As 2010 draws to a close, everyone at Advertise.com would like to thank all of our customers and partners for making the past year a very memorable one for us.  Thank you for your business and for your friendship! We look ahead to 2011 as a year with good things in store for all of us.

Have a very Happy New Year 2011!

–The Advertise.com team

By: Daniel Yomtobian, CEO of Advertise.com

Recently I read a story in the New York Times about a young woman and entrepreneur Amy Gottesman. After retiring from her career in retail and missing her income she decided to start her own website offering entertainment for parties called Smash Party Entertainment. The article describes Amy’s success with a Google Adwords PPC campaign, noting that her ability to bid on the correct phrase led to progressive revenue growth.

Later the same reporter, David H. Freedman, followed his article up with Seven Pay-Per-Click Mistakes to Avoid.  David provided his readers who were tempted by Amy’s success with the following tips:

1. Do not give up before you pull in enough clicks to allow for the sort of analysis that can lead to vast improvements in results.
2. Do not focus on click-through rates. The most obvious measure of a pay-per-click campaign is the percentage of time that a displayed ad is clicked on. If you get a single click for every ten thousand times an ad is displayed, you have a low click-through rate. If you get a click one out of four times, according to David, you’re a click-through genius.
3. Master conversion metrics. The biggest advantage to online advertising is an improved ability to calculate your return on investment.
4. Set the right budget.
5. Tweak everything relentlessly. Even if you’re making big bucks on pay-per-click, adjust relentlessly — it’s so easy to do, carries so little risk, and has such a huge potential upside.
6. Don’t shoot too high. If your keywords aren’t highly desired by other advertisers, you can grab good ad placement for pennies. But if you’re selling high-ticket goods or services in a crowded industry, and particularly if you’re going up against better-heeled competitors, you can face thousand-dollar bids on hot keywords.
7. Reassess your strategy. Even after you’ve got everything optimized and running smoothly and profitably, it’s a good idea to take a step back every so often and see if there isn’t some way to take it up to a higher level or to adapt to changing conditions.

David offered a great case study along with some excellent advice for those looking to foray into the world of online advertising. At Advertise.com we ask small and large businesses alike to look for ways to complement the work they do with Google. Take our Keyword Marketplace for example, the world’s largest privately-held network of high quality organic search, contextual, domain parking, browser toolbar, semantic keyword hot spots and email pay per click (PPC) publishers. So what does all that mean? The Keyword Marketplace allows advertisers to go beyond expectations in driving traffic and exceeding their online marketing goals.

Let’s go back to our friend Amy, without taking away from the success she has seen using Google, she could potentially reach even more eyes and garner more ROI by utilizing the Keyword Marketplace to reach internet users beyond conventional search traffic providing exposure to over 700 million additional impressions daily! These exclusive publisher partnerships deliver the additional high performing traffic that online businesses need to succeed in today’s competitive online marketplace.

Time is closing in for online retailers as the number of holiday shopping days dwindles. It’s more important than ever to recapture shoppers who added items to a cart, then left without purchasing.

In fact it’s possible to succeed in bringing back shoppers and having them purchase.  Read the latest from our CEO Dan Yomtobian in his article Reconnect with Abandoned Shopping Carts appearing on ZDNet. Remarketing is a very effective approach. The proof is in the numbers!

Happy holidays and happy shopping!

–The Advertise.com team

In the aftermath of the extended holiday weekend we are thrilled to see an amazing turnaround from last holiday season’s lack-luster sales. According to an article from Internet Retailer’s Allison Enright, E-retailers are now predicting online sales will grow ahead of previous estimates!

Allison reported, “Online sales totals for the Thursday through Monday period are still being tabulated, but web measurement firm comScore Inc. estimates U.S. online sales were $3.5 billion from Monday, Nov. 22 through Sunday, Nov. 28, compared with $3.2 billion during the same period last year, an increase of 9.4%.”

An increase of 9.4% cannot be ignored and we can only hope that over the next few weeks online retailers continue to push for an increase in sales. The first step is to take on those holiday shoppers that have visited and decided to leave their site. Whether they are comparison shopping or debating a new gift idea entirely, it would behoove retailers to get back in front of these visitors.

It is one of the most important times of the year to implement a remarketing campaign. Bring the holiday gift-buyers back!