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 [...] ....

It’s common to hear advice that you should use long tail keywords and that you should be careful when using broad match. After all, broad match keywords do not convert higher than either phrase or exact match. The problem is that often these two pieces of advice can be contradictory. If you start using keyword phrases with [...] ....

Yahoo! announced their Q4 ‘09 earnings on Tuesday, making their best effort to portray a 4% year over year decline in revenue as a signal of a turnaround.  While that certainly beats the 12-13% declines Y! saw earlier in ‘09, there are still troubling numbers deeper in the report and in RKG’s data. The big number that jumps out is a 15% Y/Y decline in search advertising revenue.  From Yahoo: Marketing services revenues from Owned and Operated sites were $971 million for the fourth quarter of 2009, a 9 percent decrease compared to $1,063 million for the same period of 2008.  The decrease was primarily driven by a 15 percent decline in search advertising revenue and a 1 percent decline in display advertising revenue. Results from a basket of RKG clients are in line with that figure with a spend decline of 20% across Yahoo and its partners in Q4.  By comparison, RKG’s spending on Google rose 14% Y/Y. While a general improvement in the economic environment helped all three engi...

Three of every four paid search clicks happen on Google, and 75 cents of every paid search dollar is spent on Google. That’s according to the latest quarterly report from Efficient Frontier, a search advertising agency that manages more than $750 million in annual digital spending annually. The stats cover Q4 of 2009, and show [...] ....

Google is making its intentions in the real estate vertical more clear. Speaking this week at Inman Real Estate Connect, an industry conference, Google’s Sam Sebastian reportedly said: “We’re actively looking to acquire one to two small real estate companies a month.” (Update: We now understand that the Realtor.org blog post linked above may have misquoted [...] ....