• Being in the 1st position will make your ads most profitable. This is not entirely true. There is no doubt that being in the 1st position gives the best visibility of your ad to a user and sometimes that can result in a conversion (after a user clicks on your ad, of course), but mostly it will end up spending more money that what the ad is generating. Being in the 1st position is great for branding purposes, however it also drives a lot of users who are not yet ready to make a purchase, subscribe to an email newsletter or register on the site, but are still researching. It is advised to experiment with ad positions, so that you can determine the position that works best and helps you achieve the right balance of costs vs. value.
• Add and use as many keywords into your PPC account as possible to get the most traffic. In theory you may get a ton of traffic, however it is important to keep in mind relevancy. By adding a lot of keywords, the traffic you get from it won’t be qualified traffic. This will most probably result in unwanted clicks or no action from users what so ever. Let’s admit, if you are selling chocolate, for example, there is no point to bid on clothing or shoe related keywords. It is important to target the most relevant keywords for your PPC account, otherwise it’s likely to use all your budget quickly without generating any of your desired conversions.
• After setting a PPC account you can forget about it. A lot of people think that they can create campaigns and ad groups, set budgets, bids, load in keywords, ads and walk away. Although it would be very nice and easy, unfortunately this isn’t true. PPC is not a “set it and forget it” if you want to make the most of the money you are willing to invest or spending at the moment. It takes monitoring, testing, adding, removing, bid increasing or lowering, turning off, turning on, etc., in order to get the highest results for the money you spend. Because of the workload involved in managing a PPC account many businesses choose to outsource their accounts to PPC agencies, which can dedicate time and expertise to complete the mentioned tasks.
• Opening up a new PPC account will re-start your Quality Scores. This actually is partially a myth, because technically if you open up a new PPC account your Quality Scores will reset, however, if you are keeping the same account structure, landing pages, ads, keywords, etc., you are going to end up with approximately the same Quality Score as you had previously. To improve your Quality Score, you need to monitor your account or maybe even re-structure to organize your campaigns, ad groups, keywords to reach the most targeted audience possible.
• Test ads every week regardless of the clicks they have. And again this isn’t true. It is important that when ads are tested (before deciding on when to pause or leave an ad on) to give them a longer date range to look at. Also be sure that each ad has at least 100 clicks – the more the better, before making any final decision. This will allow to get a true perspective on which ads are performing best over time. If an ad is paused too early, it could result in pausing a potentially great performing ad. Sometimes testing can take a longer time period, but it can achieve very positive results.

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The Brand Republic reported:

From today (24 February), users will be able to experience real-time Twitter feeds in Yahoo! search. Real-time public tweets will also be visible on Yahoo!’s media properties including news, finance and entertainment

Yahoo!’s integration of Twitter aims to run deeper than the deal Twitter struck with rivals Google and Microsoft at the end of last year, to launch real-time feeds on their search engines….”

Related Links: Brand Republic Article

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“Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer said the 10-year deal would provide Microsoft’s Bing search engine with the necessary scale to compete. “Through this agreement with Yahoo, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,” said Mr Ballmer.

In return for ceding control of its search engine, Yahoo will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell adverts on some Microsoft sites….”

Read the rest at BBC.

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“There are several reports tonight that Yahoo and Microsoft are close to consummating a search and advertising deal. 24/7 Wall Street cites an investment banker who says a deal is “imminent.” All Things Digital says an agreement is “down to the short strokes,” but also points out that the companies have been down this road before.

Both reports speculate that the deal will include a large upfront payment to Yahoo — the “boatloads of money” that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has said a deal would require — and additional future payments in exchange for Microsoft taking over Yahoo’s search and search advertising business. 24/7 Wall Street cites sources who say Yahoo will get $3 billion upfront….”

Read the rest here.

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“We’re testing a program that uses favicons, the little icons that show up on your browser next to the address window when you’re on a page—say, on Expedia.com. These favicons are already widely in use on the Web. Now, when a user searches for “Expedia,” or another search that matches your domain name, that same favicon will show up next to the URL in your ad….”    

Read the rest and view an example ad here.   
Want to take advantage of this new feature? Contact Tug today! 

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Covering the Report, NMA had this to say:

“Some 48% reported better returns on natural search (optimisation) campaigns and 43% claim greater ROI on paid search (pay-per-click). However, 15% reported decreasing effectiveness for paid search compared to just 6% for natural.

The report, conducted by Econsultancy in association with search company Guava, found more companies were tracking ROI effectively than last year – 45% of respondents who used paid search campaigns and 35% using natural.

Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy, said, “It’s encouraging to see a large proportion of companies still increasing budgets for both paid and natural search. It shows they’re better at measuring returns for search, and that’s good at a time when budgets are being cut.”

The report also revealed the end of Google’s Best Practice Funding had little effect on the market, with just 5% of companies reporting a negative impact since 1 January. However, 15% of respondents said Google’s trademark bidding policy had had a negative impact on ROI.

Unsurprisingly Google remained the behemoth for paid search, with 85% using the search engine, well ahead of Yahoo (44%)  and Microsoft Live (30%). Yahoo took the biggest hit year on year, with 5% fewer companies using it for paid search.

Mobile search remained static, with just 5% of companies investing in mobile search listings. Despite 23% of respondents planning to invest in mobile search this year, more than two-thirds (37%) said mobile isn’t on the radar yet and a further 32% have no plans to use mobile search.

“Mobile search represents a huge opportunity for companies as there’s no one really doing it,” said Gregoriadis.

The report also revealed huge growth in investment in social media, which 65% of companies saying it’s used as part of the marketing mix. Twitter was used for marketing by 49% of respondents, compared to just 3% a year ago.”

For the the full article go to: http://www.nma.co.uk/over-half-of-companies-to-increase-search-budgets-for-measurable-roi/3000311.article?nl=DN

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 ”We try not to oversell the changes we make to Sponsored Search — sometimes a button is just a button, after all. So, we hope you’ll pay attention when we tell you this: the new targeting features we’re adding right now are kind of a big deal.

Starting now, you’ll be able to target the audiences you want, when and where you want them, with a lot more control. We are rolling out demographic targeting, ad scheduling (which you might know as dayparting), and enhanced ZIP-level geo-targeting at the ad group and campaign level.”

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land has also taken a look at these new features and has written an indepth walk through, here’s a small quote:

“You can geotarget the ads by country, state, city, zip code, or DMA. But that is not the new part, the new parts are that you can adjust the bids based on this setting, plus there is an enhanced map, a bulk import location feature, you can overlap locations and set specific bid adjustments to those overlays and finally, you can set the targeting on a more granular set.“

Read the full article from Barry here.

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Yahoo has announced that it will be closing its UK content network in order to concentrate on improving their search and display offering. I personally have never received great results from Yahoo’s content network and can’t help wondering if this is the real reason they have decided to shut it down, especially as now the new CEO, Carol Bartz, has recenly taken over. It seems to me this might be an attempt to improve the Yahoo offering before trying to get a MSN / Yahoo deal back on the cards. The Yahoo announcement is below …

“As a valued client we are writing to give you advance notice of the closure of our Content Match product in Europe.

The decision to close Content Match underlines our commitment to focus on our Sponsored Search and Display business and to simplify our solutions to deliver a high ROI for our advertisers.

Content Match will close on 31 March 2009, after which the product will no longer be supported.
All Advertisers should therefore opt out of the Content Match marketplace by this date.
Your account manager will be happy to assist you.

[...]

We aim to work with you to propose alternative products.”

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