Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

What do you really need to know about Google having exposed it’s numbers of search occurences, instead of those green graphics that would just give you a very rough estimate of how often a search term was looked for?

Well, many people have written about this, but two blog posts really stand out: Jerry west wrote “Google Updates their Keyword Tool” and Jim Morris wrote “The Initial Assessment of Google Unveiling Approximate Search Counts In Google External Keyword Tool”. (Haha, Jim, you crack me up with your beancounter language - but that’s exactly what makes you such a good fit as a keyword expert!).

I would say both of these posts are mandatory reading. So read them. Now.

Google just indexed it’s one trillionth’s website in their index. You can read more about that on the official Google blog.

Now granted, this post is almost a little off topic.

It’s not exactly about PPC, but it’s what happens AFTER PPC: once a prospect has clicked your ad and landed on your site.

Do you convert this visitor into a member of your list, or better yet, a paying customer?

After all - even if you could get one-cent clicks on the term health insurance, what good would it do you if you had a 0% conversion rate? It would do you no good at all, you’d still be losing money.

Now a lot of the conversion is about copywriting, headlines, etc.

But a good part is also about layout!

Sometimes you can drastically (and I’m talking double-digit) enhance your conversion rates without changing a single word.

You’ve probably heard about the eye-tracking studies, that tell that the most important point of a landing page is the upper-left corner.

After all, this is where Google tells you to place your AdSense ads.

It’s the most expensive place you can buy when you want to buy advertising space on a website (usually).

Funny thing is, a guy who’s into PPC conversion deeply did some split tests and found that he upped his conversion rate a lot if he places the main elements in the upper RIGHT corner of the screen.

For example: split testing opt-in form in upper left corner, centered under headlines, centered under body text or upper right corner.

Upper right corner won every time.

This is an important thing to remember, so when you split test, don’t just split test your copy, also split test the placement of different elements.

While my stay in Berlin I was looking for restaurants to eat. So I googled “restaurants in berlin”.

And guess what I found? Well, of course googles local search listing, but what else? In the sponsored listings, in the number one spot? Again Google’s local listings - an advertisement for maps.google.de !

I thought that is really interesting. Considering that they are one of the biggest data mining companies worldwide they must have a pretty good grip on where the profits are to be made, and this step seems like they’re now pushing their way seriously into some local markets - I guess local magazines will find it increasingly hard to compete with that.

A new way to advertise online? That’s what Yahoo wants to do. After they reclined an offer from Microsoft which offered to buy Yahoo for 44.6 billion USD Yahoo president Sue Decker announced that they had big plans.

But let’s look at that number again: 44.6 billion US dollars and Yahoo did NOT want to sell for that amount of money. Do you know what that is all about? It’s all about Pay Per Click advertisements! That’s how Yahoo generates revenue! From PPC advertising! And they didn’t want to sell for 44.6 billion dollars. That’s a lot of money…

Anyway: Yahoo’s new advertising platform is currently under the name of APEX (advertiser-publisher exchange). According to the Decker it will make it much more easier for both buyers and sellers of online advertising. They are working together with around 500 newspaper publishers to make it easier for them to advertise on a broader, yet still targeted scale.

And Google is not the only company that aims at simplicity: Google tries to make things simpler, and so does Microsoft with their AdCenter and AOL with Platform A.

Brent Sharp just wrote a really good post on how PPC advertising will continue to grow in both market share and total spending. In case you ever find yourself wondering: ‘is this whole PPC thing really worth the trouble to figure it out?’ It’ll be good for you to look at the bigger picture and see where the future is going too: more and more money will be spend online, and lots of it will be in PPC ads!

There’s an interesting article on the value of domain names for pay-per-click marketers. It basically goes on to say that domain names are still a great investment, even when the economy everywhere is tumbling down right now. Read it for yourself: Are domain names recession-proof? By Paul Sloan

Internet advertisement will reach $23 billion in 2010 according to Park Associates - that would be 10% of the total spent on advertising that year. And guess what - a big share of that money will go into PPC-advertising. Good News!

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is changing the whole marketplace. Remember the Dot-com bubble in 1999, when it all came down? Multi-Million Dollar companies that all of the sudden where worth next to nothing?

Some people say that’s what’s happening right now, with billions of dollars being spend on online advertising every year. But it’s not. It’s very different. Back in 1999 very few people had a real idea how to make money online - nowadays, there are pretty big companies with pretty sophisticated business systems that generate real revenue.

The biggest players in the field are companies like Google Adsense, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter, AdBrite and others.