» pay per click

I am pretty suprised that Search Engine Land decided to publish the article called The 5 secrets PPC agencies dont want you to know. I get sick & tired of people who write articles with an agenda and this seems to be yet another case of self serving rubbish. If you havent read the article, the author Jon Miller of Marketo basically dismisses the use of PPC agencies & pushes for the use of automated technology that can be used in-house. Suffice to say, Jon Millers bio at the bottom of the piece explains exactly what his business offers. Jon Miller is VP of Marketing for Marketo, a prov...

So in yesterdays post, I noticed Google were testing the yellow background and search product features more widespread. TheInside Adwords blog has now confirmed two changes to how the top paid adverts are displayed. First of all, the yellow background is here to stay. Adverts in the central top positions will no longer have a blue background,instead the pale yellow. Why? Not just for a new look as the Inside Adwords blog suggests. The tests must have revealed a certain amount of banner blindness from the older norm blue background. The yellow background will place greater emphasis on the top ...

1) Because It Was All SEO - When I first stumbled into the industry, a lot of news I read was SEO focused. I am equally enthusiastic about organic search now, but at the time there was little in the way of a PPC dedicated news source in the UK. I decided to give it a try. 2) To Learn - I wanted to continue to develop my learnings on the web and not just with PPC. This blog has been a learning process in itself, but its also helped me clarify thoughts, keep up to date with the industry, bookmark information and discuss. The blog has developed as I have. It has ranked 1st page for both PPC and p...

Ive been meaning to discuss bid management solutions for a while and there has been some interesting developments in this field over the past couple of weeks. Firstly Google snapped up DoubleClick, adding DART search to their inventory and now it seems Microsoft have acquired ad firm aQuantive, owner of Atlas. Moving back to my original intention of discussing bid management tools, I wanted to look at there value today in an ever increasing opaque bid landscape. While bid management systems offer a single source for PPC multi channel control and management, there has been a fair amount of gru...

1) You need to be number 1 – Leave your ego at the login, you do not have to rank number 1 for the pay per click campaign to work or to get volume. Concentrate and optimise on conversion and ROI 2) You will pay 1p a click if there are no other advertisers – Minimum bids & actual CPC are quality based & some engines have set minimum CPCs. 3) The content network is all bad – Actually no. There are a lot of scare stories out there but in fact the content network can perform very well in some markets and for certain businesses. Set up the content network seperate to sear...

I am suprised by how often I still see how budget caps are used in PPC campaigns. Such a basic thing can make a real difference to performance and return. Budget caps are there to prevent you from overspending as a safety precaution and are not a primary method that should be used to control spend. They are great as a fail safe measure but they are not a performance effective method of controlling spend and are often a sign of a lazy marketeer or someone who does not know what they are doing. Budget caps are great for those new to PPC but experts should know better and be able to control spend...

Am I being to cynical but page load time as another factor in quality score?. Why? According to Google its all in the name of user experience and hence its going to be added into the quality score algo in Adwords sometime soon. I dont get it. Why bother? Surely if site load time is long and delayed meaning the user experience for a visitor is that awful then they will simply go elsewhere, meaning the advertiser will lose out on conversion. Ultimately if it was that much of a problem it would be detrimental to the advertisers business and they would naturally drop out of the bidding or just fix...

Interesting article over at Conversation Marketing about bidding on your own brand name. The post throws up some good arguments, but like all things in life one rule simple does not fit all. Aswell as reasons to bid on your own brand there are equally very good arguments against bidding on brand and it really depends on the business circumstances as to whether it makes sense for you. When bidding on brand one thing you should always do is track brand performance separately from your non brand campaigns. There are some agencies who will encourage you to bid against your brand and then proc...

Some interesting talk today of ways of using paid search to play with your competitors. I am sure many advertisers have noticed incorrect prices, promotions, erroring destination urls or just plain poor adverts for their own campaigns – whether it be down to an in-house team, their agency or affiliates. It can be a very frustrating process tracking down who is running the offending advert and getting it amended to display accurate information. The reason is anyone can run any advert as anyone else. I can run an advert with the display url set as any company in the world. So can anyone el...