Are you thinking of outsourcing your search engine marketing (SEM)? Many businesses elect to outsource because they know that the use of experts can help increase traffic faster and achieve better search performance. The dilemma lies in knowing which firm to hire as an outside vendor. It’s an extremely important decision, because search is mission-critical and your selection affects the ability of your business to compete in today’s demanding business environment. Search is a vital...
Posts Tagged ‘PPC’
Help! I Need Somebody … For My AdWords Questions
Apologies to Lennon and McCartney for the beginning of that title, but I couldn’t think of anything other than that classic phrase when I was reading some posts today about how you can get in trouble with AdWords if you don’t follow the rules exactly and sometimes even if you do. Add that to the fact that Google is constantly tweaking things and it can be overwhelming to try to keep track of all the...
Digital Marketing For Analog Markets — PPC In An Emerging Market
[This article has been translated into Spanish and can be accessed here, if you would prefer to read it in that language] In late July of 2008, I was assigned the task of launching a SEM program for small and medium sized businesses in an emerging market. The SEM program included pay-per-click advertising on search engines using a fixed monthly budget. At that time, one study, commissioned by the Sales and Marketing Executives Association, showed...
PPC For Affiliate Websites – Challenges And Opportunities
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing has been a graveyard for a lot of affiliate marketing programs. In many cases, ambitious amateurs with a dream and a high credit limit have found that a lack of in-depth knowledge about Google Adwords, MSN (Bing) adCenter, or Yahoo Search Marketing led to a lot of click charges but few sales. However, there are a lot of savvy PPC practitioners in the world of affiliate sales, and some new products on...
Got A Question About Paid Search? Ask Some Experts
Came across this interesting and useful new site the other day and wanted to share it with you in the event that you aren’t aware of it. It’s called “Ask the PPC Experts” and is a place where anyone can send in a question about pay-per-click advertising in general or some specific aspect of their campaign that needs some tweaking and receive an answer from an actual, real, live expert. Obviously, questions may be submitted...
Yahoo! Search Platform Continues To Grow
Two weeks ago on, February 10th, Yahoo released two new search marketing products. Both products were unveiled to show the search market that even with the Yahoo-Microsoft ad partnership deal in place, Yahoo will continue to evolve and innovate in the search marketing space. Let’s take a look at the two new releases and see just what has been going on in the Yahoo lab lately. The first product they announced was the Y!our Ads...
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet With Paid Search
As the Google SERPs have changed and mutated through the last few months in particular, I’ve begun to wonder what’s going to happen to the good old paid search ads? For years, we’ve been saying things like “paid search ads, mostly of the pay-per-click variety are found along the right-hand side of the results page and/or above the general results in a box usually labeled as ‘Sponsored Results’ so that users can easily identify them...
Take Google's AdWords Recommendations With A Grain Of Salt
I recently ran into a service that Google offers to all of its AdWords customers, and it caught me by surprise at how lackluster the results were. The service is an AdWords optimization plan, but what I was looking at was anything but optimized. I believe there were good intentions with the plan, but it was so far off the mark that I could hardly pull any positive data from it to incorporate into the...
Google’s Click-to-Call Mobile Ads: A Lead Generation Direct Response Marketer's Dream
A few weeks ago — Thursday, January 28th to be precise — Google released a mobile feature that allows marketers to add a click-to-call mobile paid search ad to their paid search campaigns. While paid search is nothing new to the mobile world, the new feature of click-to-call has made it a much more accessible space to advertise in. This is an ideal setting for local businesses to advertise in, but it is also is...
