When choosing keywords for your PPC advertising campaign, it's important to give careful thought to the use of branded/corporate keywords, or keywords that support your company’s brand name. Some advertisers believe that bidding on their own brand terms is a waste of money. The reason being that the user has decided to convert with the brand he searched for and it would make more sense if he did it by clicking on the natural listings. Brand terms almost always appear at the top of the natural listings, (but not always). So why waste valuable budget on PPC? By not bidding on your brand, you are missing whole lot of traffic & conversions:

• A branded term always outperforms non-branded and competitive terms because ... Read more...

Recently Google released their new trademark policy for the United States. This latest change has the potential to have a greater impact on PPC campaigns, which is why PPC account managers are taking notice. This new policy allows using the trademarked terms in ad creative by resellers, affiliates, aggregators, unaffiliated informational sites, sellers components, replacement & compatible parts in US market. So there will be no more whitelists or blacklists maintained by Google’s systems – use of your trademark, as long as it seems legitimate, will be allowed freely. Google is already facing two class-action trademark lawsuits, and as Eric Goldman on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog says, this move could open them up to more. So how much impact will it ... Read more...

In the PPC world, a Quality Score is a measure which tells you the relevance of your keyword to the users search query. Specifically, Quality Score is a score given to a particular keyword taking historical data of the keyword’s Click Through Rate, quality of the landing pages, relevance of the ad with the keyword and several other factors. Why Quality Score is important for a PPC professional? Not because it gives a rating on a scale of ten but as a score which reduces your CPC when your Quality Score moves up, which affects your First Page Bid Estimates and your Ad Position. Today I would be breaking 5 myths about Quality Score.

Restructuring your account does not cause you to lose ... Read more...

Keywords are an integral part of any online advertising campaign; however what is sometimes overlooked is the equal importance of negative keywords which are word filters that disqualify ads being triggered by users search query. For instance if “iPhone” is one of your keyword, each time somebody runs a search for that keyword your ad will be displayed. If someone were to run a search for the term “iPhone problems” your ad will also be displayed, since the main keyword “iPhone” is present in the search query. To avoid bloating total impressions, with irrelevant searches it’s important to add “Problem” as your negative keyword, so that “ iPhone Problem” query wont trigger your ad.

Every search engine advertiser should be using ... Read more...