adding a bit of description to the destination URL). This way you will be able to tell what is ppc traffic and what is organic from Yahoo and MSN. Use this tagging URL builder.