At online marketing's inception, advertisers were thrilled to be able to see click-throughs, since they'd never had such measurable media offline. Columnist Soren Ryherd urges today's marketers to avoid getting caught up in that now-outdated metric.
Microsoft has a long and checkered history when it comes to product advertising. Perhaps you recall the cringeworthy yet bizarrely compelling “Bing Goes the Internet” ad campaign in the early days of the search engine’s existence. Here’s one of those clips: Then there was the Microsoft campaign mocking the iPhone — mildly funny at points […]
New options will allow advertisers to see exact settings of campaigns in one location without having to hop through any hoops.
Advertisers will need to use call or location extensions to display phone numbers.
Today, Google announced the roll out of callouts, a new ad extension in AdWords that allows advertisers to show off unique offers and benefits of their sites, products and services with an additional line of text in their ads. Advertisers can use callouts to promote free shipping, around-the-clock customer service and price matching, as in […]
Think you know everything about Google AdWords or Bing Ads? Have all the best practices nailed, are a master of match types, and have encyclopedic knowledge about gaining the upper hand when sparring with the quirky idiosyncrasies of bidding, scheduling and conversion optimization? Think again. As kung fu masters remind us, “the wise always remain […]
Setting up conversion tracking is vital to ensure that your ad campaign is performing as well as possible. This means tracking whether your ad is actually leading to the action you want it to, whether that be selling an item, gathering email addresses, or just sending a user to a certain page. How to implement […]
If you have decided to use online advertising for marketing, you need to know which ad sizes to use and which to avoid. If a salesperson calls, then plenty of bold claims will come your way about that company’s own ad sizes. Don’t listen to them! We’re here to help you sort the signal from […]
Once your campaign has been running for at least 3 days or has served 1,000 impressions (whichever comes first) then you should start “optimising” your campaign. To do this, simply look at what your overall CTR is for the whole campaign, and then remove any individual element that doesn’t hit that CTR. For example, if your […]
CTR is a generally accepted marker for how well a campaign is doing. The higher the CTR, the better the adverts are being responded to. What are the CTR benchmarks for different types of digital marketing though? This can depend on a myriad of factors. Where and when your ads are served, what they say, […]
One of the strangest things about online advertising is that results for most campaigns stay pretty consistent over time. If a campaign starts off with a CTR (the ratio of clicks to impressions) of 0.5% on a site, then it is likely that it will remain at that level throughout the campaign. What this means […]
Last updated June 2024 Index Click on the links below to jump to the associated section What is a frequency cap? Frequency cap advice for Ad Buyers CPA Campaigns CPC Campaigns CPM Campaigns Frequency Cap Advice for Site Owners Technical Information Frequency Formula Find out more What is a Frequency Cap? A frequency cap is […]
The great thing about online advertising from an advertisers point of view is that with all the reporting and metrics available, never before has advertising been so trackable. If you want to know how well your ad has performed, it’s just a case of looking at the reports that should be available to you. In […]
If you are trying to work out where to advertise online, the answer is simpler than you may think. The best place you can advertise your goods or services is on sites with endemic content. This simply means that if you are selling books, then a site about books is generally the best place to […]
Pre-Roll is commonly used to refer to any type of video advertising. It is also often called Video-On-Demand (VOD) in online advertising. Pre-Rolls are an incredibly effective yet expensive form of advertising. They are prevalent across most sites with any amount of video content and are highly sought after by marketers and ad networks alike. […]
Travel advertisers spent three quarters of a billion dollars on Google AdWords in the U.S. last year, according to AdGooroo’s annual review of AdWords activity in the U.S. travel sector. Nearly 12,700 travel advertisers competed for visibility on more than 50,000 keywords. Booking.com captured more impressions on Google AdWords desktop/tablet in the U.S. than any […]
Welcome to Part 2 of my PPC Health Check series! In part 1, I covered account structure, settings, conversion tracking and budgets. Today’s piece will help you understand the areas you need to be checking with regard to keywords, ads and performance. Reviewing a campaign properly isn’t something that is done in 20 minutes — […]
It looks like we have an upset. Bud Light appeared to be the clear front runner among Super Bowl advertisers running paid search ads on Google and Bing, It turns out the King of Beer’s less filling counterpart is merely the runner up on both search engines. Volkswagen has garnered the top spot with the […]
An MPU is a display ad unit that is 300 pixels wide by 250 pixels tall. It is commonly called a 300×250 or MPU but is also known as a Med Rec, MREC, or Medium Rectangle. MPUs are the most popular ad unit in online advertising. This is because they typically perform best for advertisers, […]
In the weeks leading up to game day, several Super Bowl advertisers have been employing paid search to help ensure their campaigns are found by the legions of users searching for “Super Bowl ads”. While the majority of Super Bowl advertisers still aren’t taking to SEM, those that are have been displaying some interesting tactics […]
Consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers have been spending an average of $6.2 million monthly on Google AdWords in the US over the past three years, according to a new AdGooroo study which looked at ad impressions between August 2012 and July 2013. All of the CPG companies engaged in brand marketing, but AdGooroo found that […]
Following up on the release of the Bing’s 2013 search trends, which culled the top search queries across a range of categories, the Bing Ads team has pulled together the list of the most searched ad campaigns from 2013 as well as the most popular brand searches on Bing this year. Humor drove search volume, […]
Ad copy testing is one of the foundation blocks of PPC campaign optimization. Yet, as any PPC manager knows, it can be laborious, time-intensive, money-consuming, or take eons to get enough data to make a call and move onto the next test. Jonathan Nelson and Yuanyi Zhang developed and recently launched AdProof, a new “user testing” […]
With the July 22nd mandatory migration to AdWords enhanced campaigns looming, we will be checking in with marketers over the next several weeks to get their perspective on the transition process, hear what they’ve learned so far and what advice they have to share. I recently spoke with iProspect’s Associate Director of Paid Search, Jeremy Hull, […]
The PPC world is abuzz over the news that Google opened its beta for image extensions, which allow AdWords advertisers to include images with their text ads. In these very early days, PPC managers that have had campaigns in the beta are in experimental mode, while others are eager to get their accounts into the […]
Bing Ads announced a number of updates last month, including new campaign filter options, improved search query reports, more visibility with appealable ads, and new keyword competition insights. Also, the Keyword Suggestions feature was made available to Bing advertisers in the UK. New Filter Options The new filtering options let advertisers filter and search from […]
Coming out of Google I/O at Moscone Center in San Francisco yesterday, I did a double-take. Was that Microsoft pitching its “Bing It On” challenge against Google directly across the street. Yep. “Put the science back in computer science: test your Google bias inside,” read a big banner, over the entrance to the Metreon Mall, […]
Bing announced today a new version of their Bing It On Challenge, an online campaign launched last September that offers users a side-by-side comparison of Bing and Google search results. In the latest Bing It On Challenge, Bing asks users to perform five separate search queries on BingItOn.com and choose the unbranded search result list […]
The commercial in the middle of an episode of “Worst Cooks In America” this weekend caught me off-guard. Was that an ad for the Google Search App? It sure was, and the restart of Google’s campaign to push its cross-platform search tool. It was the first time I spotted this particular campaign on TV, though […]
AdGooroo has released a new study titled Yahoo! Bing PPC Performance Metrics that analyzes advertiser participation and performance metrics on the Yahoo! Bing network through Bing Ads compared to Google AdWords. The study looked at U.S. advertisers in six verticals during Q312. Backing up one of the loudest complaints among advertisers about the Yahoo! Bing […]
Microsoft’s “Scroogled” ad campaign, which attacked Google over paid inclusion in shopping and Gmail over privacy, is coming to an end. KQED reports that Microsoft will stop TV, newspaper and social media ads promoting the Scroogled message: “That part is about finished,” Stefan Weitz, Microsoft senior director of online services, said on Thursday. Microsoft launched […]
Advertising is an ongoing process, that you will likely have to continually do in order to keep your business a success. If you want your ad spend to be as efficient as possible, you will have to review what you are doing (and why) regularly. You should also keep the following final few points in […]
This is a loaded question, as it depends on what you are advertising and where. The important thing to know is how to compare the prices of different places. You do this by working out the eCPM of what you are buying. eCPM stands for “effective Cost Per Thousand impressions” and is used to turn […]
Before you buy any advertising space you should decide what it is you actually want from your ads. By having a clear focus on your goals from the outset you can maximise your results while minimizing wasted ad spend. Online advertisers goals generally fall into one of the following categories: Selling products or services Gathering […]
In the third quarter of 2012, click share on the Yahoo Bing Network rose to 21.3%, the fourth quarter in a row the network has posted gains. Google dropped to 78.7% in share, though based on click traffic, Google still outpaced YBN. These are stats from the Search Agency’s State of Paid Search report for the […]
Surely you remember (or have heard about) the now classic “Pepsi Challenge” ad campaign from the 1970s and early 1980s. Pepsi went around to public venues like shopping malls and offered people blind taste tests of its own caramel colored soda vs Coke. Overwhelmingly people preferred Pepsi to Coke. Microsoft is now trying something similar […]
“Bing Is For Doing” is the catchphrase being used in new ads for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. But in a bit of irony, one new ad literally suggests jumping off a cliff but then warns in small print, “Do not attempt.” I first saw the ad on Sunday when watching the Mad Men finale and […]
In this column, we routinely write about some fairly advanced topics: Next-level optimization, automated bidding algorithms, hyper-targeted search campaigns, paid vs. organic search, etc. Lost in all this is the underlying discussion around the need to hit your financial goals. The majority of large enterprises engage in annual planning, which means that as SEM managers, […]
National Car Rental has been running a TV campaign named “Go Like A Pro” where they feature certain professionals in different industries that use their car rental service as part of their business. In February they featured an SEO named Lindsay in one of the videos. National Car Rental informed me today on Twitter that […]
Bing is set to launch a new ad campaign this weekend that includes a subtle change from its previous messaging. Rather than promoting the idea of making decisions, the new campaign is about people doing interesting things and uses the slogan, Bing is for #Doing. More specifically, the new TV campaign focuses on winter sports […]