PPC Blog News Roundup for May 22, 2009

• This week, Google announced that they are updating their U.S. trademark policy. Under this new policy the restrictions will be loosened slightly so that more advertisers can display relevant brands within their PPC ads. This update applies only to Google.com within the U.S. and takes effect around June 15th.

• Gordon Choi has crafted a good introduction to the Google AdWords Quality Score for beginners. The Quality Score can be difficult to grasp so this is a very helpful resource for those who are just starting to figure out how it works. And I’m not saying that just because he references PPC Hero!

• The MSN content network is not extremely vast or robust but adCenter has just released site performance reporting and a website exclusion tool. This should help better target your MSN ads by removing those sites that are under performing on the content network.

• Online forms can make or break conversions on your website. From PPC to SEO to content efficiencies, there are a lot of elements that need to be considered when using a form on a website. This great blog series from FormSpring is an in-depth look at creating online forms that convert.

• Do you tend to shy away from display ads because they aren’t targeted enough? Well hold the phone, because Yahoo! is expanding their Smart Ads program. Ads that perform like search… Sounds good to me! Smart Ads is an open platform, but Yahoo!, Teracent, and Tumri are all working together on this one to bring Smart Ads to as many PC and mobile users as possible.

• If you manage any YouTube accounts, you should check this out. Use Insight to monitor your traffic and stats. And now, as an added bonus, Insight data is now download-able! You can export all of your video stats into .csv files so that you can save the data.

• Your ads could soon be appearing in a whole new location…at the bottom of the Google Suggest box. I don’t know how they’re going to get there- is that considered position one? Are you bidding separately for them (unlikely)? Is there some kind of rotation?- or how people will respond to them (will they click?), but it should be kind of cool to see what the response is once it’s been implemented for a while.
• Ah, the part after the click…your landing page. Not always as simple to manipulate as pre-click factors, but this is the part where you actually make money so obviously worthy of attention.  Roberta Rosenberg has posted a “landing page makeover” at Copyblogger that’s in-depth and full of nice graphical illustrations of her points. Translate her advice to your site and fix up your pages to improve user experience & conversions.

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• PPC News Roundup for March 13, 2009
• PPC News Roundup for February 6, 2009
• PPC News Roundup for April 17, 2009
• PPC News Roundup for April 3, 2009
• PPC News Roundup for March 6, 2009

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 12:58 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.