• When it comes to successful paid search marketing, we can’t emphasize account structure enough. A well-planned, calculated account structure will allow you to manage your campaigns faster & easier as there will be less clutter, and when your account is structured properly this will aid your quality score as well. Joy Brazelle at Serengeti Communication has written a good, straight-to-the-point article about successful ad group structure, which is one part of a well-structured account.
  • With the parameters that have been put in place by the search engines, we honestly believe that click fraud is a thing of the past. And if you would like an update on how search engines are taking the next steps to ensure click quality, here are quick updates from Yahoo and Google.
  • This quick wrap up of a quality score session at SES New York from Pablo Palatnik isn’t filled with any shocking revelations about quality score. However, there is a tid-bit at the end that has peaked my interested, under the “things to avoid” section: “Extremely Long Keywords (low volume words can hurt you).” We’ve asked Google specifically about low trafficked keywords and we’ve been told that keywords with low search volume do not negatively affect your quality score, but they don’t enhance it either.
  • Use funnel reports to improve conversion rates. It doesn’t get much more straight-forward than that! Grokdotcom laid out the basics in this post of why you should be using funnels to track and optimize your site. What it boils doing to: Funnels help you to empathize with your customers and discover what’s holding them back from converting.
  • The Search Engine Roundtable reported on a WMW thread that stated the quality of adCenter’s traffic is falling. According to the thread, conversion rates are at all time lows. While I sometimes feel that adCenter gets bad-mouthed excessively, this time I actually agree. I have 2 clients who had “ok” months in January and February for conversions, but March’s conversion rates have plummeted!
  • SEM Geek has a great post on how to monetize every success event for PPC performance. The point being that you should set the expectation with your clients for tracking the performance of KPI’s beyond the normal CPA and ROI. This is good advice for anyone who manages PPC accounts for clients.