• What’s the future of Google Adwords Pay-Per-Action model? According to Search Engine Roundtable who spoke directly with their Google rep, Google doesn’t know where they’re headed with the PPA model but they’re not sending out any invitations to be a part of the beta, “while t he product team figures out what direction the model will take in the future.” Interesting…
  • Search Engine Land posted a great article on landing page testing, how much is too much? They go into great detail on how to test landing pages and if you’re capable of having the volume required to achieve statistical significance.
  • Don’t overlook the power of keywords in the singular form says Ann Smarty from Search Engine Journal. Ann talks about the differences between singular and plural forms of keywords and how they perform against each other. She shows Hitwise graphs and reports that have documented the success of the singular keyword over the plural.
  • One of the aspects of the Google Quality Score that has remained hidden (more-so than the others) is the Account Quality Score. Andrew Goodman has written a very good article about inheriting low-quality AdWords account, what to do with them if they are linked to a poor score, and where do you go from there.
  • SEM Geek has a very interesting article on the hierarchy of keywords, and creating a thorough launch plan for your PPC campaign. Your hierarchy is determined by the client’s navigational structure to their main site. I have built PPC campaigns in the same manner, and this is a good description to employ this method.
  • Is anyone else impressed with the quality of posts coming out of the adCenter Blog lately? I sure am. Anyways, there isn’t much I can write about this post that isn’t explained by this excerpt: “The synergy between paid search and web analytics creates a feedback loop that can ratchet up the impact of both your search advertising and your web site.” In other words, you can’t be great at PPC without utilizing your analytics reports (this sounds strangely familiar).
  • When Andrew Goodman has a “meta-thought” – you better watch out! In this semi-rant, Andrew describes his frustration with the immense attention given to SEO, link-bait and the personal happenings of the search marketing elite. The frustration comes from the lack of focus on the $15 billion per year PPC industry, the driving force of search marketing. This is a great read.