Adam Jewell - Search & Affiliate Marketing

It is probably rooted in the world of traditional marketing. A company creates a product after doing some market research and then looks for an agency to “handle the marketing”. There is a little song and dance, some wining and dining a little negotiation and eventually an agency is chosen to get a 15% cut of whatever the media budget will be.

This same process happens when it comes to Internet marketing as well. A company decides they need to “do search”. We need someone to “do our search” for us. The same process often ensues. The merchant looks around, they talk to some different people, they look at different proposals and find someone who makes them feel comfortable. The search company talks about wonderful technology they have, how long they have been in business and lands the business. The good and bad thing about marketing on the Internet & search in particular is that it is so trackable. Big traditional agencies generally give their clients a sheet with clicks and impressions as if just putting any information in front of a consumer is valuable even if it is irrelevant.

What very, very few merchants, traditional and online (even search) agencies realize is that the success of a pay per click search campaign (or most any other online marketing campaign that is supposed to drive sales) is only fractionally dependent on the search campaign.

Internet marketing & search in particular is a conversation. Ads don’t convert people. They never have. A sales person, a trusted friend, sales material or product packaging convinces someone to make a purchase. A search ad that is generally limited to about 100 characters cannot sell someone something by itself. This is why click to call PPC ads have always failed in search engines and why they will always continue to fail. If the consumer just wanted to call, they would pick up the yellow pages, find a number and make a call. When they are on the Internet, they are searching because they want more information. A phone call is generally something that happens after a bit of consideration and research.

All marketing [should] start with search because that is what people do. People identify a need or want which may sometimes be spurred by an ad (but not a search ad) and they go search for information. The search may take place on a search engine, a blog, a store, in a conversation among friends, on Twitter or a combination of things. The search happens because the person has one or more questions they want to answer so they look to start a conversation. Once the person is engaged in a conversation the information presented to them needs to answer their questions.

The search ad serves as the bridge to get the attention of the person and then the site needs to sell them by presenting information the way they want to see it and the way they will be influenced by it to make a purchase or further engage with the merchant or organization with products or services to offer.

According to Marketwatch, there will be no Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo! because Microsoft cannot meet Yahoo’s economic demands.

Who out there besides Microsoft ever though this acquisition made any sense? From the get-go Yahoo! didn’t seem interested in being swallowed or dismantled by Microsoft. The whole thing seemed rediculous and it seems that Microsoft’s desparation to do something, anything to catch up to Google online is starting to show. I’d sum it up like this:

This is like a high school cross-country race. Google wins at each meet, Yahoo! comes in second and once in a while MSFT has someone that manages to finish the race while wearing downhill ski boots.

Google goes on to win every race as usual, the Google ski team also wins since Microsoft and Yahoo! have sustained injuries that put them out for the ski season.

What Microsoft needs is a fresh perspective. They have brilliant people there. They have the best service of any search advertising provider in the industry. They just don’t have what people want - consumers or advertisers. They can’t buy what they need, they need to develop it, hire some smart Internet people (not software people).

From a consumer (or search results and search advertising) perspective, all I can say is thank-god the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal is going nowhere (at least for now). We’ll still have more than 2 search advertising options, we’ll still have more than 2 unique companies that serve up search results and that is a good thing.

The list of Pay Per Click (PPC) bid management systems in the marketplace today is rather large. When you want a system that works and you don’t want to spend your whole advertising budget on the management system, go with KeywordMax!

As search engine advertising gets more and more competitive and more and more advertisers wake up to the potential and opportunity that awaits, more and more technology solutions are developed to manage campaigns. If you are Target, Amazon, or Ebay, KeywordMax isn’t likely to be the tool for you. If you’re a mid sized, even fairly large company with thousands of keywords, KeywordMax may be just the system for you.

The beauty of KeywordMax is its simplicity. There are no redirects that may take hours and hours to generate, there is not fancy technology behind KeywordMax, it just works.

It tracks your bids, it tracks you match types, reports sales by keyword and engine and can track organic search traffic and other advertisements as well. It’s got the same bid rules at virtually all of the (often far) more expensive sysems from the industry heavyweights that often charge six to eighty times what KeywordMax charges. These bid rules are not particularly advanced but neither are the bid rules on most other systems. Unless you have hundreds of thousands of keywords to manage and even then, the additional cost for most other systems may be hard to justify.

KeywordMax charges based on actions which include bid updates, bid checks, tracking actions, clicks and other actions that the system tracks or initiates within the engines. With other systems you can pay up to $0.03 per click and probably won’t get below $0.01 per click. The cost per action on KeywordMax typically ranges between $0.00163 and $0.000125. In most cases, multiple actions will be associated with a click so the action & click process are not apples to apples comparisons, however in virtually all cases, especially for smaller advertisers, KeywordMax wins a price competition hands down.

With KeywordMax, you can track order IDs, you can automatically generate the tracking parameters needed to setup your campaigns and you can manage your campaigns from one central interface. What more do you need?

Well, generally not much but you also get a click auditor to help detect fraud traffic and if you’re an agency or SEM company you can get bulk accounts that can be private labeled so your clients will think they are using your in-house system.

When you want an inexpensive PPC bid management system with most of the features of the big names in the industry, go for KeywordMax. It just works.