Pinterest: Social Media’s Rising Star

Posted by Rose Mountague on February 14th, 2012

Engagement, Social Media

Like it, share it, now pin it.

About nine months ago, one of my friends told me about ‘Pinterest’ – a new visual social book marking site that lets you collect, share and organise the images you like on the web. Being a graphic designer, Pinterest looked like the perfect solution to my overfilling, unorganised ‘inspiration’ folder on my desktop – so I signed up and was instantly hooked, preaching about Pinterest to all my friends and colleagues. Read the rest of this entry »

Developing Your Brand as a ‘Go-to’ Resource for Journalists

Posted by Amy Byard on February 13th, 2012

Media, Online PR

It is one thing to be pro-active within the online PR sphere, but it’s an entirely different ball game dealing with the reactive.

I’ve talked a lot before about symbiosis between journalist and PR, and this is precisely where that relationship can come to the fore. Read the rest of this entry »

Should women’s multi-tasking drive multi-platform marketing approach?

Posted by Fay Nyberg on February 11th, 2012

Brands, Marketing

The perceived ability of women to multi-task is often the subject of both boasts and banter, but a new report from Nielsen suggests that advertisers should be looking to use the tendency for women to do more than one task at once to their advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

Identifying Key Relationships and Cultivating Them = Linking Success

Posted by Jodie McDonnell on February 10th, 2012

Link Building, Online Marketing, Online PR, Social Media

In my last post I talked about how building key relationships with authoritative authors in your niche could prove to be beneficial to your linking campaigns, not only improving your chances of long term linking prospects through different outlets but also how placing more importance on who is linking to you than which site or page is linking to you, can empower your link with more trust.

With this in mind the next step would be to identify those authors and start making relationships. So . . . Read the rest of this entry »

Importing campaigns into adCenter Desktop from AdWords

Posted by Ryan Jones on February 10th, 2012

adCenter, Google Adwords, PPC

This is actually quite a straightforward operation these days (although one that has caused me plenty of headaches in the past) but can always be made a little smoother with a few tweaks to the basic process…

1)    Get the latest version of adCenter desktop (v8.2 or later). Previous versions had a character limit of 70 which caused problems when attempting to import AdWords ads with two thirty-five characters, as adCenter inserts an extra space between the two, causing errors. The latest version helpfully allows you to have 71 character ads.

2)    Export (as a CSV file) the campaigns required from AdWords Editor. Open up the file in Excel as it’s much easier to make any required changes at this stage rather than after importing into adCenter.

3)    Keyword match types should automatically map to the correct types in adCenter, except it won’t recognise modified-broad matches, so if you have any in AdWords either remove the plus-signs, or scrap these keywords altogether if you don’t want to go ‘fully’ broad.

4)    Delete any paused adgroups / keywords / ad texts etc – not a strictly necessary step but there’s no point uploading content that isn’t needed and will just slow down the upload.

5)    I also delete the rows relating to AdWords sitelinks – this step shouldn’t necessarily be required either, but I’ve run into problems here in the past so now I err on the cautious side and scrap them just in case.

6)    If required, add any URL tagging that is necessary for tracking purposes – for me this will usually be Google Analytics tracking parameters. Without adding these manually, your adCenter traffic will just show up in Analytics as organic traffic from Bing.

As a minimum I’d use the utm_medium and utm_source parameters but there are also a few useful adCenter query string parameters available to choose from, the most useful ones being {OrderItemId}, which outputs the keyword that was triggered, and {QueryString}, which gives the actual typed search phrase.

So a tagged-up example URL will look something like this:

http://myurl.com/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={QueryString}&utm_campaign=campaign1

Google’s URL builder can help with this.

7)    Save as a comma-delimited CSV file and import into adCenter using the ‘Import from Google’ option:

8)    Double-check adgroup and campaign settings and targeting to ensure everything has been imported correctly.

9)    Upload!

Have I missed anything? Does anybody else have any tips for importing campaigns without errors? Let me know below.