Posts Tagged ‘Pay Per Click’

Growth in Holiday Spend? Where?
According to comScore, the fastest growing online category in the 2008 holiday season was sports and fitness. This category grew 18 percent compared to 2007 as consumers were more inclined to purchase higher priced fitness machines online instead of offline.

Sports and Fitness was followed by Video Games (14 Percent Growth Year over Year) and Apparel & Accessories. All other categories unfortunately saw a drop in growth due to consumers curbing their purchasing due to the poorer economic conditions.

Who is Spending More?
Growth in online spending occurred in households with income over $100,000 (7% Growth), while all other income segments showed declines in online spending. $50,000-$99,999 Household Income Consumers showed a -8% Growth Rate, while those under $50,000 showed a -13% Growth Rate in Spend.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Today I am posting a presentation on the new first page bids and dynamic quality scores for Google AdWords. It is my hope that the new quality scores and bidding algorithms will force pay per click marketers to become smarter; however I do agree with Paul Lee that there is a chance that more “dumb money” will be floating around. My belief is that after all of the “dumb money” is spent, many advertisers will look back to see that they received very low ROIs and will be forced to either leave pay-per-click marketing or use an agency that is ROI-focused. It looks like SlideShare.net does not properly sync up PowerPoint 2007 presentations as well as I hoped, but it gets the message across.

Please remember that many agencies are not focused or concerned about your returns and only wish to spend more of your money on pay-per-click systems. Just in business, less can sometimes mean more when it comes to keyword bidding.

LeadQual has some internal algorithms for determining keyword bid positions, called MONACO (Monetization and Cost Analysis) and I am very eager to be working on updating these algorithms with the new first page bidding and dynamic quality scores in place!

- Nicholas Abramovic

A little known tactic with Dynamic Keyword Insertion (the “bracket trick”) is placing keywords into your destination URLs.

Most Internet marketers just implement the bracket trick in their headline or description line (see below example)

{KeyWord:Lead Generation Marketing}
Get ROI focused SEM PPC Management.
We Share All Our Strategies & Data!
www.LeadQual.com/Leads

You can also use the bracket trick for your destination URLs: http://leadqual.com/?keyword={keyword}

By implementing the above tactic, you can use your web logs and analytics to record which keywords generated the most leads for you by tracking referring URLs.

Why is this useful? Conversion tracking is not 100%. MSN can sometimes inflate your numbers by 4 fold. Also, there are situations where Google, Yahoo or MSN are just not able to track your conversions. What is an ROI-focused marketer to do? By dynamically inserting your keyword into the destination URL you have just greatly increased the likelihood of properly tracking the truest number of conversions. Now, just add a distinct variable for your adgroups and you no longer need to rely on Google for conversion tracking.

Rock On,
Nicholas Abramovic

Nicholas prefers playing {KeyWord:FoosBall} over blogging, but just thought you should know about a useful way of implementing DKI.