As I noted in an earlier post, although Bing represented a big step forward for Microsoft in user experience, it was a step back for search advertisers in terms of amount of traffic sent to websites through paid clicks. Even more annoying: because Bing quickly stops serving ads for companies on whose ads a searcher doesn’t click, advertisers had difficulty assessing whether their ads were even running. Bing wouldn’t show advertisers their own ads (unless the advertisers cost themselves money by clicking on their own ads), so how could they know what the average searcher was seeing?

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Broad to Begin With
Google recently expanded the breadth of searches that will match to broad-matched keywords. Originally, broad match would trigger ads when a searcher typed in misspellings of an advertiser’s keywords. A little over a year ago, Google expanded broad match to include synonyms of an advertisers’ keywords. While that did enable the advertiser to have his/her ads show for search queries that he/she hadn’t thought of, it also resulted in ads showing for unrelated queries. For instance, do you think that the query: “What is event marketing” should be matched to the keyword: “hispanic advertising agencies?” Me, neither, but Google’s broad match algorithm did. This expansion turned broad match into a very powerful, but potentially dangerous tool: It could deliver new customers, but it could also eat up your budget if you weren’t careful.

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Best Practice Email Design Templates Can Increase your ROI

Employing Best Practice Elements is critical to maximizing your ROI from your email marketing campaigns.   In 2009, marketers are shifting dollars from traditional media into areas like Search Marketing & Email Marketing as they need to see higher overall ROI on declining marketing budgets.  Opt-in Email Marketing will continue to rise as it provides a low cost approach to building brand engagement, retaining customer relationships and generating revenue.  Providing the basic best practice elements for your email design templates can go a long way in maximizing your ROI.

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