I always get excited when a client’s click-through-rate has increased while cost-per-click has gone down. What can be overlooked though is it doesn’t matter if you’re getting a million clicks a day for one cent each if none of your clicks are converting. Maria Nikishyna of Search Engine Journal has written a great post on how to get the most qualified traffic to your site. She offers tips for the Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced PPC-er but using all of her approaches together is sure to keep marketing costs down while increasing relevant traffic to your site.
In an ideal PPC world, every account would be making the max profit. But this is not where you and I work! Every day we are trying to get our accounts from current to potential profit. In his ClickEquations blog post, Alex Cohen gives some great tools on how to do this. He explains the types of paid search problems, the paid search technology landscape, and most importantly, in my opinion, finding your place on the paid search technology marketing curve. You have to know where you fall on this “maturity” curve to choose the right tools and get your accounts closer to the ideal world.
Smart phones have changed the way the world searches. No more solitary browsing at large monitors: now a bus ride past a gyro stand can lead to search for Greek recipes, and an argument about the best jazz saxophonist can lead to an mp3 sale. This is great news for PPC – that is, of course, if PPC writers remember that a phone’s screen is only about four inches across. This week, Brad Geddes of BG Theory takes a look at this phenomenon by doing a case study on what Display URLs work for what devices. Not all URLs will resonate with all users, and the results may surprise you!
Yahoo! entertainment searches will now be shown in a box form at the top of the SERP in an expanding accordion search box. Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch uses Lady Gaga as a search example, explaining how the box will initially give you an overview of her with the option to explore tabs for her events, albums, videos, and Twitter feed. In addition, Yahoo is now using HTML5 for mobile searches and providing search generated slideshows for trending topics.
There is no such thing as too much data and Google has realized this. So that being said, Google Adwords has began to see much positive feedback based on it’s new Search Funnels feature. Basically, you can see the complete conversion path of a customer. From telling you what other ads the customer saw, to what types of keywords assisted you on your conversion, and even how much time the customer spent looking at your ad or landing page, Adwords Search Funnels is a major leg up for PPC advertisers looking for that statistical edge. Check it out…Nerds.
