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Without seeing you analytics I can't do much more, but with what you are saying I think you should re-look at how your thank you page is performing, see if that page is getting 2 around double as many page views as sessions, or if there are a large number of page views with less than 1 second, or if you look at your thank you page, is the previous page nearly 50% of the traffic.  If your goal is set up correctly the only thing that could be causing this would be the page double loading in quick succession or having 2 copies of your GA code on the page.

I can do that, send me a private with the domain/email

Thanks

I agree. Google should make the tests very difficult and require a very high score for a person to say that they are "certified by google". The test is easy and only 75% is needed to be "certified". Do you want a person who does not know 25% of the facts running your $20,000 per month campaigns.   That means that they are blowing $5000 per month. Google needs a kick in the pants.

We have found proposals to be a waste of time. We charge flat rates that are on our website. We have no contracts. We send them a 1-page summary that outlines the monthly fee, a recommended budget, and a blurb about how we  work. And that's pretty much it. Someone is either sold or not sold on the idea of paid search and Adwords. And a proposal from an agency will not change that. A conversation can. Same goes for whether they want to work with you. It boils down to price, and most importantly trust.

I would also make sure to include generic terms for the industry or type of company that is in the case study. So if someone was searching for "saving money in the widget industry" you might show up because you included the term "widget industry". Just a thought.

Its not always the person that pays the most that will out rank other advertisers The formula looks like this: CPC bid × Quality Score = Ad score (The highest scores will rank in the top) so what does that mean? Lets say that advertiser A has a Quality Score of 8 and he is willing to pay a max cpc of 2$ that gives him a total of 16 points ( 2$ x 8 quality score) But advertiser B is willing to pay 3$ per bid but only has a quality score of 5 giving him a total score of 15. In this scenario Advertiser A would get the top position. The avg _Quality Score is 5.. if you do a great job with your _Quality Score you will pay less to rank, and visa versa. __ __CTR has a huge impact on _Quality Score - So make sure your ads are relevant, interesting and standing out. ___

No problem! Glad I could help.

I have been using Captora in the past for more than a year and "auto-creation" is misleading. It assists you with creating content that lines up with (long tail) keywords that you have not covered yet with the content existing on your website, blog etc...adding analytics and some clever algorithms to the mix for compintel and prioritization.

While it might be questionable, throwing away a well-aged domain, it sure sounds like it's causing you some other issues, including bounce rate issues for people who find you simply because of partial domain name match against their queries. I'd be inclined to take the hit on domain age and move to the new site.  301 redirect the old site's pages to corresponding pages on the new site.  You can set up your old email address to forward to your new one, so people using the old will still get to you fine.  I wouldn't use the old email address on the new site, as you'll get people ignoring your emails because it's not from a site they recognize.

Thank you and yes we are doing that. We have requested a list of Google Proxies as many of the clicks come through them We are also looking for IP addresses that resolve to proxy servers. This is a manual task and the cost involved is reducing ROI. Sent real letters to customers last week for the first time in years. Fantastic response!!

You can use url rewriting to fix urls, no need of coding, just web.config http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14274370/url-rewriting-in-asp-net-4-0

You're correct and good catch! If you want that Ad History to remain, you'll need to duplicate the ads and update the URLs.

Hi Hutch42, Here's what we did. What do you think? We haven't implemented this yet. It's still in planning stage. Resource: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2082129/how-to-track-a-google-adwords-conversion-onclick

Thanks Steve! Yes, I totally agree. There are so many options out there for tagging and tracking. Personally, I prefer to leave it up to Google unless I'm tracking the information elsewhere (of course unless you're working with Bing, then you definitely need it!). Steve, do you tag all of your URLs even when they just go directly to GA from AdWords? When would you recommend using any manually tagged parameters? Thanks for chiming in!!

Thanks Richard. Just to make sure I checked this one, but nothing changed: we were already showing 100.00% and got the same amount of impressions.

Thanks Marie!

If it were a brand new site and the target markets were pretty equal (or the Brazilian market was relatively small), I think the sub-folder approach is a good bet. You could use <rel="alternate" hreflang...> for language-equivalent pages, and the combination of a .com plus language/country targeting should work fairly well. In this case, though, since the Brazilian market is so strong, and you're already dependent on that .com.br domain, I think making the switch completely would be very high-risk. From an organic standpoint, I would advise against redirecting the .com.br domain to the Brazilian sub-domainfolder I'd suggest either launching the new domain with  <rel="alternate" hreflang...>and no Brazilian sub-folder, or, as you said, setting up <rel="canonical"...>from the sub-folder to the .com.br domain (and keeping that the main site for Brazilian visitors). As the new site gains ground and you see how it performs, you can always switch them out later.</rel="canonical"...></rel="alternate" hreflang...> As Michael said, make sure you're not double-dipping on the Adwords side with two domains in the same region. That could land your account in hot water. For now, if the .com.br stayed canonical for Brazil, AdWords should continue to use the .com.br site. You can set up regional/country campaigns for the .com site and target them specifically. That shouldn't be a problem and will give you time to build up the quality score and history on the new domain.

Hi Jess, I'm not a heavy iOS user, but I've heard a few good things about this app: http://analytiksapp.com/

Since these are branded terms, I would recommend that you do a simple search on Google to see if your competitors are already paying for your branded term. Not all of them do, especially if your branded term is irrelevant to your products. More likely than not, if you are ranking 1 organically and not paying for your branded term in PPC you will still get upwards of 90% of the clicks. Most people searching by brand already know what they are looking for and where they want to buy it. They will look for your SERP. If you want to test the theory, turn off the paid campaign for a week and see if the traffic on branded terms increases organically or if you see a huge decline in traffic. AdWords is easy to Beta. Maybe it isn't cutting spend altogether, but dropping your bid to position three. Having two listings next to each other is the holy grail of SERP positioning.