So you've got your website all fired up, and you've set up your Google AdWords campaign. And your website is getting visitors.... yaaaay! You've added Google Analytics and you've set up a couple of goals so that you can track how successful your marketing efforts are being. So far so good. Or is it?..

To go back to a time before the internet was a significant force in business you don't have to go back very far. The mid 80's, in fact. Madonna was already a pop diva, hair was big, and Marty was heading back to the 50's to make sure his Mom and Dad got together. To go back before the days of Google is an even shorter journey... Madonna was still a pop diva but at least hair, whilst not quite normal, was back to more natural proportions. And businesses had started to embrace email and web pages and all that "new fangled stuff" that the kids were so keen on. Let's go back to those days...

In addition to being a Google Certified Partner - we are regular contributors to the AdWords Community Forum. Recently, another user asked how to reduce the cost per click on their keywords. As you can see from our response - copied below - the simple answer - Reduce your bids - is perhaps not the best. The simple answer is decrease your bids. But that's not going to be a valuable solution as all that will do is start you on a downward spiral ... you lower the bid, so your ad position falls, as a result your quality score is likely to drop, as a result your cost per click increases to maintain the same (lower) position, so you lower your bid, and on and on until your ads simply stop appearing and you give up...

Google has just published it's Zeitgeist for 2012. The annual Zeitgeist - from the German for "spirit of the times" - is exactly that - an overview of Google's users, based on the most popular search terms in different categories...