Internet Marketing Blog

AdWords is a very powerful, flexible system, and with that comes complexity. This complexity can obscure some very important information, such as if and when you’re running out of your daily budget. This is where one of the most important and frequently overlooked numbers comes into play: Impression Share (IS). This is the percentage of […]

We have recently developed a new tool, our Google Analytics Tag Validator, to help diagnose issues constructing URLs for advertising and tracking. If you’re tagging landing page URLs for AdWords, adCenter, Facebook advertising, and so on, this tool will help make sure that your composite URLs are properly constructed. Among other things, it alerts you if […]

Microsoft has announced that as of March 3, 2011 they will no longer review keywords for trademarks. This comes almost a year to the day after we explained why limiting keyword usage is unfair to advertisers and inconsistent with most other interpretations of trademark protection. It also makes trademark usage roughly consistent between Bing, Yahoo, […]

Microsoft adCenter has announced additional capacity for negative keywords. The new limits allow “1000’s” of keywords at the campaign and ad group levels, and the character limit at the keyword level increased as well. Negative keywords are critical for managing costs and achieving optimal ROI, and the extended capabilities offer more control. Now we just wish […]

This week Microsoft sent emails to US advertisers stating that Bing is beginning to power Yahoo natural search results: This week, Bing will begin powering organic search results on Yahoo! Search for the English language in the United States and Canada. This only affects natural search, not paid results at this time. Microsoft is still […]

According to TechCrunch, the Yahoo Publisher Network is being shut down. Participants are being directed to Chitika as an alternative. Yahoo Publisher Network can be thought of as Yahoo’s version of Google AdSense, a program that allows website owners to easily display and gain revenue from ads. This change primarily affects publishers of ads, not […]

A long time ago, we wrote briefly about how higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) values aren’t always desirable, and our clients often ask how to best interpret the significance of CTR. CTR is literally defined as the percentage of people who viewed an ad that clicked on it.  For example, if an ad is shown 100 times […]

Microsoft and Yahoo! have received regulatory approval for their “search alliance” in which Microsoft will provide search and advertising on Yahoo’s websites. Details are being revealed at http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-alliance/home. Advertisers do not need to take any actions right now, as the integration is not likely to take place before late in 2010, and we assume that […]

Even PPC campaigns that have an Impression Share (IS) of nearly 100% can get more traffic by increasing bids. What happens when you do so? Will doubling bids result in twice the traffic? No, and here’s why. If you increase your bids, your ads will show up higher and will get both more impressions and […]

In a prior post we described a problem in Microsoft adCenter’s geo-targeting feature. Today we learned that the bug has been fixed, and we were able to verify it through the interface and web analytics. It is now possible to exclude all of any state. We have no examined how this affects metropolitan areas that […]