October 2008

The Archives

• Paid SearchGoogle Quality Score Update

  10.31.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Yesterday, Google announced more changes to the way the calculate your quality score and how they show ads.  There have been good points made on the PPC Book and on SE Roundtable about this so I’ll just sum them up the biggies.

  The Ad Position part of the algorithm will be updated.  They don’t really say [...]

• Paid SearchGrab a Chimay & Bid On Google

  10.31.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Recently, I wrote an article about Google cutting costs and trying to increase revenue and it looks like Google is taking one more step to give their income statement a boost.  Google updated their policies to show that beer is now acceptable to advertise for as long as it meets the local regulations.
  Don’t promote unacceptable alcohol [...]

• Paid SearchAmerica On Yahoo - Yahoo Looking to Deal

  10.31.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Yahoo’s in trouble - at this point, everyone knows that.  Throughout this entire year, they’ve been playing a mating game with all of the top search engines (Microsoft, Google and now AOL).  They first were in some talks with Microsoft that kept falling through.  With Google, they seemed to have a fairly finalized deal to [...]

• Paid SearchGoogle Gives PPC Edge to Blue Nile

  10.24.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  It seems that Google is testing (I’m hoping they’re not just playing favorites) a new feature that is allowing Blue Nile to display 3 products with descriptions with a drop down link on the PPC Ad.  It is giving them an extra line of linked text with the ability to bold face keywords and when [...]

• Affiliate Marketing, Paid SearchThe Case For Affiliate Brand Bidding

  10.24.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  I’ve been thinking about this topic for the last few months and have been dealing with it ever since I’ve started in this industry.  I was going to hold off on writing about it, but a post from PPC Blog got me to go ahead and just post my thoughts on the subject.
  While managing paid [...]

• Affiliate MarketingDon’t Let Legal Cripple Your Affiliates

  10.22.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  I received an email today from one of the affiliate managers I work with letting me know that they’ve received complaints about our site infringing on a few companies’ brands. What was it that we were doing so wrong? Making false claims? Bidding on their brand terms? Inaccurately portraying the brand? The answer: none of [...]

• Paid SearchYahoo! Dissappoints! Investors!

  10.22.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Yahoo! reported revenues yesterday of $1.33 billion, $40 million below analysts expectations.  It also is cutting it’s year end revenue targets, but the bigger news is that it’s cutting it’s workforce by 1,500 by the end of the year, or 10% of it’s employees.
  With so much bad news coming from Yahoo, I would think they’d [...]

• Online MarketingConnecting PPC vs SEO Spending

  10.21.08 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  Rand Fishkin asked some important questions about why paid search gets most of the ad dollars allocated to it.  Reading the comments is even more interesting to me because they’re mainly from the viewpoint of SEOs rather than PPC folks which puts a different angle on the questions. 
  First the questions:

  Why does paid search earn so [...]

• Paid SearchIs Google In Financial Trouble?

  10.17.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Slightly deceptive title, but while they’re not in trouble of going bankrupt or anything, I’ve got a feeling in my gut that Google is either feeling the pain of the economic downturn or is just trying very, very hard to protect themselves from it.  Yes, they just released very positive earnings yesterday showing better than expected revenue [...]

• Paid SearchNew Google AdWords Features

  10.17.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Google has recently added a few features to it’s system.  One is that they’ve added keyword quality score and Estimated First Page Bid to the reports you can run and the 2nd is they’re allowing you to separate Google Search clicks from Google Search Partner clicks.
  These are two nice additions to their advertising platform that [...]

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