I’ve been blogging here for almost two years now, and I haven’t accepted comments because of the massive volume of blog spam. I routinely get 10-20 attempts to post spammy comments every week, so I’m sure it’s a problem. So many folks have requested that I enable comments, though, that I began looking at a solution in October. After some testing and modifications, and now that I’ve gotten some free time to implement it, you can post comments here on the blog. I welcome your feedback and look forward to the dialog!

Google’s Inside Adwords blog recently provided some insight into Google’s quality score that’s used to rank your Google Adwords ad. This information is a good read for those of you that manage your own Google Adwords campaigns.

According to Google’s Ad and Quality Performance section in their Adwords Help Center, Google Adwords quality score is defined as:

Quality Score = (keyword’s CTR, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance)

Editor’s note: “CTR” above is “clickthrough rate,” or the ratio of the number of times the ad is seen to the number of times the ad is clicked.

It turns out that quality score isn’t a number (at least not outside of the Google compound), but you can still find out where you stand by doing the following:

The best way to calculate your Quality Score is by looking at each keyword’s minimum bid. The lower the minimum bid, the higher your keyword’s Quality Score.

What’s encouraging about quality score is that Google Adwords consultants like me can improve ad copy, relevance and landing pages and pay less for traffic:

You can also try to reduce your keyword’s minimum bid by increasing its Quality Score.

In my experience, landing pages are often the most neglected part of the ad campaign. Google Adwords can send lots of traffic to your site, but how effective is your landing page at directing traffic and building customer confidence? Most companies either send all of their Google Adwords traffic to their homepage or don’t properly optimize their landing pages. Here’s what Google has to say about what makes a quality landing page:

• The money you spend on AdWords ads will be more likely to turn into paying customers.
• Users develop a trust in the positive experience provided after clicking on AdWords ads (and this turns in to additional targeted leads for you).

Your landing pages will do these things when they:

• Provide relevant and substantial content.
• Treat a user’s personal information responsibly
• Develop an easily navigable site.

So there you go, an overview of Google Adwords quality score. My take on quality score is that the more effort advertisers put into crafting a quality campaign, the better their results will be. Additionally, a quality campaign costs less per click.

Recently, MarketingProfs had a good feature called Top 13 Marketing Budget Wastes–and How to Avoid Them. While most of the 13 wastes didn’t focus on online marketing, I found two of them compelling:

Marketing Waste No. 9: Failing to get the most out of your email marketing

A well-designed message (not necessarily a pretty one) can increase response to your emails by up to 50%! That’s a huge difference in the return on your marketing dollars.

There is no magic formula for a good email message. To make sure your message is well designed, you have to test every element of the message—from the subject line to the placement of the links and the call to action.

Not spending time to track the results from your email marketing campaign, failing to send compelling creative and not knowing email marketing best practices are the main reasons why companies fail to get the most out of their campaigns. So what should companies brush up on? I’d say the top issues are optimizing their messages for the preview pane (those of you with Outlook know what I mean), doing everything possible to keep messages from being caught in spam filters, providing intuitive navigation back to your web site, and using appropriate calls to action.

Marketing Waste No. 11: Losing people on your Web site

All roads lead to your Web site. Any serious prospect will be looking at your Web site multiple times throughout the interaction with your company—before, during, and after the purchase decision.

The first thing you need to make sure is that your Web site content is of interest to your prospects. The second thing is to have calls to action that will get your Web site visitors to engage—view a webinar, download a whitepaper, fill out a survey.

Last, you need to make sure that you can track these interactions. With this information in hand, you can fine-tune your follow up to match your prospects’ interests and avoid wasting valuable marketing and sales resources.

There’s a lot of meat to this point, and yet it just scratches the surface. To have an effective web site, it needs to be relevant, well-designed and usable. By “well-designed,” I don’t mean that it has to be pretty. Your web site needs to communicate your brand and also help people navigate their way through so they find desired information.

The point about tracking interactions is key. Companies need help learning what’s important to track, and how to act on the data. It’s not enough to know that you get 2,000 visits per month from your Google Adwords campaign — you need to know which keywords actually make the sale and what else to do with them, for example.

Another key point is that a web site must support the customer “before, during, and after the purchase decision.” It’s not enough to have great product information — the site needs to be easy to use so people can make the purchase confidently and easily, and then close the feedback loop once the purchase is made.

WebProNews is a site I discovered a few months ago, and their video coverage of the latest Search Engine Strategies conference is very good. Their newest video is an interview with two smart marketers with two first names, Allan Dick of Vintage Tub and Bath and Brian Mark of ToolBarn.com. Both of these sites started as small online businesses and now are among the top 500 internet retailers, so if you own a small ecommerce site or want to start one, you should take 15 minutes to listen to the interview.

Dick and Mark discuss many search-related ecommerce marketing strategies they use in their day-to-day ecommerce businesses, and they make some great points about the following:

• Using Google Adwords as a research tool to find top converting phrases as input to an SEO campaign
• How both companies handle local search and retailing to local markets
• Retailers’ perspective on social media and working with niche bloggers
• Advice for a budding online retailer — “Be open to trying everything”

I don’t want to give it all away, so check out the video.

I wanted to take some time out to give you a quick case study for a company that’s doing online holiday marketing the right way.

The company I’m referring to is Philosophy, a cosmetics company based in Phoenix, Arizona. For its holiday marketing campaign, the company built a branded holiday microsite. They didn’t stop there, though. They also crafted holiday-themed email marketing campaigns and banner advertisements, and they ran pay-per-click ads that directed traffic to the microsite.

The company’s email consultant helped it create a gift wish list email campaign that showcases the same visual design and branding as the holiday microsite.

The email camapign directs web users back to the online holiday boutique where where customers can create an online holiday wishlist. The downloadable wish list also provides customers that prefer offline shopping the opportunity to write their wishlist on paper and provides a list of retailers that carry Philosophy products.

Web banner advertisements touting the holiday message also ran on Oprah.com and WebMD, directing the customer back to the holiday microsite.

Philosophy also runs a Google Adwords campaign that is holiday-themed to drive traffic to the boutique.

Once Philosophy attracts customers to the microsite with the various forms of online advertising, they make sure the experience wouldn’t be a disappointment.

The holiday boutique does a great job at portraying a “magical” experience while selling products effectively. A large product presentation is shown on the homepage which rotates Philosophy products. Each product has a “shop now” button that takes customers to the product page on the Philosophy site where they can buy it. Customers can even “thumb through” the products by hitting a “next” button beside the product display.

All of the navigation in the holiday boutique is holiday-themed. Philosophy assembled six holiday-themed stores where customers can shop for similar product lines. The “need gift ideas?” section takes online shoppers to a gift finder on the Philosophy site.

There’s even a holiday sweepstakes where entrants can win Philosophy products. This feature helps Philosophy build it’s email marketing database while giving customers a chance to try their products for free.

Who would have thought that a business could advertise for a few cents per click and get a free landing page to boot? Google is removing another barrier for small businesses to advertise on its Adwords search engine advertising service. Google will help small businesses create their landing page and host it on Google servers.

Landing pages will not be full-featured web sites, but instead can include phone numbers, addresses and simple images. Clearly, this type of landing page is meant to serve the local search client — small businesses that rely on foot traffic or phone calls but still want to advertise on the web.