Internet Marketing Blog

Just last week we looked at Yahoo’s Ad Placement Report, how it can help optimize your Yahoo PPC campaigns and how discloses the huge number of sites included as part of the Yahoo Search network. Does Microsoft adCenter offer a similar report? Yes, the Publisher Placement Performance report. Running the report is extremely easy. Access [...]

Finally Microsoft adCenter has an ad preview feature so that you can see if your ad is appearing in Bing, and how it will look. The tool only works from within the Campaigns tab, and it doesn’t support testing by location (yet). You also can’t click on the ad to test it, so there’s no [...]

Over the years we have managed a lot of pay-per-click campaigns for a variety of clients. Some of them have a thorough understanding of conversions, while there are still a lot that don’t. It is still surprising to find companies that only measure the success or failure of their AdWords campaigns (or less often Yahoo! [...]

We’ve found several bugs in Microsoft adCenter, usually related to their web interface. This is a keyword addition bug. When entering keywords, either through the online interface or CSV import, certain keyword combinations are ignored if other variations with conjunctions exist, such as those containing “for” or “on”. Example: If “butter for toast” has been [...]

After recent news from Yahoo Sponsored Search and Microsoft adCenter that both programs are shifting to draconian trademark protection policies, it is a quite refreshing to hear Google breathe some reason back into search advertising. For years trademark owners have objected to the use of their marks in competitive advertisments, some going so far as [...]

Increasing bids in a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) / search engine advertising campaign improves ad position, which usually increase the number of impressions and clicks. However, if you have a fixed daily budget that is always being spent, you will get more clicks if you decrease bids. Here’s why: The total number of clicks you can get [...]

Yahoo! has just announced new ways to target particular users: Demographic Targeting Ad Scheduling Enhanced ZIP-level geo-targeting All of the big three search engines have been offering some version of geographic targeting for some time. Yahoo! finally added rich scheduling functionality, a lot like that offered by AdWords. Microsoft adCenter has offered demographic targeting for [...]

This post was prompted by many discussions with clients in which we attempt to summarize SEO and PPC performance in practical, easily digestible forms. There is frequently a tendency for clients to oversimplify evaluations to “it works” or “it doesn’t” based upon summary data. For SEO, we try to summarize performance in terms of increases [...]

Here’s a tip for finding negative keywords for PPC campaigns as well as websites to link to for linking campaigns. Set up Google Alerts for those keywords your advertising on. Depending on the popularity of your keyword(s) you should start receiving emails from Google pretty quickly with links to various articles, blogs and websites. It’s [...]

In recent weeks we have had two client accounts on AdWords “hijacked.” Someone was able to discover or hack the passwords for two different email logins, presumably either by inadvertent disclosure or use of weak / easy-to-guess passwords. Campaigns were created that targeted keywords related to screen savers and loans, and the ads took users [...]