Paid Search

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! 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.

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.

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

Drop us a line if you’d like to meet up at SMX West 2009 in Santa Clara, CA. We’ll be speaking on techniques for measuring the offline success of search.

What would your paid search program look like if it was missing 50% of the sales that it was generating? Would you alter your bidding?

Some follow-up thoughts on Google’s search-within-the-site.

Matchtypes and negatives play key roles in keeping your ads away from less relevant search queries.

Linking to a post today I wrote over at Search Engine Land on year-to-date trends in PPC.

The long tail of search, examined. Excerpts from a longer post at SEL.

As 2007 is now half over, it seems a good time to compare the performance of the Big Three search engines year-to-date.

RKG is speaking on paid search and website conversion at the DM Days NY Conference, June 19-21. If you’ll be there too, give us a shout.

I enjoyed speaking this morning at the AMA’s Hot Topics In Search Marketing. There are still some seats available for the last city on our tour: Chicago on June 22.

Here are 12 tips for winning at paid search in 2007.

We’re honored three of our suggestions made the Catalog Success list of best tips of 2006.

Our engineers are really pleased with the support, docs, and architecture of the Yahoo new platform. We’re optimistic and think it will be win for Yahoo and advertisers.

John Lenser is spot-on: “I suggest that most of those who arrived via your catalog name did so as the result of a catalog mailing or as the result of years of brand development in the marketplace resulting from catalog mailings. “