Should you stick entirely to search advertising or incorporate display advertising into your marketing plan? Should you do one or the other, or both?

I believe you should be doing both. Search advertising is very effective, but you cannot successfully brand yourself without also including some banner, or display, advertising.

First, you need to know your target market. Who are they? Where do they hang out? What are they looking for? If you know the mindset, the language, and the preferences of your target market you’ll be a lot more successful in online marketing no matter what kind of advertising you employ.

Secondly, establish your goals. Knowing your goals is important because if you don’t define them then you can’t reach them. Do you know what you want your advertising to do for you? Advertising is generally done to qualify leads and send them to your website. Both search advertising and display advertising are effective in doing this.

It is easier to write your search ads before designing your display advertising. Your graphic designer will need to know some things before he or she can design your display ads. By writing your search ads first, you define your marketing campaign and give your branding team a frame of reference from which to start.

If you have search ads and display ads on the same website, put them in the same general area of the site. You will be much more effective this way.

Finally, the key to all kinds of advertising is testing. Don’t be afraid to try different things. Some things you think won’t be successful will be very successful. Other things that you think will be quite successful won’t make the grade. Be sure to test different ads, different landing page, and different placements for your ads. You can be successful with online advertising if you incorporate search advertising with display advertising.

Will Yahoo!s $1 million lawsuit change anything for PPC advertisers? Certainly not if Andy Beal is right in his prediction.

Lawsuits such as this one usually take years to run their course - if they go all the way through to the end and a decision is made by a court. In a lot cases, they end before they get there and the litigants settle out of court. It is likely that Yahoo! will settle out of court as well. It won’t benefit them to let a judge decide the case as they will to disclose details about their advertising programs that they don’t want public. Google would play it the same way.

In fact, Google already has been the target of several lawsuits and each has ended with the same fate or looks as if they will. None of the PPC companies can afford to lose a judgment and none can afford for a competitor to lose. It would likely lead to legislation and regulation and nobody wants that. Settlement is better. The question is, How much will the parties settle for?

In the end, when it comes to click fraud, there are few alternatives for advertisers other than the course that Bigred has taken.

Search Marketing Standard recently had a helpful article on what to look for in a search marketing firm when you are ready to start running your pay per click campaigns. There are some good pointers here and I just want to highlight a few snippets:

Do you spend $500 a month on search or do you spend $500,000? How much do you plan to spend in the future? This is a crucial starting point before you begin looking for outside help.

True. Some search marketing firms won’t even talk to you if you don’t have a sizable budget. By sizable, I mean up in the thousands of dollars. Every company is different and sets its own limits but if you have a small budget it doesn’t mean that you are left out in the cold. Some of us do like small companies with smaller budgets and we can get you results.

PowerPoint is a wonderful tool isn’t it? Any agency can create a PowerPoint that makes it seem like they have the most advanced technology and proprietary methods for getting your business optimized on AdWords and YSM. My advice is to avoid the PowerPoints all together.

Well, you’ve got to receive your presentation in some manner. If you live in Miami, Florida and you’re interviewing an SEM firm located in Vancouver, B.C. then you’re going to have to have visuals. But this point is well taken. Don’t rely on pretty pictures to tell the story. Ask for references and examine the company a little more in-depth before taking them on.

There are four basic agency/consulting pricing models in SEM: percentage of spend, hourly rate, fixed monthly fee, and performance-based fee.

Each of these pricing models has its advantages. If you are a small company with a small budget then you might be better off with a performance-based or percentage of spend basis. A larger company with a large budget might go for the hourly fee payment method. But be careful. Some SEM professionals who charge by the hour may not be as savvy as the ones who charge using these other methods.

Not all SEM agencies and consultants are the same. Some only want to deal with your keywords and bids. Others will work on ad text but not landing pages.

This is a very important one. Be sure to ask all the right questions before hiring your SEM firm. What will they do for you? How much information will they share with you? Etc. You can’t ask too many questions.

There are plenty more questions for you to ask any potential SEM firm before doing business with them. I encourage to read the entire article by David Rodnitzky here.

Ever since Google close the deal on the Performics plan, we’ve heard SEO and SEO go on and on about how unethical it is for Google to be involved in SEO. Well, now they’ve gone and done it!

They’ve decided to sell the search marketing part of the business. On the Google blog you’ll read:

Recently we completed this process for the DoubleClick Performics businesses, and have decided to split them into two separately-run business units: Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing.

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party.

That’s good news for search marketers. What it means is we won’t have to compete with Google to rank well in its own search engine. That would be a fatally flawed plan! But, thanks to Google’s foresight and its ability to listen to the market, we don’t have to worry about it. It’s tough enough to run a search marketing campaign as it is without having to compete with the monster of all search engines. Thanks Google! We still love you (well, some of us do any way).

(Search) Further research indicates that 93 percent of local shoppers use the Internet for research. This is a huge opportunity for marketers, especially considering 85 percent of all purchases are made within 15 miles from the home.

Local search just keeps getting better and better. Can you imagine a member of your local community typing a search phrase into Google or Yahoo! and seeing your search listing at the top of the page along with your very own search marketing ad right next to it. Studies show that most searchers will click on the organic listing for a search phrase. But about 10% will click on the search marketing ad. That’s a great opportunity for you. You may end up losing that 10% to a competitor if you don’t make another offering, and since you don’t pay for the advertising unless someone clicks on your ad, it’s well worth the added expense.

Plus, by having both an organic listing and a paid search listing on the same page, you increase your credibility. Your organic clicks will increase because of the search marketing ad. More people trust a company willing to spend money on advertising than a company that doesn’t show that willingness. So even if you never get a click, you’ll benefit. And why wouldn’t you advertise locally for key search phrases when you know that most people will drive to pick up the merchandise they want. They can go to you, or they can go to a competitor. Which would you prefer?

Search engine marketing is doing much better than projected. Based on a SEMPO survey of SEMs, more people are spending money on search marketing and they are spending more money on search marketing than was projected a year ago. It seems that small and mid-size businesses are taking money away from their off line advertising budgets and moving it to their online budgets. The part about this that I found interesting was this little statement at Marketing Pilgrim:

This should be especially good news for Google (and Google shareholders), since it’s the only search engine in the top four to get a bigger share of the market. 97% of the marketers survey use Google AdWords. 70% utilize Yahoo Sponsored Search and less marketers use MSN and Ask.com than last year.

97% of SEMs and online marketers are using Pay Per Click Google AdWords while MSN and Ask.com are on the decline. Yahoo! has a respectable market share at 70%. That means that Google and Yahoo! are the leaders just as they are in search. It also means that - unlike search - some of the same people using Google are also using Yahoo! And it means one thing, too: Some advertisers at MSN and Ask.com have shifted their focus away from those two search marketing providers to pursue advertising at Google and Yahoo!

I believe the opportunities in search marketing and Pay Per Click are expanding. I didn’t need this study to tell me that. But this form of advertising is obviously working because it wouldn’t be a growing industry if it wasn’t. There’s a good bet that search marketing would work for your business as well.

Search Marketing Standard is one of my favorite magazines. They’ve carved out a niche for themselves in producing a print magazine that covers SEM-related topics. And they do it well. Now they’ve gone and outdone themselves.

Starting March 17th, Search Marketing Standard will begin offering reviews of Pay Per Click and SEM companies. They’ve started taking information from readers already. It’s called SEM Compare. The idea is to let consumers - not editors - write the reviews. So if you’ve done business with an SEM company, like Brick Marketing for instance, and you’d like to provide a review for the magazine then you can go online and write up a review for the magazine.

The first 50 people who take advantage of this opportunity and write a review of an SEM company for Search Marketing Standard magazine will receive a $25 gift certificate for Amazon.com. Now that sounds like a pretty good deal.

(Source) Paid search accounts for more than half (57%) of the online advertising dollar, while display advertising has a 22 percent share. Advertisers say that’s because search works.

If you’ve been involved in search engine marketing or pay per click advertising then you aren’t surprised by these figures at all. Pay per click works.

Most people think of Google AdWords when they think of pay per click advertising, but Google isn’t the only show in town. There’s also Yahoo!, MSN adCenter, Miva, and several other smaller pay per click companies. Sometimes the small companies are more effective in getting you the traffic you want than the larger companies are. But the large pay per click companies are a good place to start.

Split Testing Beginnings: Where To Start
I recommend starting a campaign at each of the major pay per click advertising providers and using the exact same ad at all three companies. This is called split testing. By testing the same ad at all three service providers - Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter - you can decide which one is more effective in sending you the traffic that you want.

The ad will not cost the same at all three providers. It may read the same and target the same keywords, and you should point it to the same landing page as well, but you will likely be paying less per keyword at Yahoo! and MSN than at Google. You will also likely get more traffic from Google. But don’t just look at your traffic numbers. Compare conversion percentage to conversion percentage and ROI. The following table is fictional, but it should illustrate what I mean when I say compare conversions and ROI rather than traffic:

Of course, just looking at these numbers doesn’t tell us whether we should drop an ad or not. You are making a return on investment with each ad so I’d say that there is some effectiveness with each one. But you’ll need to look at your ad’s position at each search engine and determine whether you can make tweaks within each campaign to increase the overall effectiveness of your advertising. If your .15 bid per keyword at MSN adCenter positions your ad in the No. 5 position then you can increase your bid and affect the total effectiveness of that campaign, maybe even increase your ROI. The same goes for each of your other campaigns at Google and Yahoo!

Just remember, split testing your ads doesn’t necessarily tell you which one to drop, though it could. It does, however, measure the total effectiveness of your PPC ads and whether or not you can make each one more effective than it already is. And that is what you are trying to do.

(Source) For as much as 88.5% of the time people don’t pay attention to PPC adverts, which means that the click through rate is just 11.5% overall. This fact highlights the need for well-designed and well-executed SEO campaigns by companies for them to reach out to a majority of all those browsing the Internet.

I don’t dispute this SEOs experience and knowledge, but this is faulty logic. And I’m not anti-SEO either. You can see the proof of that here. But I do believe in abstinence from skewering the facts.

First, just because 88.5% of the time searchers don’t pay any mind to PPC ads does not mean that the click through rate of all PPC ads is 11.5%. Because many people online make multiple searches throughout the day, comparing time statistics to actual people clicking through to ads is not a fair comparison. How many times have you tried searching for something and had to make three or four queries to find the information you were looking for? Search is not an exact science.

Secondly, 11.5% of nothing to sneeze at. If the later assertion in the same article is true, that there are 2,500 searches per second, then that means 287.5 people click on a PPC ad every second. That’s 17,250 clicks per minute and 1,035,000 clicks every hour. That’s a lot of clicks.

In advertising, it just takes a fraction of a small market to be profitable. I’m not disputing the value of SEO. Yes, SEO is important, but if you focus only on SEO and do not target PPC clickers then you are ignoring a part of your market. Some people click on organic search listings because they appear beside a PPC ad promoting the same URL or website. Take away the ad and your organic SEO loses value.

The most effective advertising is to use is PPC advertising and SEO in conjunction with each other, as complimentary tools working toward one objective. Paid search clickers are important. Don’t ignore them.

DaveN wrote a great post PPC versus organic search. I think what a lot of small business PPC advertisers don’t realize when it comes to PPC is that the benefit is more than just your monetary ROI. There is more to measuring ROI than merely crunching numbers. There is also a credibility factor.

Let’s take a look at three different search engine marketing campaigns:

• The first campaign, we’ll call it Campaign A, uses organic search methods only
• The second campaign, Campaign B, utilizes PPC only
• Campaign C is a mix of both PPC advertising and organic search listings

The question is, who will get the greatest benefit from their efforts? Let’s assume a few things first.

• Assumption No. 1: All three companies are converting sales from organic searches
• Assumption No. 2: While both companies using PPC are converting sales, neither is converting enough sales at their bid prices to realize a profit
• Assumption No. 3: The company using a mix of PPC and SEO is realizing a 10% increase in sales conversions above and beyond the company using only organic search listings

Given this scenario, who is doing better? Campaign A is obviously making money. Campaign B is losing money. But what about Campaign C?

Since we don’t have real numbers in front of us, let’s analyze our assumptions and make three more:

• Campaign A is turning up a $1,000 per month profit
• Each PPC campaign is losing the company 10% of their revenue from all other sources
• Each PPC campaign is based on a $300 per month advertising budget

Now we have realistic numbers to look at even though this isn’t a real scenario. Company A is obviously making $1,000 per month. Company B is losing money on its PPC advertising, though we don’t know how much because we have no information on its revenue from all sources. But look at Campaign C:

• $1,100 revenue from SEO (see Assumption No. 3)
• Ad spend of $300 monthly
• While the PPC ads are converting sales, they are still losing money
• Isolating the loss of PPC revenue into a comparison between its SEO revenue, Campaign C is costing the company $110, degrading its SEO revenue to a mere $990 per month

At first glance, you might think Campaign C isn’t working. Campaign A is making $10 more per month. But the real determining factor is the fact that Campaign C is earning the company 10% more in revenue as a result of its PPC ads. This translates into a branding value that, in reality, outlasts the monetary gains the company is realizing. Though the net value in the PPC is a monetary loss, the actual value of the PPC is that consumers see that company as more credible than either of the other two companies. A certain number of people in any market will do business with the company that is using free advertising methods in conjunction with paid advertising methods and advertisers who spend money on radio and TV ads know this. That’s why it is difficult to place a strict monetary value on ROI when it comes to PPC advertising.

Search engine marketing has been defined in a number of ways. Some people include search engine optimization in their definition and some people don’t. Either way, you can’t get around search engine marketing as a viable way to market your business online. I like Jeremiah Owyang’s list of marketing methods, but the definitions and cross over definitions can be a bit murky.

For instance, he classifies SEO and SEM as a part of the branch of Search Marketing. I can buy that. But he doesn’t talk about pay per click or pay per action as a part of SEM. That was likely intentional, but in my mind, SEM is not all-inclusive. In other words, pay per click advertising is a branch of SEM, but SEM doesn’t include all forms of online advertising. I don’t think he meant to leave that impression, but when you lump SEO and SEM together under “Search Marketing,” that seems to be the indication.

Owyang places contextual advertising under a category he calls “Brand Extension.” I’ll have to agree that contextual advertising does go a long way to brand your company. It is certainly a branding tool, but it is also a form of pay per click advertising, which makes it a form of search engine marketing. At least, the way that I define the terms.

The problem with definitions is that everyone has their own, which makes it difficult to communicate about some of the concepts. That’s why, when I talk about pay per click, I like to talk about specific vehicles - Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, MSN AdCenter, Miva, etc. Google AdWords is not considered contextual advertising and the major pay per click advertising companies do not get involved in this form of advertising, but some of the pay per click companies (AdBrite, for instance) are pay per click based and offer contextual ads. That’s why the definitions can get murky. There are just so many products online and so many more becoming available.

Kent Lewis makes his 2008 predictions for search engine marketing in today’s Search Marketing Standards blog. All of his predictions in the last two years have not been accurate, but a lot of them have, especially the ones concerning Google. This year, he’s predicting Google will do to cross-platform bid management what he did to analytics in the past two years. That’s an interesting prediction. If he’s right, I’m sure it will mean a bigger boost for pay per click advertising and search engine marketing in general. I hope he’s right.

Playing off a previous list of myths about PPC, an infamous blogger added some of his own. I like this last one that was mentioned:

(Source) 3. You can’t do well with ppc unless you spend more than $1000 per month. I see this written on many seo blogs and in forums. It isn’t true. I’ve run ppc ad campaigns that were $300 per month that produced $10,000 in monthly sales. So I know this is a myth. Don’t believe otherwise.

That’s absolutely true. You don’t need a big budget to be successful with pay per click. You need the right keywords for your PPC campaign and a well optimized landing page. You should set a budget, but you can turn a limited budget into a profitable campaign.

The rest of the myths regarding PPC include:

1. You need to be No.1 - Uh, no.
2. You will pay 1p a click if there are no other advertisers - Every pay per click company has a minimum bid for each keyword.
3. The content network is all bad - SEO Service Provider disagrees, but I tend to agree. You can expand your advertising through the content network, but SEO Service Provider does bring up a good point in mentioning that the risk of click fraud is higher.
4. Broad /Advanced match is all bad - You can use broad match effectively if you do it the right way.
5. Bidding high increases your quality score - Not necessarily.
6. There is only one search engine - Google is not God. You can actually get a higher ROI with some of the smaller PPC companies.
7. PPC has a bearing on natural rankings - There’s no evidence of this at all.
8. Advertising spend has a bearing on quality score and hence ad rank - Nope. Not true.
9. PPC is only short-term until organic rankings arrive - Actually, the most successful PPC advertisers maintain their PPC accounts and actively use them even when they achieve front page organic rankings.
10. PPC Optimisation is a one time event - Wrong. Like organic SEO, PPC optimization is ongoing and you must spend time tweaking your campaigns.
11. Optimisation is campaign only, not the site - Wrong again.
12. Deleting will delete history - Not true either. Google AdWords will keep a record of your history.
13. Adwords / Yahoo! / adCenter hates me - They probably don’t know who you are. Perhaps you just aren’t reading the guidelines.
14. Running your own PPC campaign is easy. Anyone can do it (SSP) - Yes, anyone can do it if they are willing to take the time to learn it. PPC takes time and meanwhile you are losing dollars with ineffective advertising. You might as well hire an expert.
15. Hiring a professional is too expensive (SSP) - It can be, but it doesn’t need to be. If you are quoted a price that is out of your range then go to another PPC manager. Some PPC managers will work with smaller companies.

Don’t base your attitudes about PPC on these myths. Get a real view of PPC and talk to someone who knows what they’re doing.

Pay Per Click Journal would like to thank you for your continued readership. We will not be posting tomorrow or on New Year’s Day. But we would like to take a look back over the last three months of our life and highlight some of the more popular blog posts we’ve made since October.

Our first blog post was made on October 13. Since then, we’ve published 76 posts. These are 10 of our favorite:

• Who’s Going To Manage Your Pay Per Click?
• Google AdWords Vs. Microsoft AdCenter
• Microsoft AdCenter Upgrades And New Features
• Keyword Match Types: When Is Narrow Too Narrow?
• Yahoo! Search Marketing Quality Index
• Landing Page Optimization Is Of Supreme Importance
• PPC Bidding: How To Aim For Position No. 3
• Google Analytics Gets An Upgrade
• Landing Page Basics: Is Too Much Enough?
• Microsoft AdCenter Offers Free Pay Per Click Training

We hope you’ll check out these Pay Per Click Journal posts from the past three months. Meanwhile, if you have a favorite post about pay per click advertising, we’d like to know about it.

Finally, overture is dead. No one should be surprised.

Overture used to be one of the best tools for keyword research. In direct competition with WordTracker, you could get valuable information from Overture for free. Of course, WordTracker charged a fee. For that fee you could get a little bit more valuable information than you could from Overture, but not much. Until WordTracker started improving its service and left Overture behind.

In 2003, Yahoo! purchased Overture. Shortly after that, they began offering Yahoo! Search Marketing. For a while after that Overture was still fairly useful.

The real death knell for Overture came when the information on keywords it provided started being up to six months old. That’s when it really started to decline because search marketers need the most up to date information. If you are trying to write blog posts or monetize a website around specific keyword phrases that are popular then you need that information to be current. Six-month-old information is just too old. When Overture’s information started falling that far behind, savvy entrepreneurs began developing other search and research tools to compete with WordTracker. Some of them got to be quite popular.

In September, SERoundtable posted that Overture seemed dead. For the better part of this year, Overture has been off line. If you tried to click on its web address from any search or go to the URL (inventory.overture.com) where you’d typically find the keyword suggestion tool, you’d get an error page, or a message saying the website is temporarily unavailable. In fact, type in that URL now and that’s exactly what you’ll see.

Search marketers keep hoping Overture will come back, bigger and better than before. But I’m not holding my breath. I really think Overture is dead. Who’s going to trust them now?

Aaron Wall discussed on his blog yesterday the future of contextual advertising. It was an interesting read and his predictions for the future included:

• fewer ads
• ads with more information
• ads that look more like information
• ads tighter integrated into the content
• having a semi-porous brand which allows your free content to do your marketing for your paid content
• in many case selling ads that include personal endorsement, and ads for white label products or house products (often via subscription)

If this describes the advertiser of the future then I think the ads will be a lot more creative than they are now. Pay per click advertising is almost over saturated, but I don’t think it will go away. People still use banner ads, don’t they?

But advertisers on the cutting may figure out that Aaron’s assertion that pay per click ads are clicked on by poorer, uneducated clickers and decide to get more creative with their advertising. What then?

I still think pay per models will be popular. Pay per play videos will become more popular, and I also like the idea that ads will appear more as content. I believe that is likely true. Ads could appear as content and run side by side with the content in the form of advertising. But online marketers have tried that before and as soon as the public finds out there’s a big brouhaha about authenticity and advertisers almost have to revert back to making overt statements that their ads are indeed ads. I do believe that Aaron is on the right track and pay per click advertising, though it will still be used, will birth a new form of advertising soon that is related, but different and more creative.