Author Archive: George

Last week Google and Yahoo announced an agreement by which Yahoo would be allowed to selectively serve Google ads along side search results on Yahoo.com and Yahoo’s partner sites, and take advantage of Google’s Content ad platform as well.

The second of a ten part series on what is required of top tier bid management platforms in 2008.

I raised a great many hackles at IRCE in Chicago on Monday 6/9 pointing out some of the important issues associated with Affiliate Marketing. Did I go too far? Yes and No.

I’m giving a 2 - 2.5 presentation on PPC Marketing next Thursday 6/5 at noon EST. Join us!

The first installment in a series on critical technology and know-how associated with bid management in 2008.

Bidding by margin rather than sales has many benefits, particularly for retailers with a diverse mixture of products.

Those super affiliates, who “drive” so much business to your company? Where do they get their traffic? The answer will tell you whether you should clap them on the back or clap them in irons.

Sometimes, we take technology for granted. That can be perilous in the search game.

Are your affiliates thieves robbing you blind, or a valuable network of allies driving sales? Here are six ways to sniff out the truth.

Which advertising dollars drive sales, and which don’t? Direct mail drives web sales, web advertising drives phone and retail business, and within web, paid search drives email and vice versa. It’s increasingly difficult to see. We’ll give some tips for finding a way through the maze.

YouTube captures the marketer’s imagination: a huge number of eyeballs, a perfect medium for communicating messages of any length, and a user base that is nanoseconds away from your store. But how do we get them to voluntarily watch a commercial?

AdGroups are useful for folks managing small programs, and an essential construct in making Content advertising work well. However, for a large complex search program, AdGroups are simply in the way. In this post, we’ll dig into how and why we don’t pay too much attention to the engines’ advice on AdGroups.

We often hear references to “the Long Tail” of search. But the length of the list is secondary to the value it’s bringing to the program. Quantifying the “thickness” of your tail can be a good check on the overall health of the program.

Finding the right message for your PPC ads is important, and testing is a key component of a well run program. But too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Find out the sometimes hidden costs of over doing the copy changes.

Did your Q4 PPC Sales meet expectations? How are those expectations set? Every retailer is different, and there can be very good explanations for being above or below the “norm”, but knowing what the norm is can be a useful place to start the evaluation process.

How did we do compared to everybody else? The perennial question is a hard one to answer. Perhaps these benchmarks will help.

A while back I blogged on the in-source versus outsource decision with SEM. Today, I want to go into a bit more depth on what those choices mean.

Yesterday I wrote about the relationship between PPC program performance and business models. Today we’ll take a look at how product categories seem to impact the numbers.

As retailers, we always wanted to know: how are we doing relative to our competitors? We thought it might be useful to throw out some benchmarks of what we see across our client-base.

David Pasternack of Did-It argues that the reason 80% of companies are dissatisfied with their SEMs is that good service can’t be had without huge management fees. We say he’s wrong.

MSN and Atlas released a study suggesting that half of search budgets are wasted on brand search…whose campaigns are these guys looking at?!?

Google says the change is designed to improve the quality of ad results. We see the change as a medium-sized plus, coupled with a potentially frightening minus.

See how Google and Yahoo’s syndicate partners compare in traffic volume and quality to their parent sites.

The last installment of a 4 part series on auditing your search program. How to evaluate the marketing objectives and the extent to which your program meets them.

Conversion rates differ by engine and by keyword, but also by match type and whether the search is coming from Google.com or Google’s syndicate partners.