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If your search marketing campaign contains broad or phrase matched terms you may be wasting a significant portion of your budget on irrelevant clicks. Most PPC advertisers focus a majority of their time building keyword lists but fail to recognize the importance of negative keywords. In addition to mitigating...
If you are new to online advertising you might not know that your ad network probably offers two different types of ad placement: search engine placement and content (contextual) advertising. Search network ads appear beside search engine results on sites like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Content ads appear...
As we mentioned in our introduction to writing effective ad copy , there are three primary things that a search marketing ad has to do: grab a user’s attention, describe your offering, and tell a user what to do next. The function of a headline is to grab the user’s attention. When one of...
When you select keywords for your search marketing campaigns, you’re trying to identify customers who want whatever it is that you have to offer. This is easier to understand if we think about “searchers” rather than “keywords.” Keywords can be ambiguous, but searchers aren’t...
Writing effective ad copy is one of the most difficult parts of search engine marketing—or of marketing in general for that matter. Creativity always helps, but there are a number of tips you can use when you can't depend on inspiration. They won't get you to "Bo Knows Baseball,"...
A few days ago, Google AdWords made two major modifications to the rules that determine which ads appear in which locations on the page. While AdWords quietly makes minor tweaks and changes all the time, these major change were announced on the official AdWords blog , and are likely to have noticeable...
Clean up your dirty campaigns! No I'm not talking about politics here. I'm talking about your search engine marketing accounts. Unless you have unlimited funds, unlimited time, and more patience than sense, a regular cleaning of your PPC accounts can help profitability, improve quality scores...
(Free Holiday Season 2008 Webcast! Click here to take advantage of a special Holiday Season Presentation hosted November 29, 2008, by Clickable and Search Engine Watch. It was led by SEW editor Kevin Newcomb and Clickable’s Senior Director Keith Hong.) Holiday Season 2008 Search Marketing Checklist...
The fundamental task of marketing and sales is to convince people that they want your product. Usually, this is a two part process: Figure out what exactly people want. Show them that your product or service meets those needs. The first part of this -- figuring out precisely what people want -- can be...
Site Placement Basics Until recently, AdWords advertisers had little control over their content network ads. The lack of control led to untargeted ads with low conversions and high costs, especially relative to search network ads. As a result, the majority of advertisers began turning off content network...
What if you only paid search engines for keyword ads when visitors they lure convert to customers? That is the goal behind the cost-per-acquisition (CPA) model. Instead of just paying to get people in the door, you only pay for people that make a purchase. CPA models help allocate funds where they will...
When Should I Use Phrase Match? The Best Practices section of Clickable University includes a detailed discussion of keyword matching options, but it wouldn't hurt to review the basics before turning to a discussion of the "phrase match" option. There are three kinds of match type: "broad"...
For business people who have limited search marketing experience, the daily budget would seem to be the attribute of a search marketing campaign that is most familiar and obvious to deal with. Advertisers typically have a certain, fixed set of funds available for search marketing efforts - probably a...
If you’re a Clickable user, you may have noticed a new feature in the Manage section called "Ad Scheduling." So what is it? Ad Scheduling is a powerful tool that allows you to pause your campaigns on certain days of the week (known as "week-parting") or times of the day (known...
In recent months, Google has made significant changes to the algorithm it uses to calculate Quality Score. In an effort to increase the quality of keywords, ads, and landing pages, Google has again modified the old CTR (Click-Through-Rate) * Max CPC (Cost-Per-Click) formula from the past. You can read...