Articles about Paid Search

Hi all,
Pay per click advertising has proved to be a fantastic cashcow for Google with Adwords proving to be its flagship revenue generator. Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsfot AdCenter, the ppc networks offered by Yahoo and MSN respectively,  have also tasted success though not on the same scale as the Google Adwords program.

As far as the advertiser is concerned, there is not much joy when it comes to click costs for the keywords they target in their ppc campaigns. Unlike the stock market where crashes occur, the prices of keywords have been going up steadily and there is no possibility of them coming down in future.  It is not fair to expect every advertiser to know the intricacies of PPC marketing and factors like quality score, targeting and relevancy.

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Recently, Netconcepts China successfully organised “the search marketing salon 2009” event in Beijing. The leading lights of the China SEO industry gathered and shared their experiences in search marketing field.

This event not only provides good opportunities for interactive discussion of new techniques and new methods of search marketing, but also aims to create a sustainable interactive platform for internet marketing in the long run in China.

The search marketing salon drew many SEOs’ attention and was well received industry wide. Many reputable companies from internet related industries attended this event including Elong travel booking, Net Ease, adSage, 99go.com, taikang insurance, DHgate.com, China Travel Service Head Office, 99Bill.com, Tuubar.com and Edeng.cn to name a few.

As honored guests, Mr. Zhang Tao (Baidu search marketing manager) and Allen Qu (Netconcepts CEO) held a series of seminars on search marketing techniques and development with many case studies.

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Hi all,
My post today covers a less discussed but critical aspect of  how pay per click account history can affect the Google Adwords quality score. The ppc account history of your campaigns is the recording of the clicks, costs, CTRs and all other performance factors relating to your ads from the date of inception of your Adwords account to date.

Good targeted and relevant keywords are vital to the healthy performance of any pay per click campaign. Not all keywords are created equal. In a campaign, some keywords outperform the others. It is a publicly discussed fact that poorly performing keywords can bring down the quality score of an otherwise decently performing campaign. The crux of the issue is: Is it wise to delete the poor performers or move those keywords to new ad groups under new ads?

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Hi all,
Continuing on the Pay Per Click (PPC) post on Pay per click landing pages that convert, I will be looking at the important factors that influence Google Adwords Quality Score. This score measures the relevance of the keywords that form a tightly knit ad that in turn is relevant to a landing page. The higher the targeting and the relevancy along the chain, the greater is the quality score.

Quality score is important in determining the ad rank using the formula Ad rank = Quality Score * Maximum Cost Per Click (CPC). A higher quality score can still give your ad a higher rank if the cost per click is reasonable. For ads with poor quality score, the ad rank can be increased if the cost per click is hiked up. This leads to the advertiser paying through his nose which is certainly a recipe for disaster in the long run.

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Hi all,
Landing page is one of the most important aspects of Pay per click (PPC) marketing on the Google Adwords network. After the initial keyword research and the creation of ad copy, you must have ads that are well targeted, great call to action and relevant to your industry and geotargeted to your target audience.

Each ad group in each of your campaigns must have a corresponding landing page that talks only about the product or service advertised in that specific ad. For exampe, if you are selling blue widgets, your landing page copy must address only blue widgets. This increases the relevancy of the whole process as the user gets to click on the ad of her choice and finds relevant content on the landing page that is in sync with the ad itself.

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Hi everyone,
In a major move, early this month, Google has lifted restrictions in 190 countries for using trademarks in Adwords copy. Last year, restrictions were removed from  UK and Ireland (the only countries in Europe) with the view that the legal rules were pretty similar to that of the US when it comes to using trademarks as a trigger to show ads in Adwords network.

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Hi all,
Google Squared is a concept in the anvil and is due for launch under Google Labs later this month.

When you type in a search query in Google, a useful Square is built around the query. For example, if you typed in “small cats”, the first row in the square can have the result miniature cats, a variety of Persian cats. There can be other varieties of small cats returned in other rows.

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[an abbreviated version of this article first appeared in the Febuary issue of Admedia magazine]

Let me state at the outset that I am a card-carrying member of the direct response school of search marketing, an unapologetic advocate for spending more on search and less on everything else. I got this way because I was responsible for making a return on online marketing budgets and over time I found that search consistently delivered the results. Simple. (more…)

It is a well known fact that the Title tag (as in <title></title> tags in the head section of a page) is the most important factor that influences on page optimisation with respect to the search engines.

The title tag is significant in two ways in that the search engines look at it closely to get a good idea of what the page is about. The title tag gets listed in the search engine results pages (SERPs) on which users click to go to the specific page in question. A meaningful title tag increases the click frequency.

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Hi all,
I am Ravi Venkatesan, senior SEO consultant and the latest addition to the Search marketing team at Netconcepts in Auckland, New Zealand.

I have around 9 years experience in the search marketing field and am adept at both organic search engine optimisation(SEO) and pay per click (PPC) marketing.

I have worked on a variety of projects ranging from accounting and legal fields to ecommerce and New Zealand travel and tourism projects with a huge dose of social media marketing.

I am an avid learner and keep up with the latest trends of the incredibly dynamic search marketing field that is growing astronomically with each passing day. I am looking forward to working with the clients of Netconcepts and use my knowledge gleaned over the past many years to the best of my ability to achieve clients’ and company expectations.

Cheers
Ravi Venkatesan