BOOMER eZINE

The Online Entrepreneur Magazine

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Table of Contents for this issue.....

1.    Authors Comments

2.    Q & A, Suggestions and Comments

3.    Problems with AdCenter

4.    Google Analytics

Author's Comments

Linda and I were discussing the future of Boomer eZine and we feel that now might be the time to change from a weekly publication to a biweekly or monthly publication.

We both are busy in our lives.  I am still working full time and the time seems to becoming “fuller”.  My day job is fun and challenging so I still enjoy going to work every day.

We wonder how many readers feel overloaded by receiving Boomer eZine weekly.  I know that we both are bombarded by information everyday.  It is difficult to filter all of it out and decide what is really important.

I have become involved with PPC advertising and my campaigns are successful.  This is a great way to make money on the Net.  I have always liked the business model, but I did not take the time to get really good at it.  Now that I am starting to “get it”, I plan to expand my PPC business.

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Q & A, Suggestions and Comments

In our article about Google Alerts last week, I stated that I received a lot of useless information about SBI since it not only returned information about Site Build It.  It also returned information about State Bank of India , an insurance company, a soccer team, etc.

One of our readers (Art) sent me an email that asked why I did not use negative keywords with my alerts.  My response is “I did not think of it”.

Here are Art’s suggestions for negative keywords for SBI:

sbi  affiliate - india -"bank of india " -soccer -football

Thank you for pointing out that I can use negative keywords to filter out the information.  I use negative keywords in my PPC campaigns, but it did not occur to me to use them in the Google Alerts.

For those of you who use Google Alerts and are not using negative keywords, we send our thanks to Art for pointing this out.

If you have anything for this section or you have a suggestion for a topic for an article, please send us an email with your suggestions or your input.  With your help, we can improve the Boomer Video eZine.  

Problems with AdCenter  

AdCenter is the easiest of the three PPC operations in which to design campaigns, but it seems to have the most problems with its system.  

The best campaign that I have directs the viewer directly to the Amazon page with the product information on it.  There is no question about the validity of the information on the page or the relevance of the information.  Yet, AdCenter constantly rejects the keyword for having forbidden information on the landing page.  

Notice that the rejected keywords are also the best and most popular keywords.  You can see this in the impressions and clicks columns in the picture.  I am not using the conversion tracking feature.

I call AdCenter and file an appeal to have the keywords manually approved.  This is done, but AdCenter has robots that regularly crawl the landing pages and check for illegal content.  The robots crawl the Amazon product page and reject it again.  

A special appeal has been filed in my behalf to exempt these campaigns from the robots, but it will take a few weeks so I will have to continue to become closer friends with the customer service reps at AdCenter.  

I must say that the customer service staff at AdCenter is outstanding.  I rarely have to wait more than a minute to get a real, live person on the line.  The reps are well trained.  They are friendly and helpful.  This is refreshing in this day of automated phone systems where you usually have to listen to 20 messages and press 20 buttons to finally get to the choice you want.  

Google Analytics  

In previous issues we have written about StatCounter.com as a way to gather information about your visitors to your website.  

StatCounter.com has various tools to help you determine how long a visitor stayed on your site, what path they followed through your site, how they arrived at your site, etc.  

Google Analytics does the same thing, but appears to be much more complete.  I am studying it and I have installed it on three of our websites that also have StatCounter.com installed to compare the two tracking systems.  

Analytics works just like StatCounter.com.  You enter your website URL and other requested information, and it supplies you with a few lines of code to paste into each page of your website.  

If you use a template or FrontPage as I do for all my non-SBI sites, you can put the code in the part of the template that holds the footer.  This way you will automatically have it loaded with every page.  If you view the source for this page, you will see the code for both StatCounter.com and Google Analytics at the bottom of the page.  I always add comments when I insert code from another source so I will be able to see the comments for the beginning and ending of the scripts for these tracking systems.  

If you are using Google Analytics, please send us an email for publication telling us your evaluation of Analytics and how you use it to improve your site.  We would like to hear from you on this and share it with the rest of our readers.  

If you use another tracking system other than StatCounter.com or Google Analytics, please send us an email about the tracking system that you use.  

That wraps up our issue for this week.  Until next week, stay tuned.  

John and Linda Howe  

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