In the last three years, on the heels of Apple’s debut iPad in 2010, the rapid proliferation of tablet devices has changed the way consumers and advertisers interact across the paid search landscape. Consumers now rely on their tablets more than ever before to gain instant access to local business information, product details and reviews, […]
In January, Marin Software released a study on Google’s 2012 transition from Google Product Search to the commercial, “pay-to-play” model built on Product Listing Ads. When this enhanced shopping experience was first announced in May of 2012, online retailers reacted with both praise and criticism. However, since the transition, PLA campaigns have performed with a […]
Over the last year, like every year prior, online marketers have witnessed an incremental growth in digital advertising spend and a rapid adoption of new technology. In 2012, we saw the introduction of Product Listing Ads as Google shifted to a pay-to-play model for shopping. Facebook began testing every ad format under the sun, with […]
No matter what level your paid search program is operating at, whether small business or enterprise, inevitably some campaigns will outgrow the daily budgets that were set to sustain them. Aggressive keyword expansion or increasing CPCs due to competition could be two contributing factors. Until these budgets can be expanded, your campaigns will be limited. Optimizing a […]
As keyword lists expand, they often outgrow the groups that were initially created to contain them. For example, a group that started out with a single keyword, [running shoes], could expand over time to contain [running shoes], [womens running shoes], [jogging shoes] and [black running shoes], among others. The original creative that was generated to […]
The holiday shopping season has always been the most profitable time of the year for online retailers. Search, display, social and mobile have shown tremendous growth year over year and continue to be vital programs for acquiring more revenue during the holidays. Online marketers going into the 2012 holiday season should have a plan for […]
Competitive keyword analysis should play in integral part in your paid and organic search optimization strategy. As paid search activity continues to grow, so will the number of businesses you compete against within the search battlefield. Understanding who your competitors are and the keywords they’re optimizing for is critical to staying relevant, competitive and profitable […]
For paid search programs, big and small, creative optimization remains one of the single most impactful strategies for increasing traffic, lowering costs and acquiring more revenue. Continuously generating, analyzing and iterating on new creative delivers incremental improvements in keyword-to-creative relevancy. Increasing relevancy results in higher click-through-rates (CTR) and Quality Score, and as a result, lower […]
In a search landscape where millions of keywords define intent, generating the most compelling creative can prove to be a daunting task. Understanding your audience and formulating a message might be easy, but packaging up that message within the narrow limits of a 130 character creative can be a challenge. For paid search programs, for […]
In a search landscape where millions of keywords define intent, generating the most compelling creative can prove to be a daunting task. Understanding your audience and formulating a message might be easy, but packaging up that message within the narrow limits of a 130 character creative can be a challenge. For paid search programs both […]
As campaigns mature, keywords evolve from experiments to proven revenue drivers. Remembering to add a keyword to Bing after a successful trial in Google or remembering to expand a new top performing keyword across its other match types is easier said than done. With so much focus these days on the next best thing — […]
John Wanamaker once stated, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” One of the things we love to tout as search marketers is our ability to track our efforts. We pride ourselves on it. But, as much as our tracking capabilities would leave Wanamaker dumbfounded, […]
Between the rise of tablets and the continued proliferation of smartphones, 2012 is looking more and more like the year of mobile for search marketers. Neilsen reports the number of smartphone subscribers accessing the Internet on their phones has grown 45 percent since 2010 with the majority of 18 to 34 year-olds owning a smartphone. […]
I realize most of us are already well-focused on 2012, so a look back at the 2011 holiday season may seem a bit dated. However, the holiday season provides search marketers a snapshot of behavior that should prove relevant for the upcoming year, though perhaps on a smaller scale. To gain a more accurate view […]
As you put the finishing touches on 2012 budgets and plans, it’s important to build a point of view on the future. While it’s impossible to predict what will happen or when, running through a few what-if scenarios makes you more prepared for changes as they come. In this column, we’ll highlight some of the […]
Earlier in the year, YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the world’s second largest search engine. In June 2011, ComScore reported that in the U.S., YouTube attracted 5.6 billion viewing sessions per month and the average U.S. visitor frequents the site 23 times a month with each visit lasting on average 26 minutes. And, just today, ComScore […]
Last holiday season, online consumers spent approximately $32.6 billion, a 12 percent increase from 2009. We can safely assume the trend will continue in 2011 as shoppers’ propensity to search online for the best deals grows and retailers respond by bulking up their online offers. As a result, competition among online retailers will be at […]
Sick of spending afternoons reviewing raw query reports? We’ve all been there— pouring over keyword expansion tools trying to identify those stellar terms that your account may be missing. Adding new keywords and refining match types is certainly important for optimization, but it’s not necessarily the fastest way to increase volume. Often, advertisers focused on […]
The importance of a combining SEO and SEM to optimize online performance is not a new idea. Paid advertising programs cannot be successful without top ranking natural search results and vice versa. That is why most large scale organizations typically have experts focused on each practice separately. Every once and a while, it’s important to […]
Back in December 2010, I was relatively convinced that click prices were going to continue increasing in 2011, but Marin Software recently released a study of large scale paid search programs that suggests otherwise. The Paid Search Quarterly Benchmarking Report showed that although average cost per click (CPC) has increased since December 2010, it hasn’t […]
More and more consumers are accessing the Internet on their mobile devices each day. There are over 5 billion mobile phones worldwide, and according to recent Neilsen research, over 50% of the mobile phones in the US will be smartphones (capable of internet browsing) before the end of 2011. The majority of these mobile users […]
Apple’s iOS platform, which powers the iPad, iTouch and iPhone, is currently used by 130 million consumers. The latest iOS device, the iPad (now into second generation sales of the iPad2), has already sold over 15 million units since its April 2010 launch. As iOS-based devices become more popular, advertisers should be asking critical questions […]
Once campaigns reach a certain size, successful paid search marketing becomes less about generating traffic and more about identifying and driving the highest value visitors. At the same time, however, scale makes creative testing and ad group refinement difficult to implement across hundreds of thousands or even millions of keywords. In a high-volume world, actively […]
For search marketers, the holidays are all about giving—that is, giving an ever-increasing share of your advertising budget to Google. But for columnists, we get to give the gift of predictions. In this Industrial Strength column last year, I examined a number of trends in the paid search industry and even made several bold predictions. […]
Reading search marketing advice, you will find an abundance of information about best-practices that are easy to apply to a campaign or ad group level. Common best practices such as keeping ad-groups small and targeted, with relevant and keyword specific ad-copy have demonstrated great results. Moreover, the value of managing match types and negatives to […]
Effectively coordinating your TV commercials with paid search marketing programs could be the key to driving measurable results and overall improvement in your marketing programs across channels.
The holidays are just around the corner, and with shoppers gearing up for the holiday rush, smart marketers are already preparing their paid search campaigns for the 2010 season. By evaluating consumer trends from last year’s holiday season we found some interesting insights that will help marketers be even more successful this year, including a […]
Will this year be the year when online holiday sales return to double digit growth? Or will the holidays once again deliver lackluster growth in the low single digits for online advertisers? While predicting how much consumers will buy may be difficult, predicting how they will likely behave is not.
Back in late April, Google announced that it was changing the way AdWords would work for agencies and application providers managing paid search via the AdWords API. This seemingly simple change from Google levels the playing field between in-house and externally developed search engine marketing tool providers.
You’ve heard about the Microsoft/Yahoo search alliance, but what does it really mean for your paid search marketing campaigns? To minimize the disruption to profitable paid search programs, marketers will have to be thoughtful about campaign structure as they begin to understand the traffic and consumers from the combined search engines.
With more than 400 million active users on Facebook, advertisers are salivating at the opportunity to reach targeted and engaged audiences through Facebook ads. But paid advertising on Facebook is still in its infancy. Few organizations have figured out how to effectively leverage Facebook ads, and in many cases resources and budgets have not yet […]
In today’s competitive, crowded and often copycat online advertising environment, advertisers are continually looking for new, innovative, cost-efficient ways to get their message though to target audiences. They’ve studied and implemented all the standard best practices into their ad copy—strong calls to action, keywords in the creative, trademark symbols and even dynamic keyword insertion—but many […]
As a large-scale paid search marketer, you may believe social media marketing has little to do with your craft. After all, most marketers hold true to the notion that paid search is extremely measurable, focused on bottom-line ROI and grounded in analytics, whereas social media, including Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and viral video, is experimental, difficult […]
Search engine marketing no longer exists in an online vacuum. In today’s multi-channel world, people search online, visit stores to test out products, return to the internet to compare prices and then complete purchases in-store, online or via a call center. Over $155 billion worth of consumer goods was purchased online in the U.S. in […]
The “long tail” is a source of much debate within the paid search marketing community. The concept, popularized by Wired’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, is used to describe the large number of keywords available for purchase that individually deliver little traffic, but in aggregate have the potential to be an important source of clicks and conversions […]
If a single ad network could help you reach 80% of global Internet users—and target them based on geography, website and even context—you would probably invest a lot of time figuring out how to optimize your advertising dollars there. Yet, for many large advertisers, the opportunity of advertising on Google’s AdSense content network hasn’t been […]
Staring into a crystal ball is a dangerous undertaking, especially when you’re attempting to predict the future of a market as dynamic as paid search. Leading analysts continue to project that paid search marketing spend in the U.S. will grow from $13 billion in 2009 to $26 billion by the year 2014. But how this […]