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Author: Nico Brooks

How Reviews Flow Around the Web

Click on the image for a big version, suitable for framing. My colleague Kris wrote a fine post a couple of weeks ago on the importance of online reviews for local business, and how to get them. Following that post, we did a little research to figure out how reviews get passed around between major

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What Percentage of Search Is Local?

I’ve had a hard time finding a good answer to this question: what percentage of searches on web search engines such as Google and Bing are local? I’ve heard wildly different statistics, possibly due to the fact that “local” is a difficult concept to define. Is a search for an area code a local search?

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Be Warned: Google Broad Match Keeps Getting Broad-Matchier

Google Ads “Related-To” Links and the Importance of Negative Keywords We have come across a number of instances recently where Google is broad matching terms that are barely related to the keywords we are buying. In some cases, the commercial intent of the broad match term is a complete miss with what our intent is

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SEM: Why You Shouldn’t Care About Minimum First Page Bid

Hardly anyone goes past the first page of Google results, so you want your ads to show up on the first page, right? That’s why Google prominently displays the minimum first page bid in the AdWords interface, right? Wrong. One of the things we do here at Two Octobers is to audit PPC accounts to

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How to Use Google Ads Match Types

Google Ads allows you to specify a match type for each keyword you bid on. Yahoo and Bing do too, though there are some slight variations in how they work.  The three match types in Google are exact, phrase, and broad.  The match type you choose tells the search engine when to match a user’s

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The Problem of Measurability

There is a basic problem with web analytics today. Web analytics tools give us data on what drives leads or web conversions, but the picture they paint is incomplete at best and can be misleading. As an illustration, below is a cartoon describing my own experience deciding on and purchasing a new brand of trail

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