Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Honestly, I don’t understand why every single company or person trying to sell a product or service is not doing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Sure, you can run a newspaper ad and just hope the right person reads it at just the right time when they are looking for your product or service. Sure, you can run a TV campaign and again hope that people who might be interested in your product or service are actually watching TV at just the right time when you run the ad. Sure, you can throw up a billboard on the highway and hope that just the right drivers are seeing your advertisement just when they need your product or service. You can even throw up flashing billboard displays on thousands of websites and hope that just the right customer base is searching the web at just the right time when they are in need of, or desire, your product or service.

Or you can run a PPC campaign with Google AdWords, or Yahoo Search Marketing, or MSN AdCenter, and show your ads to precisely those people who are already looking for your product or service! Obviously, there are other reasons why you wan to run newspaper ads or television campaigns, but PPC advertising really should be a part of your marketing efforts. Yes, there is an expense involved, but that’s true of any type of advertising, and I’m hard-pressed to find any other type of advertising that is more directly focused on the exact type of customer you want for a business. By putting a keyord term or search phrase into a search box, these folks are looking for you so you should be doing whatever you can to help them find you — and that means running an online pay per click campaign.

Of course, at JumpFly we have a vested interest in pay-per-click advertising because our business is to help others manage their ppc campaigns, but we also run our own PPC campaigns because we believe in the value of it and we have seen excellent new partnerships and clients result directly from our own use of pay-per-click marketing. We’re always looking for new customers, too. If you’ve been hesitant or unsure about using pay per click marketing for your business, I encourage you go give it a try. Even if you don’t want or need JumpFly’s services, we have seen such incredible results with other business owners that I encourage you to at least give it a try. Your holiday sales figures might turn out much better than you hoped for if you do.

Learn more about Jack

A blog entry released earlier today (view here) by David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer with Google, publicly announced Google’s decision to walk away from a planned partnership with Yahoo! (view details about the agreement here). This is not a huge surprise, as the deal was recently delayed, but it is now official.

The blog states, “… after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn’t have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement.”

In response, Yahoo! said it was disappointed by Google’s decision and maintained that the abandoned partnership would have been beneficial for everyone. Yahoo! just lost out on hundreds of millions of dollars in additional annual revenue that would have resulted from the deal. Yahoo!’s statement also said that they are, “disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court.”

Several analysts speculate that losing the Google deal will make Yahoo! more likely to revisit a possible deal with, or outright buyout from Microsoft. Details of the Google-Yahoo! partnership put up significant barriers to a Microsoft buyout – barriers that no longer remain. Yahoo!’s stock price finished up today despite the DOW plunging 486 points, likely due to investor speculation and hopes for renewed buyout potential. We’ll see how this plays out, but I’m confident that Microsoft execs are talking about this situation as I type. Tic toc. Tic toc. Time will tell if Microsoft will come back to the table. In the meantime, Google continues to expand their search dominance.

Learn about Brad

Here at JumpFly, we’ve been receiving numerous emails from Yahoo Search Marketing about keywords that are pending inactivation, which means it’s time for another round of bid raises in Yahoo.

Yahoo Minimum Bids Increasing

Yahoo has been periodically raising minimum pay-per-click (PPC) bids on various keywords, and to me, there is no rhyme or reason. Some minimums are only being raised a small amount, like ten cents. But some of the increases are ridiculous including increases of thirty, fifty, even seventy-five cents. Supposedly the minimums are determined by competition – the more competitors, the higher your minimum bid must be (which sounds like a nice way for Yahoo to make more money). It’s also supposed to be determined by how relevant searchers find your ads. The better your CTR versus your competitors, the lower your minimum bid should be.

This doesn’t happen very often, where we have two clients with the same search terms, but I have one situation where this has happened. I have two clients with the same term, and in the last round of changes back in September, both of them were required to increase their minimum bids. Both had a CTR of well over 3%. When I emailed my Yahoo rep to find out about why, I was told that it was probably because of too much competition. Now when I checked, there was a total of four advertisers on the term. And the minimum bid wasn’t a minor increase, but a really major increase. For one of my clients it went from $.29 to $1.12. The other one was required to go from $.29 to $.86. And now, there’s one lonely (and probably happy) advertiser on this term.

Here’s another instance that really burns me up. I have a client who is advertising on their own URL, which is something we recommend doing. Yahoo wants them to increase their minimum bid from .93 to 1.56. On their own URL.

Another annoyance – we get Minimum Bid Increase notices on keywords in old campaigns that haven’t run for a long time and are paused. It would be nice if Yahoo would take into consideration that paused campaigns don’t need to have notices sent. The only thing to do to stop the notices is to delete the keywords or campaigns, because Yahoo doesn’t care if the search terms themselves are paused.

I don’t know if Yahoo has noticed an actual decrease in revenue, but a lot of the bid increases that Yahoo is making are souring my clients on Yahoo even more than they have been in the past. Most of them are spending LESS on Yahoo than before, because some of the bid minimums are so ludicrious that it doesn’t make advertising on them worth it. They should take a look at what Google is doing – they’re doing AWAY with inactive bids, and Google keeps gaining share, not losing it.

Something else to keep in mind: just because you’ve gone through a round of bid minimum changes in the past doesn’t mean you won’t get them this time. Make sure to keep an eye out for the email, and continue to check your Yahoo account for them, because there’s no rhyme or reason on when and what keywords might get flagged. And once they’re flagged, you need to determine the ROI on the increase so you can decide if you’re willing to pay the price or respectfully decline by deleting the keyword.

Learn more about Nikki