Marketing on the Web The following are some of things that you should consider when creating a Pay Per Click campaign: Getting Started / Open an Account To get started, you will need to set up an account with each of the search engines. It’s painless and there is no initial cash outlay. Many of the hosting companies will give you ad credits for Google or Microsoft as an enticement to sign-up and the major search engines give these away at tradeshows and marketing events. These credits come in the form of a code an...
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Yahoo Marketing to MSN AdCenter Transition Complete
Looks like the Yahoo Marketing to MSN AdCenter cut-over is now complete (I had several email notices to this effect this morning). With this change, customers will no longer be able to differentiate bids or ads between these platforms. To make this more clear in the reporting for my customers, I have updated the campaigns that previously read MSN (cpc) and Yahoo (cpc) to display as “Bing (cpc)” in their Google analytics traffic reports. Several in the industry are reporting wild gyrations...
MoreYahoo’s transition Bing Search and Ad results
It looks like the transition of Yahoo to Bing for it’s advertising platform (Micro-hoo) is finally happening. In case you were not aware, Yahoo has been testing the use of Bing for its search results for several weeks. Yahoo made the full-time switch to Bing results last week (if you search on Yahoo, you now get Bing results). The date for Yahoo to start using Bing's AdCenter platform has been less clear, but it appears now that the transition will start later this week. see: https://www.ysmblo...
MoreYahoo to Microsoft AdCenter Transition Update
I attended a seminar today that discussed the Microsoft (AdCenter) /Yahoo (Panama) transition. I have hit several preliminary discussions on this topic at conferences, but this was the first one that had any real information about the Microhoo transition. The seminar was lead by representatives from Microsoft and Yahoo and they set forth a time-line that showed the transition starting in August for completion by mid-October. They were careful to point out that this transition only effects sea...
MoreAdCenter Beta Says Thank You
I have assisted with a number of product beta’s over the years, but was flattered when Microsoft contacted me to do an interview about my involvement in the AdCenter beta program. see: Thank You for Helping Improve Microsoft adCenter
MoreYahoo and Microsoft Deal
The big news in the press today is the Microsoft/Yahoo deal. I have already received questions about this from a couple of clients, so I thought it best to expand here. In the deal the search brand at Yahoo will remain to be "Yahoo Search" but it will be "Powered by Bing." There will be no immediate changes however until they get regulatory approval, following approval the integration effort will move forward (expected early 2010). What about allocating advertising dollars? In the deal ...
MoreDon’t Count Yahoo out
I had a meeting at Yahoo this week. The meeting was targeted at companies heavy into affiliate programs. We heard from a number of program managers, but because I am under NDA, can't disclose all the great stuff they are working on. However, I will say these guys are not sitting around worrying about Microsoft. They are firmly focused on the future and presented an impressive list of products and upgrades. Most interesting was some of the stuff going on with PPC management and while I can't be ...
MoreMeasuring Conversions
I am always surprised when I find businesses measuring Ad effectiveness based on click-thru rate. CTR is a simple measurement of clicks given as a percentage of impressions. That is, for a given volume of ad impressions, some number of readers have clicked-thru to your site. Unfortunately CTR can be very misleading. If you create a gee-wiz ad (such as click here to WIN), you can make your CTR soar, but if 100% of those clicks bounce, or otherwise don't go past your landing page, you have wasted ...
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