Google’s New Third Party Reporting Requirements

As a small business, if you are spending advertising dollars online and paying an agency or some other third party provider to manage this service for you, it is only a reasonable assumption that you would know what you are spending and what you are receiving in return for that spend.
Google’s recent announcement of a [...]

Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance: Preparing for the PPC Transition

In the last few weeks as more information has started to trickle its way from Yahoo! and Microsoft about the search alliance, I have started to share some information on this blog to facilitate this knowledge transfer. Ultimately every single advertiser who is managing a PPC account on both Yahoo! and Microsoft should be aware [...]

Getting the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance

Recently, I wrote about one of the main impacts of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance being the transition of Yahoo! Search to the Microsoft adCenter platform. For search marketers this is a fairly significant consequence of the Search Alliance, but for the searcher, the changes will not be as drastic.
So is anything going to [...]

Yahoo & Bing Merger – The Pain Awaits

In mid-2009, the Yahoo-Bing merger became final and a wave of speculation hit the market about what it meant for the search industry, searcher experience, market competition, SEO & PPC implications etc.
We are now in Q2 of 2010 and the hype has died down, people got used to the merger and the key focus [...]

Ad Sitelinks – Better for You or Google?

In late 2009, AdWords launched a new feature designed to ‘increase choice and relevancy in search ads’ by allowing you to provide additional links to deep content on your website.
If you are not yet familiar with sitelinks or you have seen it and wondered how to set up something similar in your AdWords campaign, the [...]

Your PPC Client Resisting Change?

It appears that there are still a number of people out there who implement a paid search campaign in AdWords and then once it is operating at an acceptable level proceed to switch their minds off and forget about it.
Once they have ascertained that the existing CTR is acceptable, CPC is not bad and conversion [...]

Rushing into Paid Search

Sometimes clients launch into paid search advertising, leaving the decision making to the agency without fully understanding the strategy being implemented. They nod, agree and seem to ‘get it’ so you proceed with the project, implementing structures that have been agreed upon, setting up the appropriate reporting to report on business goals and KPIs, which [...]

Paid Search Receiving its Due? – Part II

In Part I, we looked at two ways in which paid search may not be receiving its full credit – when lifetime customer value is not measured properly and when online sales tracking is not properly implemented in order to capture all PPC driven clicks.
In Part II, the focus becomes more complex because we dive [...]

Paid Search Receiving its Due? – Part I

Gone are the days when PPC was new, sexy and could do no wrong – in the wake of a crippling recession that continues to hold us in its grip in 2010, even online marketing programs are under greater scrutiny.
Clients are asking more tricky questions about their paid search programs in order to evaluate their [...]

What’s the Point of PPC?

Perhaps shocking but true, is the fact that there are still brand / lead generation / marketing managers out there who have allocated a marketing budget to PPC spend, but they do not quite grasp its purpose. What seems to happen is that upper management has experience with the PPC medium and they understand the [...]

keep looking »