Every year, bloggers from all corners of the SEM industry create “Best of” lists to review news-bites, articles and varied quips on the year’s performance. All of us at PPC Hero wanted to dive head-first into this year-end ritual. As part of our week-long look at 2007, we decided to examine these lists from other blogs and compile the 3 best for our readers!
ClickZ: 2007 PPC Search Retrospective
Seeing as our focus is on pay-per-click, ClickZ’s retrospective on the major PPC news items from 2007 was especially relevant. Writer Kevin Lee felt that the acquisitions of publisher networks by the big search engines played a huge role in this past year. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and even AOL all made major purchases in ’07. How will that affect PPC? These acquisitions will broaden the horizons of what is available in ad inventory on the content networks and the avenues with which to advertise (i.e. more display ads, expanse of AdSense network). While this look at ’07 doesn’t dig much into actual PPC account management, it’s a great perspective on the big picture and what will coming down the road in 2008.
A common 2007 theme was the crossing of boundaries once considered sacrosanct. These crossings include the near-elimination of true third-party ad serving and a blurring of lines between publisher, network, technology provider, and agency.
The PPC Book: Winding Down 2007
Once again, this is a PPC focused look at 2007. Jeff Hudson over at PPC Book took a personal, account manager level look at this past year. He briefly touches on some of the big idea topics such as the plethora of changes in AdWords and beyond. But where the magic lies is in his honest interpretation of how PPC has changed for the better! Jeff maintains that PPC is still the “most phenomenal” medium for advertising despite the increased work load. Additionally, he feels that “set it and forget it” PPC management is gone and that due to the increased efforts required of advertisers, weak SEM agencies will begin to be filtered out in 2008.
Pay Per Click is still the most phenomenal advertising medium I’ve ever seen.
Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg: Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007
When looking past PPC to the wider world of search marketing, 2007 was another big year. Tamar Weinberg compiled this veritable “who’s who” list of SEM blog articles. My first reaction to this post was, “Holy Crap!” The enormity of the list and realizing the amount of time required to get this information together make it one of the best “year in review” lists ever! While PPC Hero didn’t make the cut (no hard feelings!), there is a wealth of knowledge to be had in this list of blog articles.
What really pushes this review to the upper echelon of list-dom is that it has categories by industry niche! If you want to know what happened in internet video in ’07, these articles are in a category. If you want know what happened at specific social media sites, Digg, Reddit and other similar sites have their own categories. Kudos to Tamar for compiling this list and sharing it with the SEM world!
This year, I present you my favorite timeless posts of 2007, complete with descriptions about each blog post (which more than quadrupled the workload for me this time around, especially because I tripled the amount of links, but I had fun!)
Well, those were the big three lists for us. But before I leave this subject alone, I want to throw out some honorable list-mentions:
Search Year 2007: Search News, In Review – Our top 10 of 2007 – The Year in Review – Top Four Paid Search Traps – The Best of Copyblogger in 2007 – adCenter Blog Nostalgia – A Look Back At 2007
