PPC

In today’s challenging business climate, any positive results that can be gained are encouraging, but it is often diffi cult to accurately measure success. Marketers face a bewildering array of potential success metrics, the defi nition of which is not always clear, let alone their impact on overall results. Because of the complexity often involved in assessing the true success of a campaign, marketers tend to look for answers where the looking is good, rather than digging deeper. Most of us have probably been guilty of this at some time.

Pay-per-call advertising has been growing rapidly over the last year or so, allowing advertisers and publishers to generate hot leads from potential customers who prefer to use the phone. Some industry insiders are already estimating that it will become a multi-billion dollar market, with companies like RingRevenue, KeyMetric, CallButton, ValueLeads and others extending the pay-per-call payment model into affiliate marketing.

The Microsoft/Yahoo PPC alliance was always going to have teething troubles and give advertisers some headaches. We are gradually learning just where those are going to come from.

The most complicated issues are likely to spring from the differences in the way that Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft's adCenter treat keywords. adCenter in general provides much finer control over management of keyword mis-spellings and plurals, significantly greater limits on negative keywords, as well as taking a different approach to geo-targeting.

Networks Go Wild
If there is one recent development that has changed performance marketing it is the explosion in new advertising and affiliate networks. Nobody seems to know for sure how many there are now but a guess of over 500 active networks, and several thousand in total, is probably correct. It is easier than ever for someone – anyone – to set up a network and start brokering offers. It’s almost become a standard career path for successful affiliates to start their own CPA network.

Google is cracking down. Last month, Google filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Pacific WebWorks and several others as part of an effort to stop fraudulent “Google Money” schemes. These are scammy offers that use Google’s brand to attract unsuspecting customers and then trap them into hard-to-break continuity programs, often via negative option contracts.

RP3.pdf