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PPC News Roundup for 1/22/2010

January 22nd, 2010 | Jessica | PPC News Round Up

You maybe determined to give your PPC accounts a makeover this year, but remember to optimize PPC accounts gradually.  Melissa Mackey from Search Engine Watch discusses why drastic changes can end up hurting your account and some ways to achieve long-term results.

With 350 millions users, Facebook is hard to ignore – even for PPC. This post on Search Engine Land shows some interesting stats for traditional campaigns, and the boost a Facebook campaign was able to give them.

With advertisers spending nearly half of their budgets on PPC last year, it’s certainly an area that requires our attention going …

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Outsource Search or Keep it In-House?

January 19th, 2010 | Brian | Basic PPC Strategies

In this case, I’m not referring to traditional manufacturers and distributors that contract an agency to sell their goods and services through search.  Instead, I’m referring to online companies that possess the knowledge, ability and experience to maintain their own search campaigns and have done so successfully in the past, but are considering outsourcing search efforts to cut costs.
I tend to lean toward keeping search efforts in-house, but there are many valid reasons to consider outsourcing search.  Among those reasons are the costs and time of training, the increasingly specialized skills necessary for paid search and the possibility that an outside …

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PPC News Roundup for 1/15/2010

January 15th, 2010 | Jessica | PPC News Round Up

The lives of Yahoo PPC advertisers just got a little easier! Yahoo announced that they are launching a feature that lets you import campaign data from Google AdWords.

Here’s a great tutorial on what types of Google Analytics reports you can run to help better manage your PPC campaigns. There are lots of new features on Google Analytics, but it helps to get back to the basics and recognize how much valuable data you can find!

One of our favorite things to do is Test, Test, Test, and this post gives a great step-by-step process for creating and testing …

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Increase Your PPC Ecommerce Sales with Yahoo! And Pricegrabber

January 12th, 2010 | Amber | 2nd & 3rd Tier Search Engines, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Just announced yesterday that they will no longer offer the free Yahoo Shopping listings as part of their API services. They are now partnering up with Pricegrabber, an online comparison shopping search engine, to provide your products via Yahoo.

Pricegrabber is a cost-per-click program just like Google, Yahoo and MSN. However instead of creating campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads you simply upload a feed of all your ecommerce products with their relative information like price, description, shipping cost etc.

So now not only will you display your products on Pricegrabber, but they’ll display on Yahoo from the same …

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PPC News Roundup for 1/8/2010

January 8th, 2010 | Jessica | PPC News Round Up

Google is definitely reaching new heights with their mobile ventures. Search Engine Land reported this week that Google is to introduce Click-to-Call (billing) in Ads on Mobile Devices. It will work much like the clicks to a website, except a click will lead to a phone call.

Tis the season for resolutions, so here are 5 great ideas from Jason Tabeling of Search Engine Watch that will help us all get back to basics, and help make 2010 a fantastic PPC year!

Though short and sweet, this post from ROI Revolution helps us remember the cardinal rules of PPC …

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Our Greatest Hits for December 2009

January 7th, 2010 | Erin | Greatest Hits

The page views have spoken! Below we have gathered PPC Hero’s four most visited, and hopefully most valuable articles from December. Whether you’re a new or long-time subscriber you may have missed these insightful and helpful PPC management tips.

Need to improve your quality scores and gain better PPC performance? Amber has put together 6 rules to achieve better quality scores and get the results you want.

Google website optimizer can help test your landing page and we have come up with a list of elements you should consider before even using website optimizer. Make sure you follow the right …

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Did Your Holiday Optimization Work?

January 6th, 2010 | Brian | Basic PPC Strategies

Now that the holiday festivities and hangovers are over with, it’s time to determine whether or not you pre-holiday optimization efforts were effective.

So, what questions do you need to ask and what numbers do you need to evaluate?

Impressions
Did your keywords get more impressions than normal during the holidays?  Were those impressions for your standard keywords, or for holiday-specific terms like “christmas sale” or “holiday special?”

Click Through Rate
Since getting more impressions is worthless without being able to drive more traffic to your site as a result, the next question is, “Did your holiday themed ads generate more clicks than the non-holiday …

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New Contact Form Extensions Beta from Google – Super Cool

January 5th, 2010 | Amber | Google AdWords

Google is going extension crazy here lately with the release of site links, then location extensions, and now contact form extensions!

I got an email from my Google rep asking if I wanted to participate in a new beta from Google called, ‘contact form extensions’.

The gist of the beta is if you’re running a PPC ad in Google, and you’re in the top position, you can click on a plus sign next to a call to action (the name you give your contact form) and Google will drop down your contact form to be submitted right there in the …

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PPC Outside A Vacuum

January 4th, 2010 | guestblogger | Basic PPC Strategies

This is a special guest blog post from Matt Umbro at theppcblog.com.
Any PPC campaign interface provides valuable metrics such as number of clicks on a particular ad or the click-thru-rate (CTR) of a certain keyword, but to solely look as these figures when determining the success of a campaign is a mistake.  To truly realize the value of your PPC campaign you must view your data in accordance with your analytics and determine the value of your conversions.

PPC does …

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Happy New Years 2010 from PPC Hero

December 31st, 2009 | Amber | Uncategorized

Happy New Year! 2009 was a rough year for the country with the economy and all, so PPC Hero is cutting loose! Okay, maybe a bit too loose! But you can’t blame him… he has the PPC world resting on his shoulders. He is the sentinel being, the chosen one, who watches over the land of PPC to make sure all is fair and just. That is a lot of responsibility! So, even our fearless hero needs to get gussied up and have some bubbly everyone once in a while! …

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