Results tagged “cpc” from Portent Interactive, Seattle, WA
As we all already know Google AdWords has beta testing the AdWords Bid Simulator feature since late May/early June. So what’s new since then? I’ll show you: Previous screenshots of the new feature have not included this Cost versus Clicks graph, which gives you a nice visual on how your estimated stats will look like with an increase in bid. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much else on this new feature, it’s been like an Easter egg hunt just to even find campaigns that have it enabled. What we do know: It’s campaign based, not just account based. Last week I
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Continue reading AdWords Bid Simulator Update
As promised, my presentation from the SMX Advanced session Writing Killer Ad Copy. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. And you’ll completely re-think how you write ads. Keep in mind that this presentation was created for advanced paid search specialists. The purpose of the session was to get people thinking “outside the box.” My job was to go so far outside the box that it would be almost uncomfortable and to also bring humor to what can be a very tedious job, managing paid search campaigns. Writing Killer Ad CopyView more OpenOffice presentations from Elizabeth Marsten. Read the warnings and disclaimers slide
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Continue reading Writing Killer Ad Copy...and not getting arrested
That’s right, yours truly is on one of many SMX Advanced panels this June 2 and 3rd in Seattle, dedicated to organic, paid search and internet marketing tactics. In particular my panel is on the paid search track for “Writing Killer Ad Copy- The Interactive Edition.” After the conference, I’ll post my presentation here (or rather a link to it) for those that couldn’t make it across the country or foot the entry fee into the conference. A sneak peak of what I’ll be presenting on: Writing ads that use guilt or are aggressive: Buy My Stuff Now Hey You!
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Continue reading Writing Killer Ad Copy: SMX Advanced Seattle Speaker
This week as part of the MSN AdCenter Spring Upgrade a new feature was released that’s been a long time coming: Content Network reports! Ever wonder what those mystery “Microsoft property sites” are? I sure have. I asked an AdCenter rep once and got a “we don’t know either” answer which I found pretty unsatisfactory. But now we can see where on the content network of Microsoft sites our ads are showing and even going that extra step to block a few. So what do we do next? Rip it apart of course! Accessing the reports is easy enough through
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Continue reading MSN AdCenter Content Network Reports
We’re all very well familiar with Google’s myriad of keyword generation tools, be it within the AdWords interface, the external keyword tool, by URL, by similar keywords, by topic or the new “search based keyword tool.” Then of course each search engine has it’s own keyword tool generator, add in the Wordtracker, Wordstream and Trellian’s of the world and you’ve got a lot of resources. But where do you go to find those really weird and whacky keywords that you should be bidding on? Or at the very least, expanding your negative keyword list with? Ask.com is Useful? eVisibility’s post
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Continue reading Keyword Resource Tools that Aren't Keyword Tools
Are you tired of having to run a report in AdCenter every time you want some stats that aren’t: Yesterday, Last 7 Days, Today, This Month, Last Month, Last 3 Months, Last 6 Months, This Year, Last Year or Entire Time? Or in my case, I’m tired of deciphering just what would be 3 months after last year’s before entire time. Do you feel that the gold colored “Loading” circle spinning and spinning and spinning was placed there just to taunt you? Relax. The developers behind Microsoft AdCenter finally decided to stop loading up on predefined date ranges and now
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Continue reading Microsoft AdCenter Finally Brings Us Custom Date Ranges
AdBrite has been around awhile, they’ve been conventioning and promoting and press releasing, trying to grow their brand and their business and I have always been a sucker for testing a new platform. You just never know when you’re going to find that 2nd or 3rd tier platform that turns into a gold mine. Previously I had taken them for a spin on an affiliate site as a publisher, just to see if I could find another source of income by the pennies other than Google AdSense for automatic ad serving. (Not the kind where I go out and
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Continue reading AdBrite: Trash or Treasure?
Back in September of 2007, Yahoo announced the ability to choose Pay Pal as a payment method for adding funds to your search marketing account. Up until now, I hadn’t had a use for the option and continued doing manual refills, automatic deposits or invoicing for clients. But then a client came along (me) that had a free $100 advertising credit if I opened a new Yahoo Search Marketing account. All I had to do was put down the minimum deposit of $30 to get the $100. Sounds like a great deal for the small business right? Right. I went
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Continue reading Paying your Yahoo Search Marketing bill with Pay Pal
We’re all familiar with the wedding industry’s spending power, no matter what the economic climate, the lavish wedding will always prevail. The industry is highly competitive with high barriers to entry, so how do you generate a positive ROI in a sector that can bleed your budget dry within an hour? Build Up & Be Smart. Pick a few items or products to start out with. Go with broad long tail keywords and with more of a budget on those niches rather than trying to break right out of the gate into [wedding invitations], [wedding favors], [wedding dresses] and [wedding
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Continue reading Winning In the Wedding Industry with PPC
Since the latest Quality Score update, one of the new features was doing away with the “inactive” classification for keywords whose maximum cpc was below that of Google’s set minimum bid. Instead we have the “first page bid” qualifier which will label keywords with a maximum cpc too low to appear on the first page of search results. It’s been said already that by creating this label Google is admitting that having your ads on any page but the first page is an exercise in futility and what we all already know, that you’ve got to get on that first
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Continue reading More Revenue for Google with First Page Bids
Continuing our coverage on 2nd and 3rd tier PPC engines, we’ve come to ABC Search. A little platform that could out of Encino, CA. ABC Search is a search engine themselves, but also rather a mediator and distributor of ads to partner sites from advertisers through their "Adentify" content network. They claim 1billion searches a month and have been around since 1998. From the advertiser side, I can say that this is one of the few 2nd/3rd tier engines from which I have seen a consistent positive ROI and not just in 1:1 or 2:1, but during seasonality highs, up
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Continue reading ABC Search | A Positive ROI
Once again, it’s that time when Google AdWords announces to the world that they will be tweaking their Quality Score algorithm. Rather, as they put it “making an update.” Each time these “updates” occur, I end up on the phone with a Google rep. Each time they’ve done this though, I will give credit where credit is due, they’ve gotten smoother and smarter about the transition. Claiming to be rolling this out to a “very small segment” of advertisers and gathering feedback before unleashing their changes system wide, is a far cry from the day I would login and find
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Continue reading Quality Score Updates Make Me Nervous Too
Most optimization tips and instructional guides cover the big 3 of PPC search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN. But what about all those little guys out there? Have you tried any of those yet? I’ll review some 2nd and 3rd tier interfaces in the coming weeks, how the traffic was, how much it was, the return on investment and the customer service. In the meantime, I’ve put together a short checklist of must do’s before deciding on whether or not take one of those lower tier PPC search engines for a drive. This doesn’t include sites that are content or
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Continue reading Top 11 Tips for Picking a 2nd or 3rd Tier PPC Engine
If you're like me, you have your Google Reader set up to feed you all the latest, greatest and newest news, tips and tricks in the world of pay-per-click marketing. At the very least you're set up to receive recaps or topical news items. I noticed that when I receive recaps from Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, SEO Roundtable and their like, their stories rarely match up with the muck and the ilk I find in my Google Reader. Why? Because respectable news sources like the sites I linked to filter out articles from zealous spam laden proprietors whose
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Continue reading No Deep Secrets In PPC Marketing
Not everyone has the ability to work with Yahoo and receive the occasional free optimization help from their “experts.” If you do, carefully review the ads that come back. Several times, I sent in existing ad groups for help with ad optimization (who knows what will get a better quality index score than the search engine itself, right?) or requested help to build a new ad group to save time, only to have to tear down the ads returned. It wasn’t that the PPC advertisements were unrelated or made no sense, but they were still wrong in that the
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Continue reading Yahoo Outsources Your PPC Ads to India
The display URL in any PPC ad is a great place to stuff additional keywords, attract attention to your ad and/or increase branding. So it is definitely not a space to be wasted or ignored. Next time instead of simply putting “www.yoursite.com” as the display URL, try some of these simple tests and see if you can’t increase click through rates! 1st Display URL Vs. 2nd Display URL Test http://www.examplesite.com www.examplesite.com No “http” www.examplesite.com examplesite.com No “www” www.examplesite.com www.Examplesite.com Capitalize first word www.examplesite.com www.ExampleSite.com Capitalize first letter in all words www.examplesite.com www.examplesite.com/product Adding keyword to
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Continue reading Do Not Waste PPC Display URLs
When you read that paid search and organic search require separate content strategies you might think, “Duh! That’s obvious.” Except that something happened to me last week, and this was not the first time. A Portent’s client earned a top ten ranking for an important keyword, one right near the top of the keyword chart. Time to cheer, right? Except, Google selected a different “landing page” than the one we optimized and targeted for this particular search query. Instead of celebrating a profitable new top ten ranking I found myself asked how to move the ranking result away from
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Continue reading Paid Search & Organic Search Require Different Content Strategies
These days Ask.com seems to be flailing, desperately trying to control the bleeding of is its’ visitor base and PPC advertisers. In the world of PPC search engine marketing, I have found increasingly less value from Ask’s paid search advertising program and stopped using their service altogether for several clients. If you cannot get a keyword to convert in 2008, one that easily converted in 2007, and especially during the keyword’s peak season, something is terribly wrong. Another issue I am experiencing is Ask double serving ads: One is from Google, as a Content Network partner. The other comes from
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Continue reading Ask PPC Advertising Pushing Me Away
Much like the mystery of the Big Mac’s secret sauce and Colonel Sanders 11 herbs and spices, we’ve all speculated what exactly makes up the closely guarded formula that determines Google’s PPC Quality Score. What are all the factors? How much weight does each factors carry? How can I exploit this to my advantage?! Last week Search Engine Journal posted screen shots of tiny suspicious text beneath Google AdWords ads. The text icluded pScore, mCPC and thresh. This spurred much discussion concerning what these terms mean and why they appeared. Google issued a statement to Search Engine Journal citing a
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Continue reading Google Leaks AdWords Quality Score
Once in awhile you get a client who’s site offers a lot of little specific products that is great for niche keywords but low traffic. Those keywords are great when they convert, but the real traffic is in the high competitive keywords that bring the visitors to the site. These visitors that search by the broad terms most of the time don’t actually know what they are looking for yet. It’s a “I’ll know it when I see it” type of shopping mentality. So, the question is: how do you get the most out of those big terms you have
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Continue reading Make the Most of High Traffic Keywords
