Divining the Importance of a PPC Bid

Goldilocks Syndrome or How to Find the Porridge that is Just Right

Most companies we talk to spend their time coming up with keyword lists and writing ads.  But when it comes time to setting bids, they either don’t have the time or knowledge to come up with the best bids.

A typical account we look at has set the same bid for almost all of their keywords (with maybe a handful of higher bids for super important keywords).  They randomly pick how much they think a click should cost and then wait for Google to perform.  Usually anger ensues if performance does not occur immediately.

Let’s analyze what happens to accounts that don’t have an optimal bid established for their keywords.

What is the cost of a bid that is too low?

Interestingly enough, a bid that is…

Things You Can Learn from Social Media Monitoring

13 Truly Useful Tips!

Everyone has gone social: you, your competitors, your partners, your customers, your leads, your friends–everyone.  So now what?

It’s time to set up a system to mine all of the qualitative data that is floating around out there and put it to good, practical use.  Try using this list of 13 truly useful things you can actively learn from monitoring social media:

1. Who’s in bed with the competition?

Who’s blogging favorably about them?  Who’s providing them with good reviews?  Who’s following them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and active in their community?  Who’s presenting with them on webinars and co-sponsoring collateral with them?

Get some good monitoring going on around your competitors names, and keep an eye on their online reviews and their social media account followers and activities.

Find their biggest fans and start to…

Expecting to Go All the Way

… On a First Date?

Let’s face it: it’s typically not recommended! Though it may happen once in awhile, for most people it just doesn’t — usually for good reason.  And yet many businesses treat first visits to their websites as if they’re expecting to go all the way on a first date.

Since we all need that little thing called revenue in order to stay in business and be profitable, many businesses just focus on tracking their one main revenue-generating action as a conversion event for online activity.  Whether it’s a product purchase or generation of a lead, all online campaigns and keywords are judged by their ability to immediately result in this one conversion.

However, in this day and age of information abundance, reviews, referral sources, and the like, many searchers do lots of poking around…

NEW FEATURE: Improved Multi-Search Engine Budget Allocation

Chronic Search Engine Underspend affects 2 in 10 campaigns on the Internet.  That statistic is entirely fabricated, but it raises an important issue.  How is your campaign budget being spent across search engines? Recall that one of Yield Software’s great features is the ability to define one campaign and push it to up to three search engines.

Thanks to customer feedback and suggestions, you will now see two improvements.  First, we have updated our cross-search engine budget allocation algorithm to consider additional statistics including click-through-rate (CTR) and stay rate. As a result, you will see a more optimal allocation of spend across search engines. All existing and new campaigns will automatically leverage this enhancement as they will be set to Automatic Budget Allocation in the Advanced Campaign Settings page.

Second, for those of you wishing to have more…

Fantasy SEM

Crush Your Competition!

Fantasy sports continue to attract more interest each year. The concept of assembling a dream team of elite players, watching them outperform and raking in the profits is very appealing and addictive to many.

Since there are never enough sport analogies in the business world, let’s apply these fantasy team concepts to SEM. If you were to assemble your own SEM fantasy team, what would it look like?

The Fantasy SEM Team Roster. You can’t play any sport without a full team. What does a full team for SEM include? You need team members to both attract visitors to your website and then convert them once they get to your site.

Here’s what your starting lineup should include:

The Offense: Get them to your site.

Paid Search Keywords. Star keywords are short tail enough to get great volume and make…