Author Archive - Andy Groller

PPC Buzz of the Week for Friday 3/5/10

Due to the 2 feet of snow we received up here in the Hudson Valley last week, plus about 2 and a half days without power, the Buzz took a little detour last week right up to Lowe’s to find a generator. In any case, I wanted to focus solely on conversions and the sheer importance behind identifying and tracking them when it comes to PPC.

Conversion, as defined by Google AdWords help center is “when a user completes an action on your site, such as buying something or requesting more information.” This is all fine and good from Google’s perspective, but let me take a step back for a moment and let you in on a little secret as to what a conversion is from the perspective of both an advertiser and PPC manager. (more…)

PPC Buzz of the Week for Friday 2/19/10

When the agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo was first announced back in July 2009, I had offered my opinion, insight, etc into how this could affect the landscape of PPC in this post. For the last 7 months both corporations have been at the mercy of the US Department of Justice and European Commission in approving this agreement. That is until today.

The Yahoo and Microsoft Search Alliance, or Microhoo as it was called a few months ago, finally achieved regulatory clearance in both the US and EU. Did they really have to call it The Yahoo and Microsoft Search Alliance, though? I kind of see the concept they’re going for in terms of not making it look like one company is better than the other, in addition to giving off the perception they’re joining forces to do combat with Google. In all honesty it has a little too much Soviet Union feel to the name though, but in the end it is probably better than Microhoo. (more…)

PPC Buzz of the Week – Friday 2/12/10

Y!our Ads

According to this article from AdWeek.com, Yahoo unveiled two new search ad features this week: Y!our Ads and Yahoo Search Assist ads. Essentially, Y!our Ads (nice play on words/grammar by the way) takes into account a user’s search history and serves text ads based upon that history rather than displaying ads only when specific search phrases are entered into the Yahoo search function. The other “unveiled” feature is integrating ads into the Yahoo Search Assist feature (shown below).

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PPC Buzz of the Week – Friday 2/5/10

I usually highlight some noteworthy topics, posts, and other industry information within the PPC Buzz every week. So I decided to push these ideas to the back burner for one week and focus on something a little more upbeat and creative: how an internet marketer knows they’ve been in PPC way too long. I must admit that I got this idea from several Tweets I’ve seen lately, so I’ll try to give as much as credit as possible to any that I saw come through my Twitter feed.  That said, below are just some of the many ways in which PPC consumes our lives as PPC specialists….

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PPC Buzz of the Week – Friday 1/29/10

The Sleeping PPC Giant: Apple

Think hard for a second about what could possibly bring Google to its knees and reshape the paid search landscape. First thought that came to my mind… an act of God. In all seriousness though, I couldn’t really answer this question prior to reading this post by Laurie Sullivan. If Apple would exhibit the same technological savvy with a paid search platform that it is conducting with the iPhone and iPad, the possibilities for paid search could be endless. Would it bring Google down though? Probably not right away but it would be one heck of a battle and not some 3 round fight. I’m talking Ali – Frazier, Tyson – Holyfield (minus an ear of course), and other great bouts in history. But this is all speculation at this point.

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PPC Buzz of the Week – Friday 1/22/10

For another week we’re going to focus on a single PPC topic, with this one coming up as a result of some interesting statistics surrounding one of our ecommerce PPC clients. This ecommerce client has been using the new Google Product PlusBox, or Product Extensions depending on who you ask, feature for AdWords ads with some rather surprising results.

We first blogged about the Product PlusBox feature in a PPC Buzz post back in August 2009, but this feature was still in beta at that time. Since then, Google Product PlusBox has come out of beta testing and is available to all AdWords advertisers. That being said, this DragonSearch client has been using the Product PlusBox feature for a few months now and just recently we’ve begun to notice not many searchers are viewing the extension.

For reference, in order to view the product extension a user must hit the “+” sign under the AdWords ad where it states “Show Products from ….” as displayed below. Please note this is not our client.

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