Category: SEM

A few weeks ago, Rimm-Kaufman Group CEO George Michie had the pleasure of interviewing Linda Bustos of Elastic Path and the eCommerce blog, GetElastic.  Now the tables are turned with George in the hot seat.  They discuss the future of paid search as well as current best practices.  Read the full interview here.

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As a core component of paid search quality score, a strong Click-Through Rate (CTR) is vital for ensuring lower costs per click and higher ad visibility. If you are seeing your CTR decline over months or years it can be concerning, but not necessarily an indication of a problem with your copy or PPC program as a whole.

Yahoo’s new syndication bidding controls should be a big win for everyone!

Sometimes it’s tempting to leap to conclusions in paid search. In this cautionary post, we’ll provide a tool for testing whether data has changed meaningfully, or whether you’re looking at statistical noise.

Yahoo! announced their Q4 ‘09 earnings on Tuesday, making their best effort to portray a 4% year over year decline in revenue as a signal of a turnaround. While that certainly beats the 12-13% declines Y! saw earlier in ‘09, there are still troubling numbers deeper in the report and in RKG’s data.

A layered approach to assessing paid search effectiveness. Now is the time to raise the bar.

Traffic from mobile devices has grown tremendously over the last year, but the quality of that traffic may be sketchy.

The long tail matters.

Just because there’s traffic doesn’t mean you want to pay for it.

The numbers are in, and show some intriguing trends.

The value of traffic from each network partner varies. Allowing advertisers to control what they pay for traffic from each would benefit the advertisers, the quality publishers, and the engines.

Data and other observations indicate that holiday 2009 should be a good one!

Anticipating traffic value shifts at the holidays is the key to a successful Q4.

We’ve seen clients reallocate branding funds from offline marketing efforts to paid search recently. Why search?

Occasionally, an increase in a term’s average CPC can occur simultaneously with a decrease in average position. Here, we explain why.

Thin data impacts every paid search program.

New Google AdWords Plusbox Functionality, SERP Layout & Notable Data Updates

Cashback is an attractive system: Bing pays users to shop at your website. But there are some things advertisers need to watch out for and some precautions they should take.

Bing Cashback pays users to make purchases using Bing. Here’s how it works.

Sudden drops in conversion rates can happen for a variety of reasons. Here are some tips for identifying and addressing these issues.

In paid search, metrics often vary in unexpected ways. Unexplained variation is often referred to as “noise.” Noise occurs on top of, and can sometimes cloud our view of, the true underlying pattern, or, the “signal.”

Has eBay been phasing out syndicated Yahoo ads in favor of Google’s? RKG records indicate a major change in the search partner landscape.

Google predicts shifting from CPC to CPA and keyword-free advertising. Sounds great…er, maybe not.

PPC ads do not control brand traffic or sales; rather, other advertising channels, customer referrals, and the power of brand drive brand sales. A dip in PPC brand sales can be related to cannibalization (affiliates, organic listings) or may be down in truth (site issues, competition, decrease in other marketing channels, economic changes).

Part 2 of our study: much of the conventional wisdom around paid search driving store sales may be wrong.