After the announcement last week of The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, I thought it would be helpful to take a look at the adCenter tools that are available, and how you can use them to help grow and optimize your accounts. Microsoft adCenter Desktop Tool As an avid user of the Adwords Editor, I was delighted when Microsoft launched their adCenter desktop tool. Sure, I knew it wouldn’t be as robust or user friendly, but at least it was something! Over the past year I’ve stumbled upon a few things that I hope will help streamline the use of the desktop tool, and make it a little more effective for editing and optimizing your campaigns. When using the desktop tool, there are a few things that I think are important to keep in mind: Your entire account will be downloaded when exporting. Unlike the Editor, you are not able to choose specific campaigns, ad groups, ads, or views to download. You get the whole enchilada every time. However, when uploading, it is not necessary to ha...

When it comes to developing an effective PPC strategy, it is important to include branded terms. However, many marketers are opposed to doing so. This is a mistake. Let’s take a look at why. Understanding the value In this economy where marketers need to do more with less, it is easy to understand why they might balk [...] *** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above or, in Facebook, by clicking on the "View Original Post" link below. ***

As a core component of paid search quality score, a strong Click-Through Rate (CTR) is vital for ensuring lower costs per click and higher ad visibility.  If you are seeing your CTR decline over months or years it can be concerning, but not necessarily an indication of a problem with your copy or PPC program as a whole. Compared to other data points, CTR is a relatively unreliable metric for judging the health of a paid search program over time because there are so many factors that need to be accounted for, some of which the advertiser has little to no control over. If you’re worried about how your CTR looks month to month or year over year and are considering widespread copy changes, here are some factors to consider first: Search Network Expansion: For many, traffic from the engines’ search networks is growing faster than traffic on the engines themselves.  Click-through rates on this partner traffic also tend to be significantly lower,  by as much as 50-90%.  If you were to...

It surprises me how often keyword research is overlooked when I hear people talking about optimizing their website, blog or other online assets for search engines.  The thinking often goes that when you come up some keywords that represent your product, and you optimize your online efforts around these keywords, your target market will find you.  I hear variations of this thinking often. It’s a good start; however, this is only part of the equation.  A key factor is missing, which is how many internet searchers are typing those particular queries into search engines.  It is imperative that, before beginning any kind of search optimization, you find out what queries people are using to search for your type of product or service. For example, you may think that “keyword research” is a great keyword.  If you dig deeper, you would find that “keyword tool” and “google keyword” are relevant keywords which are actually searched more often in Google.  Depending on the co...

This is the last introductory post for the PPC Academy course. We’ve covered some frequently asked questions about paid search, a brief history of the medium and some common terms to know for PPC advertising. Starting next week, we’ll dive into the immersion phase of paid search and then onto the finer details of campaign [...] ....