On a recent trip to my local auto mechanic, I started thinking about how SEM professionals are similar to auto mechanics in the ways they are viewed by customers. Some of those views are good, some are bad. Here are 5 connections that I made between SEM professionals and auto mechanics:

In Part 1 of my Google Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) case study, I outlined the comparison between standard search text ads and Dynamic Search Ads for a particular product category for one of our clients.

Earlier last month, I wrote about my initial thoughts on Google's new Dynamic Search Ads. Recently, I've had the chance to test out DSAs in some of our clients' AdWords campaigns. My next few blog posts will center around the results of Dynamic Search Ads for one client in particular when compared to standard search text ads targeting the same product category.

On October 20th, Google officially released Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) as a limited beta. Basically, DSAs appear the same as any standard Adwords text ad, but are triggered by category selections rather than keywords. Advertisers can select specific product categories, site URLs, site content, or even page titles as their DSA targeting options.

Below is a video tutorial walking through the implementation of Ad Extensions within your Adwords account. This tutorial touches specifically on Location Extensions, Call Extensions, and Sitelink Extensions. Product Extensions will covered in a future tutorial, but you can get some additional information into Product Listing Ads by checking out this blog post.  Enjoy!

If you currently have a Google Merchant Center account, and are submitting a shopping feed to Google, you may want to consider running Product Listing Ads in your Adwords account as well. Product Listing Ads pull information from your Google Merchant Center account feed to display ads alongside other paid text ads. The main difference is that these ads are not triggered by keywords within your Adwords account, and will display your product image, price, headline, and descrition.

In my last blog post, I outlined the two main types of tests that PPC marketers should use, along with some of the metrics they should regularly apply those tests to. Now that you've conducted your tests and gathered your data, you're all done, right?  Well, not unless the data you have gathered is statistically significant enough to base conclusions on. 

In PPC (and most other forms of marketing), the name of the game is "testing." If you don't test different variables within your campaign, you will never be sure that the results you are getting are the absolute best. But what types of testing should you be doing? And what things should you be testing?  Below are some of the basic testing strategies used in PPC that advertisers use to refine their campaigns and improve performance.

There are two main types of tests that PPC advertisers will run in their campaigns - A/B testing and Multivariate testing:

As we've come to expect from Google, tons of great new features and updates have been released so far this year. Since we just passed the half-way point of 2011, I thought now would be a good time to take a look at some of the best features that AdWords has released this year (well, in my opinion at least). Take a look at the ones I have listed below, and feel free to share some of your favorite new AdWords features as well.

Google Instant Preview (GIP) was a feature that Google began rolling out for organic search results back in November of last year. This feature was recently applied to paid ads in April, and to be honest, I'm still not 100% sure how I feel about it. There are definitely some positive aspects to the preview feature, but there are also some downsides.