Online Marketing Blog

When performing a search on Google, there are two different types of results that show up: the organic listings and the paid, or sponsored, listings. Organically ranked sites are those which Google finds most relevant for that search query. The paid listings show up because an advertiser is paying money to be ranked that highly for those phrases. When a searcher clicks on one of those listings, the advertiser is charged the cost per click price for that ranking, so hopefully the searcher will convert into a sale for that advertiser.

But what if you don’t know anything about search advertising or setting up a pay per click campaign? What are the best practices behind PPC? And how do you track conversions? This session at the end of Day 2 of SES San Jose goes over the basics of search advertising and how to implement it for success.

Spotlight on Search: Interview with John Slade of Yahoo!

There has been quite a bit of buzz on the paid search marketing front with the launch of the new Yahoo! Search Advertising platform aka “Panama”. At the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, Yahoo! announced the launch during a sponsored lunch. Dan Zarrella did a good a review of that session here.

Our YSM account recently went through the upgrade and we’re going through the process of getting familiar with all the new platform features. After talking to my contact at Yahoo PR as well as Mona Elesseily from Page Zero who has written a book about the Yahoo Search Marketing program, I thought it would be good to get some insight directly from Yahoo for Online Marketing Blog readers. John Slade, Senior Director of Yahoo Global Product Management was kind enough to field a few questions for me.

A new WebSideStory study announced today shows that paid search has only a slight advantage over organic search results for conversions.

The study looked at more than 57 million search engine visits on Google, Yahoo and MSN and showed a median order conversion rate of 3.40 percent at business-to-consumer e-commerce sites for pay per click compared to a conversion rate of 3.13 percent for organic search results during the same timeframe.

This announcement is timely, because recently, someone on our MIMA-SM discussion list asked about clickthrough rates on organic versus pay per click ads in search results. It’s pretty common knowledge that most people click on the organic results, but this person was looking for a credible resource citing specific numbers.

So here’s what I found:

DM News has announced the next edition of their Essentials Guide to Search Engine Marketing (pdf). Editor in Chief Mickey Alam Khan says:

“Packed within these pages are articles from executives at the nation‚Äôs leading search engine marketing firms, agencies and consultancies. Also inside is commentary from two of the top three search engines, Yahoo and Microsoft. These experts offer tips, best practices, case studies and research on almost every topic under the search sun.”

The Google “Inside AdWords” blog has announced the addition of “ad scheduling” or as it is more often know as, “day parting”.

“Ad scheduling can also help you improve your ROI by ensuring that your ads run when it makes the most business sense. For instance, a local business may only want to run their ads during business hours, or an online retailer may want to boost their bids during their busier-than-normal lunchtime shopping period.”

When Andrew Goodman spoke here in Minneapolis at the MIMA event this week, he mentioned the impending addition of this feature to the AdWords program, but I’m not sure how many people caught it.

Kevin Newcomb over at ClickZ also has more details including several quotes from Richard Holden, director of product management at Google.

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