Thursday, March 15, 2012


Keywords..!

This blog is all about the various kinds of keywords that can be made use in Google Adwords.


 Exact Keywords : These keywords are mentioned within square brackets. Your adword will pop up only if the searcher’s keywords exactly match with yours. Your ad wouldn’t pop up even if there is a change in the order of the words.


 Phrase Keywords : These are keywords are mentioned within quotation marks. If these keywords match with the user’s keywords in the exact same order then your ad might pop up. For example if your keyword is “story book” and the user types “alice in wonderland story book”, then your ad will pop up.


 Broad Match keywords : These are keywords which might allow your adword to pop-up even if there are slight variations(with respect to your keyword) in the keyword searched by the user. For example if someone is searching for “books in Tucson” and you have set “notebooks” as your broad match keyword for your adword , even then your ad would pop up. And this is the default option provided by google adword.


 Negative keywords : These keywords are used to drive irrelevant traffic out of the website. So these keywords are usually tagged with ‘-used’. 

Wednesday, March 14, 2012


Social Networking Analysis

We the “tech-savvy” are dwelling in the world of Web 2.0 and are already on the verge of evolution into Web 3.0. The major factor that contributed to Web 2.0 is social networking – the influence of “people” connections on internet. Facebook is inevitably the major player, but not the first one. Sixdegrees.com launched in 1997 was the first to implement this concept. But this triggered off many online forums and chat rooms which became the sensation of the past decade. Any teenager not on facebook is literally considered to be “anti-social” or a “boring” person...!! It looks like a “really cool” stuff where I can find my second grade friend on facebook but there is a lot more than this. There are a lot of companies out there who try to analyze our networks and find some meaning out of it.

“Social network Analysis” is indeed not as fanciful or glamorous as you see. It involves a lot of calculations. It is the measuring of relationships between people or groups. A node in a network can represent a single person, a group, a tweet, hastag or a community. Edges are the connections between the nodes. The edges can be directed or undirected. For example in twitter you can know who is following whom, so it is a directed network. Apart from this there are “zillion” other terms that reveals different truths about the network. Following are a few question which would help you understand the terms.

Who is the hub for the network?
Degree centrality would give the answer for this question. It measures the most number of direct connections made by a particular node. The degree centrality of the network would be the node which has the maximum degree centrality. That node is the most active, that person is connected to every other person on the network.

Who can access all the other nodes more quickly?           
Closeness centrality of a node tells whether it can access all other nodes quickly or not. The closeness centrality of a network has the shortest paths to every other node in the network.  So the information can spread quickly through this node.

Who can act as a mediator in the network?
Betweeness Centrality gives the probability of a node occurring between any two nodes. So “he” is the person whom you can find between any two your friends.

Who is the most influential person in the network?
Eigen vector weighs every connection that a node has and the eigenvector centrality gives the weighted sum of all connections (direct as well as undirected). The person having the highest eigen vector is the most famous person in the network. 

Tuesday, March 13, 2012



Longtail keywords and definitions for Google ad words

Deciding on keywords is the most time consuming part of the Google adword marketing challenge. You need to think from the searchers perspective – a lot of mental work is involved. I’m pretty sure that “Long tail” keywords originated from the concept of long-tail – finding a market for obscure product. These keywords are usually 3 to 5 words long are rarely been used. But we need to flip the coin and look at the advantageous part of it. These keywords come for a lesser CPC. So you can more audience by having more number of long tail keywords. This is another marketing strategy..!
Example of some long tail keywords are: “ information security courses in Arizona”
There are a couple of terms that we would have to analyze in order to check the effectiveness of our adword. Following are a couple of them:

Avg CPC(Cost per Click): This is a simple average operation performed on the total no of clicks that your ad has received.
Total actual CPC / No of clicks

Actual CPC : The cost that you pay for each click on your ad and it can be lesser than  the maximum bid that you have set for the keyword. You will be charged only the amount will allow you to beat the adrank of your adword.

CTR – Click through Rate : This is a ratio of no of clicks to the number of impressions that your ad makes on the search result page. It is very important in deciding how well you have chosen the keywords and how effective is your bidding strategy

Impressions: Every time your ad shows up on the search result page it is counted as one impression.

Quality score: Every adword has a quality score which is determined by the potential of your keyword to trigger your adword.

Adrank: This is the value assigned to your adword based on quality score. Your adrank determines the ad position.

Sunday, March 11, 2012



Wanna advertise online..Here you go..!


How does Google make money? If anyone of you have thought about it you would definitely know that Google makes its revenue from the online advertisement that we see popping on to the top and right(sometimes even at the bootom also) of the google search webpage. It seems very easy for us to look as a searcher to see the various ads being displayed on the search result page. But there is more than this that goes behind these ads. There are many different types of online ads – textual ads, display ads, pop-up ads, flash ads and image ads.

But in this blog we’ll be focussing only on textual ads. I would say that creation of a Google ad undergoes a complete life cycle from deciding on the theme to the bidding of these ads. Every company wants to attract the users by displaying the best deals/ offers on their product. So these ads are basically designed for any special event or deal. It is not necessary that a company should have just one adword, there can be many depending on the variety of products or deals. Once you have finalized on the theme of the adword you need to work on adword design. Every adword is made of 4 lines. As you can see from the image the first line is the header followed by the display url and the content of the ad. Be specific in the ad content because this is the only way to drive the user to your website. All that I have discussed above is the easiest of constructing an adword. The most challenging part is building a bidding strategy for the adword.

Every adword can be tagged with 40 to 50 keywords. These keywords are nothing but the possible textual content that any user will be typing in the google search box that is looking for a product that is related to our adword. So you need to put yourself in the searcher’s shoes and think of all possible combinations of keywords.  It doesn’t stop there, you still have the bidding strategy left for these keywords. There are two type of bidding strategies – Manual and Automatic. In manual bidding you will have to key in the bidding amount for each keyword based on the analysis that you would have done using Keyword tool and traffic estimator. These two tools come handy in deciding the bid amount because it shows the global monthly searches. In automatic bidding the bid values will be adjusted based on the number of clicks that your ad will be receiving and the ad position.
I think I have pretty much tried to explain the Google adwords on a high level in this blog.