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,…

Join Us at SES San Francisco 2010

Stop by Our Booth on the Expo Floor!

Yield Software will be presenting and exhibiting at SES-San Francisco 2010 next week at Moscone West.  Our booth number is 416 — Matt, Jenae, Jacob and I will be hanging out there doing demos and schmoozing, and we’d love to say hello if you’re there.

If you’re not already registered for SES, you can still get a free exhibit hall pass — just visit Search Engine Strategies San Francisco to reserve a pass.  We’re also going to be giving away a free Apple iPad (a $499 value) from business cards dropped into the fishbowl at our booth, so be sure to bring yours along and drop it into the bowl.  We’ll do the drawing at the end of the conference and ship the winner’s new iPad directly from Apple.

One more thing…

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…

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…

Summer Reading (and Year-Round Blogs)

What to Read When You Put Down Those Stieg Larsson Novels

It’s summer and I understand everywhere else in the United States, it’s hot.  In San Francisco, we’ve endured day after day of thick fog (during my run through Golden Gate Park the other day, I swear it was snowing) so I can only imagine what it’s like to lay in a backyard hammock reading great books (now, on my iPad) while sipping ice cold lemonaid.

Recently, I was at a meeting where the group I was addressing asked what blogs and websites I regularly read to stay on top of trends in search and social marketing.  It occurred to me that it might be fun to list them in this column, together with some great career-oriented reading.

Every morning, when I fire up my laptop upon arriving…