With the release of the iPhone5 and iOS6, attention has become focused on the competition between Apple and Google for local and hyper-local search dollars. The iPhone has relied for years on Google's mapping service and data, but with iOS6 they have introduced their own Apple Maps service. The problem is that Apple's alternative is suffering from some highly publicized and … [Read more...]
AdWords Tool Is Surprisingly Bad For Keyword Research
I've often found that Google's AdWords Tool seems to provide surprisingly limited results in terms of discovering high volume search words and phrases but i've never been quite able to put my finger on what's going wrong. Now I know. Rand Fishkin brings us the wisdom: As you can see, there's ~50% of the terms not shown in the suggestion list, which is fairly substantive and … [Read more...]
Google's AdMob Changes Mobile CPC Auctions
The one area of mobile in which Google is kicking Apple's as$ is advertising. Forget about the Android operating system; mobile search and display is where the money is for Google in mobile right now. In order to make the most of the opportunity, Google has now changed the way they're selling their CPC ads, introducing an AdWords-style quality score to the auction process. This … [Read more...]
How AdWords Really Works
Advertising on Google is still one of the staples of online marketing: pretty much everyone should know how it works and what it can do for their business. But AdWords can be intimidating, with many hidden features that can affect how well your ad works and how much you have to pay. A new infographic from Wordstream makes sense of it all in a … [Read more...]
Google Forfeits $500 Million Generated by Online Ads & Prescription Drug Sales by Canadian Online Pharmacies
From the Department of Justice: “Google Inc. has agreed to forfeit $500 million for allowing online Canadian pharmacies to place advertisements through its AdWords program targeting consumers in the United States, resulting in the unlawful importation of controlled and non-controlled prescription drugs into the United States.” This is one the largest forfeitures … [Read more...]
Top 5 Takeaways Re. Twitter's New Advertising Platform
Twitter has made its move towards monetization and there are big opportunities for performance advertisers as a result.. In the last 48 hours they have announced a new performance advertising platform, new targeting capabilities via geo-location, and that Twitter now has 105 million registered users with 75% of traffic coming from outside Twitter.com. Let’s explore what … [Read more...]
Raising Your Score
Over the last seven to 10 years, paid search has proven to be a cost effective channel for affiliates and performance marketers alike to drive high quality leads while maintaining strong ROI. In fact, search engine marketing (SEM) frequently represents an inordinate portion of a performance marketer’s business – often more than they care to admit.The decline in … [Read more...]
Google Hates Affiliates
Back in January 2005 Google changed its Adwords policy to read, "We'll only display one ad for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same Display URL per search query." Consequently, affiliate arbitragers who used pay-per-click advertising to send traffic directly to their merchants' sites saw their ads disappear overnight. Those who hadn't diversified their incomes by … [Read more...]
Mining for Keywords
Now that you've set up your search engine marketing campaign and it's chugging along nicely, how do you take things to the next level? You've picked out some good keywords, written some good copy and you're getting a reasonable ROI, but every time you look at your pay-per-click campaigns, you just know there's more that you could be doing to maximize your investment. And you … [Read more...]
Don’t Give in to Click Fraud Fears
Click fraud is a potentially serious problem faced by any affiliate marketer who uses pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising to market their sites.One study estimated that between 10 and 20 percent of a PPC advertiser's budget is lost to fraud. That estimate increased to 50 percent for high-priced, highly competitive keywords.Unfortunately, there is no guaranteed way to … [Read more...]