Comments on: SMBs, Paid Search And Self-Service

By: Martin Garcia

Martin Garcia — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 04:18:28 +0000

Yahoo’s flat-fee pricing should help demystify and remove some barriers to advertising locally online.

By: Erica Forrette

Erica Forrette — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 18:35:11 +0000

Great points made about penetrating the small biz market! The engines (particularly Google) have made it fairly easy to get online and set up a campaign (assuming a biz has a site already, that’s a challenge to begin with – many smb sites are just “brochureware” sites with no good conversion action as has already been noted by Solomon Rothman.) But I would take this article and the comments a step further – what do smb’s who actually get their PPC campaigns set up, do after that? Many, with no idea of budget management to ROI or CPA goals, just bid to position and get hosed on spending tons of budget on clicks, with little to no results. So the battle for these smb’s with regard to search marketing is actually two-fold – get them on line with search, and then help them efficiently manage their own campaigns.

By: Tony Comstock

Tony Comstock — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 18:32:32 +0000

I just tried Google’s self-service adword program, with results taht were some sort of mix of Kafka, Dada, and Ionesco.

By: Patrick Schaber

Patrick Schaber — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 12:02:07 +0000

Greg – great article about small business. As a small business marketing manager using paid search I can say that not only did I not have a salesperson introduce me to paid search, but I couldn’t even get any live support until recently (after I started spending more). Many small businesses need to search this out themselves to stay in the game and compete.

By: Solomon Rothman Web Design Search Engine Marketing

Solomon Rothman Web Design Search Engine Marketing — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 07:32:20 +0000

Until the technology and ability to setup a campaign, track conversions, and modify your website for SEM becomes more common place, small businesses will need a local sales force to “convert” into PPC advertisers in any great number. You would be amazed at how many small businesses I’ve worked with who barley even understand the most rudimentary elements involved in SEO / SEM, yet alone are in any shape to be success in setting up their own PPC campaign. Most small business websites don’t even have a strong call to action and wouldn’t convert the traffic anyways. If you deal with mostly tech companies you’ll get spoiled by having somewhat educated customers. Go ahead and call your local insurance agent/hotel/used car dealer/ restaurant/merchant/boutique/hair dresser/insert small business here and you’d be surprised at the number of individuals completely naive of basic internet technology. Their salvation lies in “do this for me”, because they’re in no shape to do it themselves, plus many of them are already overworked in their current occupations.

By: Cohn

Cohn — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 01:39:24 +0000

What tactics did Kudzu use to get the 20,000 SMBs to
register?