Small Businesses Plagued by Poor Quality Scores

How to Overcome a Significant Competitive Deficit

One of the major touted benefits of Google AdWords’ Quality Score system for advertisers is that the “little guys” should be able to compete with the “big guys” on a level playing field.

However, 99 percent of the small and medium-sized business that we work with come to us with such low quality scores, they are the ones being punished by the very system that is supposed to help them out.

Many small businesses don’t even know about Quality Score.  Of the businesses that do know about it, most are only familiar with the high-level requirements that keywords, ads and landing pages should all be relevant.  In the mind of the small advertiser, they have created a relevant ad campaign.  Small advertisers lack the time and resources to figure out quality…

Announcing Our New PPC Bid Management Offering

Yield Web Marketing Suite Lite Debuts

We’ve been busy at Yield Software — this is the second big announcement in as many weeks, and there’s more to come — and today’s announcement is going to make a lot of businesses happy. Today we released the newest version of our flagship offering, which we’re calling Yield Web Marketing Suite Lite. It’s a completely free version focused just on PPC campaign management for smaller budgets.

Advertisers continue to shift from more traditional advertising channels, such as direct mail, spot cable, radio, and print ads, to online marketing channels, especially search engine marketing (SEM). However, many are unsuccessful in their SEM efforts and fail to generate the desired returns from their marketing campaigns.

Search engine marketing is a competitive and dynamic marketplace. Manually managing SEM campaigns requires significant domain knowledge and expertise,…

Call Tracking Enabled in Yield Web Marketing Suite

Marchex Integration Now Live and Available

This morning we officially announced the availability of a new call tracking feature in our Yield Web Marketing Suite for Advertisers and for Agencies through an integration with Marchex Call Analytics.  This is a feature many of our users have been eagerly awaiting so we’re pretty excited to announce that it’s live for all users.  For those who don’t know about Marchex, what this means is search marketers and their agencies can now track and optimize sales and conversions from search engine pay-per-click (PPC) ads or natural search results that lead to a telephone call as opposed to an online transaction.

For many of our users, a call to a telephone number is the conversion event inspired by their search engine ad or natural search result.  By integrating with Marchex, the leader in call…

Get the Most from Google AdWords Sitelinks

Some How-to’s for Increasing CTRs

First off, just in case you are not yet using them, Sitelinks ad extensions are now available to all AdWords advertisers.   These extra links to your website display with your ad when 1) your keyword and ad combo has an awesome quality score and 2) your ad appears in the top positions of the search page.

Google, and many others have seen CTRs increase an average of 30% with Sitelinks, so they are really an incredible opportunity to boost the performance of your AdWords advertising.

AdWords allows you to enter up to 10 additional Sitelinks.  When creating your Sitelinks, it’s important to be mindful of the order in which you enter them.  The first two that you enter will get the most impressions, so be sure to make those your most compelling.  It’s also quite…

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…