Clients sometime question the cost of designing a landing page. Many feel their current site is sufficient enough for search marketing and they don’t need to spend more money on rebuilding something they have essentially already invested in, their website. Sounds reasonable right? From a client point of view, why outlay more money if they already have a website they’ve spent time and money designing.
Category Archives: Paid Search Management
The Importance of Local Business Listings
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).
Does "Harry Potter" Draw More Than Clicks?
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.
Microsoft adCenter Tools Slowly Catching Up With Google
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?
Google Broad Match Opens Wide
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.
Path Interactive Featured in Digital Media Buzz
Path Interactive’s Call Tracking solution for paid search advertising, CallPath was featured today in the product review section of Digital Media Buzz.
Got An E-Retail Site? You Better Have A PPC Campaign
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.
