Last week, a long time client called to tell me that he couldn’t pull the trigger on a 30K yellow page ad. Although his yellow page ad has worked for him in the past, these are different and difficult times. He didn’t want to tie up 30K for twelve months in one advertising medium. That’s the beauty of PPC or SEO. You can shut down your programs when necessary and speed up as you see some strength in the market.

In the florist industry, 50% or more of the business comes during four holiday periods,Valentine’s day, Mother’s day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. With PPC or SEO, you can put more emphasis on your keyword terms during peak periods while maintaining your regular campaign throughout the year. Still, you can shut it down when and if you need to. 

In the end, the client passed on the yellow page ad and saved the 30K.  It just made sense. 2009 will prove to be a very treacherous year for advertisers. You want to be able to adapt quickly to consumer buying behaviors. You will need to be able to turn on a dime or you will wind up wasting your money.

Are you running email campaigns? What about sending out newsletters, blogging, and managing PPC campaigns? If you are doing all these things, that is most excellent! If you have synched up all of these opportunities and are utilizing them to cross promote each other, that is even more most excellent!

It is very important to synch up these campaigns because it will make your activities more effective and simple to manage. It is not difficult to set up cross promotion activities. Here are a few simple tips to get you started.

• Add a new PPC campaign that directs people to your blog.
  PPC campaigns are a great way to generate traffic to your website. It is not surprising, then, that PPC campaigns can also send traffic in droves to your blog for free ideas and information.
• Use your blog as a teaser for your newsletter once a month.
  Write a short blog entry about a pertinent subject and then mention that newsletter recipients will receive a more detailed article in your upcoming newsletter.
• Add a newsletter sign up button to your blog.
  If people are actively and consistently reading your blog posts, chances are they will want to sign up for your newsletter as well.
• Always mention your blog in your newsletter.
  Tell your customers that they do not have to wait a full month to read more great stuff, written by theirs truly and direct them to your blog.
• Link to your blog within newsletter articles.
  Try to refer back to your blog as well as your website within your articles. Soon your newsletter recipients will realise that your blog is a valuable source of information.

Properly synching up and utilising your email, newsletter, PPC management and other online campaigns as cross promotion tools will help generate interest and drive traffic to your website. It will also simplify your efforts. Of course, this will only work if you actually taking part in all of these marketing efforts, so if you have yet to set up that blog, newsletter, or email campaign, get going already!

The holiday season is upon definitely upon us! Shoppers are just starting their shopping scramble. With maybe a little more emphasis on budget than in previous years, holiday consumers are frantically trying to make up their minds about what to buy for whom. So have you adjusted your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns yet?

ABT (Always Be Testing) is an important rule to follow when it comes to PPC campaigns, and that is never more true than during the holiday season. PPC ad messages need to keep up with and cater to shoppers’ moods and needs. As the countdown to Xmas begins, PPC ads should be evolving daily. And that is pretty much the brilliance of PPC ads, isn’t it? That we really can change our messaging instantly? So, if you haven’t yet, dust off your old PPC campaigns, dive in and start testing. Research shows that Canadians are spending more time shopping online (that includes research and price comparisons) than ever before.

Tired and generic Adwords are not going to cut it. Capture attention online with sale announcements, countdowns, and seasonal merchandise or offerings. Or, you know, let other competitors do it and see how it works for them…

Google has made a few changes to their Quality Score rating in Adwords over the past few weeks and Inside Adwords now provides 2 new videos on Ads Quality Basics and the new upgrades.

The first video, Ads Quality Basics, provides a general introduction to Ads Quality, including an overview of Quality Score and answers to some common questions about Ads Quality.

The second video, Ads Quality Updates, goes beyond the basics and gives more detail on the recent changes made to Ads Quality.

Check out the Inside Adwords blog once a week for updates that will influence for Adwords campaign.

ClickFraudNetwork report indicates that click fraud was up from 14.8% in the first quarter to 15.8% in quarter 2 of this year. The average click fraud rate on search engine content networks was 25.6% including Google AdSense.

For more information on Google AdSense, check out our pay-per-click advertising articles.

Inside Adsense announces Site Authentication; a recently launched feature that allows you to get ads on content protected by a user name and password.

Check out our article section for a basic overview on Google AdSense.

Search Engine Land’s article on optimizing your B2B pay-per-click campaign in just 4 hours a week contains important tips on a variety of parameters, including:

Keyword Research
Ad Testing
Landing Page Testing
Bidding

You can vist our article section for additional information on pay-per-click advertising.

Google announced on their adwords blog that they are expanding their pay-per-action Beta globally.

Advertisers who use adwords conversion tracking and receive more than 500 conversions in the most recent 30-day period will be invited to join the beta test, on a rolling basis..

You will be able to pay for completed actions that you define, ie; a completed sale. You can expect to pay more than you would for the regular adwords program so you better step up your ROI (return on investment) tracking.

eWhisper.net reports that Google Adwords now enables you to exclude up to 20 IP addresses.

Sounds great but there are some concerns you should be aware of. Internet service providers tend to use a range of IP addresses for all their users. If you exclude an IP address of a competitor, you may be excluding hundreds if not thousands of potential customers on the same IP.

Before you exclude an IP, you can check to see if the IP is dedicated to one company by going to DomainTools and checking the url of the domain. You can then do a reverse IP (think reverse phone look-up) and DomainTools will indicate if there is one or one thousand web sites on the IP in question.

Since search engines have moved towards quality-based bidding, the debate over the usefulness of bid management ttools has escalated. One session at the Search Marketing Expo consisted of a debate on the issue. Search Engine Watch has the recap.