Pay per Click Update

The May issue of Marketing Karma is now live, and this month we're looking at pay per click advertising - it's something we haven't written about for quite a while and things have moved on in the last couple of years!
The article really is just an overview of the 3 main PPC services which are Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft Adcenter. We've not gone into much detail but check out the Resources page on Marketing Karma with links to the help & FAQs of each of the PPC services.

We'll be looking at what makes a campaign successful in next month's issue, as really that's the most important part of a campaign. Once it's up and running you must check your campaign regularly and tweak it for best performance & check your website's log files to see what traffic from your paid advertising is doing on your site. The PPC search engines are making it easier to track ROI now as they provide code you can put into your website pages to track conversions.

From the campaigns that we manage on behalf of our clients, results really tend to vary from one campaign to the next, depending on the product or service offered on the website. For competitive sectors it can take a couple of months before the ads start to improve their performance e.g click through rates, ad positions etc. Our clients provide us with information on sales & enquiries coming through their website and track performance against spend.

We briefly mention in our article that Yahoo! Search Marketing are launching a new interface for advertisers. This is long awaited, I've found their interface to be cumbersome and slow and failing to work on several occasions, meaning I've had to enter data twice or call their customer service team and arrange for them to do it for me. I'm therefore looking forward to testing the new service and see how good it is!
There will be changes from the current guidelines, as posted in Search Engine Roundtable.