SEMPO announced an educational partnership this morning with yellow pages publisher Yellow Book, a division of the UK based Yell.  According to the press release put out, the SEMPO Institute "will be providing distance learning education for Yellowbook’s media consultant sales team." I believe this is the first such relationship between SEMPO and an individual yellow pages publisher, although the Yellow Pages Association is a long-time member of SEMPO. The deal appears to be about helping the Yellowbook sales force improve its ability to educate and sell SEM related products to local [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Marketing: Local Search Marketing | SEM Industry: General

On the face of it, bid management is a simple process. Lower your bids where you are spending too much for a conversion. Raise your bids where you are willing to pay more for a conversion. However, there are two hidden assumptions in the above "simple process" that can cause your bid management to be severely under optimized: Assuming all conversions are to be valued equally, and assuming you know where to edit the bids. Tracking conversion value as expected customer value For many AdWords advertisers, simply tracking conversions is an "advanced" tactic. High-performing marketers [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | How To: PPC | Search Ads: General

When I speak to lead generation marketers at conferences and shows, the first thing I tell them is to get beyond a Cost Per Lead (CPL)  metric and to tie their closed deals back to the lead and back to the ads that produced the lead. Once they're able to do this, they can then judge the performance of their ads in terms of profit and loss versus deeming an ad to be successful just because it produced a cheap lead. One question that often arises from lead gen marketers is, "How do I optimize ads when I have a long sales cycle?" This question comes from two types of companies: 1. Those wi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | How To: PPC | Search Ads: General

A couple of our paid search columnists have offered some great tips on generating ad copy. I’m going to build on this and talk about gearing ad copy to the consumer buy cycle. By targeting specific stages, advertisers can increase relevancy by delivering appropriate messages at the right time in the buy cycle. In this article, I’ll outline the various buy cycle stages and provide some ad examples (fictional) related to "on demand publishing." Stage 1 - Awareness While the right ad copy helps address buyers at the appropriate stage, it’s definitely the case especially at the awarene [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | How To: PPC | Paid Search | Search Ads: General

In this last installment of my series on "Making Search Campaigns Work Harder in the Downturn" (part 1, part 2), I will cover essential bidding techniques and strategies, and what I call "insider" bidding secrets. Let’s begin with keyword categorization. One way to categorize your keywords is to relate them to the number of conversions they can generate. You may categorize them into groupings called "head terms," "fat-middle terms," and "tail terms." Head terms generate most of the traffic to your website, but generally need to operate above your CPA goal. Fat-middle terms often meet your [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Features: General | Search Ads: General

Increasingly, savvy search marketers believe that the traditional approach of giving conversion credit to the last ad click is a flawed attribution method. Therefore, many of you have investigated or invested in technology that allows you to track beyond the last ad that is clicked so that you can perform attribution over the team of ads that lead to a conversion. With this new tracking in place, you then need to determine the correct attribution models, and it is at this point that if you are like most marketers, you get stuck. Why do we get stuck? We quickly realize that the argument cou [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Credit Is Due | Features: Analysis | Search Ads: General

According to data released yesterday by the IAB/PwC on Q4 and full year 2008 online advertising revenues, performance-based advertising and search gained while other segments declined slightly or were flat. Overall, online advertising grew 10.6% in 2008 to reach $23.4 billion. US online ad revenue in Q4 was $6.1 billion, up from $5.8 billion in the third quarter of last year. Especially noteworthy for the readers of this blog, search ad revenues comprised 46 percent of Q4 online ad revenues, up from 42 percent a year ago. Here are a selection of charts from the report: [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Marketing: General | SEM Industry: General | SEM Industry: Stats | Stats: Size | Stats: Spend Projections

TechCrunch has a guest article today about internet advertising that sounded interesting until I got to the part about search ads as "misdirection." At that point, I realized the author apparently knows little about search advertising -- and since that's the bulk of online advertising sold, it put into serious question anything he had to say about online advertising overall. Unfortunately, I won't get a refund for the time I wasted reading through his article. Even worse, it infuriated me enough to waste even more time to point out the errors in it. Normally I just try to ignore stuff [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Features: Analysis | Google: Critics | Search Ads: General | Top News

SEMPO's new report, due to be released this week, cuts its forecast for search advertising. The results are based on a survey of almost 900 agencies and search marketers. According to the Wall Street Journal, the report scales back previous growth projections considerably: [SEMPO] says North American search marketing spending will increase only 9% to $14.7 billion in 2009 from $13.5 billion a year ago. Its previous estimates, made in early 2008, called for the industry to grow at more than twice that rate this year, from $15.7 billion in 2008 to $18.8 billion in 2009. The new forecasts call f [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting | Search Ads: General | Search Marketing: General | SEM Industry: General | SEM Industry: Organizations | SEM Industry: Stats | Stats: Spend Projections | Top News

I have been fascinated watching how the search ad space has been impacted by the current global recession. Rimm-Kaufman has posted early first quarter PPC data showing the weak trends in retail for search advertisers. Let me summarize his retail client data: Approximately 20% reduction in sales from search ads from last year Approximately 20% reduction in his costs from search ads from last year The average order value from search ads dropped 10% from last year The conversion rate from search ads seemed to remain stable from last year There may be more competition in the space, but ha [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General

Penn State's Jim Jansen announced a recent study they just finished that looked at the click through rate of search ads. They studied hundreds of thousands of users, as they interacted with Dogpile, the popular meta search engine. The findings were somewhat surprising to  Jansen. The clickthrough rate on an ad when it was supported by an organic listing was only 15 percent. He thought having an organic and paid listing would increase the click through rate to a number higher than 15 percent. His study also found that "35 percent of queries" did not result in any ad clicks ad all. The [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Stats: Search Behavior

By now you have read half a dozen articles on how to recession-proof your PPC campaigns. You've added negative keywords, revisited your ad text, and increased budgets to capitalize in areas others have pulled out. You've gone back to building out long-tail keyword lists to seize some outlying traffic and perhaps you have even pushed content in an attempt to capture cheaper traffic. You've done it all, and for some of you…it simply hasn't been enough. Now what? At a time where the value of visitors is so crucial, I suggest focusing on the place where you are most likely to lose them: your cam [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Features: Analysis | How To: PPC | Search Ads: General

Search marketing firm Internet Engine released findings from a new "Retail Search Presence Study," which analyzed paid search results in ten product categories over the past three holiday shopping seasons. What the study found was the following: The results show that on-line retailers have a very strong presence, representing well over 30% of the listings shown, while bricks and mortar retailers consistently have had the weakest presence of any group showing up only 12% of the time. The overwhelming majority of product purchases are made in stores. E-commerce remains a tiny fraction (<4%) [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Marketing: General | Search Marketing: Local Search Marketing

As economic uncertainty continues, smart search marketers are on the lookout for ways to wring better results out of existing campaigns. In this post, I'll look at how to make even your worst-performing creatives work better. Don’t scrap your worst-performing creatives altogether; update them with ideas from best-performing creatives. To find your top creatives, you can rely on traditional tools such as AdWords Editor, as well as the search engine ad centers. Focus on the creatives with enough clicks to ensure the data set is statistically significant. As a rule of thumb, if your conversi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Features: Analysis | How To: PPC | Search Ads: General

Even in this challenging economy, paid search will continue to be one of the best-performing marketing methods out there. Search marketing has weathered economic storms of the past. In fact, Google and the entire industry was born out of necessity, during the dot-com bust. When times are tough, marketing needs to work hard and prove its value—and that's what search does. While other forms of advertising (TV, print, display) are facing cuts, search is surviving because it's extremely measurable and enables advertisers to easily tie revenue and ROI back to the ad level. But as paid search b [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Features: General | Search Ads: General

Not long ago, Google rolled out its "Geolocation API" (via Google Gears). Initially it was intended to enable third party publishers and developers to get location for their apps on mobile devices using a combination of the phone's inherent location-awareness technologies (i.e., GPS) and Google's cell-tower database (which has been expanded now to include WiFi locations). However it also works for destkop browsers, provided that Gears is installed on the computer. Here's the Google Code Blog discussing the impact: When we originally proposed the Gears Geolocation API our goal was to make i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Features: General | Google: AdWords | Google: Maps & Local | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting | Search Ads: General | Search Ads: Mobile Search | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Search Marketing: Local Search Marketing | Yahoo: Display Ads | Yahoo: Search Ads

Overall online ad spending in the US was up almost 13 percent compared with Q2 2007, but down slightly (0.3 percent) from Q1 2008. Online ad revenues for the second quarter were $5.7 billion, compared with $5.8 billion in Q1. Revenues were $11.5 billion for the first six months of 2008 vs. approximately $10 billion during the same period in 2007, according to the IAB. Search took a bigger share (44 percent) of the pie than it did in the first half of 2007 (41 percent). Otherwise the first six months of 2008 look quite similar in most respects to the first half of 2007. The question now is: [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | SEM Industry: Conferences | Stats: Spend Projections

Successful paid search marketing is an ever-moving target: bid prices and placements are constantly changing, auction rules shift from one day to the next, and your keyword mix is constantly in flux due to seasonality, new promotions, and changing campaign needs. It's no wonder your search engine marketing ROI also fluctuates with all this confusion. Now, to top it off, today's roller-coaster economic conditions are adding to the uncertainty: SEM spending may drop off, keyword prices may go up or down, and your paid search program will become even more difficult to manage effectively. As a [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | How To: PPC | Search Ads: General

Valleywag (using data from Hitwise) posts about the paid search campaigns of the two major US presidential candidates, over the past 12 weeks. The post shows a list of the actual keywords being used by the campaigns. It's a fascinating look into their "offensive" and "defensive" strategies concerning paid search. Meanwhile earlier this month SEM agency, Did-It, issued the report "2008 Search Engines and Politics: A Study of Attitudes and Influence." The study tries to measure the relationship between search behavior, political attitudes and likely voting behavior. There are still a meaning [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Search Ads: General | Search Marketing: General | Search Marketing: Public Relations | Stats: Hitwise

There are several different payment options you can use to pay your ever-growing paid search bills. Each method has its own risk and reward, so it's best to consider your options against your business model. Please note, Microsoft adCenter is similar to Yahoo in billing, but they also have many options, and it's worth speaking to your rep about their options. Before we can talk payment though, we must talk financial risk. What Level Of Payment Risk Taker Are You? There are three major ways of dealing with media fees for clients. 1) The entire spend goes on your card (or inv [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | How To: PPC | Paid Search | Search Ads: General