Pay-Per-Click Can Save You Money

And Knowledge Can Equal Profitability

For the most part, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is all about goal achievement and profitability. However, there are situations when spending PPC dollars to attain valuable knowledge can lead to great cost savings for your business.

PPC is a truly unique medium – enabling you to test business strategies on volumes of people across the world in very short time periods. Given its speedy broad reach, it is a valuable data-mining tool that can help you make informed decisions.

Here are three key situations in which PPC can help your business save money:

1) New Marketing Message or Positioning

New marketing positioning is a very expensive venture. It often involves changes to your website, marketing materials, sales materials, employee training and more. PPC is a great way to get a lot of exposure fast and see…

An Efficient Check List for Starting a PPC Campaign

Five Clear Steps Before Getting Started

Many people think starting a PPC campaign is as easy as opening up a Google, Yahoo!, and Bing ad center account, writing some quick ads and then watching the clicks and dollars roll in.

Were it only so simple.

Although PPC campaigns do give you results faster than a SEO campaign, starting a PPC campaign does require some up-front work on your part. You’ll want to use the following checklist to ensure you have everything needed to make a smooth PPC transition.

1. Determine your budget.

If you’re spending less than $500 a month, you might want to consider a single search engine such as Google or Bing. Why is that? Spreading such a relatively low budget across three search engines won’t give you enough bang for your buck.

Generally speaking, we recommend a minimum…

Can a PPC Ad Change Your Mind?

Tips for Gaining Clicks on “Stretch” Ads

I like search engines – they quickly find what I am looking for and don’t talk back.  I can visit them when I like, ask about as many search terms as I want and the search engine responds in a speedy fashion with more information than I could ever find the time to read.

Because the search engine is such a trusty sidekick, we quickly forgive it when there is the occasional irrelevant result.  We have become so accustomed to irrelevant results spattered about, that our eyes are actually trained to quickly glaze over anything that doesn’t exactly match.  Search engines even help us with this by bolding the results that parrot our requests.  Even if we accidentally click on an irrelevant link, we can immediately bounce back to the…

Local Business Center Listings

… and Tips for Tweaking Them!

In August we ran a post about getting your site listed in Google’s 10-pack.  This post has been our number one read post to date, so I thought you might appreciate additional tips on tweaking your local business center listings across Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

1. Submit complete forms.

All three local search centers include a wealth of information that’s of use for people doing searches (i.e. your prospects!), so be sure to fill out each form completely (the hyperlinked “Google”, “Yahoo” and “Bing”, above, will take you to each).

For example, if you have a bricks and mortar storefront, you can indicate your operating hours. If your site then appears in Google’s 10-pack listing and someone clicks on your listing, it will say whether or not you’re open for business –…

But Google, that Keyword IS Relevant

Nothing frustrates a marketer more than when their golden keyword, that is, in fact, their product or service, has a quality score of two or one from Google, usually accompanied by this lovely message: “Rarely shown due to low quality score.” When you click for more info on how to fix it, Google says the keyword just is not relevant and you should delete it.

Outrage!

Can’t Google see this keyword is in all of my ads and it’s all over my landing pages? This is the core of my business!

How could this possibly be?

With a little investigation, we usually find that proper account structure and maintenance have not been in place, and have left the advertiser in a punished state — Google has effectively issued a restraining order and your ads are no longer allowed to…

Funnel Vision

What Are the Most Important PPC Metrics?

Our current subscribers to the Yield Web Marketing Suite will see a new feature when they log on today: the new Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel.  This groovy new feature is a very visual way to instantly see how each of your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are doing.

We frequently get two key questions from folks regarding their PPC campaigns:

How can I tell if my campaign is doing well?

What are the metrics I should be paying attention to?

Depending on the campaign, the response is often not a simple one. And accurately concluding how your campaign is doing pivots off of what sort of results you want from your campaign.  Our system provides a variety of both simple and more complex reports to gain insight to these questions, but we heard from our customers…

How to Choose the Right Agency

… To Run Your SEM Campaign

Since we just introduced our new Yield Web Marketing Suite for Agencies, I thought it might be helpful to cover how to choose the right search engine marketing (SEM) agency for your business. Finding and interviewing agencies can be difficult and time-consuming, especially if you haven’t done this process before. But it doesn’t have to be.

Here are my five steps for finding the right SEM agency.  (Tip-of-the-hat to David Rodnitzky at Blogation and Mike Nierengarten at SEMpdx for their “choosing an SEM agency” tips.)

Step #1: Identify your SEM agency needs.

Do you want the agency to oversee SEO, PPC or both?

Will you want them to develop content based on the recommendations they give you?

Do you want them to do everything for you and just send you reports every month – or do you…

We’re Big Fans of Agencies…

…Which is Why We’re in New York

Even though we are headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, we are making our first trip east to exhibit at ad:tech New York 2009, with very good reason. The nightlife? The food? The fashion? While New York certainly has a lot to offer–the three months I lived there, I think I slept for about 2 hours total–it is also one of the epicenters of advertising activity. Sure, Madison Avenue is renowned. However, in this digital media age, there are tons of interactive agencies successfully helping advertisers get online and leverage search engine marketing to attract and acquire customers.

So, what could be a better location to launch our agency offering, the Yield Web Marketing Suite for Agencies. We’ve been working on this product for over a year, ensuring that…