One Half Amazing!

Infographic by PPC Blog

In November, Google launched a small beta of Ad Sitelinks.  Essentially, Ad Sitelinks is a feature for search-based ads that lets you include up to four additional links to deeper content on your site beyond the main landing page or link.  To give you a better idea, here’s what they look like.

Well, I guess the test was successful, because Google is now releasing the feature to all Adwords users.  In fact, they’re even reporting the advertisers are boosting their click-thru rates upwards of 30%!

Ad Sitelinks is available on the campaign level, so  before you turn it on you’ll want to make sure that the additional sitelinks you create are releavant to any ad in that particular campaign.  When a user’s search matches a keyword in your Ad Sitelinks campaign, Google will decide if your ad is up to snuff (ads with the highest quality score are most likely to contain sitelinks) to show Ad Sitelinks and whether to show the two-line or the one-line format.

To turn on Ad Sitelinks, shimmy on down to the Campaign Settings tab in your Adwords account.  Once you’re there, go to the “Show additional links to my site” section under “Ad extensions.”  All clicks are charged the same rate, regardless of which of the Sitelinks are clicked, but you may want to make sure you increase your budget a little in case you experience the same success as the beta testers.

Got questions or want to find out more? Check out the FAQ on Ad Sitelinks.

If Google or Apple went out of business tomorrow, which one would you be more disappointed about? Discuss.

You may have heard that Google Analytics opened their app store a couple weeks ago. No, you didn’t? Well, go there now and I’ll wait.

Campaignsync is one of the early entrants into the store and taking on a common frustration for new search advertisers.   Put simply, it enables search engine marketers to quickly import their Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter campaigns (PPC) and track their performance together through Google Analytics. Yes, there are alternatives and other ways to achieve the same thing, but the beauty of this app is its simplicity.  Just import your campaign in the form of a CSV file and Campaignsync will take the liberty to tag everything for you.  Post the file back to your pay-per-click account and you’re done.  Campaignsync is free. See the video below for their 4-step process.

In addition to the live stream below, you can also follow #io2010 on twitter.

Google I/O, which starts tomorrow, is our annual conference to help developers learn about the latest ways their applications can work with Google services.  If you develop applications or just are enthusiastic about using applications that interact with your Google account, you can learn the highlights of this year’s announcements by watching the live keynote streams.  See the Google Code blog for more details.

via Official Google Mac Blog: Google I/O: live keynote streams.

I’ve been a fan of Delicious for a while now (even back when they were del.icio.us), but the process of tagging and organizing saved bookmarks is often tedious.  I must admit, I really don’t use Delicious for all it’s intended.  I don’t share links with friends or create groups, etc. None of the social features are important to me.  I really just use it so I can access and save important bookmarks all in one place online. It’s been great; often I get better and more relevant results (depending on the search query) out of Delicious than I would from other search engines.

What many people don’t know is that Google has a bookmarking service with similar features as Delicious. If you have any sort of Google related account, its a snap to get started. Some of the main advantages of having Google Bookmarks over Delicious is the ability to use one account (Delicious is owned by Yahoo), better search technology and ease of use.

So if you’re in the same boat as I am and want to transfer your Delicious bookmarks to Google, but didn’t want to do it manually, I’ve got the solution for you. Persistent.info has created a Delicious to Google Bookmarks script.  Here’s how you get it to work:

• Make sure you’re logged in to your Google account
• Jog on over to Persistent.info and find their Delicious to Google Bookmarks script.
• Login with your Delicious password (Persistent.info publishes their source code, so rest assured that your credentials are in safe hands).
• Click import and wait about 20 seconds.
• Magically your bookmarks have now been moved over to Google Bookmarks.  Feel free to edit, remove, etc your bookmarks.  Google Bookmarks are marked private unless you tell them otherwise.

If you’re a Firefox user, check out the GMarks plugin.  Use it to help you sync, edit and remove bookmarks right on your local machine.

Google Bookmarks also includes a bookmarklet. Drag it to your browser toolbar and you’re making magical bookmarks in no time.

Have you tried Google Bookmarks or are you a Delicous die hard? Worried about the big, bad Google privacy gorilla?  Tell me in the comments.