Google just released their retail industry newsletter for September 2007. This newsletter in particular is talking about Halloween and offers suggestions for businesses running seasonal campaigns. Some of the main points are:

Being Creative

If you sell a variety of items you might want to think outside the box in terms of what you offer. Besides your typical items like costumes think about other money making products that are in your inventory. I would suggest you setup your campaigns based on product and price range within those products. Read more »

We encountered a situation last week where we wanted to promote a particular news story on one of our sites using Pay Per Click. We saw amazing click through’s and low bids until we got a message from Google saying the status of our ad was “Disapproved”Google has various criteria that they examine in their approval process but the reason this particular ad was disapproved after running for a short time was because of our destination url. This page we were linking to, our “landing page” had a popup on that page. Google does not allow popups on landing pages regardless of the content.

Here’s what Google officially says about this:

“We do not allow links to landing pages that generate pop-ups when users enter or leave your landing page. We consider a pop-up to be any window, regardless of content, that opens in addition to the original window.”

I for one despise popups and see no value in them but there are sites out there beyond our company that get good money out of these ads. If you are running these make sure you have a mechanism in place to block these ads through JavaScript on your site or another means to ensure your PPC ads aren’t disapproved and your site visitor gets what they want.

I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a Search Engine Marketing blog for a few months now.  I’m an adamant reader of a few blogs in particular which you can see under “Sites I Use”, and I would like to think that I have industry knowledge that I can share with others.  So now after testing a few layouts I feel ready to get started and hopefully do my part in helping others in this growing industry.

If you have absolutely no idea who I am, I am a Search Engine Marketing Specialist for E.W. Scripps or just Scripps as we call it.  Scripps owns such companies as HGTV, Food Network, Shopzilla and they also have a division called Newspaper.  I work for the newspaper division spending most of my day managing PPC campaigns for our 14 or so newspapers but also working on SEO projects as well.  If for some reason you want to know more about me then you can visit the about me page.

I’ll be adding more to this site as time goes on in terms of functionality but for the time being I’m going to focus more on the content.  Feel free to comment on any of my posts and I look forward to having a full share in the SEM blogging community.