By Britnee Nguyen

If you’re planning on doing a PPC campaign or any type of internet marketing through the winter months, you’ll want to take the holiday season in consideration. Undoubtedly, there’s going to be a rise of on-line traffic during the holidays as many people turn to the web to find gifts. You’ll want to make sure you have your PPC campaigns properly set up to make the most of your on-line advertising investment. Use these guidelines to be successful during the holiday season through your PPC campaign.

Use keyword reports from the previous holiday season to see what keywords did well during that time. You can use the search-based keyword tool to see these reports. Most likely, these terms will do well again this year. You’ll want to use Google’s sbKT (search-based keyword tool). When you’re on the website you’ll see how well keywords are ranking and how much they are per click. This is really helpful any time of the year, but can be of great assistance if you’re trying to sell your product or service during the holidays.

The one day out of the year you should have your PPC campaign geared for is Cyber Monday. This is like Black Friday which is the day after Thanksgiving where every store has discounted prices on items. Cyber Monday occurs the Monday after Thanksgiving and is for sales available on-line. You could bid higher this day compared to other days to take advantage of the increased traffic on Cyber Monday. To get the most clicks, you’ll need to get your ads in the top 3. If you don’t, then it might be useless to do it since your competition will dominate you. You’ll want to be part of the holiday revenue that day so make sure you maximize your ROI the best you can on Cyber Monday.

Also, even after the holidays come and go, many sales happen after the holidays. Consumers are looking for the best deals after the holidays, so don’t miss out on this opportunity either. Don’t end your PPC campaign on Christmas Day, instead you should keep it and monitor it to make money off of the post-holiday shopping. You’ll might want to alter your keywords a bit after this to make sure you’re still targeting the on-line shoppers.

This holiday season, don’t miss out on increased revenue from your PPC advertising. Be sure to plan and prepare it in advance to get the most ROI. If you’re busy taking care of your own holiday shopping, it’s best to hire a professional company who can handle your account during the busy season. Submit Solution is an example of a company who are experts in pay per click advertising and will maximize your ROI this holiday season.

By Robert Lockard

An excellent blog post on Practical Ecommerce got me thinking about how paid-search campaigns are handled. The blog post is entitled, “Pay-per-click Advertising: Seven Pointers for Smaller Campaigns.”

I was amazed when I read all of the pointers on how people can improve their PPC efforts because basically all of them are easily handled by Submit Solution. I think it’s a great idea to be educated on the best practices of online promotion, so you should definitely read that blog post and take its advice to heart.

After you come up with a plan and thoroughly research your keywords, you can present your ideas to a Submit Solution PPC expert, and he or she will be able to improve upon your ideas and fully implement them for you. Submit Solution offers a number of pay-per-click solutions, including one-on-one support, easily updatable keywords, up-to-date reports and more.

The seven things you should keep in mind when using PPC in your marketing strategies include learning about negative keywords, long-tail keywords and match types. Negative keywords are phrases that include your selected keywords, but attach unfavorable or irrelevant words to them. I’m sure Nintendo wouldn’t want to pay for people who click on its ads when they type in words like “Nintendo Wii defective,” or something to that effect. Those people are more likely to be looking for information or venting rather than hoping to make a purchase.

Long-tail keywords are great because a relatively small number of people search for them and so they used to be less expensive to advertise on. But now that the secret is out that Internet marketers want those targeted keywords more than the general ones, they’re becoming more expensive. A long-tail keyword is a search term with more than one or two descriptive words in it. Terms like “Internet marketing” have a high amount of competition to be number one on search engine results pages. Terms like “Internet marketing solution Orem Utah” will have fewer searchers, but they will be much more targeted.

Match types help you get even more targeted traffic to your website by adjusting how precisely you want people’s search terms to match your selected keywords and phrases.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my discussion of PPC campaigns. This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post: “Submit Solution offers PPC solutions.” The photo of the bad advertisement is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Unlisted Sightings.

By Britnee Nguyen

Recently, YouTube announced they are allowing advertisers in Australia to buy search keywords for their videos. I never realized YouTube had the option of Pay-Per-Click ads for videos posted there. Apparently, they’ve been offering this service in the U.S. for a year now. It’s quite a brilliant idea for internet marketing since more people are apt to click on the ad because it’s a video over clicking on an ad that is just has text.

The two major advertisers who use this service are Mitsubishi and Holden who have been doing it in the U.S. Other popular advertisers are automotives, entertainment industry and packaged goods. It’s a clever way to get more hits on videos. How it works is that the advertisers buys popular search keywords that relate to themselves and then their ad for their video pops up when someone types in those keywords. When someone actually clicks on the video ad, then advertisers pay for the click.

With these YouTube pay-per-click ads for videos, it is starting to blur the lines between what is advertisement and what is entertainment. Because of this, I think it’s easier to get more clicks through YouTube, then through a regular search engine. To make it even more effective, if your company actually produces a pretty fun video that can turn viral, plus with pay-per-click ads of it, it would eventually get so many hits that it would probably organically show up in the results and you no longer have to pay for views. It’s quite the clever way to be creative and use YouTube’s paid search to promote it.

So it’s a pretty effective tool to use. The only downside that could happen with it is that a negative video about the company could show up in the organic search results right next to the paid advertising video from the same company. It might deter the message from the paid video. A YouTube spokesperson did say that advertisers can add keywords to their campaign that they don’t want to show up for. So that would probably solve that problem. Overall, it sounds like a great way to get a company out there in the web community.

By Britnee Nguyen

A new and free research tool, Google Insights, provides e-commerce owners with the ability to improve their pay-per-click (PPC) advertising with its search data. Many on-line retailers depend on utah PPC services to get more customers to their shops. If less people are clicking, then that means less business coming in.

Some may not see the relevancy in PPC or even understand how many people actually use it. Google reported that most of its $5.5 billion revenue in the last quarter was from PPC advertising. This is why Google has a keen interest in paid search ads and want to help on-line retailers receive the best support in it.

So the newest tool is Google Insights which helps hone a marketing message. You can choose three different ways to describe your product such as “environmentally-friendly”, “portable”, and “high-tech” for example and plug them into Google Insights which will tell you which term is searched for most in the U.S. or whatever area you’re in. This gives you a starting point on knowing which phrase will benefit you the most.

You can also see how a certain keyword tends to trend each year. For example, “softball cleats” trends to be the highest on March when softball season is about to start. You can also see which states search for the most and other related keywords and how they trend. You can see below how each divot and peak occur around the same time each year.

Note that Google Insights doesn’t tell you exactly how many people search for that keyword, but instead scales it accordingly. It is a helpful tool to help those with pay-per-click and to use it more efficiently. It’s not the only tool needed to succeed in utah PPC, but it is definitely one you’ll want in your toolbox.

By Robert Lockard

In September, Google introduced a new way for its customers to buy and sell online display ads. It’s called the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and it allows Internet marketers to find a variety of Web pages to advertise on and quickly make a bid. This speeds up the process for both advertisers and publishers looking for ad revenue.

I heard about this development in a Wall Street Journal article, entitled “Google Unveils Market for Display Ads.”

Google has literally thousands of partner websites scattered across the Web that display its online ads. However, Google has never been very good at display advertising. It bought DoubleClick back in 2007 for $3.1 billion and has been trying to come up with a good way to jump into this part of the paid-search market. This appears to be its big move.

This isn’t the first online-advertising exchange service. Actually, other major search engines, like Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have had them for some time, though none of them has been able to make them particularly big or useful, yet. Maybe Google will find a way to make this exchange service popular and profitable.

Google’s move comes with plenty of risks. What if few ad publishers and advertisers sign on to the service? Who would want to participate in a service that no one else is using? Internet marketers are looking for ways to reach the right audience in simpler ways.

Surprisingly, Google is far behind other search engines in the display-ad market. Google is definitely the king of PPC with about a 70-percent share of the industry’s total revenue, but it only received 1.3 percent of all display-ad views. Yahoo is actually the leader in display ads.

Apparently, Internet marketers who want to target a specific audience with simple Internet ads turn to Google. But if they want something more dynamic, appealing to customers’ emotions more than their intellect, they are more likely to turn to Yahoo or TV advertisements.

This is a complete version of the blog post on the eHarbor Blog: “Google tries to expand into new PPC forum.”

The photo of the fiery wok is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of liber.

By Britnee Nguyen

In speaking with a photojournalist from a newspaper the other day, she was telling me how a company had called the newspaper trying to sell them on the idea of using utah SEO/utah PPC to improve their traffic to their stories. I was surprised at first since I’ve never thought those services could benefit a newspaper. Actually, some say pay-per-click has been the reason of newspapers downfall since more choose to advertise that way instead of through the traditional newspaper ad route.

The thing with SEO and keyword internet marketing is that it does take some time to build up. So if newspapers are trying to use SEO to build up traffic to timely or breaking news, it will be too late and useless before they see the results. People will have picked up the timely story beforehand somewhere else.

With utah PPC on the other hand, I can see how that would benefit newspapers. If there is a breaking story that they want to be the ones where readers go to find more information on-line, then PPC would definitely work. Basically, the way it would work is if this kind of scenario happened: Someone twitters breaking news utah adwords management that there is a shooting downtown and that they are there at the scene. A viewer sees it and texts about it to their friend who lives near the shooting area. Since not many details are given, the friend who receives the text is most likely to immediately jump on-line to search for more details.

By this time, newspapers would have caught this story too. They write up a quick article and constantly update it. In addition, they bid on a utah pay-per-click ad that will pop up on search engines for whoever searches: “shooting in ‘city’ or ‘state’”. And then whoever searches for that term (such as the friend who received the text) will find the newspaper article pop up very first on the list, and will most likely click on it.

This is just an example of one scenario. From what I’ve found, it looks like several newspaper organizations such as Cox Newspapers Inc., The Chicago Tribune, and New York Daily News have used pay-per-click advertising in the past to generate more revenue and traffic. If more newspapers got into PPC then they would have more chances of viewers going to their site for more information instead of other websites.

So instead of newspapers competing with PPC, they should actually take advantage of it and use it for their own benefit. Traffic and revenue are things newspapers desperately need right now, and PPC can help them achieve these things.

For more information on utah PPC services, visit Submit Solution who are experts in the field of PPC and keyword internet marketing.

Flickr Photo Credit: antonkawaski

By Robert Lockard

It looks like two Davids are joining forces to take on Goliath. After years of public wrangling over the details, Microsoft and Yahoo finally announced a proposed 10-year partnership between their search-engine and online-advertising departments on Wednesday, July 29, 2009.

“In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo search while Yahoo will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers,” the official Microsoft news release said.

The way I read that sentence, it means they will pool their resources so that Yahoo’s search engine will have the same tools as the Bing “decision engine.” It also means Bing will have access to Yahoo’s superior online advertising services and it can give advertisers better results and a bigger audience.

Right now, Google controls about 70 percent of the online-search market, while Microsoft and Yahoo, combined, only account for nearly 30 percent of all Internet searches. They’ll need a lot more stones in their sling if they hope to take down the giant.

What does this new relationship mean for pay-per-click advertisers? According to the news release,

Yahoo will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.

Advertisers will be able to take advantage of Microsoft’s online-advertising tools while also receiving Yahoo’s expert service. This new service will hopefully offer the best of both worlds.

“Through this agreement with Yahoo, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, referring to Google.

Of course, companies and their CEOs want to promote their services as much as possible. Google probably has a completely different take on these events. So what are your thoughts? Is this development good or bad for ecommerce and Internet marketing? This is a complete version of the blog post on the eHarbor Blog: “What the Microsoft-Yahoo merger means for ecommerce.”

The Microsoft-Yahoo logo is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of JVManna.

By Robert Lockard

The Bing decision engine is the most-visible sign of competition between Microsoft and Google, but the two technology giants are competing in many ways besides their search engines. And online companies and users are benefiting from their rivalry.

According to a Wired magazine article, “Google vs. Microsoft: What you need to know,” there are several ways Microsoft and Google are trying take market share from each other. I’ll discuss how some of those ways could be good for us who work in ecommerce and Internet marketing.

For instance, Google’s online advertising services, through Adsense, have taken pay-per-click campaigns to a new level. This service allows many websites to post paid-search ads from Google and earn money when someone clicks on one of them. This allows these sites to translate visitors into revenue, and it also helps Google earn money on its advertising campaigns. Web marketers benefit from the added exposure, allowing them to reach more online users than ever before.

Microsoft is trying to get into this market with Bing cashback. It has yet to become profitable, like Google, in the arena of online advertising, but the additional competition could mean lower advertising rates and better service for Internet marketers. I discussed Bing at length in an eHarbor Blog entry, “Bing decision engine good for online marketing.”

Although Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has already had plenty of competition from Mozilla Firefox, Google’s new Chrome browser is sure to push them to innovate even more.

By the way, as I read this article, I noticed a glaring grammatical error that called out for me to comment on. Here’s the sentence:

It is, however, not a death match — it’s more of an fight to see who will be the King of Technology…

So close. By the way, this is a complete version of the blog entry on the eHarbor Blog: “Google-Microsoft face-off benefits ecommerce.” The Google vs. Microsoft photo is from Flickr, and it is courtesy of michperu.