• We all know the pains associated with broad match keywords that may have no relation to what you are actually targeting in your PPC campaigns. The folks over at PPC-Advice.com offer up some useful strategies to counter this issue. We typically employ negative keywords as the weapon against these broad match keywords. This post outlines what negative keywords are useful and what aren’t.
  • Ever wonder why the keywords of the company you are advertising for obtain a ‘poor’ quality score from Google, even if the keywords are extremely relevant to your campaign? Jeff Hudson from The PPC Book outlines his conversation with a Google rep explaining this conundrum. In a nutshell, organic search results can adversely affect your company keywords.
  • Search Engine Roundtable reports that Barry over at Search Engine Land reports that Google is launching a new tool called Google insights for search. Ahh, that’s a mouthful! The new tool supposedly gives advertisers insight into user behavior. The metrics included are geo-graphical data comparable to Google Analytics, time trending and news headlines.
  • Is there hope for Google placements asks Joe Vivolo from KOMarketing Associates. Joe discusses the new Adwords interface where your keywords, placements and content network stats are all on one tab now. He poses the question of what are the benefits of the new placements talks about improvements he’d like to see.
  • With pay-per-click advertising, it’s so tempting to jump in and tweak your ad copy and bid amounts the minute you see results that don’t please you. This post, at Pay Per Click Journal, offers a great explanation of why it’s a better idea to test your advertising over time than to constantly tweak it.
  • This week, the adCenter Community blog shares 5 tips for improving landing page relevancy. All 5 tips are excellent best-practices for PPC advertisers. My favorite? “Applicability of Search.” Your ads have to match your landing page and vice versa!
  • What’s a good click-through-rate? Yahoo! asked that question this week, and I love them for it. It’s a common question, and it has a truly ambiguous answer. “The highest possible click-through rate may work for some-but it doesn’t work for all.” Think of CTR of just one indicator of your ad’s overall performance, not the entire picture!