What would happen if you turned off all PPC advertising for a month?

We’re very pleased to be presenting a case study webinar in just over a week’s time with one of our clients, YouSendIt, titled The Opportunity Cost of PPC.
I had a chance to sit down with YouSendIt’s Director of Product Marketing, Angela Sanfilippo, at their office in California just before our latest B2B Expert Series: Face-to-Face event. We talked through the advances her team has made over the past few months with their paid search campaigns. This success has led to increased investment in SEM moving forward.
This webinar will be of interest to other marketers that have struggled [...]

SAR-R: Search and Rescuing ROI

Over the past several months, in part due to increased economic pressures, we have seen an increase of importance placed on improving return on investment (ROI) from search-based activity, particularly from PPC campaigns. ROI attribution and measurement becomes especially important when justifying the cost of the online sponsored advertising and improving the return on advertising spend (ROAS). Here are some tips on improving your search performance and getting the best ROI possible.
1.      Know Your Analytics
This statement may seem fairly redundant, but all too often search marketers find themselves flying blind without proper analytics. Much of this article will focus on [...]

Key PPC Best Practices (Part 4 of 4)

This is the final installment of the 4-part series on key PPC best practices (PPC Best Practices Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).
Speak Their Language
There has been constant debate as to what to use for keyword analysis with regards to long-tail versus head phrases and which yields the better results. Head phrases are the very generic and broad search queries where there is enormous search volume, but costs associated with the keywords are quite high. Torso keywords are the more-specific keywords; the 2- to 4-word search queries that still have lower search volume compared to the head phrases, but [...]

PPC Best Practices (Part 3 of 4)

This is the third installment of the 4-part series on key PPC best practices (PPC Best Practices Part 1, Part 2). So far we’ve introduced the basics in the planning and measurement involved with the setup of a PPC campaign in addition to conversion path analysis. This week we’ll get into testing, demographic targeting, and vertical engines.
Don’t Guess… Test
With a PPC campaign, testing is the campaign manager’s best friend. Testing is a constant, iterative process that must be followed to refine the effectiveness of your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns. Multivariate testing can be as complex as developing a multitude [...]

Key PPC Best Practices (Part 2 of 4)

Last week, I started wrote a post on some of the key PPC best practices (Go to Part 1). This is the second installment of the 4 part series.
 
Plan to Measure; then Measure the Plan
As you move forward with your PPC campaign, ensure you are able to effectively measure your KPIs through your analytics tracking. With several of our clients, we are using keyword-level ROI to ensure we can accurately spend the budget where we are making the highest returns. This measurement includes being able to merge data from several sources in order to accurately measure the effect of each [...]

How to Develop a Stronger Search Marketing Training Program

Recently I have been involved in creating a search marketing training program which some very clear objectives: help new search marketing strategists get up to speed quicker, allow them to work on billable client work sooner/more efficiently and get them prepared to participate in high-level brainstorming strategies. As much as I can teach the new strategists, I have learned it’s as important to learn from them to continually tweak and improve the program. Below I have outlined 3 steps to creating a stronger search marketing training program.
 

Constantly Reading, Sucks: Providing course material to your trainees is important but don’t overload [...]