With the release of the latest version of the AdWords API, Google advertisers have a hugely expanded array of keyword research tools at their fingertips. In the past, API users were able to get a list of keyword synonyms or a list of keywords Google associated with a specific url, along with the average monthly searches for the keyword. The problem was that only “broad match” counts were possible (through the API). And broad match counts differ significantly from exact match counts, which estimates of the actual number of searches that occurred on the keyword. While it was possible to get counts associated with the three types (broad, exact, and phrase) through the AdWords interface, keywords or urls had to be checked manually, one at a time. With the API, its possible to cycle through hundreds of urls, get keyword recommendations back from Googlebot which can be used as part of a deep linking AdWords campaign.

That issue is solved with the new release. Counts can be requested for broad, exact, or phrase match types. But that’s just a beginning.

The new keyword targeting service allows API users to request a much expanded list of search parameters, speficially:

* KeywordCategoryIdSearchParameter
* RelatedToKeywordSearchParameter
* RelatedToUrlSearchParameter
* SeedAdGroupIdSearchParameter
* AverageTargetedMonthlySearchesSearchParameter
* CompetitionSearchParameter
* CountryTargetSearchParameter
* ExcludedKeywordSearchParameter
* GlobalMonthlySearchesSearchParameter
* IncludeAdultContentSearchParameter
* KeywordCategoryIdSearchParameter
* KeywordMatchTypeSearchParameter
* LanguageTargetSearchParameter
* MobileSearchParameter
* NgramGroupsSearchParameter
* RelatedToKeywordSearchParameter
* RelatedToUrlSearchParameter
* SeedAdGroupIdSearchParameter

And, the new service supports a research into keywords associated with Google content network. User can create queries of the content network with selections include:

* AdTypeSearchParameter
* CountryTargetSearchParameter
* LanguageTargetSearchParameter
* PlacementTypeSearchParameter
* RelatedToKeywordSearchParameter
* RelatedToUrlSearchParameter

The list of outputs from the service is vastly expanded as well. It includes:

Expand AD_SHARE AD_SHARE
Represents the percentage of the time that the advertiser’s ad (if applicable) was shown for queries associated with the given keyword idea.

Expand APPROX_CONTENT_IMPRESSIONS_PER_DAY APPROX_CONTENT_IMPRESSIONS_PER_DAY
Represents the (approximate) number of impressions per day for this placement idea on the content network.

Expand AVERAGE_TARGETED_MONTHLY_SEARCHES AVERAGE_TARGETED_MONTHLY_SEARCHES
Represents the average number of searches (approximated) on this keyword idea, targeted to the specified geographies.

Expand COMPETITION COMPETITION
Represents the relative amount of competition associated with the given keyword idea, relative to other keywords. This value will be between 0 and 1 (inclusive).

Expand EXTRACTED_FROM_WEBPAGE EXTRACTED_FROM_WEBPAGE
Represents the webpage from which this keyword idea was extracted (if applicable.)

Expand FORMATS FORMATS
Represents the various types of ads & sizes of ads that may render within the given placement idea.

Expand GLOBAL_MONTHLY_SEARCHES GLOBAL_MONTHLY_SEARCHES
Represents the (approximate) number of searches for the given keyword idea, independant of any geo settings.

Expand IDEA_TYPE IDEA_TYPE
Represents the type of the given idea.

Expand IN_STREAM_AD_INFO IN_STREAM_AD_INFO
Represents the duration(s)/other instream information, for the given placement idea. (if applicable)

Expand KEYWORD KEYWORD
Represents the Keyword corresponding to the given keyword idea.

Expand KEYWORD_CATEGORY KEYWORD_CATEGORY
Represents a category id for a category within the category hierarchy for keyword ideas.

Expand NGRAM_GROUP NGRAM_GROUP
Represents the ngram group for the given keyword idea.

Expand PLACEMENT PLACEMENT
Represents the Placement corresponding to the given placement idea.

Expand PLACEMENT_NAME PLACEMENT_NAME
Represents the publisher given name of the given placement idea (if applicable).

Expand SAMPLE_URL SAMPLE_URL
Represents a sample page upon which the given placement idea shows from the content network.

Expand SEARCH_SHARE SEARCH_SHARE
Represents the percentage of the time that the advertiser’s webpage (if applicable) was shown for queries associated with the given keyword idea.

Expand PLACEMENT_CATEGORY PLACEMENT_CATEGORY
Represents a category id for a category within the category hierarchy for placement ideas. Resulting attribute is IntegerAttribute.

Expand PLACEMENT_TYPE PLACEMENT_TYPE
Represents the type of media of the given placement idea. Some examples of this could include: videos on the web, web sites, flash games on the content network, website feeds, etc.

Expand PUBLISHER_DESCRIPTION PUBLISHER_DESCRIPTION
Represents the publisher-supplied description of the given placement idea.

Expand TARGETED_MONTHLY_SEARCHES TARGETED_MONTHLY_SEARCHES

The capabilities of the new keyword service vastly expands what has been possible in the past. This should be enough for AdWords professional that haven’t used the API in the past to rush out and get their API tokens.

Resolute Digital Internal Guidelines

Given that the FTC has published Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials which are scheduled to go into effect on December 1, we want to make sure that all of our staff as well as freelancers employed by us, adhere to the highest standards of transparency as we interact in social media and with the blogger community on behalf of our clients.

Our policies are as follows:

1) Whenever a representative of Resolute Digital posts a comment on a blog, Twitter, Facebook, or other forum for user generated content, the representative will acknowledge that he or she works for the agency or client. Anonymous posting is not permitted.

Example: A staff member joins a popular Facebook group focused on preschool education. The staff member would like to call attention to our highly rated new iPhone application, iPlan ‘n Learn™, built for Meredith Publishing. Rather than post a comment like, “I’ve found a great new iPhone app, iPlay ‘n Learn&trade, which really helps small children learn to create alphabet characters,” we should write, “My client, Parents’ Magazine, has a great new iPhone app, iPlay ‘n Learn&trade, that uses the unique features of the phone to train small children to draw alphabet characters.”

2) If we provide product to a blogger or webmaster for review, urge he or she to acknowledge the receipt of the product to their readers. In the case of products that have a value of more than $100, we require the blogger or webmaster to return the product to us within 60 days. We will pay for the return shipping.

3) Monitor bloggers that we are working with or which we have sent product. In some cases, we, or our clients, may be held responsible for misleading information. For example, if we are working with a food supplement company and the blogger who received the product wrote that the product cured their breast cancer, we could well be held responsible for this misleading comment. If you see statements from bloggers or webmasters we work with that seem unsupportable, please ask them in writing to make a retraction.

I should have known when my partner, Ben Sanders, who runs the technology practice at Resolute Digital, offered to sell me his Treo 700W phone for a bargain price of $100 back in March, 2008 that I was going to be taken [worse, I already has a 700P but I figured the Windows version would sync better with Vista -- and it did].  Ben was getting  a new iPhone and ditching the Treo.  Ben is known as a new adopter and I, like many Treo users was worried about typing on the keypadless iPhone and spotty AT&T coverage.

So when Resolute Digital standardized on iPhones a few months ago, I was skeptical.
I was about as wrong about the iPhone as I was in 1994 when I pronounced the Internet as too slow (using Mosiac and a 28.8k modem) to be useful as a communication’s platform.

This iPhone phenomenon is the real deal. For many companies, building and promoting a dedicated iPhone application is going to be as important, if more important, than their own website. The reason is there are many kinds of applications that are better suited for an easy to use mobile platform like iPhone than an office, home, or laptop computer. Such as finding a Starbucks when you’re on the road. Checking the weather forecast from your sailboat. Reserving a car or hotel when you realize you’re going to be stuck in Kansas City for the night. The last thing you want to do is battle a mobile browser trying to make an e-commerce internet connection.

Companies that lag in putting their reservation system on the iPhone will find they are losing real business. For example, I needed a car and I couldn’t find an iPhone app for Enterprise or National so I went to Avis (Hertz has one too). Sometimes I get tired of that old gray lady, the New York Times, and I want to check out the New York Post’s racy headlines or the Daily News. The Times has a great iPhone app. The other papers don’t. So guess what I read on the subway.

We at Resolute are so sure that designing and building quality iPhone (and other mobile apps) will be a huge business in the next 24 months, we’ve launched a dedicated business iPhone Dev Shop to serve that need. Our first application, Parents® magazine iPlay ’n Learn™,  rose rapidly to 3rd place in the Education category and is now #13 in the”What’s Hot category-  iPlay and Learn iPhone.

Compared with building websites, iPhone apps can be built at much lower cost.  And they can be developed quickly.  These are not going to be optional items, so marketers better find some spare budget pronto.

Writers and editors have to adopt a very different mindset when they set out to write headlines and titles that will attract search engine visits rather than catch the eye of a passerby at the newsstand or the book store. While clever headlines might sell newspapers, they won’t do much to attract the search engine user. That’s because search engines are very good at giving the user results that are related to their specific search query. A user interested in finding a job at Goldman Sachs is likely to type into a search box “Goldman Sachs jobs” or “Careers at Goldman Sachs.”

A professional writer or editor, on the other hand,  has been trained to think of a clever, non cliched turn of phrase rather than the ultra prosaic “Jobs at Goldman Sach.”  He or she might title an article about the rebound at Goldman Sachs like “Goldman Sachs Gold Rush is Back!” or something much more clever.  The problem is is that the more clever the headline or title, the less likely it is that anyone might be searching on that specific phrase. After all, it’s clever because it’s unique, not because it’s obvious.

The search engines give great weight to the “title tag” when trying to figure out what the content of the page is about.  The title tag is the content in the html source  that appears between the <title>this is the title</title> in the <head> section at the top of the page.  Although the title tag is invisible to users on the page, it appears in the blue horizontal row at the top of the browser.  A good compromise for clever writers and editors is provide a <title> that matches what a user interested in the subject might type in a search engine.  He or she can save that very clever turn of phrase for the title that actually appears on the page itself, usually in the form of a <h1> tag.

My advice to writers and editors who want to have their copy read by large numbers of internet users and who want to help their companies sell more advertising, is work closely with your webmaster or search marketing staff to find out what keywords or phrases that have been identified as important to building traffic to the site.  Often, there will a relatively small list of, perhaps 50 or fewer words and phrases, that are highly relevant to the website but which are most frequently entered into search engines.  These are the works and phrases that you want to see included in the title tags and even the <h> tags as well.

Google announced an API for Google Analytics on April 21, 2009. An API or “applications programming interface” is important because it opens a window between the consumer of analytics data and the data itself, which resides Google servers. Agencies like Resolute Digital are continually involved in creating and sharing reports with their clients on the progress of digital marketing campaigns.  With the API, it’s now possible to automate much of that reporting, to build custom reports, to make information available in near real time, and to share data with clients in a transparent fashion.

It also opens the possibility for a variety of widgets and mobile apps and, in fact, there are several Google Analytics applications now offered on the iPhone so that Google Analytics users can stay in touch with their websites while away from their computers. While it might seem like data overload to need to stay in monitor website data that closely, it’s not unusual for search marketing campaigns to to testing new bid levels and keywords.  It’s often hard to predict how quickly budgets might be consumed and using budget caps is a rather crude way to manage the campaign. You don’t want to be away from your computer when a new campaign kicks in and the spend rises to $5,000 per hour.

The API itself is extremely easy to use for anyone with a programming background.  There is a ample documentation and Google provides sample code to jump start the process. And naming conventions are quite intuitive.  To read more about the API itself, check out Google Analytics Documentation.

Resolute Digital has created a benchmark report that compares traffic and traffic sources for four different time periods: a “baseline” period which serves as a benchmark, “last month,” “month to date”, and “last 7 days.” The main traffic sources that we follow are: organic (unpaid search engines), paid search engines, referral urls, direct, and email. For our paid search clients, we typically report cost per visit (as opposed to cost per click), cost per page view, and cost per action (goal). “Green” change numbers report progress against the benchmark while “red” number show movement in a negative direction. Resolute Digital’s modest web traffic is reported here: Resolute Digital Reporting. In order to view the report, login with the username “rd” and password “rd”.

Webmasters  need to understand, on a daily basis if their site’s content changes frequently, how the search engines view their site.  Google provides this feedback mechanism through its Webmaster Tools, a free service that is quick and easy to set up.  In order to get data on the website, Google requires the webmaster to validate their rights to see statistics on the site by demonstrating their ability to get a file  or a meta content item added to the root directory or home page of the site, respectively.  If you have access to the servers (or can get your developer to respond quickly), this can be done in a few minutes.

Google Webmaster  Tools should be checked daily, especially if there are many changes occurring on the site.  The single most important stat is crawl stats which is found under the “Diagnostics” heading.  This is, in essence, your SEO heart rate.  The first two indicators (“pages crawled per day” and “kilobytes downloaded per day” indicate the attention Googlebot is paying to the site.  In this case of both of these indicators, more is better; less is worse.  In the case of the third indicator, “Time spent download a page,” less is more.  Googlebot considers the time that it takes when assessing the site’s overall quality (in the case of AdWords, a slow loading page will actually reduce the quality score and increase the cost of buying traffic).  We like to see pages in the 100-300 milliseconds range.  There are a number of causes of slow loading pages, but typically is a fault of poor software design or lack of bandwidth to the servers.

You can check the download time of your pages as well as the page elements contributing to the download times by adding the “Firebug” add-on to your web browser.

Slow loading pages threatens Googlebot’s willingness to visit the site and index pages.

Once crawl stats has been examined and the developers have been notified if there is a problem, it’s important to look at “crawl errors” which will point out issues that Googlebot might be having indexing the site.  Stats are reported for web search, Web Mobile CHTML, and  Mobile WML/XHTML. We are primarily focused on web search since that is where most of the traffic volume is. We see the following kinds of errors:

Possible errors include:
* Not found
* URLs not followed
* URLs restricted by robots.txt
* URLs timed out
* HTTP errors
* URL unreachable

Google describes the source of each of these problems as follows:

Not found
Google encountered an error when attempting to view the URL. See RFC 2616 for more information about HTTP error codes. Google encountered an HTTP error when attempting to view the URL. In general:
* Ensure that the file exists at the specified location.
* If we attempted to crawl the URL from your Sitemap, make sure that your Sitemap lists the URL correctly.
* If we attempted to crawl the URL from a link on your site, make sure that the link is correct.
* If another site lists a broken link to your site, we may list that URL but you may not be able to fix the error.
* If the file exists, your server may have returned an error when we tried to access the file.

The following table lists some errors you might see:
404 not found     The webserver returned a 404 error (page not found). This page likely does not exist.

HTTP errors/ 401/407 authentication error     The page requires authentication. It’s likely that you do not intend this page to be indexed. If this page is listed in your Sitemap, you can remove it. However, if you leave it in your Sitemap, we won’t crawl or index it (although the page will continue to be listed here with this error).

HTTP errors /4xx error     See RFC 2616 for a complete list of these status codes. Likely reasons for this error are that the webserver didn’t understand or couldn’t process the request, the request was forbidden, or the request timed out. If the page has moved and requests for it return a status code of 410, you might consider changing the response to return a status code of 301 and permanently redirect the request.

HTTP errors /Domain name not found     The DNS may not have been properly resolving. We could communicate with the DNS server, but couldn’t find the domain name.

HTTP errors /Couldn’t parse HTTP response     When we tried to access your page, we couldn’t parse the response we received from the webserver.

HTTP errors /IP in excluded range     The IP address is in a private address space, reserved for local use (for instance 127.0.0.1). See RFC 1918 for information on private IP ranges.

No Title - Google encountered a general HTTP error     Google encountered a general HTTP error when trying to access this page. Note potential reasons for this error could include any of the HTTP errors listed on this page
Google encountered an error when attempting to view the URL. See RFC 2616 for more information about HTTP error codes. Google encountered an HTTP error when attempting to view the URL. In general:
* Ensure that the file exists at the specified location.
* If we attempted to crawl the URL from your Sitemap, make sure that your Sitemap lists the URL correctly.
* If we attempted to crawl the URL from a link on your site, make sure that the link is correct.
* If another site lists a broken link to your site, we may list that URL but you may not be able to fix the error.
* If the file exists, your server may have returned an error when we tried to access the file.

URLs not followed errors
This category lists URLs that we were unable to completely follow, along with some information as to why. In general, keep in the mind the following to ensure Google’s spiders can follow links in your site:
* Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, since many search engines see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as Javascript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
* Don’t use &ID= as a parameter in your URLs.
* If you use dynamic pages (for instance, the URL contains a ? character), be aware that not all search engine spiders crawl dynamic and static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
* If you are permanently redirecting from one page to another, make sure you’re returning the right HTTP status code (301 Moved Permanently).
* Where possible, use absolute rather than relative links. (For instance, when linking to another page in your site, link to www.example.com/mypage.html rather than simply mypage.html).

URLs restricted by robots.txt errors
Google was unable to crawl the URL due to a robots.txt restriction. This can happen for a number of reasons. For instance, your robots.txt file might prohibit the Googlebot entirely; it might prohibit access to the directory in which this URL is located; or it might prohibit access to the URL specifically. Often, this is not an error. You may have specifically set up a robots.txt file to prevent us from crawling this URL. If that is the case, there’s no need to fix this; we will continue to respect robots.txt for this file.
If a URL redirects to a URL that is blocked by a robots.txt file, the first URL will be reported as being blocked by robots.txt (even if the URL is listed as Allowed in the robots.txt analysis tool).

URLs timed out errors
We received a timeout when we tried to access the page. Make sure the page is accessible. Some errors you may see are:
DNS lookup timeout     We received a timeout on DNS lookup.
URL timeout     We received a timeout when connecting to your webserver or during the request.
robots.txt timeout     The server timed out when we were trying to access your robots.txt file. Before we crawled the pages of your site, we tried to check your robots.txt file to ensure we didn’t crawl any pages that you had roboted out. However, we received a timeout when we tried to access your robots.txt file. To make sure we didn’t crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. When this happens, we return to your site later and crawl it once we can reach your robots.txt file. Note that this is different from a 404 response when looking for a robots.txt file. If we receive a 404, we assume that a robots.txt file does not exist and we continue the crawl.\

URL unreachable errors
Google encountered an error when trying to access this URL. We may have encountered a DNS error or timeout, for instance. Your server may have been down or busy when we tried to access the page. Possible URL unreachable errors include:

5xx error     See RFC 2616 for a complete list of these status codes. Likely reasons for this error are an internalserver error or a server busy error. If the server is busy, it may have returned an overloaded status to ask the Googlebot to crawl the site more slowly. In this case, we’ll return again later to crawl additional pages.
DNS issue     We couldn’t communicate with the DNS server when we tried to access the page. This could be because your server is down, or there is an issue with the DNS routing to your domain. Make sure that your domain is resolving correctly and try again.
robots.txt file unreachable     Before we crawled the pages of your site, we tried to check your robots.txt file to ensure we didn’t crawl any pages that you had roboted out. However, your robots.txt file was unreachable. To make sure we didn’t crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. When this happens, we return to your site later and crawl it once we can reach your robots.txt file. Note that this is different from a 404 response when looking for a robots.txt file. If we receive a 404, we assume that a robots.txt file does not exist and we continue the crawl.

Network unreachable     We encountered a network error when we tried to access the page.
This can happen when Googlebot encounters a time-out or other network related issue when requesting a file from your site, and thus is forced to abandon the request. This can be caused by one or more of the following:
* Excessive page load times due to dynamic pages taking too long to respond
* Excessive page load times due to a site’s hosting server being down, overloaded, or misconfigured
* The hosting server is blocking Google’s web crawler
* A DNS configuration issue.

Failed to connect     A connection could not be established.

No response     The server closed the connection before we could receive a response.

Truncated response     The server closed the connection before we could receive a full response, and the body of the response appears to be truncated.

Connection refused     The server refused the connection.

Truncated headers     The server closed the connection before full headers were sent.

Googlebot also reports problems that it is detecting with the content of the pages it is indexing where content refers to title tags and meta descriptions in the HTML content section.  Usually duplicate titles and meta descriptions means that Google is seeing pages that look identical to it and it implies that it will eliminate such duplicate pages as time goes on.  These issues are usually incurred when pages and urls have been redesigned but the old pages page not been eliminated through 301 redirects.

Google states “When Googlebot crawled your site, it found some issues with your content. These issues won’t prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but addressing them may help your site’s user experience and performance.”

It’s important to use 301 redirects to let Google know that old pages should be eliminated from the index in favor of the new urls for those pages.  The section should be monitored over time with the goal that duplicate content will be eliminated over time.

The “sitemaps” section will report any difficulties that Googlebot is having handling the sitemap.xml files (or sitemap_index.xml file in the case of multiple sitemaps)  that were set up to help Googlebot explore the site.

While there is lots of useful information contained  in Webmaster Tools that can provide webmasters with a better understanding of how their site is being indexed, the above are the principal error messages that should be monitored on a daily basis to make sure that the site is being properly indexed by Google.

Search engine marketing, in the broadest sense, refers to a set of strategies and techniques designed to help companies benefit from the activity that takes place on internet search engines.  That activity is important because  internet search has increasingly become today’s equivalent of the “yellow pages”; buyers use their keyboards and mice to identify shops that want to visit rather than their fingers “doing the walking” flipping the yellow pages . Yellow page publishing was always been a very good business (although much less a good business since Google and the search engines came along)   because it combined the user’s specific and strong buyer interest with a set of product and service categories.  Google and search engines in general are able to do that in a much more efficient manner by matching the search query with advertisers (who needs print anymore?).

The rising new discipline  of search engine marketing has to do with activities,  both paid and unpaid, that attempt to garner a significant share of the links that a search engine user might use after getting a result page from a search engine.  Within the discipline, practitioners differentiate between “search engine optimization’ (SEO) which are techniques and practices designed to improve rankings within the search engine’s “free” or “organic” listings, and “search engine marketing” or SEM in the narrow sense which is management of the search engine’s paid advertising services.

Given the volume of traffic and revenue that can follow successful implementation of SEO and SEM strategies, it can safely be said that these new disciplines are among the most competitive marketing activities ever undertaken.  There are literally thousands of self-proclaimed experts in the field, and given that Google never reveals the secret algorithms that determines winner and losers, it makes it extremely difficult for a buyer of SEO and SEM services to fugure our there to turn.

At Resolute Digital, we offers a few words of advice.

1) Your SEM or SEO vendor has to extremely familiar with Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics (or another major analytics package).  Without a detailed understanding of these tools, they (and you) will be “dancing in the dark: which will surely cost you money.  We’re not talking about finding vendors that are “Google certified” because we’d like our analysts to be independently trained.    We don’t think it makes a lot of sense to use vendors that are trained by the company selling you the advertising.

2) Your vendor should be very comfortable with the more robust analytics software like Omniture, Unica, or Clicktracks (Lyris) since you may decide to avoid the Google “free” packages [Google supplies the software free of charge but gives itself a license, if you accept the Ts&Cs  to your data].

3) Your vendor needs to have programmers who are familiar with the APIs (application programming interfaces) of Google, Yahoo , and MSN (Bing) since it is virtually impossible to find efficiencies in these systems without using large volumes of keywords which requires an automated interface to manage (image managing the bids of 10 million keywords manually!).

4) Your vendor needs to have programmers that are still active.  Don’t sign up for an agency that uses software written 10 years ago.

5) From an SEO (free) perspective, signing on with the wrong vendor can land you in a Google “doghouse” that might takes years to get out of.  The initial SEO activity is all about details: select the right keywords to optimize for,  getting unique title  tags and meta description associated with each distinct page or url, and rewriting urls to simple and memorable urls if needed.  After all that, it’s then a process of identfying the right sites to link to you, contacting them, and convincing them you are worth a link.   Any shortcut in this process of likely to get you in the dreaded doghouse.

There are obviously many more details and issues to consider, but the above tips are enough to get you started.  When you are ready to work with a professional, give us a call.

Resolute Digital has deployed its new ad servers using OpenX, which is an open source software product designed to give the web publishers more control over the delivery and reporting of advertising, independent of the giants that now dominate the business. It also allows publishers to maintain control over their own reporting and performance metrics.

Resolute is one of a handful of digital marketing agencies in the world that offer ad serving as one of its core capabilities.

Resolute’s OpenX system was designed to let publishers organize and manage their ad inventory under one easy to use interface. It works with multiple websites, varied ad format including simple banners to rich media. Resolute has optimized its servers to deliver ads as fast as possible, using servers with 12GB of RAM so that much of the processing can be performed in memory. Resolute’s server array is currently capable of serving more than 5 billion ad impressions each month, and it expects to increase its capacity significantly in the months ahead.

With Resolute’s OpenX Ad Server, publishers can manage and target your ads any way you want. Use prioritization controls to optimize how your ads are delivered. Use frequency controls to limit how often campaigns are shown. And use targeting to serve the most relevant ads to your audience. There’s no limit to the flexibility you have over the delivery of your ads.

Resolute’s extensive set of reports provides comprehensive statistics on your websites and ad zones as well as your advertisers and ad campaigns. Get detailed breakdowns on ad delivery, conversions, revenue and more.

Google introduced the quality score algorithm a few years ago in order to give it more control over the prices AdWords advertisers paid for the clickthroughs to their websites. The first cost per click bidding system introduced by Overture nearly a decade ago allowed advertisers to bid against each other for position in the paid ad listings. Overture ad “auctions” were quite transparent, with Overture even publishing the bids paid by competitors for the same keyword. (Overture was later acquired by Yahoo).

When Google launched AdWords, it included the click through rate as a factor in cost per click. An advertiser whose ad was able to attract a 2 percent click through rate and who posted a bid of $0.51 would be shown ahead of another advertiser for that keyword bidding $1.00.click with a 1 percent click through on its ad.

Google’s system worked well for advertisers who were able to get high click through rates and worked very well for Google, which was able to get higher yields from the cost per click ads by avoiding displaying large volumes of ads with low click through rates. Unfortunately, the AdWords auction became opaque since Google did not publish the CTRs or the advertisers bids. Advertisers had to guess what their competitors might be paying.

The landing page and keyword quality algorithms introduced a whole host of new factors that Google claims were designed to improve the user experience by displaying the right kinds of ads and links to the right kinds of sites. The current system employs quality scores for each keyword. Google says:

“It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).”

The quality score is important because it directly affects the amount an advertiser must pay for a click through in relation to other advertises. For example, and advertiser with a keyword quality score of 1 might have to pay $20 per click through which a competitor with a quality score of 8 might only have to pay $2.00 for the same click through (quality scores range from 1 to 10 from poor to excellent)

We are always working to improve the quality scores of our clients’ AdWords campaigns. We use a very easy method of monitoring these scores. To do this, you will need AdWords Editor, Excel, and the ability to create a pivot table. Here’s the step by step process:

1) Open Adwords editor and update for any changes in the account.
2) Selecting the keywords tab, select all the row and paste in an Excel spreadsheet (if you have very large AdWords campaigns – more than 66,000 keywords – you will need Excel 2007 which allows up to one million rows and make sure your computer has lots of memory)
3) Create a pivot table (“Insert > Pivot Table”) and set the “Row Label” to quality score and the “Values” to “Count of Keywords”
4) Now you have created a Quality Score Distribution Table. Add another column which calculates the percentage for each quality score. Create a graph, date it, and compare your progress as you make changes to the landing page and ad text.

Ideally, 80 percent of your keywords should be quality scores of 7 or higher. In the case of highly competitive keywords, it’s extremely difficult to get higher than 8 since Google appears to take into the account the popularity of the keyword in AdWords auctions in setting the quality score. Keep track of all you experiments. As Dr. Arrowsmith learned from his mentor Max Gottleb, good scientists take great notes. Good luck.

TinyURL is a web page redirection service that substitutes short aliases for longer, presumably hard to remember urls. Created in 2002, it has been of limited use on the web and has occasionally been misused by affiliate or scam websites that wanted to get clickthroughs without showing their domain identify. [All domains can be tracked back to their owner through the domain registration system administered by VeriSign].

The explosive growth of Twitter has dramatically increased the visibility of the tinyurl service because Twitter, with its limit of 140 characters per posts, doesn’t want a lengthy url to take up too much of the limited space. Typically tweets now contains dozens of tiny urls as the user references followers back to expanded content, usually on a blog.

It has not gone noticed in the SEO community that Twitter back links can be valuable in helping a website increase its page reputation, especially with Google. It’s not uncommon to see Twitter links  appearing in the first page of results to “link://www.yoursite.com” Google searches, which displays the list of inbound links to your site. So many webmasters would like to use Twitter to help increase the reputation of their sites.

The rub is if the back link is in the form of a tiny url, you can pretty much forget about getting any page rank boost from the link. As a result of the spotty reputation of tiny urls in the past, Google devalues any tiny url back links.

Twitter doesn’t automatically rewrite all urls as tiny urls. We’ve tested shorter urls up to a length of 31 characters and found the original links preserved. At the same time, we have found links of 41 characters to be rewritten as tiny urls. We’ve also found that longer “non working” urls not to be rewritten, so they must be employing some kind of test to see if the page displays. It doesn’t not seem to matter how much content precedes the 31 character url, as long as it stays within the 140 character limit. We haven’t had the time to test this extensively, so we’d be interested in hearing what other Twitter rewrite testers have found.