Since the advent of paid search engine marketing, click fraud has been a growing area of concern for search engine marketers. Estimates of the scope of click fraud vary from 10% to 35% of all click activity. If not detected, click fraud can rob your company of both your marketing dollars and your sales. Are your campaigns safe? This article provides some tips on how to detect click fraud in your campaigns and some guidance on what to do if you find it.
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Click Fraud: Are Your Campaigns Safe?
Published by May 1st, 2007 in Search Marketing, SEM, Google, PPC, Adsense, Search Matters, Newsletter and Click Fraud. 0 CommentsSEM Has Become Mainstream
Published by April 24th, 2007 in Search Marketing, SEM, Paid Search, PPC and Search Matters. 0 CommentsI’m not sure exactly when it happened but it happened. Search engine marketing has become mainstream. Businesses of all sizes no longer debate whether or not they need to do search engine marketing, the debate has become: “Do we do it in-house or do we hire an experienced SEM agency.”
Not long ago, many businesses who were jumping on the SEM band wagon decided the SEO component of SEM required technical expertise that they did not have internally, so it was a fairly easy decision to farm that piece out to an experienced SEO firm. Conversely, many companies felt they could manage the paid search component in-house since it was a fairly straightforward process in that you could completely control your rankings simply by outbidding your competitors.
The SEM world is now a very different place. If you are considering the option of managing your campaign in-house, make sure you know what you are getting into. Mistakes will cost you in terms of rankings and revenue, and you can quickly burn through your SEM budget.
On the organic side of SEM, gone are the days of doorway pages, invisible text, and other black hat short cuts to success. Competition for the top spots is stronger than ever and the search engines have strict rules about how you can optimize your site to improve rankings.
Optimizing your paid search engine marketing campaign has also become very sophisticated. Paid search engine marketers need to have in depth knowledge of the search engine tools and features. The days of controlling your ranking based solely on your bid are over. Nowadays, your quality score is at least as important as your bids. Keyphrase relevancy, click-through rate, ad quality, landing page quality, and site quality are all factors that impact your ranking and the amount you pay per click. It may not be rocket science but its getting there. Furthermore each search engine has its own unique algorithm for ranking paid search ads, unique rules for writing ads, different match type options, different methods for handling plurals and mis-spellings, different demographics and psychographics, and well you get the idea. Its not as easy as it used to be. And oh yeah, the rules and tools are constantly changing.
Just remember, at the end of the day it all comes down to your return on investment. Good search engine marketing not only requires good technical and marketing skills, it requires good business skills. Do you have what it takes?
Exploiting Site-Internal Search Systems for SEM
Published by April 24th, 2007 in Search Marketing, SEM, Paid Search, CPC, PPC and Local Search. 0 CommentsMany of our clients’ sites have internal search features, which allow visitors to the site to search for information within the site, such as a “Find a {Doctor/Center/Office/Event/Course/Dealership/etc.} Near You” feature. This type of internal search is powered by a searchable database, and the URLs of search results pages in this system are dynamically generated. With all the possible permutations of different parameters, this can add up to thousands of possible URLs. However, we have recently been developing tools for using the internal search results pages as landing pages for sponsored search ads. This is a unique way to take users directly to the page that is most relevant to them.
Suppose you have internal search on your site. Your brand, Acme Dialysis, is trying to help people find kidney dialysis centers near them. Assuming the user’s first stop is a typical search engine like Google, where they type in, for example, “Dialysis centers in Chicago”. You have a search results page on your site that contains a list of all your dialysis centers near Cleveland. But how do you serve an ad on Google’s search results page that links people to your internal search results page for Chicago?
The answer is that those long, complex, and often intimidating URLs of internal search results pages are actually quite systematic. By tapping into this systematic URL structure, we can generate super-targeted keyphrases and ads, so that when someone types in:
“Dialysis centers in Chicago”
They see an ad that says:
Chicago Dialysis Center
Visit Acme Dialysis Center Located
Near You in Chicago.
www.Acme-Dialysis-Centers.com
And they are then taken to page on the site as though they had just searched your internal database for centers in Chicago. It is possible to do this for hundreds of locations at a time, as well as for multiple products. The end results is a campaign with thousands of keywords, each of which has a highly targeted specific ad, and each of which takes users to exactly what they wanted on your site.
Major e-commerce retailers have long used this tactic. For example, if you search for an ordinary product and click on an eBay ad, you will be taken to the same page as if you had searched within eBay for that product. As brand marketers’ sites become more integral to their business, they should consider integrating this type sophistication into their paid search campaigns as well.
Paid Search: Are you getting your money’s worth?
Published by February 28th, 2007 in Paid Search, Search Engines, CPC, PPC, Text Ads, Adsense, Overture, Local Search and Newsletter. 3 CommentsThe Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) recently released its annual industry survey and it includes some truly remarkable findings. One such finding is that spending on paid search marketing was approximately $8 Billion (U.S.) in 2006 and that number is expected to double over the next five years. This is obviously a testament to the value that paid search marketing can provide, but it also begs some key questions. Am I getting my moneys worth from my paid search campaign? Is my campaign producing a positive ROI? Should I spend more, or less?
Continue reading ‘Paid Search: Are you getting your money’s worth?’
