Category Archives: Paid Search

5 Good Alternatives to Google Adwords

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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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Pay Per Click Account History And Quality Score

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Google Adwords Quality Score – Important Factors

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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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PPC Landing Page That Converts

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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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Google Adopts Liberal Trademark Policy In Adwords Copy

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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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Google Squared – Great Concept From Searchology

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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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Search and Brand Marketing

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search and brand marketing

[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. Continue reading →

Title Tags and Branding-Tussle in the Making?

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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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New Addition to Netconcepts SEO Team

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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

Marketing is an Art and a Science

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This post over at Idealog caught my attention this morning…

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told a recent Advertising Age conference that the future of advertising lies in measurement. But, to quote the genius campaign for Toyota’s Signature range of imported used cars: they would say that.

It would be easy to assume that Google is utterly unbiased—the numbers don’t lie, after all. But data (gathered after the event) doesn’t necessarily amount to intelligence.

If Google is right we will have gone from one extreme to the other. Rampant idealism meets bloodless statistics.

read the full article

The point I think David MacGregor is making is that marketing and advertising are not just about statistics, and that we should not let Google’s algorithmic approach to what they do vanillify marketing practice. And I have to say that I agree in large part…marketing is about people and when it comes to people there’s always more art than science imho.

But marketing and advertising is an art in the conception and the execution (just like business generally). Google are pioneering ways to execute better but I don’t think that necessarily means there isn’t still plenty of scope for well conceived advertising creative.

Even in Google’s Adwords product there’s a need for creativity and persuasion. For sure it is very a limited medium, but good ‘creative’ copy in search marketing can move ROI + or – an enormous amount. And Google’s Adwords product isn’t just about what you do to get the click, that’s only half the job (or less), what happens after the click is probably more important…enter stage left talented marketers.

So, I would argue that Google’s algorithmic approach doesn’t reduce the need or importance of good creative marketing and advertising (the big idea!), but does bring some long overdue science to the execution. Measurement is really important. Particularly as the economy tightens good marketers want to know where the ROI is.

But then again, I’m a dyed in the wool search marketer so I would say that :)