I was derailed when I couldn’t figure out how to get any output in the command line.  All I got was either the source code or a blank result.

This StackOverflow post helped a lot.  So here are the steps you need to take to get your WAMP server PHP code to run on the command line.

The end goal is to allow yourself to quickly run PHP files from the command line.  Your ending command line code will be

php my_script.php

Changing Environment Variables in Windows 7

1. Open up your System Control Panel and choose “Advanced system Settings”.
2. From the Advanced Tab, click on the Environment Variables button on the bottom.

3. From the System Variables section (bottom half) scroll down until you find the Path variable.
4. A lot of the time you’ll have additional filepaths separated by semi-colons(;) – they’re automatically added when you install some programs.
5. You need to add your WAMP php.exe filepath to the end of these strings.

6. NOTE: you don’t actually include the \php.exe portion.  With that in mind, you need to make sure there are no other files that start with php.  If you have a standard installation of WAMP you’ll be okay.  Just watch out for .dll files.
7. Once you’ve entered your path, hit OK and restart your comptuer.
8. Once you’ve restarted, try running a script by using

php your_script_name.php

You should be good to go.  Let me know if you have any problems in the comments.

So, you need a set of formats or text in every single excel workbook or spreadsheet you create.  You need to take a few simple steps to get this done.

1. Create a template workbook.
2. Create a template worksheet.
3. Point Excel to the location of the template files.

Creating Template Files in Excel

For any report that I create, I need to include the file path, the page number and my name.  It’s a pain because I have to enter in three sets of information on each worksheet.  So instead, I want to create a template in excel 2007 that will give me a standard, default footer across all tabs and in any new tab I create.  There’s a difference!

Step 1: Create Footers Across All Tabs

In Excel, the standard workbook has three tabs.  You need to make your changes across all three tabs.  For my default footer, I needed to add &[File]&[Path] | &[Page] / &[Pages] | WJohnson.  That’s standard for me.

Now that I’ve got my footers taken care of I need to save the file as an Excel Template file (.xltx).  Save this file in a folder that is dedicated solely to your startup files (I’d suggest in your documents, make an Excel 2007 Template folder and a sub-folder for your default files).  Save it as Book.xltx.

Step 2: Create a Template Spreadsheet

So with a workbook created, you need to create a default spreadsheet.  From the same Book.xltx, delete all but one of the tabs.  Save this as Sheet.xltx.  The names are important.  Book and Sheet templates override Excel 2007’s default behavior.

Point Excel to the Templates

You saved your default footers in Book and Sheet.xltx in a specific folder.  Now it’s your job to get Excel to open the template files when you open excel.

• Start off by going to Excel Options.
• From there you select the Advanced Tab.
• Scroll to the bottom of the menu.
• Get the file path of your default template folder created in the previous steps.
• Paste the file path into the “At Startup” box (see picture below).

That’s it!  Now, any new workbook you create will have your default footers.  Any new tab you add will also have the new footers!  So incredibly useful!

The One Issue:  The spreadsheet template doesn’t increment the sheet number.  When you add a sheet, it normally goes sheet1, sheet2, sheet3, … sheetn.  Instead it will just copy the name of the tab – if you named the tab in the spreadsheet “Sheet”, it would output Sheet(1), Sheet(2), Sheet(3),… Sheet(n).  I’ll update if I can figure out the incrementing!  Maybe, Mr. Excel has the answer.

I see marketers always getting hyped about the latest technology or the newest way to segment our data.  This trickles down to entry-level employees who think that is the way a search marketer become successful – by knowing the tools.  I absolutely disagree.  I believe that the vast majority of blog posts explaining success in every new technology essentially repeat themselves.

The same message boils down to understanding business goals, talking to your customers, knowing your tools, and knowing how to optimize.  This is how marketing students should look at AdWords or Email marketing or Social Media marketing.

Knowing the Business

Adwords and online advertising is looked at as if in a silo.  The big search engine marketing blogs talk about what they’re doing to optimize clicks or attribution models or state of the art technology.  What SEM blogs don’t talk about is matching business goals to your paid search marketing.  It’s really only web analytics professional like Avinash Kaushik that talk about things like that.

The business goals that you’re supporting drive your message, your account structure, and the tests that you run.  A company doing branding isn’t going to be looking for conversion tracking, instead they’ll use display advertising.  If you’re looking to build leads, does your CTR matter more than the conversion rate?

If you’re working in Customer Acquisition is it more important to get that one customer or is it more important to get customers that you retain year after year?  If you want to support existing customers, your keyword selection should be driven by existing customer interviews rather than the keyword search tool.

Typically the business goals are driven by your manager.  You should not confuse adwords goals with business goals.  If you play by Google’s rules you want to optimize clicks at all cost.  That’s the way to win at quality score according to Craig Danlouff.  Yet, it might cost you more to improve quality score, increase click-through-rate, only for conversion rates to drop as less qualified visitors arrive.

One thing that gets lost in eCommerce companies is the idea of the micro conversion.  In lead generation, you have whitepapers to be downloaded, email subscriptions, webinars to attend, and scores to be calculated based on all of those touches with the prospect.  Knowing what actions are taken that before a sale gives you more ways to optimize your marketing.  ECommerce companies should be looking at time on site, adding products to the cart, any requests for more product information, or clicks on related products.  All of these touches add to a visitors worth and gives you a better model for predicting a visitor’s lifetime value.

The basic knowledge you need is “What does my business want to do?”  If it’s sell more products, you build a strategy around selling.  If it’s find leads for the sales team, you build a strategy around building awareness and interest.

Knowing the Customer

The most important things you ever learn about your business, the product you sell/support, or the company you work for is through talking to customers.  From a keyword bidding standpoint, you’ve got to look at it in two different ways. (1) Using the language of your customers and (2) knowing when customers are going to buy.  From a marketing standpoint, it’s (3) knowing the message to use.

1. Using the Language of the Customer

You already know this.  Every business has it’s own nomenclature for product titles, descriptions, features, and benefits.  Keyword advertising is an awesome way to show just how weird your product descriptions are to real customers.  A customer is looking for a simple set of features using common terminology.    It’s easy to just load the data that your product team uses.  It takes effort to get things right.

2.Knowing When the Customer is Going to Buy

The words a searcher use has an intent, which follows the sales cycle of Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action.  The keywords that you bid on can dramatically influence the class of visitors you will receive.  Generic terms like “digital camera” are way back in the awareness/interest stage – they’re just building their consideration set.  As more knowledge filters into the searcher, they add more details in their queries.

Knowing the exact terms that a user types into Google when they want to buy saves you a lot of time.  However, your paid search campaign could be supporting earlier stages.  Maybe you need to educate the marketplace so you bid on generic terms that are lateral to the typical search terms.  So knowing the business directly impacts the keywords you should be choosing along with how the customer thinks about your product/service/problem you’re trying to solve.

3. Knowing the Message to Use

The ad copy you display is triggered by your carefully selected keyword.  So that means your ad copy should

• Speak clearly to the interests of the searcher – specific to the keyword searched.
• Use a call-to-action that jives with the intent of the searcher – are they ready to be sold or looking for more information?
• and the extensions you use or the sitelinks you want displayed all stem from what the searcher is looking for.

You can have the most generic ad text in the world, and it can work, but putting in the extra effort to have specific ad text helps support those business goals.

Knowing AdWords

This is where most young search marketers (and veteran agency search marketers) focus their time and effort on.  This is good. You cannot be a good search marketer without knowing the tool.  Knowing quality score formulas, knowing the options for extensions, the valuetrack parameters, and understanding how conversion tracking works is useful.

I honestly believe knowing AdWords (and you can learn all about adwords by studying for and passing the adwords fundamental exam) is a fundamental step for any online marketer.  Having a basic understanding of direct response marketing changes your mindset.  Instead of thinking of marketing as a communications outlet, you think of marketing as a sales tool that can drive a company’s profits.  The localization focus, the deep-links (relevance), and the compelling ad copy are all parts of online marketing that should be emphasized in every channel you use.

After you’ve spent some time focusing on AdWords, it’s important to double back and use what you’ve learned from your business goals and from your customers.

Let’s get into some examples (Business goal | AdWords implementation):

Find Qualified Leads | Decrease CTR with very specific ad text which increase conversion rates.

Sell a Product online | Tap into the Merchant Center and syndicate your product information.

Get an Email Subscription | Join AdWords’ beta on collecting email information through a search or display ad.

Get someone to visit your physical store | Use location extensions to provide directions.

Expand Internationally | Target a specific country or region or city that you want to advertise in.

Build Brand Awareness | Display advertising all the way.

You can even do some operational goals in terms of budget and ROI:

Decrease Costs | Use Automated rules to lower bids if your average position is too high or the Cost-per-Acquisition is higher than the value of the customer/sale.

Increase Sales | Use conversion optimizer to automatically bid higher for keywords and ad copy that is more likely to result in a sale.

By knowing the tools that AdWords (and AdCenter or whatever paid search tool you use) has available, you can restructure they tactics you use so that they support the goal of the business.  If you really want to know AdWords I strongly suggest you pick up Craig Danlouff‘s book.

Know Testing and Optimization

This is the fundamental of direct response and online marketing.  Knowing what to test and what is a successful test is one of the most important skills to have in online marketing.  Testing is a transferrable skill.  Email marketing, catalog marketing, even branding can use testing to see if there is a greater lift in one segment than another.  Even sales calls, the bane of so many marketing majors, can use testing and optimization practices to find better buyers.

In AdWords you have a few things to test or optimize: Ad copy, structure, and extensions.

1. Testing Ad Copy

The ad copy is the most important element of your marketing you should test.  There are interactive marketing books written about call-to-actions and writing copy in general.  You as the marketer need to understand what motivates a customer (see Know the Customer) and how to write something compelling within 90 characters.  Your job won’t be as hard as you might think if you introduce a testing driven campaign.

Eight out of ten test will fail, according to Bryan Eisenberg.  For good reason, too.  Your simple idea or brilliant spark of thought is going against the collective knowledge of your company’s entire experience.  If you work for a well-developed company, they already have tried great ideas and have the data to back up their way of doing things.  Testing can hurt too!  If your test drops conversion rates for 100 visits, you just lost real dollars.

2. Optimizing Your Account Structure

This goes back to knowing AdWords.  There are subtle ways that your account structure (campaign, ad group, keyword, ad copy, and targeting) influences your performance.  I won’t go into all of the details, but here are a few areas that you should look into:

1. Do your campaigns need to be localized?  Can you offer different promotions or services based on the region a user is in?
2. Are your ad groups narrow enough?  Mixing vague and specific keywords is trouble because your ad copy is going to end up being generic or not relevant to all queries it could serve on.
3. Is your ad copy specific enough?  If you’re supporting a product, spell out the benefits of buying the product or why they should buy from your company.
4. Is your display URL unique enough?  Who cares about display URLs?  Google does.  It’s actually a part of their quality score equation.  Make each category of product/service you are advertising a unique display URL; example.com/Toys isn’t as good as example.com/Action-Figures and example.com/RC-Cars.

3. Extensions Must Be Evaluated

The extensions you end up using can greatly depend on what your business goals are.  And in any case, an extension is only useful if it’s driving a positive result.  For example, you could spend thousands on building a sweet product database and an XML export so that you could submit it automatically to Google’s Merchant Center and other shopping aggregators.  Yet if you don’t get a single sale from a test run, why even bother?

The same goes for Location Extensions, Sitelinks, Call Tracking, or enabling Social extensions.  It’s really easy to evaluate them.  Turn them on, run for 21 days, take a look at the performance!  Rinse and repeat every once in a while to validate the results.

So now you know how to dominate AdWords in four steps.  Know your business, know your customers, know the AdWords tools, and know how to optimize.  Understanding the business and the customer comes from talking to others outside of your marketing group.  Understanding AdWords and learning about testing is really self-study.  And how you implement comes from understanding what the business is looking to accomplish.

Euclid Elements

Kontagent analyzes user behavior in mobile / social games.  Zynga built their own, but Kontagent lets you outsource the data collection and processing.  With so many actions that can be recorded and millions of users, you get a lot of data very quickly.  I’m following them because they’re another company that is churning data and serving up new ways for companies to slice their user’s behaviors.

Also, their website looks strangely similar to Mint’s homepage…

Lastly, Wooga is awesome – not because it’s a social games company, not because it’s a fast-growing company in the European Union, but because they bring people to Berlin, Germany.  Wooga reminds me of my high school dream of working in Germany.  Wooga makes me happy because they’re willing to build an international community within their company walls – they’re also willing to invest in teaching others the German language (through games of course).

BONUS COMPANY: Healthy Surprise

Healthy Surprise delivers Vegan, Gluten Free snacks to your door. Now, I can’t speak to how much data this group actually collects, but I think the opportunity to collect data is there. I know if I were running this company, I would be cataloging every single item I ship out along with satisfaction surveys.

I would include a leaflet in each box with a QR code that links to a personalized URL (PURL) that I can track their enjoyment of the snack. Plus, think about the list they’re building! You could rent that list of Vegan/Health nuts to any brand looking to release their new product.

October ACM Data Mining Camp in the Bay Area: This makes me so mad.  There are so many AMAZING and free events happening out west.  What are we doing in the Midwest?  We are the direct marketing corridor.  We live and breathe data all day.  We should be investing in our community.

Encrypted Queries: Google is planning on encrypting the queries that are sent on their SSL site.  I’m wondering if many people even use the SSL version of Google.  The remedy is to use your webmaster tools.  The data is just so bad!  Businesses are just dying for exact figures – even though aggregate data is good enough for trends.

ViralHeat Chrome Extension: ViralHeat is such a cool company.  They do sentiment analysis but are treating us to their API with a Chrome extension.

The AdWords Reporting Exam covers Google Analytics (GA), Conversion Tracking, and Google Website Optimizer (WSO).  Not only do you need to know the best practices, but troubleshooting issues – such as how website optimizer can prevent analytics from tracking – are covered.  I noticed that the Study Guide section is out-of-date.  They still make mention of the Reporting Center – an entire section of AdWords that was removed in favor of the Dimensions tab and the ability to download reports in each tab (Campaign, Ad Group, Keyword, etc.).

Before you take the Reporting exam, make sure you’ve passed the adwords fundamentals exam.  Here are the top observations from taking the exam.

1. Know How To Manage Google Analtyics, AdWords, and Website Optimizer Together

Because Google provides these free tools to optimize your website, increase conversions, and identify just where you ad spend is going, they want to make sure the person managing the data will know how to do it all.  The subtleties can include

• How to share only Website Optimizer data with an AdWords colleague.
• What might go wrong when connecting an existing Analytics account to AdWords.
• What level of access do you need to have in order to connect GA to Adwords.

2. Data Discrepancies Between GA, WSO, and AdWords

I saw several questions on why “an advertiser” would see differences between how Website Optimizer, Analytics, and AdWords report conversions, visits, and clicks.

• WSO only sees conversions and visits for the visitors that reached the test pages.
• WSO code may need to be customized to include any changes made in your GA tracking script.
• AdWords reports clicks that have been filtered while GA reports all visits to your site.

3. Troubleshooting

Really, this is what the exam was about. WSO, GA, and AdWords all have possible data issues which might not show in your interface.  Google quizzes you on what is the most likely issue causing the failure of reporting.

4. No Code – Just Understanding of Implementation

The Google Reporting Study Guide shows the code snippets that you would use for conversion tracking but you never have to identify whether the code is correct or not on the quiz.  However, you do need to know about google_conversion_value.

• Conversion tracking can setup a default value for a conversion.
• Useful for subscriptions, downloads, and non-E-commerce conversion or micro-conversions.
• You can have e-commerce value for google_conversion_value, but only if you use code to overwrite the variable.

5. Definitions

Now this should be a given.  You should know all of the terms like Bounce Rate, Search Query Report, and the difference between profiles and filters.  I wouldn’t say that there are a bunch of questions strictly on definitions, in fact an entire section of WSO was skipped for my quiz.

If you want to learn more about the technical nature and more examples of how you could use GA or WSO to optimize your site, take a look at the best interactive marketing books.

Don’t skip the bolded terms.  Spend a good amount of time looking back and forth between the study guide and the interfaces so you can both see and read the differences.

With only 100 questions and 18 different sections of the study guide, there is still a lot of ground to cover.  Let me know what more questions you have in the comments below.

Split testing your ads makes you look talented because of higher click-through-rates and potentially more sales / conversions. If you were asked “what would you do to make our ads perform better” you should show them that you make data driven decisions and would want to test ad copy to prove that it works better than old ad copy.

A split test consists of making a change to an ad and measuring the effect it has.  AdWords allows you to quickly create new ads and measure the effects on click-through-rate.

4 Steps to a Successful Split Test

Plan, think like a customer, test, and measure is all you need to do to make a difference in your advertising.

1. Choose the Ad You Want to Test

You will get results much faster if you focus on ads that will have the most impact. Just because management doesn’t see value in new ad copy doesn’t mean you have to test an ad group with 10 monthly impressions.

2. Create a Copy With a Difference

Think about what’s important to the customer when testing ads. It’s their motivations that drive the success of your ads. Use these three ideas as priming for your own ad copy changes.

• People are motivated by deadlines – add “Hurry!  Sale ends Oct. 5th” to the second ad.
• “Learn More” versus “Buy Now” could make a huge difference for a buyer that needs to research.
• Generate qualified leads by putting “Starting at $299 per Event.” rather than “Free consultation”.

If you’re really in need of ideas try picking up a few books on copywriting and psychology.

3. Evenly Test with Rotating Ads

At the campaign level, set your Ad Rotation to “Rotate” so that both ads serve the same number of times. Each of the ads will rotate serving each time a query triggers one of your keywords.  You could choose to use the “Optimize” setting.  This will force only the best performing ad to serve.  I think it’s more impressive to say “Out of 10,000 impressions on each ad, my changes resulted in a 7.5% CTR while the original had a 2.3% CTR.”

4. Measure and Explain the Results

The true measure of an ad is its click-through-rate – focus on CTR and explain why the change happened. You need to go back to step two and ask “Did I hit the right motivations?”  If the CTR tanked on your experiment, you missed the mark.

Run the experiment for three weeks before you start explaining – its enough time to get a good amount of data.

***Bonus Ad Copy Tip – Keep Your Promises***

When making your changes, keep in mind the landing page – if the landing page doesn’t echo the claim of the ad, you just wasted a click. If you end up using the “Learn More” versus “Buy Now”, send them to a resource and not just a product page.  The same time deadline you emphasize in the ad should be present on the landing page.

If you’re trying to gain support for new ad copy, you need access to the landing page to keep the message consistent.

In the end, you need to plan what to test, craft a new message geared towards the customer, test, and explain what happened.  Even if results of a split test come up dead even, you can always take your new ad and split test again.

Learning is the most important job you will ever have.  It’s a test of your resolve to choose between relaxing and learning but finding opportunities shouldn’t be your excuse.  Try any of these seven opportunities to find education that you can put on your resume, meet interesting people, and your company would be willing to pay for.

1. Your University

You know your professors, you know your way around the campus and you probably have courses you may have wanted to take.  It’s the easiest way to identify courses and will probably get you to the course faster.

2. Other Universities

Taking one course or a certificate series from a more prestigious university can be a way to connect with interesting people and add another line item on your resume that impresses.

3. Community Colleges

Cheaper cost and less impressive but it shows dedication to keeping up-to-date.  You can also find cool, local people that share your same interest.

4. Seminars for Success

Google has a series of courses on AdWords and Analytics.  It goes from concepts to implementation to optimizing.  Highly recommended if you are looking to get a solid grounding in Analytics or AdWords.

5. Association Courses

Local associations can be a great source of boot camps and smaller seminars / conferences.  I know the CADM hosts a Direct Marketing bootcamp

6. Conferences

Some conferences such as Strata and SMX offer mini training sessions on the first day.  However, a lot of conferences are inspirational or so high-level that you can’t find anything actionable.  Be very selective if you’re paying out-of-pocket to attend.

7. Do-it-Yourself

In all honesty, this is the best option to learning.  However, it’s not the easiest when you have a full-time job or are trying to get your company to pay for formal education.  I would say find a project to work on, volunteer, or consult / freelance before looking for formal education.

Formal education is the easiest to find and the easiest to fund with corporate assistance.  If you have the idea and the drive to build something yourself, go do it.  It’s harder to put on the resume if you fail, but it’s better to fail fast than to never have failed at all.

It’s hard for me to imagine companies without heavy internet advertising – I’m immersed in it every single day.  Any size business still spends on traditional media – print ads, flyers, billboards, TV commercials.  Because I’m all about online measurement I want to explore how you can measure traditional media that drives traffic online.

The Cost vs. Benefit of Traditional Media Driving Traffic Online

You can measure how many additional sales you have before, during, and after an offline campaign.  You can compare it to a year ago and make some best guesses but you will never receive the same accuracy as online.  Despite being harder to measure you’re going to reach audiences you otherwise wouldn’t have.

My personal opinion is you should test all mediums you think are relevant – measure it and scrutinize it, cut anything that doesn’t reach your goals.  Measurement helps you find what isn’t working.

Using Microsites to Measure Your Offline Campaign

Driving traffic to your own website with online campaigns is easy to segment with your basic Google Analytics skills.  But if you add in your actions with the print ads you bought in a magazine, the leaflets you gave out, and the billboard you bought you’re going to have a lot of traffic that mysteriously shows up to your website.  The easiest way to measure how well your offline campaigns are doing is to create a microsite – a different website you create specifically for the campaign.

There are two ways of setting up a microsite:

1. Create a completely separate website focused on the goal of the campaign
2. Have the microsite redirect to your main website

Option #2 is okay but you need to properly tag your microsite redirect with Google Analytics parameters to analyze it.  With option #1 you have more upfront work (duplicating your content, tailoring it to your campaign’s purpose, and matching it to your campaign’s image) but everything that happens on the micro-site is the result of your campaign, not your original website.

Content on Your Microsite Should Reflect Your Offline Campaign

The promises you make in your ad should be reflected in the layout and copy – the headlines, the features you emphasize, the images you use.  That’s called “scent”.  So long as they can follow the scent from TV ad to your website – throughout your website – you send a consistent message and there isn’t anything that surprises your visitors.

Maintaining scent is a tough thing to do if you have a diverse set of offline ads – one with a cute animal mascot, the next with a clear selling proposition – your website can’t be as diverse as your ads without becoming confusing.  The Education Connection does a great job of connecting it’s TV ads to its different microsites.

Education Connection Commercials

Microsite 1: College in PJs

Microsite 2: School Anytime

You Need Content That’s Worth Typing In

The inherent problem with offline ads is that you need to type in the address.  If you have a complicated landing page such as http://example.com/special/new-product/2011 you’re asking for someone to drop part of the URL and only go with http://example.com.  Let’s say you’re advertising with a radio ad.  How can someone remember that long URL?

If you really need it to be your website as the landing page you have only one option: advertise something that they can’t find anywhere else on your site.  SAS placed full-page animal ads, they provided weird facts about animals like chickens and llamas and if you wanted to learn more you’d have to visit SAS.com/chicken or SAS.com/llama – you’d never see that information anywhere else on SAS.com.

You can try this with “What Happens Next” ads.  Get the audience’s attention and hold back the ending – forcing them to visit your website and its specific (short) URL.  It’s about creating a gap in the viewer’s mind.

What About QR Codes?

Quick-Response codes pop up on flyers, TV commercials, I’ve even seen one giant QR code on a billboard – that’s right, you’re supposed to pull out your phone and snap a photo of it while you’re driving… real responsible.

The QR code can direct a mobile phone browser to any webpage – effectively eliminating the “Long URLs are Hard to Remember” argument.  QR codes are great for mobile phone users but you will still need to either create a whole new mobile microsite or properly tag your QR code so you can analyze the effect of the campaign.

The next time you are testing an offline campaign, try a microsite instead of your own website.  See if that takes the headache and guesswork out of proving your campaign did great.

I’m off to the Bristol Renaissance Fair today, located next to the impressive corporate headquarters of Uline.  I’m doing some last minute research on what events and what there is to eat but each page view is a slow torture.  It takes the site over 30 seconds to load.  The RenFair has put together a beautiful website and very informative.  The dramatically slow load time makes me wonder, how many tickets did they lose because of this?

Their slow load time is being caused by several problems.

1. Multiple CSS and JS files being requested – combine these files and you make fewer requests.
2. 75% of the HTTP requests are for images – use CSS sprites to combine it into one request
3. The biggest problems are two elements that return an error and delay loading anything else – get rid of those.

Just because their event is about the Dark Ages, doesn’t mean their website has to be developed in the same age.

Try running your own web page speed test for other slow loading websites.  It’s easy and free.