by Steven LaLonde – PPC Manager at DragonSearch

According to a report by MediaWeek, your Yahoo! Costs per Click are about to rise – an average of 22% – due to the recently expanded Yahoo-Google partnership.

The article suggests that the new Google partnership, which brings more of Google’s search technology to Yahoo!, will enable Yahoo! to profit more off of keywords, through Google’s uber-profitable search technology.

This will be especially true for certain keywords, such as long tails, which Google has been very profitable with. Yahoo! has struggled with long-tails.

If you’re advertising in Yahoo!, this is cause for concern. It could have a significant impact on your campaigns and margins.

Here at DragonSearch one thing is for certain – we’ll be sure to keep a VERY close eye on our Yahoo! campaigns over the coming weeks. If you’re a Pay per Click advertiser utilizing Yahoo!, you should too.

Stay Tuned.

by Steven LaLonde – PPC Manager at DragonSearch

It is common knowledge that prices can be used in PPC ads to draw customers to your site – espically if you’re advertising prices lower than your competitors.

Another thing to rememeber though, is that prices can be used to prequalify traffic as well. By using prices in your ppc ads, you can essentially pre-qualify your visitors, and possibly increase conversion rates and reduce wasted ad spend on clicks that bounce or simply won’t convert.

Prices in ads can help you prevent much of the traffic you never wanted in the first place.  They force the visitor to make a bit more of a commitment before ’stepping into’ your store.

You’ll get far fewer clicks from visitors who were looking for something cheaper or who simply weren’t seriously looking to make any purchase in the first place.

By using prices and other pre-qualifying hints in your text, you may see a drop in volume, but a major increase in conversion rates, as you’ll attract be driving far more ‘likely to buy’ clicks.  This could be just the trick you need to rev up your ppc campaign.

Just remember that there is a time and a place for prices in PPC ads.  If you have the HIGHEST prices around, you’ll certainly want to avoid putting prices in your ads (and you may want to rethink your prices alltogether!).  So use your better judgement before advertising prices in ad text! Good luck preventing those unwanted clicks and increasing conversion rates!

by Steven LaLonde – PPC Manager at DragonSearch

Google Ad Planner is here! Google says that ad planner is a research and media planning tool.  So what is a PPC manager like myself doing with Ad Planner?

Although i’m not a true ‘Media Buyer’, most PPC Managers are in some respects media buyers of sorts.  After all, if you’re running advertising on the Google Content Network, and selectively choosing sites to advertise on, you’re a Media Buyer of sorts.  Still, Ad Planner is most-intented for TRUE media buyers who buy a lot of display advertising on the web.

The Ad Planner beta was private, but anyone is allowed to request an invitation.  DragonSearch requested an invitation, and one day later, Google emailed us with the keys (link) to test drive the Ad Planner platform.

Having never used any similar Ad Planning programs before, which have been available from companies like DoubleClick for years, it was really cool to explore Ad Planner.  I can certainly see how I may utilize this in the very near future to research and identify new content placements for our PPC clients, espicially those who use the Content Network.

Ad planner contains data on tons of sites that aren’t on the Content Network too, which is sort of interesting.  Ad Planner contains so much data in fact, that many people are now up in arms that Google has been invading privacy and collecting too much web data for years.

Regardless, Ad Planner is cool and it’s a powerful research and discovery tool for anyone buying media space on the web.  You can find data for tons of different web sites, and you can do it many different ways.

You can search and identify new sites by user demographic.  Will you be advertising to 24 year old males with income between 49 and $75,000 per year?  Ad Planner will show you some sites you may be interesting in advertising on.  You can also filter and find sites across a ton of different demographic variables, from age, to sex, to income and tastes.

Once you’ve done all your homework, you can create an actual media plan which can be exported to Excel.  Pretty neat.

All in all, Ad Planner is a really cool – FREE – site research and discovery tool. And since it comes free of charge, wheras similar softwares have been expensive in the past, it’s sure to get a lot of attention from anyone who buys media on the web.