The New AdWords Feature – Shared Budget

In early September, Google announced a new feature that allowed budget to be shared between your AdWWords campaigns – Shared Budget.
The advertiser can now specify a budget to be shared among numerous campaigns, instead of a single budget for each campaign.

Turning Missed Opportunities Into Potential Opportunities

Ever experienced a day whereby some of your campaigns exhausted their budget but the others didn’t?
Don’t you wish that these unspent budget (read missed opportunities) can be shifted to the spent campaigns to generate more potential opportunities?
Shared Budget will make your dream come true.
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Ever Been In Such A Situation?

Isn’t it frustrating when you made up your mind to complete a task, only to run into issues which you had no answers to?
Matters can’t get any worse when this supposedly very popular solution doesn’t provide a very decent support.

That’s exactly the kind of scenario I faced when I was attempting to install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress By Arne Brachhold.
To be fair to Arne, this is a free plugin he contributed to the community and we shouldn’t expect too much of his personal time to be devoted to this plugin.
The very least I suppose is a FAQ somewhere on the common issues faced.

2 Common Issues; 2 Solutions To Share

Enough whining about the situation, it’s time to do what the article aims to do – help provide solutions to 2 of the most common issues faced by users.
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Which First? SEM or SEO?

An age old question often asked – should I go SEO first? or SEM first?
Let me ask you another question – does the chicken comes first or the egg?
There’s no right or wrong answer, it very much depends on your scenario.

Chicken First Or The Egg?

The answer depends on 2 criteria, the stage your business is in and your business objectives.
A new business needing a fast turnover can’t rely on the long term benefits of SEO.
A digital veteran well optimized for the Google search engine might not (critically) need SEM.
Do they still need SEO/SEM? Yes they sure do, but it won’t be a priority for now, However, it should definitely be somewhere in the pipeline.

Why do I need SEO when I am already doing SEM – vice versa?

Similar to the current USA presidential election, there are 2 camps of supporters, 1 for Obama and the other for Romney. Among search marketers, there are 2 camps as well – 1 that believes in a direct relationship between SEM and SEO, while the other staunchly deny of such a relationship between the 2.
I am an advocate of the former and I will offer 6 reasons why, in a logical manner.

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Searching For A WordPress Contact Form Plugin?

There are countless WordPress contact form plugins available on the internet.
A favorite web developing/designing resource of mine, Six Revisions, showcased 20 of the numerous WordPress contact form plugins.

My search for a contact form ended with the Contact Form 7 (CF7) WordPress plugin.
Like many other plugins, CF7 was easy to set up. Not to mention the ease of integration with CAPTCHA and anti-spam plugins such as Really Simple CAPTCHA and Akismet.

Tracking Conversions Via Contact Form 7

The tradition conversion tracking mechanism will see users brought to a “Thank You” page after any form submissions. In the case of CF7, instead of a “Thank You” page, a “Thank You” message would be display on the same page after the user submits the enquiry. Therefore, conversions through CF7 would be tracked slightly differently.

Conversions generated via CF7 can be tracked in 2 manners:

1. Virtual Page View (VPV) Tracking.
2. Event Tracking.

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The Success Metrics To Your PPC Campaign.

What defines success in your PPC campaign?

For some, it’s the quantity of qualified traffic driven to a website (clicks).
For some, it’s the number of eyeballs that had seen the ads (impressions).
For some, it’s the click through rate (CTR).

Depending on the objective of the campaign and/or requirement of the advertiser, the set of success metrics can differ from one advertiser to another.

The bottom line of most (if not all) for-profit organizations is the amount of revenue that’s eventually generated.
In PPC terms, no metric can be more closely tied with revenue generation than the number of actual conversions.

Conversions And Conversion Values.

A conversion can be:

- Purchase/Sales (of a product/service),
- A view of a webpage – such as a “contact us” page,
- Signing up of a newsletter
- Downloading of a PDF or
- Lead generation – submission of a form enquiry etc

For every action listed above, a conversion value (also known as “goal value” in Google Analytics) can be attached to it.

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