You know, it’s still not too late to get that Mother’s Day Pay Per Click advertising campaign off the ground. You may be a little later than your competition, but you’re not too late. The beauty of pay-per-click is that you can start a campaign the week before a holiday or special day and drive targeted traffic to your website. It just takes a few minutes to set up a campaign and to set your budget. So why not start now?

If you already have a Mother’s Day Pay Per Click advertising campaign in the works and you aren’t satisfied with the way that it is going, maybe you should tweak your keywords a bit. Or perhaps your ad. An evaluation from a third-party eye might not be a bad idea.

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of your Mother’s Day Pay Per Click  advertising campaign:

• Use “mother’s day” as a part of your targeted keywords to appeal to online searchers specifically seeking Mother’s Day gifts
• Optimize your landing page to attract Mother’s Day shoppers
• Write targeted ad text that mentions your specific products by name
• Offer gift cards and run Pay Per Click ads specifically for Mother’s Day gift cards
• Extend your shipping and delivery options to include overnight shipping or free shipping to appeal to last minute shoppers
• Some people are still leary of using credit cards online; appeal to them through other means such as PayPal and Google Checkout

If you hurry, you can still get your Mother’s Day Pay Per Click  campaign off the ground before the end of the week.

Now that Microsoft has withdrawn its offer to purchase Yahoo!, the No. 2 search engine has started looking for other opportunities, one of which is to run Google AdSense ads on its network of websites. If that happens, what would that mean for Google AdWords advertisers?

First, it would mean that Yahoo! Search Marketing is bowing gracefully out of the PPC advertising market and that would leave a large number of advertisers in that network out in the cold. They’d have no alternative but to start using Google AdWords as their primary source of PPC advertising, if they aren’t already. It is not likely that many of them would migrate over to MSN Live, though some may.

But the real issue for advertisers would be the price of clicks in Google Adwords. The additional demand and competition for key advertising terms would drive up click prices in a heart beat. That in turn would lead to greater revenues for Google AdWords and Yahoo! This is no doubt what both companies are hoping for.

An antitrust lawsuit might eventually lead to Google AdWords being spun off as a separate company from Google, but it would still remain that advertisers would be paying more for clicks. The big question would be how Google AdWords would improve its services for its advertisers in the long term.

Let’s face it, some keywords just aren’t popular enough to have a year-round PPC campaign behind them. You know you’ve seen them. They’re popular at Christmastime, but you get no use from them for the rest of the year. Or maybe you see surges in popularity in the summer, but drops in other times of year. Maybe the keyword popularity goes up or down throughout the year based on holiday schedules or other influences within your industry. How do you capitalize on that?

Good question. The first step, of course, is to know and understand what causes those spikes, dips, and surges. You should also be tuned in to when they occur. It isn’t enough to know that baseball gloves are more popular just before little league season begins. You need to know when (generally) the interest in them starts. By knowing this information, you can time your ads to hit when people will start looking for what you have to offer.

Don’t start your advertising campaign when interest spikes. That’s too late. Kick it off a couple of weeks before that. You want to be the first to have your advertising in place so that you can capitalize early on when shoppers first begin to go looking for a product. Then, when the competition enters the field, you’ll already have a leg up. That will count for more than just sales. It will also make a difference with optimization and quality score.

You also don’t want to leave out keyword research. Don’t shortcut it just because it is a short-term campaign. Run it just as you would any other campaign. Start at the beginning, do your keyword research, and bid according to the value of the keywords. You can also use match types for your short-term campaigns. Run it like you would any other advertising campaign.

But you don’t have to use the spikes and surges for short term advertising campaigns. They are also useful in your long-term campaigns. The ones you run year-round. Those keywords that are a part of your campaign can have bid adjustments based on the season. You might even run a long-term and a short-term campaign simultaneously based on the seasons and times of year.

One more way to use this information is in your choice of negative keywords. Use those spikes to determine when to make a keyword a negative keyword and when to focus in on it through your bidding strategy or match type focus. The bottom line is to increase your revenues. You can do that by increasing your sales or by lowering your bids on keywords that don’t quite make the cut - even if it’s on a seasonal basis.

Will social networks ever figure out how to make pay per click advertising work for them? An article by Janet Meiners sheds some light on the subject at Market Pilgrim.

I haven’t used SocialMedia Networks so I can’t speak to their offerings, but I agree with Janet that you have to figure out how to make your ads within the social network appealing to the users of those networks, who are more often than not turned off by the traditional display advertising model.

StumbleUpon seems to have done this well. For 5 cents per click, advertisers can target their advertising to particular groups or types of users. But you can also advertise by video on SU, not a unique idea but one that works for StumbleUpon.

One thing is for sure: If you are going to advertise on the social networks, you need to know your audience.

John Chow recently posted some tips on how to test 2nd tier PPC networks. He makes some good points and I agree. Perhaps the most useful tip is to not run your initial test on the 2nd tier network. Do it on Google, Yahoo! or MSN and only use the 2nd tier network when you have figured out your profit margins.

Another useful tip I found, and I wholeheartedly agree, is to use networks that offer you free clicks. Several 2nd tier PPC networks allow you to set up an account and give you free clicks for doing so. These clicks come in the way of $25 or $50 sign on bonuses. That effectively means you get to test the network for free.

I also like John’s recommendation to use bulk upload tools. In other words, almost all of the PPC companies allow you to import-export CSV files of your keywords. Use that feature. It will save you a lot of time.

And, of course, you want to set a daily budget. You should do that anyway. If you aren’t doing it on Google, Yahoo!, or MSN where you have your primary campaign running then you should start. A daily budget will help you manage your resources a lot more effectively.

2nd tier PPC networks can be a good source of new traffic, but it may not always be the best traffic. Track everything diligently and make wise decisions.

AdBrite has been offering a pay per click alternative to the major search engines since 2002. One cool thing about AdBrite is you can have your Google and Yahoo! ads circulate through AdBrite’s targeted advertising if an AdBrite ad is not available. That’s a cool feature. But it pales in comparison to the new AdBrite.

The company recently introduced a concept being called Open Targeting Exchange. OTX partners with third-party advertising providers to increase targeted advertising opportunities for advertisers and revenue streams for publishers. In other words, instead of bringing just one algorithm to the table, OTX allows other pay per click service providers to add their algorithms to “the pool” so that publishers can publish the ads that are most relevant to their content from across the network.

Advertisers win because they can have their ads placed on websites where their ideal customers are most likely to be browsing. Publishers get the ads that are most relevant to their content. Consumers see ads that are most relevant to their interests. The revenues are shared between AdBrite and their pay per click partners. Everyone wins. At least, that’s the theory.

Personally, I think it’s a revolutionary idea whose time has come. I’m anxious to see how OTX performs and which third party PPC provider join the network.

(Source) Shopping sites are largely “generic” and undifferentiated. True e-tailers with a few exceptions are interchanable and thus vulnerable. And “e-commerce” for major retailers is increasingly about “buy (soon to be reserve) online, pick up in store.”

Once again, Greg Sterling hit it on the head. Comparison shopping sites really only do one thing well: Draw traffic from people who plan to make a purchase offline. That’s why major online retailers who want to close the sale will have to come up with creative solutions beyond these comparison shopping sites, which tend to be more and more for offline merchants who expect to drive traffic to their brick and mortar stores. That’s what online shopping is quickly becoming more and more.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that pay per click is not all about driving traffic to your website to close the sale there. The reason many products are priced lower online than they are offline is precisely to encourage people to make more online purchases. Unfortunately, they aren’t buying it. They’re doing their research online and driving to buy. Even with rising gas prices.

So what does that mean for online merchants and pay per click advertisers? It means you don’t necessarily have to pay for clicks and expect people to buy. You can pay for clicks and drive traffic to your brick and mortar store. If you don’t have a brick and mortar store then you’ll need to watch your pay per click bottom line a little more closely and keep an eye on your ROI. You can still turn a profit. It just means that may have to lower your click bids.

Did you know that YouTube has a partnership program? It’s true. This could be a great opportunity to earn additional income for your website if you produce any kind of video content.

And since YouTube has recently introduced an analytics tracking aspect of its service, you can track the success of the videos you upload and improve them so that you can increase your sharing revenue.

So what are the implications of this program for publishers? Glad you asked. Naturally, it could be an additional way for you to earn income. If you produce original video content that you upload to YouTube and embed on your own website, you could use that embedded content on your site to drive traffic to YouTube. The more income your videos earn for YouTube, the more income you can earn as a partner. Of course, if your videos are popular, you’ll earn more. That’s the whole idea.

Looks like a good idea and a unique opportunity to me. YouTube video sharing and revenue partnership. What an opportunity.