• Seeing higher minimum CPC’s lately? That might be because Google Adwords has re-evaluated their Quality Score on Keywords according to PPC Lab. Although it doesn’t explicitly say why, google frequently re-evaluates their keyword quality score algo and some underperforming keywords may suffer.
• Interested in knowing how the 2007 holiday online shopping went? Read Search Engine’s Guide on top holiday shopping trends. Some of the trends that you could take advantage of in your ppc campaigns this year are to highlight promotions in your ad text and talk your clients into adding their products into Shopzilla or Pricegrabber for additional exposure, which they are both on a CPC basis.
• KoMarketing Associates have posted a list of the top 200+ negative keywords to consider for B2B PPC campaigns. Check out the list here.
• Aaron Goldman of Search Insider asks, “Will CPA become the default pricing model for paid search?” An interesting question indeed! Aaron provides some rather compelling reasons why he thinks the answer to this question is “yes.” And I agree. I am uncertain as to which direction the evolution of paid search will take in the next couple of years. However, if CPA never fully overtakes the CPC model, I think it will definitely be a viable source of alternative traffic and conversions.
• After watching a single broad match keyword for several days in AdWords, James at Apollo SEM made the realization that Quality Score is real-time. This discovery led him to postulate that the visible Quality Score within your campaigns is really just “a visible indicator that can give you a vague idea of how relevant your keywords are.”
• In a very short, but potentially huge blog post, Brad Geddes at eWhisper stated the following: “I had a long assumed thought confirmed by Google: Quality score is only based upon the exact match for a keyword.” Very interesting…
• Most of us in the PPC biz are using some type of contact form on our landing pages. Grokdotcom came up with this list of 7 tips for boosting web form conversions. Some of the basics are present like indicating required fields and offering a reassurance of security. But this list also includes some more cerebral ideas like not using “submit” on your buttons, but instead literally stating the action the user should take!

  Don't forget to subscribe to the PPC Hero feed!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 12:56 pm and is filed under PPC News Round Up. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.