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Tim Ogilvie's Blog (12)

Video tutorials

We've added a number of video tutorials around the site. There are two on the homepage (www.soothware.com) that provide a little more detail on the Soothware service and how to get started. We've also added a number of videos in key areas of the site that provide additional detail on how to take advantage of our conversion tracking, our bid management tools, our reporting, and our campaign management section. We plan to add new tutorials for all key areas of the site - stay tuned. Continue

Added by Tim Ogilvie on April 5, 2008 at 6:30pm — No Comments

Soothware at AdTech San Francisco

A few of members of the Soothware team will be in San Francisco for the Adtech conference (Tuesday the 14th and Wednesday the 15th). If you're in the area, or in town for the conference, let us know and we'd love to meet up. Continue

Added by Tim Ogilvie on April 3, 2008 at 6:37pm — No Comments

Search marketing expo (SMX)

The Soothware team is currently exhibiting at the SMX Expo hall for the next two days (Feb 27 & 28). We'd love to meet you if you're in the area and would like to stop by! We'll also have a booth at Search Engine Strategies in NY (March 17-20). If you like to meet up at either location, please drop us a line! Continue

Added by Tim Ogilvie on February 27, 2008 at 12:33pm — 2 Comments

Tracking display advertising & email

We've recently added the option to track your display advertising, email advertising and other online marketing placements through Soothware. This allows you to track the performance of external placements alongside your SEM spend and understand what is working best for you.

We don't currently offer optimization services against this spend, but it's a solution that we're outlining right now. Expect a solution sometime in 2008 that will likely include the Right Media Exchange and other… Continue

Added by Tim Ogilvie on January 3, 2008 at 9:53am — No Comments

Soothware Agency Access

If you visited our booth at ad:tech New York, you'll know that we just released our Agency Access product. This allows agencies to manage all of their clients from a single master account, while providing individual logins for each of your clients.

Agency Access provides a quick snapshot into the total spend and total revenue earned by each of your clients. From here, you can drill into their account, allowing you to manage their Soothware account directly.

You can learn more… Continue

Added by Tim Ogilvie on November 9, 2007 at 8:30am — No Comments

MSN integration

We've released our integration with MSN AdCenter into production. You can now add your accounts, centralize your reporting and use our optimization services across all of your accounts.

If you're a new user looking to get started, you'll have the opportunity to provide your MSN credentials during the signup process. If you're already using the system, login and click on the My Account link to add MSN to your account.

Please let us know if you run into any problems or have que… Continue

Added by Tim Ogilvie on November 8, 2007 at 8:52am — No Comments

Securely passing revenue data

We've made a quiet upgrade that's worth mentioning: We can now accept a variety of hashing and/or encryption techniques to pass us real-time revenue and/or profit data without sharing the info with the world.

If you're concerned about keeping this information proprietary, please contact us at accounts@soothware.com and we'll help you find an easy way to pass us the data in an encrypted fashion.

Continue

Added by Tim Ogilvie on October 22, 2007 at 2:22pm — No Comments

Tracking ROI (even if it's not lead gen)

This recent post on SEOBrien says it all from our perspective:

Managing a campaign effectively means getting a solid handle on your ROI, and every marketer can (and should) define their ROI through some type of measurement. I once had a boss who drilled the maxim: "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" into my head and they are words to live by.

Soothwa… Continue

Added by Tim Ogilvie on October 4, 2007 at 4:37pm — No Comments

Pixel tracking discrepancies

Soothware uses a tracking pixel to determine the number of conversions (and for ROAS goal, gross sales) that you earned from your search advertising. While this is a fairly standard way to measure, there are frequently small discrepancies between the numbers that we report and the numbers you may see in your own sales dashboard. Soothware numbers are typically lower than the sources.

There are a variety of reasons for these differences but, like cockroaches in New York city, stamping t… Continue

Added by Tim Ogilvie on August 19, 2007 at 3:30pm — No Comments

Affiliate arbitrage with Soothware

Affiliate arbitrage is the practice of buying pay per click advertising on the major search engines and directing that traffic to another advertiser's web site. Companies like Azoogle Ads, Commission Junction and others provide a marketplace of affiliate offers where advertisers offer to pay on either a Cost Per Acquisition ("CPA") or on a Percentage of Sales ("% Sales").

The key to success with PPC arbitrage lies in making sure that you're constantly tracking each keyword's performanc… Continue

Added by Tim Ogilvie on August 18, 2007 at 3:30pm — No Comments

Experimenting on New Keywords with Soothware

Constant new keyword experimentation is one of the keys to growing PPC campaigns. In a previous post on PPC arbitrage, we determined that each click from the keyword “online dating” had an Expected Value ("EV") of $0.21 after measuring the conversion rate over 100 paid clicks. Setting our maximum bid to this EV or lower ensures that all of the paid clicks we purchase are profitable.

Experimentation doesn’t… Continue

Added by Tim Ogilvie on August 16, 2007 at 3:59pm — No Comments

Minimum Number of Clicks

When experimenting with new keywords, we measure the keyword’s conversion rate by measuring conversion against test clicks. Since the keyword market is fairly competitive, it's important to keep the number of test clicks to the minimum we need to confidently place a value on each keyword.

This is a tricky issue: using a high number of test clicks will ensure that your Expected Value ("EV") estimates are accurate, but costs more money to test. Conversely, testing on only a few cl… Continue

Added by Tim Ogilvie on August 16, 2007 at 3:57pm — No Comments