Mona Elesseily writes extensively and speaks internationally on search & online marketing. She is the Vice President of Online Marketing Strategy at Page Zero Media, where she focuses on search engine marketing strategy, landing page optimization (LPO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO).
At SMX West last month, in a session called “Supercharging Your Descriptions With Sitelinks,” Google Senior Product Manager Jerry Dischler covered various strategies related to Sitelinks—specifically for the new Google AdWords ad unit that offers additional links below the main destination URL. (There’s a similar new listing format for organic search as well, which may […]
At SMX West Google Senior Product Manager for Ads Quality Nick Fox offered a detailed look at several new PPC product offerings: sitelinks, product extensions and comparison ads. If you’re considering rolling any of these out, here’s the lowdown on how they work, along with some tactical tips.
Even if you've tuned and optimized a search advertising account for good performance, there are tactics you can use to drive incremental gains. In this point, I’ll suggest several ways to improve the performance of “mature” PPC accounts.
According to Google’s recent quarterly earnings report, the company earns about 34% of its revenue from AdSense, placing contextual ads on its content network partner websites. This proportion has stayed steady year over year. It certainly reflects overall growth, but some might be surprised at how conservative the pace is. One of the reasons for […]
Here, in the Paid Search column, there’s been a lot of talk of bid management tools and strategies for using them. Some of the uses of these tools can get pretty advanced. But in the real world you can do better with pretty basic bid automation strategies. Many people are afraid or skeptical of campaign […]
Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about search without keywords. Recently, the topic came up again at SES San Jose in a keynote presentation from Nick Fox, Google’s business product management director for AdWords. In the presentation, Nick outlined where paid search could be in the next 5 to 10 years and covered two […]
There’s no shortage of criteria for choosing a good agency. Reports, ratings, opinions, and referrals are traded freely and openly as you might expect in any technical business where appropriate vendor selection is paramount. A lot of the information is published, so anyone can refer to it. By contrast, when talk turns to what makes […]
In some cases, clients are not receptive to new PPC account ideas. It’s even possible for PPC ideas to be kiboshed before they’ve had a chance to make it into campaigns. In this article, I’ll discuss some client obstacles and some important factors involved in getting good ideas incorporated into PPC accounts. For the purposes […]
As goes search, so goes paid search, at least in the sense that nobody would click on paid links near search results unless compelled by search engine results in the first place. So, changes in how people interact with search engines can affect where and how they search next year and in the future. As […]
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 […]
Search marketers are pretty good at claiming credit for online sales, and they’re getting better at measuring phone sales as well. However, there’s a huge amount of activity in brick-and-mortar stores, in terms of walk-in sales in the offline world, which is not properly attributed to online search. How can we get some of the […]
Although paid search is far more trackable than many media – even online display advertising – many paid search campaign managers have difficulty tying detailed paid search data to actual sales. This is particularly true with long-sales-cycle campaigns, high touch lead generation campaigns, and campaigns that are designed to drive phone sales. Often, such campaigns […]
We’re all pretty familiar with the well reported search landscape of the US/UK. But, in other parts of the world, the search engine landscape is very different. In this article, I’ll focus on China, Japan and Russia. The goal of this article is to present PPC opportunities in counties that are not Google-centric and provide […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about landing pages lately. Last time, I talked about getting multivariate landing page testing straight. Today, I’ll look at a specialized offer technique that employs what I’ll call a Pain Reliever Page (PRP). A PRP is problem-based (or pain-specific). It addresses a specific consumer issue and attempts to alleviate a […]
These days, you can’t go anywhere without hearing about multivariate testing so I thought I’d walk through a landing page test. Along the way, I’ll provide testing pointers and leave you with several testing considerations. I’ll highlight the importance of multivariate testing and show it can yield significant improvements in pay per click (PPC) accounts. […]
Last week, Page Zero Media held a seminar in Toronto called Winning the Paid Search Game. In the intensive half day seminar, we focused on tactical PPC issues like ad copy generation, landing page optimization, and the differences between the search engines. But strategy is possibly even more important than tactics – envisioning the “endgame” […]
Since Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion, interesting times have been ours to enjoy here in the land of the search engines. On April 5 2008, Steve Ballmer stepped up the game by giving Yahoo! 3 weeks to make a decision on the 44.6 billion dollar offer or they’ll bypass the board and […]
height=”100″ hspace=”5″ vspace=”3″ width=”100″> Lately, a merger between Yahoo! and Microsoft is looking more and more probable. Not only have reports been flying around that Yahoo! and Microsoft are in negotiations, but Yahoo!’s SEC filing last week (Tuesday March 18 2008) has added significantly more fuel to the merger fire.
Last time around, I wrote about paid search planning and some cool tools to help you understand your customers and your target market (here). This time, I’ll take a look at the competitive landscape and understanding competitors in general—and show you some excellent tools that can help you gain better insight into their specific strategies […]
The season is upon us when marketers near and far are thinking about paid search planning, strategy, and implementation for the upcoming year. It’s important to take some time out to plan your strategy for 2008 so you’re not just reactive in your marketing efforts. So, in this article, I’ll review useful tools advertisers can […]