In this spring time season of renewal, there have been some common themes emerging from the PPC blogosphere. New tools and resources. New relationships (and competitors). And a sense of reNEWal with positive industry trending. I take this as an early sign that 2010 will be a great year for pay-per-click advertising!
- Search Engine Land – A survey conducted in April reveals that SEM is still a strong source of traffic for retailers. “As far as traffic is concerned, …28% say that more than a quarter comes from paid search advertising.” And almost half of the respondents to this survey have increased their PPC budgets in the past year.
- Ion Interactive – Post-Click Marketing Blog – In the world of post-click optimization, technology has a very important role – but it is only effective when part of a holistic strategy. Long story short, technology should be the vehicle to set your strategy in motion in order to reach your objectives and goals. In other words, you’ve got to know where you are AND where you’re going. This is a great reminder for all of us conducting conversion optimization.
- Traffick – On Tuesday, Google announced a new targeting feature for AdWords: the broad match modifier. Andrew Goodman explains the new match type feature in great detail in his follow up post. While the broad match modifier will only be available in the UK and Canada at first, it will surely roll out to the US soon enough.
- AdWords Agency Blog – View-through conversions have been around for a while now, but what many of us advertisers have been wrestling with is how to use this metric to prove additional value to clients. This article is one agency advertiser’s experience with view-through conversions and how he used them to prove the value of display advertising from implementation through reporting.
- WordStream – With the Yahoo! and Bing integration (Search Alliance) looming later this year, it was only a matter of time until advertisers started pitting Bing PPC vs. Google PPC. Christine at WordStream has put together a great comparison for advertisers who are unsure of how to proceed after the big change.
- Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog – Speaking of the Search Alliance, Yahoo! put together a nice, neat question and answer post regarding the Bing/Yahoo! integration. This post covers everything from payment methods to speculation on how advertisers will be able to manage distribution between Bing and Yahoo!.
- The PPC Blog – More times than not, there is a great deal of competition when advertising with PPC. It is your job to differentiate your product or service. As Matthew describes in this post, the easiest way to do this is to write PPC ads that stand out!
- The Acquisio Blog – Not many of us would readily pair Lady Gaga with PPC, but Noran at Acquisio did just that. This post explains how many advertisers have had a Bad (PPC) Romance with Google AdWords. In short, many of advertisers have become disenchanted with AdWords and get hung up on the details that frustrate them. Despite the frustrations, AdWords still allows advertisers to reach their target audiences in a meaningful way. And in Noran’s words, “I say bad romance is better than no romance at all.”
