Crafting the perfect search PPC campaign requires initial research, understanding what your customers want, using effective techniques, testing, optimizing, and measuring. The process may seem overwhelming, but a strong marketer will have a system in place to build, execute, and optimize PPC ads that produce strong ROI. Creating effective ads isn’t an exact science, and new techniques may make the current ideas null tomorrow. The world of Internet advertising is constantly evolving; an effective ad today might not be worth anything next month. Here are some important PPC best practices that will help you stay abreast of the latest changes and strategies when it comes to creating a successful PPC campaign. (more…)

We can’t believe that fall is already upon us, but we’re excited to head over to Boston for the 2011 Shop.org Annual Summit next week! If you’re attending, make sure to stop by the Advertise.com booth #308 to chat! We would love to discuss how Advertise.com can help retailers battle shopping cart abandonment and improve their PPC campaigns, all in time for the holidays. Whether you’ve heard of our Remarketing platform or not, we would love to show you how it works and provide tips about how to get visitors who have left your site to come back and make a purchase. The time is right to make abandoned shopping carts a thing of the past!

We can’t wait to see you all in Boston!

-The Advertise.com Team

Where did January go? The post-holiday crazy-busy period has deposited us in almost-February. If you haven’t yet, it’s time to get serious and think about goals for your pay-per-click campaigns this year.

We came across Jump-Starting Your 2011 PPC Campaign which offers very handy tips to put a shine on your campaigns. Here’s a sample:

Focus on coverage to gain more clicks.  This can be tough for most business owners to undertand.  Logic would tell you that the higher your ad is displayed, the more clicks (and conversions) you are likely to receive.  In some cases, this is true.  However, if you are a new marketer (particularly in a highly competitive online market), you may want to lower your keyword bids so that your ads display is less competive positions (say spots 4-7).  This allows your ad to show more often (which means more opportunities to drive clicks) for relevant keyword searches than it would if you were going head-to-head with the established advertisers in the top 3 ad positions.

If you’re not using custom landing pages, you could be missing out.  Custom landing pages help your PPC traffic convert, thereby helping improve keyword quality score while lowering the cost-per-click (CPC) of your campaign.

You don’t need to make a formal resolution out of spiffing up your PPC campaigns – no, the time for resolutions is past, my friends. All we’re saying is that you’ll feel better if you pay them extra attention when you can. It will pay off.

–The Advertise.com team