Google AdWords is adding a new TV ads seminar. The made the first offering and more people were interested so they’ve added another seminar that you can sign up for. If you have an interest in TV ads and have a Google AdWords account - or even if you don’t and you are thinking about starting one - then you might be interested in this seminar.

Microsoft is trying to get your Mother’s Day business.

And Yahoo! is trying to educate its customers on phishing scams. The “sign-in seal” that they are discussing is actually a good idea. For some reason, people are still clicking on these false e-mail messages that the receive and end up on a different website than where they thought they were going, giving phishers and scammers all of their private information. Word to the wise: Don’t click these e-mails! They’re not real.

But if you are taken in by a phisher and you have one of these seals that Yahoo! is talking about then won’t see the secret message that your programmed into your seal.

You may notice from time to time that your minimum bids move. If you’ve had a PPC campaign that all of a sudden stopped because your ads no longer met the minimum bid for the approval process then you’ve likely been frustrated by that. Yahoo! Search Marketing has a solution for you that will help you keep an eye on that minimum bid.

When you log into your account you should see a notification that lets you know your ads no longer meet the minimum bid. Let’s say you bid 10 cents for your keyword and the minimum bid is 13 cents. On your user interface within the advertising management system, you’ll see your actual bid and a red note one field to its left telling you that your bid is too low. Right below the red type you’ll the the actual minimum bid necessary to keep your ad active for that keyword.

What you do is log into your account and click on the Keywords tab. If you haven’t seen that before, it’s because that’s a new tab. But it lets you see all the keywords for your PPC ads no matter which campaign they are associated with. That’s a cool tool. Now you can see the minimum bid information described in the last paragraph. You can either raise your bid or let your ads pause for awhile. An easy way to manage all of your keywords at a glance.

Another cool feature of this new tab and new reporting tool is that your ads do not automatically go inactive right away like they do with Google AdWords. Instead, you have a grace period during which if you raise your bid to the minimum then your ads will never pause. You won’t lose a beat. If you do not raise your minimum bid, of course, then your ads will pause, but you at least have the grace period.

While your ads are pending inactive, you can raise the bids for your keywords to the minimum necessary to keep them active, but the minimums are just that. They are not minimum bids for competitive purposes, only minimum bids to keep the ads active. So be sure to remember that.

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.

Yahoo! is scurrying for a comeback. Spurning MSNs advances. Adding other services left and right, including the upcoming Flickr video-sharing deal. But what about Pay Per Click?

Yahoo! has had pretty decent success with its Yahoo! Publishers Network. In fact, next to Google, Yahoo! Publishers Network is top dog in Pay Per Click. And Yahoo! is a lot closer to competing with Google in Pay Per Click than it is in search. So will we see any big improvements coming our way any time soon?

It depends. Yahoo! is trying to dig itself out a hole. Executives may reason that since they are doing so well in Pay Per Click they don’t need to tweak anything. Then again, they may decide that since they are doing so well in Pay Per Click that they need to do what they can to make it better. I think Yahoo! should focus on its strengths. While they may be doing well in Pay Per Click, there is always room for improvement. Yahoo!s announcement a couple of weeks ago that it will do away with its .10 minimum bid and make minimums based on ad relevance and the market is a bold move in the right direction. I’d like to see a few more tweaks in that direction. They will certainly go a long way to make Yahoo! Pay Per Click more competitive.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Pay Per Click has changed the way it handles minimum bids. Previously, minimum bids were set at .10. Period. Now, they’re based on quality and value.

In the next several weeks, we will start calculating a variable minimum bid for some of the keywords you’re bidding on. That means that sometimes the minimum bid may be lower than 10¢. Sometimes it may be higher. Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at 10¢.

That’s nice, and I’ll tell you why. The Yahoo! Search Marketing blog mentions that auction houses have a similar minimum bid system. It’s called a reserve bid. And it’s based on the minimum ascribed value of the merchandise being auctioned off. This reserve bid is based on certain factors like quality, fame, market dynamics, etc. If, for instance, a rare guitar model is valued at $10,000 because it no longer manufactured and was the guitar model of choice by a fair number of professional recording artists then that can be considered a good starting point. Take into consideration that a particular guitar of that certain model was once owned by Elvis Presley (hypothetically) then that raises the value. If it was a guitar that was owned by Elvis Presley and no one else then it could be even more valuable. If he’d only played that guitar once in concert then it’s value is raised again. And if he played only one song with that guitar EVER and that song was, say, “Jailhouse Rock” then that could raise the value again. Soon, we’re talking about a standard $10,000 guitar model going for $75,000 simply because of these quality and value factors.

Yahoo! Search Marketing is headed that direction with its search marketing minimum bids. That’s a good thing because it will increase the competition for certain keywords. It will also establish a market value for every keyword in existence, which means that certain keywords may actually lose value depending on the competition for those keywords. Since competition among advertisers for keywords is based on the demand value of those keywords at the search engines then whatever happens to be popular at the search engines - likely, most popular at Yahoo! - will have more value as an advertising keyword.

Seasonal concerns will play into this as well. For instance, the keyword “Easter egg” will be more valuable in March and April than in September and October. “Christmas tree” will be more valuable after Thanksgiving than in the summer. But other keywords, like “auto parts,” may be valuable year round and could be more valuable in certain markets than in others. And that’s what I like about this new plan - it gives the market more control over prices rather than the other way round.  It is definitely a change for their pay per click structure.

The Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog is trumpeting a new keyword policy. Well, it’s not really new, but it’s negative. And that’s positive. So they tell us.

While negative keyword match types have been allowed until now, they were limited to 50 if using pay per click network Yahoo! Search Marketing, but the search portal has recently expanded its negative keyword exclusion to 250. That means if you have a lot of keywords that would work for finding your business but that don’t apply to your particular business then you can add those to your list of excluded keywords and keep on trucking.

The negative keyword exclusion allows you to block unwanted searches and therefore stop unwanted clicks, which means an decrease in CTR and an associated increase in conversion percentages. Isn’t that every small business owner’s dream? Well, I hope so and I congratulate Yahoo! on taking this important step to making search marketing for small businesses a whole lot better.

Pay per click arbitrage is the practice of buying ads on one pay per click search engine or through one pay per click advertising provider and making your destination URL a web page with pay per click ads, affiliate program ads, or flat fee display ads on it. The success of this marketing strategy depends on the arbitrageur making more per click when visitors click on their ads than they pay in clicks to get the traffic to that page. Many Internet entrepreneurs have used arbitrage to game the pay per click advertising system for several years and it’s reached critical mass. The search engines have taken notice and are working hard to address the issue. They now claim that they have done so.

Google, for instance, has changed its pay per click policies to include:

(Source)

• manual reviews, smart pricing discounting (of publisher clicks), and quality scores (increasing the cost of advertising junk)
• improved duplicate content detection
• decreasing the clickable area in many AdSense ad units
• killing sub-syndication of their feed with companies like Ask
• keeping a greater percentage of ad revenue from each click
• requiring advertiser display URLs to match ad destination (starting April 1st)

Regarding that last point, Search Engine Land just yesterday published a post that explains how Google has had that policy in place all along but starting April 1st, 2008 will begin enforcing it.

Yahoo, too, is taking action to kill PPC arbitrage. These policies are making some people very happy. In fact, legitimate pay per click advertisers are ecstatic over these changes and most of us are saying that we’re glad the search engines are finally taking a stand against pay per click arbitrage. But there will be people losing a lot of money over the changes.

Nevertheless, I don’t think arbitrage is completely dead. Nor do I think it die off completely. There are still small pay per click companies out there that will need to survive and in order to remain competitive with the larger companies like Google and Yahoo, they will need to keep their click prices low and have more lax policies. Otherwise, they risk going out of business. This will create new opportunities for pay per click arbitrageurs. It may mean that they can’t do business with Google or Yahoo, either as a publisher or an advertiser, but they can still profit from the differences in click prices at the small search engines. I believe it’s just a matter of time before they figure this out and there’s probably a handful of arbitrageurs who are working on their first e-book right now.

When it comes to making money online, there is more than way. Not all of them are considered legitimate by those in positions of power and authority. But not all are frowned upon by the entire universe either.  Pay per click arbitrage is one of those areas that has strong adherents and equally strong critics. Google and Yahoo may be driving a stake in its heart, but it will be a long time before it dies completely.

WebProNews is reporting that Yahoo! Search Marketing is using images in their sponsored ads now.

But the images only appear in the directory, not on the Web search page. Could it be that this is a beta test of a new program or will these ads be sold to advertisers for the directory pages only? I like the images in the ads. They are attractive and draw attention to the ads on the page, which is definitely good for advertisers. It may be too distracting for searchers, but if they are truly interested in finding information then the ads could serve them better than the organic search results. I’ll be very interested in seeing how this develops, or whether it develops or not.

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?

Yahoo! Search Marketing isn’t the largest pay per click company online, but they are one of the best places advertisers can get the word out about their companies. You don’t have to be big to be good, and this search engine is the proof.

For one thing, you can bid on a lot of the same keywords at Yahoo! as you can at Google and get them much cheaper. The quality of the traffic isn’t as bad as you’d expect, and in some cases it’s even better than Google. A lot of it depends on your target audience.

There are some differences between the two companies. For instance, Google’s Analytics is great for tracking the results of your AdWords ads, but it doesn’t do so well if you are at Yahoo! By contrast, Yahoo! has its own tracking codes so you can see the results of your advertising at Yahoo! Plus, Yahoo!s approach to small business marketing is far superior to Google’s. Google may have a corner on search, but when it comes to pay per click advertising, bigger is not necessarily better. Yahoo! can hold its own.

Advertise your Web site with Yahoo! Sponsored Search. Sign up and get a $25 credit into your new account. Learn more.

I knew there were a lot of options for online advertising but I didn’t know there were this many. The flip side is that if these advertising companies have that much opportunity for publishers then they also have opportunities for advertisers. But I still think for most advertisers the big companies are still the best:

• Google AdWords
• Yahoo! Search Marketing
• MSN AdCenter
• ClickBank
• Commission Junction
• Enhance Interactive
• Superpages

When it comes to your advertising opportunities, it pays to be selective. Choose an advertising vehicles that is reliable and effective. Your business success depends on it.

Advertise your Web site with Yahoo! Sponsored Search. Sign up and get a $25 credit into your new account. Learn more.

If you use Yahoo! Search Marketing for your pay per click campaigns then you’ll wan to pay attention to the Quality Index.

When you’re logged into your PPC account, on each ad display page you’ll see a blue bar above your ads. Each ad has one and it’s labeled Quality Index. It measures the quality of your ads.

The Quality Index is designed to help you gauge how relevant your ads are to your audience. That’s very important because if you get it wrong then you’ll likely not get very many click throughs. If you do, those click throughs will likely be from the wrong segment of your market. It means you aren’t targeting your ads correctly. Some ways that you can improve quality in your ads at Yahoo! Search Marketing include:

• Using your keyword in your titles
• Make your ad descriptions keyword-rich
• Exclude keywords that are not relevant
• Use Yahoo!s ad test feature
• Use the relevant keywords in your ad

The quality index is there to help you. Rely on it and you’ll do well at Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Advertise your Web site with Yahoo! Sponsored Search. Sign up and get a $25 credit into your new account. Learn more.

I have to compliment Yahoo Search Marketing on the way they have improved the PPC Ad Tester. Some of the features I like are;

1. The ability to use and rotate as many as 20 different ads per adgroup at a time is a huge help to those who want to test multiple ads.

2. The Yahoo Panama Interface allows you to create multiple ads, again, up to 20 ads, on the same screen instead of having to create them one at a time as before. This saves a lot of time.

Advertise your Web site with Yahoo! Sponsored Search. Sign up and get a $25 credit into your new account. Learn more.

3. The On Deck Feature of Ad Generator also deserves a mention here. You can create more than 20 PPC ads. Then only 20 go into rotation but PPC ads that perform poorly are delted by Ad Generator and it pulls in the next PPC ad to replace it. Again saving you time and automating part of the process.

Personally I didn’t like the interface set up by Yahoo Search Marketing when I first tried it. However, these improvements to their PPC Management area have drawn me back to them as a PPC option.