Everybody’s been chasing social media like mad for several years, and now must also contend with figuring out mobile and iPad marketing . All well and good, but aren’t you forgetting something? How about taking the time for something that could give you the biggest single marketing win for 2011 and beyond?
Paid search/pay per click (PPC) and related media types are still far and away the single largest component of most discretionary online marketing budgets, dwarfing display/banners, SEO, social media, mobile, and any other online marketing spend category. And there is low-hanging, valuable fruit to be harvested for you.
Is your performance flat to down? Is there more competition? Do you have the time to manage this? If you have the help of an agency, how are they doing? Isn’t it time to revisit this investment?
Learn the 9 things you can do immediately to recapture value back from Google and your competition. Download today and turbocharge your AdWords campaign.
TechDirt:
While we still definitely need input from an appealant court, at least judge in this case wasn’t too chicken to comment on the intersection of (or lack thereof) Google AdWords and trademark law.
Inside AdWords:
Confirming something long suspected, Inside AdWords makes it clear that clicks from within Google on Google ads are not charged to the advertiser. Such clicks will still appear as coming from an ad within the advertiser’s analytics tool, however.
John Battelle’s Searchblog:
John reports that Yahoo is close to purchasing FaceBook, the social networking site for students. This would be a great acquisition for Yahoo and a major blow for Microsoft (who has also been pitching to acquire them).
Yahoo, if you purchase FaceBook, can you please allow us to run advertising on just FaceBook, instead of having to run it on the rest of your spammy partners as well?
John Battelle’s Searchblog:
Yahoo suggests that growth in search marketing is slowing and the market thanks them with a 10% stock hit. C’mon Wall Street! It wasn’t as good as you thought it was a year ago, and it’s not as bad as you think it is now.
John Battelle’s Searchblog:
Google and Intuit have announced a partnership where Google AdWords (among other offerings) will be integrated into Intuit’s QuickBooks accounting software.
Google is getting increasingly savvy about locking up all the prime real estate, even though they don’t really know yet how they are going to make it work (who wants their CPA or accountant running their adwords campaign, and how many accountants/ controllers want to let a marketing person inside of quickbooks).
That being said, this is potentially great for small business owners that run their own books and their own marketing, and is also a brilliant tactical stroke that gets one of Microsoft’s arch-enemies (Intuit) solidly on board the Google Train.
Brietbart:
Google and News Corp. announced yesterday that Google will be the exclusive search provider for MySpace, in a deal expected to be worth at least $900MM in shared revenue.
John Battelle’s Searchblog:
Google, Yahoo, and MSN have announced plans to work together to combat click fraud. Certainly this is a laudable move, but can these fierce competitors work together sufficiently to achieve anything?
And, of course, they each still have a financial incentive to keeping click fraud around.
GoogleBlog:
Judge Joe Griffin today approved the proposed settlement between Lane’s Gifts and Google. One third of the settlement is going to the attorneys in the case. The remaining $60 million will be paid via advertising credits.
One report has it that $3.80 will be paid for every $1,000 spent with AdWords over the last four and one-half years.
That’s a 0.38% discount to Google’s income stream, significantly less than my previous estimate of 0.75%.
It’s very clear now that there are only two winners in this: Google and Lane’s Gifts lawyers.
Inside AdWords:
Google now gives you the ability to see the number of invalid clicks your AdWords account has received. In this case, “invalid clicks” are the ones that Google catches before you are even charged for them. So, it doesn’t include any they miss initially, whether they catch them later or not.
Still, more visibility to information is very much a step in the correct direction.
