By now, most advertisers are familiar with the basics of paid search advertising: you choose a list of keywords that you want to trigger your ad, select the maximum you’re willing to spend per click, and then instruct the search engines to match you up with people searching for your terms.  Since searchers are looking for a specific service or answer at the time of the search, paid search is great for transactional advertising such as generating sales or leads.  If you are offering exactly what the searcher is looking for, he or she is likely to convert.

More People Now Visit Facebook Than Google

Search engine advertising has been a dominant force in the world of online advertising for years now.  However, with Facebook taking up an ever-greater share of people’s time online, it is inevitable that Facebook will also account for an increasing share of online advertising.  That said, Facebook advertising isn’t useful for every business.  Here is some information to help you decide whether your company should give it a try.

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All the major search engines increase the number of searchers they offer an advertiser by allowing their search results to show on 3rd party websites.  The traffic for paid ads showing on these 3rd party sites is typically of a lower quality than that generated by the search engines’ own sites. However, that traffic is also usually cheaper, so some types of businesses benefit by having their ads show on search partner sites.

If you allow your ads to show on search partner sites, it’s important to constantly monitor the traffic those sites generate.  This fact was underscored one day a few weeks ago when a Path Interactive client suffered an 800% traffic spike on one particular adgroup in a Google campaign, with most of the spike coming from one keyword, with no corresponding increase in conversions.

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The debate about including a phone number in search ad copy has been going on for years.  The Nos argue that inserting a phone number takes important space away from your marketing message, and that if people call without clicking, it will lower your quality score, thereby driving up cost.  The Yesses often focus on the fact that if a searcher calls without clicking, you don’t pay for that click.  They also note that few advertisers include a phone number in their ads, so doing so can help your ad stand out.

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Earlier this year, Google gave Path Interactive employees the chance to help test Google’s AdWords Certification Beta exam.  Taking the two experimental exams (one for Beginners and one for Experts) would be an all day affair, so we only sent two of our campaign managers: Ari Berdy and Stephanie Scorziello.

We are proud to report that both Ari & Stephanie passed the exams with flying colors!  They are now among the first to be the newest type of Google Advertising Professionals.  Congratulations Ari & Stephanie!

Bing and Google have both announced that they will incorporate tweets into their search results.  Bing made the announcement yesterday, and Google today.  The purpose of these deals is to bring real time search capabilities to the two search engines.  This will benefit people looking for updates on breaking news, reviews on just-released products, and any other situation in which information quickly grows stale.

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According to a new study, nearly two thirds of searchers expect search engine results pages to list businesses within 15 miles of their home or work. That expectation is up from 52% in 2007.  More importantly for your business, 83% of local search users contacted businesses offline (46% call, and 37% visit).

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Determining Searcher Intent For Better ROI

When someone searches for “Harry Potter,” what are they really searching for? A bio of the character? An action figure?

If you sell action figures, but most of the people clicking on your “Harry Potter” ads are simply looking for information, you’re obviously not getting your optimal ROI. Conversely, if most of your clicks are precisely for the products you offer, i.e., Harry Potter figures, you’re doing well.

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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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The results are in, and something we have suspected for quite some time has now been confirmed: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) traffic is 60% more valuable than organic search traffic for e-retail sites. Engine Ready just published a study based on traffic to 26 e-retail sites in a 12-month period showing that visitors from PPC ads converted at a rate of 2.03%, while visitors from organic links converted at a rate of 1.26%. Not only that, but PPC visitors also bought the most, with an average order of $117.06 versus $106.64 for organic visitors. Visitors who navigated directly to the sites or came in from other sites also bought less, with average orders of $109.27 and $95.29, respectively.

You Need Both SEO And PPC

We here at Path Interactive have always recommended that our clients run both PPC and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns in order to maximize sales and leads, and studies have been around for years proving the importance of this. The Engine Ready study is yet another proof that companies need both SEO & PPC; though they may get more traffic from organic links, the traffic from paid links is more valuable.