SEM Rock Stars
by Jessica Niver @ PPC Hero
 You know how sometimes when you're doing a big spring cleaning, you find a cute pair of shoes you forgot in the back of your closet for a year? And they are suddenly cool again!
You know how sometimes when you're doing a big spring cleaning, you find a moldy grape your cat batted under the fridge? And you realize: wow, there could be some special stuff under all of my appliances.
Though your PPC account doesn't probably contain anything as amazing as sparkly shoes or as gross as moldy fruit, we might put some keywords in a junk drawer or throw an ad group in the basement and forget about them. Maybe they're hard to handle, or maybe we're just not getting what we want out of them anymore and newer ideas look more promising. And we're probably all guilty of overlooking a few minor account problems in the interest of focusing on higher-priority areas. So in the interest of spring, I say we should all be getting things organized and cleaned up and finding awesomeness we'd forgotten about.
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by Craig Danuloff @ ClickEquations
The idea of creating highly targeted ad groups, so that all of the attracted search queries are well aligned with the included text ad copy, is one we've written about often.
One of the drivers is the fact that better alignment drives up click-through-rates and thereby quality score.
A number of recent conversations have suggested that this good idea, like many others, is being taken to absurd extremes.
I'm talking about the practice or ‘recommendation' of limiting ad groups to a single keyword.
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by Patrick Altoft @ Blogstorm
Google AdWords just got a lot more complicated thanks to a new feature called Search Funnels.
Currently, conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad someone clicks before making a conversion, masking the fact that many customers perform multiple searches before finally converting. AdWords Search Funnels help you see the full picture by giving you insight into the ads your customers interact with during their shopping process.
The process of tracking only takes into account AdWords ads so it's far from an ideal solution (ideally this would be done in Analytics, not AdWords) however it's certainly a big step forwards. Basically when somebody clicks on an advert Google monitors the other searches they perform for 30 days and, in the even that they end up converting on your site, all their searches and clicks where they either saw your advert or clicked on the advert will be reported to you.
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IQ Workforce Blog
by Corry Prohens
 Companies that are good at recruiting talent have huge competitive advantage in the marketplace. Companies that that recruit poorly damage their brands. With so much at stake it is amazing how few companies invest the time and resources into doing it properly.
If you have a team to build or rebuild, or if you just want to improve the level of talent in your organization, we have put together the cheat sheet below. These thirteen simple steps will enable you to lower recruiting costs, improve your time-to-hire on tough positions, improve the fit factors of your hires and protect (even enhance) your brand.
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The Latest Survey Results
Our latest survey concerns the recent news of Adobe's acquisition of Omniture. We wanted to get an idea of what the Web Analytics community thought about the acquisition. Here are the results so far:
Almost everyone was surprised by the acquisition. Only 1% kind of saw it coming and no one totally called it.
43% believe there will be no NEAR TERM (6-12 MONTH) impact on the pace and type of Omniture's product development.
35% believe there will be a positive LONGER-TERM (12-36 MONTH) impact on the quality of customer service and professional services.
45% said impact on Omniture's competitors (Webtrends, Coremetrics, Unica…) will be positive.
52% believe this a good thing for the Web Analytics community as a whole.
To participate in our latest survey - please visit https://app.icontact.com/icp/sub/survey/start?sid=3456&cid=127264. To see all our survey results - please visit our industry survey archives.
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