Yahoo Marketing to MSN AdCenter Transition Complete

Looks like the Yahoo Marketing to MSN AdCenter cut-over is now complete (I had several email notices to this effect this morning). With this change, customers will no longer be able to differentiate bids or ads between these platforms. To make this more clear in the reporting for my customers, I have updated the campaigns that previously read MSN (cpc) and Yahoo (cpc) to display as “Bing (cpc)” in their Google analytics traffic reports. Several in the industry are reporting wild gyrations...
More

Yahoo to Microsoft AdCenter Transition Update

I attended a seminar today that discussed the Microsoft (AdCenter) /Yahoo (Panama) transition. I have hit several preliminary discussions on this topic at conferences, but this was the first one that had any real information about the Microhoo transition. The seminar was lead by representatives from Microsoft and Yahoo and they set forth a time-line that showed the transition starting in August for completion by mid-October. They were careful to point out that this transition only effects sea...
More

Yahoo and Microsoft Deal

The big news in the press today is the Microsoft/Yahoo deal. I have already received questions about this from a couple of clients, so I thought it best to expand here. In the deal the search brand at Yahoo will remain to be "Yahoo Search" but it will be  "Powered by Bing."  There will be no immediate changes however until they get regulatory approval, following approval the integration effort will move forward (expected early 2010). What about allocating advertising dollars? In the deal ...
More

Measuring Conversions

I am always surprised when I find businesses measuring Ad effectiveness based on click-thru rate. CTR is a simple measurement of clicks given as a percentage of impressions. That is, for a given volume of ad impressions, some number of readers have clicked-thru to your site. Unfortunately CTR can be very misleading. If you create a gee-wiz ad (such as click here to WIN), you can make your CTR soar, but if 100% of those clicks bounce, or otherwise don't go past your landing page, you have wasted ...
More

Broad match in SEM campaigns

I have said that you shouldn't use broad match in AdSense campaigns. While I still lean in that direction, it would be more correct to encourage you to test both phrase and broad match and then base your decision on hard conversions data. An excellent article on this topic: Google AdWords Marketing: Exact Match Bidding How these differ: Broad Match: Broad Match actually matches the words from the phrase any order. What is a little harder to follow is broad also matches synonyms for ...
More

Budgeting for Adwords Leads

I have blogged about this breaking Adwords campaigns up before, but recent events merit revisiting this approach to PPC management. While employed as a in-house marketing manager, I was faced running campaigns that included some very high-cost phrases (in excess of $10). This select group of phrases appeared to be the only words that were converting. We measured demos, and trips to the contact page as conversions. We received conversions only once out of eight or nine clicks (at $10/click a conv...
More