Archive for the ‘Paid Search – Pay Per Click (PPC)’ Category
‘Sponsored’ Ads Get More Clicks than Organic Listings on Google
Did you know that: “approximately half of searchers still can’t differentiate between paid and organic search listings”, Research carried out by PPC management software company – Wordstream shows that, although organic search results on a whole receive more clicks than paid ‘sponsored ads’, “Clicks on paid search listings beat out organic clicks by nearly a 2:1 margin for keywords with high commercial intent in the US”.
What Does Google’s Disappointing Financial Year End Results Mean to Search Marketers
My first degree was actually a BSc in Economics but I shied away from this fascinating discipline to join the army of marketers…online marketers to be precise! This is not to say that headlines related to Finance & Economics do not grab my attention – they absolutely do! Whilst prowling through my G+ stream yesterday, I came across this post from Google’s Larry Page:
And then this post from Avinash Kaushik:
It led me to their Q4 2011 financial summary and Year end report and YouTube webcast.
Here are some take-aways I think every search marketer should take note of from their year end report:
How to Use the Thesaurus to Kick Start Your Keyword Research
Thesaurus’ came in very handy when I was essay writing in Uni and are still very relevant to me as a search marketing professional today. The thesaurus is my number 1 keyword research tool and the perfect resource for finding synonyms or related keywords. The beauty of using a thesaurus is that a bulk of keyword research has been done for you by thesaurus publishers. My favourite online thesaurus site is Thesaurus.com. Visual Thesaurus is also a handy tool if you are after a visual representation of keyword relationships (but it requires an annual subscription of about $20). I’d rather keep things simple by sticking with Thesaurus.com. Better still, thesaurus.com used in combination with the AdWords Keyword Tool is a clincher for your keyword research efforts.
How to Use Thesaurus.com and AdWords Keyword Tool
Type in your keyword in Thesaurus.com (in this example I typed in “architect”) – it should generate a list of results
Copy the URL- I copied ”http://thesaurus.com/browse/architect” for this example
Go the AdWords Keyword Tool – then copy and paste the thesaursus URL in the website text field.
AdWords Keyword tool crawls the specific page on thesaurus.com and returns even more keyword results
This not only helps you leverage two very powerful keyword tools at the same time but also ensures that no stones are left unturned over the course of your keyword research.
So UK Internet Advertising Finally Overtakes TV Advertising Spend – Paid Search is the Real Winner
I started today with my usual tech news digs on Twitter and RSS feeds BUT this release from the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) and article from the Guardian stood out from my endless stream of tech new articles and blog updates. They are both about Online advertising expenditure finally surpassing TV advertising spend. It was inevitable but I really didn’t expect it to happen so quickly!
The summary of the two articles was that:
- Online advertising expenditure in the first half of 2009 was £1.75 billion
- TV advertising over the same period (H1 2009) was £1.6 billion
It’s not a huge margin but considering that the entire advertising industry contracted by 16.6% in H1 2009 and TV advertising declined by 17% in H1 2009 (year on year); online advertising proved to be a recession buster with 4.6% year-on-year growth in the first half of 2009. Freaking amazing…I’ll say!
Lets dig a little deeper to find out the sectors in online advertising that actually tick:
Dos & Don’ts of Landing Page Design – 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design
I came across this Webinar video presentation this morning when doing some research on the landing design best practises and have to say it is the best I have come across as yet. It was presented by Tim Ash, author of the book, Landing Page Optimization and the CEO of sitetuners.com for the official Google AdWords blog, Inside AdWords.
I have to say, it is a really long video, with a duration of about 1hr 15mins. For that reason, I have summarised the key salient points from his presentation. Hope you enjoy it!
A Presentation on the Tricky Bits of Local Search by ‘Godfather of Search’ Danny Sullivan
I’ve said it a million times, I love local search engine optimisation – here is a presentation on tricky and inaccurate aspects of Local search by Danny Sullivan “Godfather of Search”. I cannot but emphasis the fact that business owners need to claim their local listing to ensure that correct information about their businesses are displayed on all local search engines. It’s a funny and informative video – I’d love to know what you think. Read More »
Why Local Search is Important to Your Business
Local search is currently been taken very seriously by the major search engines.
Google, Yahoo & Windows Live each have special Local search listing platforms for businesses that target specific locales. Here is an overview of each of them.
Google Local
Google released its Local Business Center back in 2007 and has been adding new features to it like, the ability to upload photos, pop-up info windows via its maps interface, reporting capabilities and its integration with Google AdWords via Local Business Ads. It’s the most sophisticated and easiest to manage of all three local listing platforms. Unlike the other two platforms, its listings are better centrally managed and cover a lot more countries. It is also likely to generate the most traffic to your website due to Google’s new feature of including local search results in searches without specifying a location . Read More »
How to Add More than 25 Characters to Your AdWords Ad Text Headline
Whilst working on an AdWords account today, I came across a really interesting find – Google AdWords actually allows more than 25 characters in Ad Text headlines. They appear to be testing this feature on text ad headlines using the Dynamic Keyword Insertion i.e. {KeyWord:default text} only. The ad text headline below has 29 characters!
There would have been no way this would have been accepted if it was added the normal way.
What is the Effect of this New Feature?
Well, this added flexibility in the character length of Ad text headlines would certainly improve and increase the ad’s Click Through Rate (CTR) as it would match searchers exact search phrase.
