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Dr Shah has observed a 6% CPC increase from March through May. The report goes on to forecast another 5-10% CPC increase over the next two quarters, compared with the CPCs in the same quarters in 2012. These increases are being driven in part by enhanced campaigns.
Like many of my fellow PPC colleagues, I feel uneasy about the impending move to Enhanced Campaigns and the lurking cutover deadline of July 22nd. Should we convert now and get it over with? Should we run a few tests with our smaller, simpler accounts? Should we abandon tightly-crafted, geo-segmented campaigns in favor of the new geo-bidding […]
Back in the 70’s, when the World Wide Web was still just a glint in Tim Berners-Lee’s eyes, a pair of Stanford grads working out of their garage started a world famous technology company called Hewlett-Packard. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? What is it about Stanford students that makes them want to start businesses in their garages? […]
This month, we continue our exploration of cross-compatibility issues between Google Adwords and Microsoft adCenter, and how understanding the subtle and not-so-subtle differences, PPC campaigns managers can design and build portable and easier-to-manage campaigns that take both networks into account. In last month’s column, we explored strategies for dealing with negative keywords and made a […]
December can be a tough month for paid search campaign managers. On one hand, it’s a time to be tightly focused on hour-by-hour tactical engagement with our PPC campaigns to make sure we have a strong holiday selling season to make up for an otherwise lackluster year. At the same time, this is also the […]
After a year of planning, engineering and collaboration by teams at Yahoo and Microsoft, it’s go time for the search alliance. Within two weeks we’re told, all paid search ads appearing on Yahoo will be powered by Bing through Microsoft’s AdCenter servers. For members of the search alliance team, these next two weeks will almost […]
At the SMX Advanced 2010 conference in Seattle, we invited four leading paid search experts to share some of their recent experiments in paid search in a new session entitled The Mad Scientists of Paid Search. The panelists were encouraged to add a bit of academic rigor to their presentations by including their hypotheses, design […]
Over the past two months in this column, I’ve discussed some of the pitfalls of A/B ad testing, and in this third and final installment, I’ll discuss a new PPC ad optimization model I’ve been working on and have lovingly entitled, the Van Wagner Ad Sets Optimization Model. The model is completely new and thoroughly […]
In last month’s column, Pitfalls of Paid Search, Part 1, I raised the question of whether A/B Ad split testing, taken to the extreme, can be detrimental to ad group performance. Using the example of over-breeding of show dogs as an analogy, I suggested that our quest to discover the best ad of all time […]
Most search advertisers have no question that testing ads is a good thing, and can lead to much higher performing campaigns. But is it possible to over-test and over-optimize, actually leading to worse results? The answer may surprise you.
It is absolutely stunning that Toyota is embroiled in such a serious quality crisis. Toyota’s well-earned reputation for quality is legendary and is the envy of carmakers worldwide. Their quality control principles and methods are taught in leading business and engineering schools everywhere. In spite of all that, Toyota’s quality problems are now the subject […]