Sourced from www.money.cnn.com
By Justin Martin
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. (FSB Magazine) — Allan Keiter awoke one recent morning to the scary news that his Atlanta company’s website was nearly impossible to find on a Google search. MyRatePlan.com helps consumers compare cellular calling plans.
Search marketing and search engine optimisation are new concepts for most New Zealanders.
But for Jon Ostler, one of the founders and technical director of Auckland internet marketing company First Rate, they are big business.
BID MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE IS SEEN by many, at least at first sight, as the solution to all of their paid search management issues. As your paid search activities with Adwords, Yahoo Search and others increase, it is common to run into management issues with the number of phrases, along with such challenges as bidding in a competitive industry, and applying good return-on-investment tracking and methodologies. Ultimately manual management of campaigns becomes time consuming, confusing and leads to campaigns that are less effective than they should be. For those considering bid management software, one analogy comes to mind. Many years ago when undertaking management training I was required to undertake a project management role for 3 months, so imagine my delight when I got my hands on a copy of MS Project and thought “Wow! This will be easy – the software will manage everything for me.” Obviously, MS Project does not make you into a project manager, and it is equally true that bid management software does not make you into a Search Marketer; it just provides you will some advanced tools to take your search marketing to the next level.
London , 26 September 2005
Sales generated for e-commerce organisations by UK affiliates in 2005 are expected to double compared with 2004, according to a new E-consultancy report, titled Affiliate Marketing Networks – A Buyer’s Guide).
UK affiliates are expected to account for between £1.1bn and £1.35bn of sales for merchant partners in 2005, up from around £600m in 2004. This far outstrips the growth rates for both online advertising and search engine optimisation, which E-consultancy expects to grow by 32% and 70% respectively.
First Rate’s Consulting Manager, Samuel Stadler, outlines the benefits of using web analytics to gain a better understanding of ROI from Customer Relationship Management and online marketing initiatives.
“During the first half of 2003 paid search grew by 300% while the rest of online ad spend dropped by 14%.”
What Is Search Engine Advertising?
Search Engine Advertising is the placement of small text advertisements on search engines. Google Adwords and Overture Search are the two most well known players.
Why Use Search Engine Advertising?
Search Engine Advertising improves your return on investment from online advertising by only displaying your ads to people who are actively looking for your product or service. The placement and creative is triggered by the search phrase the user enters into the search engine and as a result, costs are low and click through and conversion rates are very high.
Sourced from Search Day
Despite the hype, being #1 in paid search results may not provide your company the desired bang for your marketing buck. Intelligently optimising a paid search budget involves far more than setting random bid prices and guessing at returns.