height=”100″ hspace=”5″ vspace=”3″ width=”100″> If you buy search ads to drive sales, you are a direct response advertiser. Welcome, today’s short column is for you. If you buy search to increase awareness of your brand, you’re a brand advertiser. Sorry, but this column is for the direct response gang, us red-headed step-kids of the advertising […]
With Google’s recent announcement about page load time influencing Quality Score, now is a good time to discuss site speed. Speed matters. People rate snappy, responsive sites as more usable, even when the user interface itself doesn’t change. If your architecture or design aren’t that great, your users will give your site more chances before […]
height=”100″ hspace=”5″ vspace=”3″ width=”100″> Last Monday, in a SEL post discussing the click quality by engine, I mentioned in passing an 89% drop-off between ‘phrases tested’ and ‘phrases actively generating good clicks’. Specifically, we posted 176,903 terms en route to discovering 20,152 active good terms for a client. Today I’ll revisit that drop-off and analyze […]
Earlier this month, in a blog post reporting our clients’ aggregate ad spend across the major search engines, we noted that Google’s slice of the pay-per-click pie increased across 2007. I wrote: “We never sat down and had meetings about moving budgets. Rather, our systems noticed that ever-so-slightly better clicks could be had on Google […]
In this post, I’d like to introduce a handy little tool for paid and natural search called RKG Duck. I wrote the app a few years back, and we find it useful in our agency’s work in paid search and site conversion optimization. We’re releasing RKG Duck under the GNU Public General License, so you […]
We’re entering the home stretch: Christmas is about six weeks out. For many of our online retail clients, the next month and half of revenue will make or break their year. PPC impressions will soar. CPCs will rise. And SPCs (sales-per-click) will skyrocket. Most clients will see big profits from their paid search campaigns, even […]
The nice folks from Google were in for a visit a week or so ago. One of the topics on the day’s agenda was Ad Quality. If you read extremely closely, much of what they presented in their briefing is also described at the AdWords help center (see What is a ‘Quality Score’ and how […]
What is the “long tail” of paid search, and why does it matter? Chris Anderson coined the long tail concept in a 2004 Wired magazine article. Anderson’s original argument applied to online merchandising. Because web-only merchants (think Netflix) should have lower inventory carrying costs than traditional retailers (think WalMart), web-only merchants can afford to offer […]
Here are eight observations about writing and testing pay-per-click ad copy. They’re broad generalizations, so there’ll be situations where these don’t hold, but we’ve found them generally accurate.
As 2007 is now half over, it seems a good time to compare the performance of the Big Three search engines year-to-date. The punch line: Google reigns dominant, providing the lion’s share of clicks, and Google clicks convert well. Microsoft offers strongly converting clicks at a lower-than-expected cost—good efficiency, but sadly almost no volume. Yahoo […]
Some keywords perform great. Some keywords perform OK, and some keywords stink. Today I’d like to write about keyword portfolio economics, asking, “Does it ever make sense to use stronger keywords to subsidize weaker keywords?” My answer is “Yes—when done correctly.” Efficiently bidding a large keyword portfolio is not simple. A well-built keyword portfolio includes […]
Forecasting is a delicate process which demands care. When prospective new clients ask our agency to build 12 month PPC projections, we often shudder. It isn’t that building forecasts is technically or theoretically difficult: stir reasonable monthly estimates of term-level click volumes and click costs into reasonable estimates of site conversion, bake at 350 degrees, […]
To grow share, revenue and market capitalization, Google should adopt Extreme Transparency. Google dominates search with 70% market share. Google has soaring revenue, 63% up year-over-year Q1. Google has a monster market cap, north of $140B. But there’s a problem lurking in the wings, and pulling that problem into the sunlight and solving it—nay, obliterating […]
Pricing structures and rates aren’t secret in established service industries. Real estate agents get 3% to 6% of the house’s price; recruiters get 1/3 of total first year comp; trial lawyers take 33% of the settlement; list brokers charge 20%. While specifics vary, each industry has conventional pricing arrangements. Not so in paid search management. […]
Hello! My name is Alan Rimm-Kaufman. I’m honored to be contributing a monthly column on paid search for Search Engine Land. The column will appear the third Tuesday of each month. My focus will be strategy, economics, and multi-channel. About me: I run a paid search agency based in Charlottesville, Virginia. We serve about 100 […]