Pay-Per-Click Keywords

Both the Long and Short of It

People like to talk about what size of keyword is best to advertise for. There’s always lots of hype around long-tail keywords, but we still see a majority of campaigns with very short-tail keywords.

We are here to tell you that you can have a successful PPC campaign regardless of keyword size; however, different sizes do require different strategies and with them come varying levels of difficulty.

Our recommendation to advertisers is usually to start off with the medium tail keywords and through daily research, build out a very robust negative keywords list and a hearty set of long tail keywords to help branch out into more profitable territory and broaden exposure.

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Achieve Your 2010 Web Marketing Goals

First and Foremost: Have a Written Plan!

Now that you’ve solicited ideas from your co-workers and you’ve evaluated your 2009 marketing efforts, it’s time to roll this data into a Web marketing plan for 2010.  Follow this basic plan for setting up a credible plan before moving into the new year.

Establish Objectives

To be effective, your Web marketing plan should tie into measurable, realistic and time-based business objectives. For instance, let’s say you want to increase the number of readers to your blog because you’ve noticed that once people find your blog, they stick around and perform other actions on your website.

Instead of using the vague phrase “Increase number of visitors to the blog,” state your objective this way: “Increase the number of visitors to the blog who download our e-book by 10% for Q1.” You can…

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Marketing (Part II)

Looking at Reach and Engagement

In my last post, I talked about how to get your team involved in evaluating your 2009 marketing efforts. In part two of this series of preparing your marketing plans for 2010, I cover how to evaluate “reach” and “engagement.”

“Reach” is the new word for “awareness.” Others call it your “sphere of influence” or “thought leadership.” Basically, you want to measure the tactics you used to make people aware of your company / products / services – and these tactics aren’t limited to social media.  Why?  Because social media, your Website, and offline tactics such as speaking gigs or print ads often influence each other. Some things to consider when measuring “reach” include:

Social media – The number of followers you have on Twitter, fans on Facebook, or connections on LinkedIn.

Website – The increase…

How to Improve Ad Performance

(When You’re Experiencing a Creative Block)

Being clever every day of the year can be tough on a search engine marketer. We all go through periods of time when we experience a creative block and can’t seem to think of new clever PPC ad copy to try out.

However, ad copy must always be on a path of improvement, even during those uncreative times. So, we’ve compiled a list of no-brainer ad performance improvement tests:

1) To “Initial Caps” or not?

Using your existing ad copy, try out different variations in capitalization. For example:

“Start a Free Trial Today” vs. “Start a free trial today”

This is a very simple test that can lead to some surprising results. Where you capitalize in your ad copy can be quite impactful.

2) To DKI or not?

Dynamic keyword insert (DKI) is quite effective sometimes, but…

The Positives of Being Negative

We are excited to announce that we just launched our patent-pending Negative Keyword Recommendation Engine as part of both the Yield Web Marketing Suite and Yield Web Marketing Suite for Agencies. This new feature is now available to all new and existing customers.

The Negative Keyword Recommendation Engine analyzes volumes of your historical traffic segmented by keyword, ad group and campaign. It then aggregates data based on common terms and uses sophisticated algorithms based on a variety of criteria including search volume, bounce rate and conversion rate to automatically recommend negative keywords for addition to each of your campaigns and ad groups.

While there are many facets of a search marketing campaign that are critical for success, many search engine marketers forget to pay enough attention to one of the most important aspects of their campaign. You launch your…

Evaluating Your 2009 Marketing Efforts

Now that 2009 is coming to a close in just a few short weeks, it’s time to develop marketing plans and budgets for the coming year. Before making any plans however, it pays to assess your 2009 marketing efforts – what worked, what didn’t, and what did you want to implement but never had the time or resources to do so.

We here at Yield Software are going through the same process – and it definitely takes more than one staff meeting or a “back of the napkin” approach! Here are some of the strategies we’ve used to help us make plans for 2010 and beyond:

1. Get your entire team involved

Small companies have one advantage big companies don’t have – the ability to hold company-wide meetings and solicit people’s feedback and insights. It’s best if you…

Google Unveils a Host of New Features

…And Innovations Galore!

At today’s Google Search Event in Mountain View, the company unveiled a number of impressive innovations — further evidence, if any was needed, that the company is not content to rest on its laurels.

In the “gee-whiz” category is the all-new “Google Goggles” feature, available via its Android operating platform for mobile devices. Google Goggles let’s Android-powered phones with cameras snap a picture, which it then interprets. For instance, snap a pic of a bottle of wine, and Goggles brings you reviews for it; snap a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge and get location, Wikipedia and other information; take a picture of text and Goggles uses optical character recognition (OCR) to complete a search for the keywords present.

In the “on-the-go” category, Google has improved its mobile application in three powerful ways: voice, location, and…

How to Get a Great Quality Score

Three Key Steps to Get into the “In” Crowd

Quality Score is an important component of Google pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. A great quality score will get your ads better exposure and actually save you money (which are the advertisers in Google’s “in” crowd). Conversely, if you let your quality score slip, Google will actually penalize you by increasing the cost for each click on your PPC ads (that would be the not “in” crowd). So, it’s time to spend some quality time on your quality score.

One of the most effective actions you can take to get a great quality score is to have “tightly knit” ad groups. That sounds easy enough.

However, the interpretations of “tightly knit ad group” we see varies quite a bit and is frequently the largest contributing factor to a poor quality score. Who…