I handle pay per click campaigns for most of my customers. The front-end, setting up and tuning the campaign is the most time consuming part of the effort. Finding the right words and then determining which words best convert. After the initial set-up maintenance requires far fewer hours, with much of the time spent adjusting spend for postion. However diligence and attention are important as results should be fed back into the website to improve landing pages and improve organic results for top performing phrases.

It is interesting to see how people charge for this service (most of my clients are hourly). There is an excellent article about PPC management options here

I had a meeting at Yahoo this week. The meeting was targeted at companies heavy into affiliate programs. We heard from a number of program managers, but because I am under NDA, can’t disclose all the great stuff they are working on. However, I will say these guys are not sitting around worrying about Microsoft. They are firmly focused on the future and presented an impressive list of products and upgrades. Most  interesting was some of the stuff going on with PPC management and while I can’t be specific, I think I can say that managing PPC on Yahoo is about to get a lot easier.

I know Yahoo isn’t the shinning star of the industry they once were, but these guys get a lot of stuff right. Google has the search traffic and therefore the money and therefore the clout, but judging by Microsoft’s track record, they don’t have the stuff to make Yahoo better.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a Microsoft ‘hater.’ In fact I was a liaison to Microsoft when I was at Intergraph and spent a fair amount of time on the Redmond campus, they get a lot right. Tons of R&D and top people, but their leadership in office applications doesn’t currently translate to search or internet services.

So did Yahoo make the right decision? If I were a shareholder, I would probably wouldn’t think so. As a Internet marketing guy, I am glad to they didn’t merge this into Microsoft’s AdCenter mess. Yahoo had a business before the MS deal and it still does.

Yahoo has great people, product, and heart.

When I started my consulting business, I imagined that I would be working with some larger firms with in-house web and marketing resources. I imagined that much like it had been for me as an in-house marketer, I would apply my SEO/SEM skills to a given situation and others would carry out the recommendations.

While it does work that way some of the time, I frequently work with small companies that have little or no marketing and/or technical expertise. It is unlikely they know or have anyone who knows what an <H1> tag is, or how to create an .htacess file.

I had one customer whose shared-hosting provider experienced frequent outages, sometimes several hours a week and another whose canned shopping cart was broken by a system-wide upgrade and was unable to process orders for months.

The long and short of this is that while my focus is SEO and SEM services, I frequently provide additional marketing services through relationships with local designers, programmers, and copywriters. Some of these folks I know from my days as an in-house marketer, others I have come to know and respect through clients projects.

I enjoy the challenges brought by different types of businesses and the opportunity to make a difference.

How about you, any stories you can share?

It appears that attitudes on mining the lesser used, but more specific “long-tail” phrases is changing. Quality Score is making it too expensive to go after these phrases. What this means is to improve the performance and lower the cost of your campaigns you need to clear out the deadwood.

If you must stubbornly clinging to your long-tail phrases, move them their own group so they aren’t needlessly impacting the Quality Score of your other campaigns.

More on this topic here in Yahoo’s Search Marketing Blog titled:
Chasing our Long Tails.