Search Marketing Standard Magazine

PPC Conversion Landslide - Exploring a Slippery Slope

by Kevin Gold

Is there ever a time when a paid search marketer can stop optimizing their campaigns and just sit back reaping the benefits of a previous job well done? This is a question I have asked myself many times over the past seven years. While managing PPC campaigns against various performance metrics including cost per action and conversion (e.g. visitor to action completion), I continually have discovered that if I am not actively adjusting bids, testing new ad copy and optimizing landing page variables (e.g. headlines, opening body text, images) my conversions tend to drop. I have spent a great deal of time driving up conversion one month to achieve strong rates of 8% - 10% to realize that the following month and without adjusting anything further, conversion would drop 3%-4% for no reason. I never could figure out why and honestly I haven’t still figured it out.

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Lessons on Marketing with Social Media

There is no doubt that social media offers excellent opportunities for marketing. However, what I have discovered, as with all other forms of marketing, is that there is a right and wrong way. In was in searching for the “right” way that I found an incredible webcast on The Secrets to […]

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Seven Habits of Highly Effective SEM, Part III: Creating the Right Ad Text

I often tell prospective search engine marketers that to be good at SEM you need to be good at three college courses: statistics, psychology, and creative writing. Creating good ad text is probably the one SEM skill that combines all three of these skill sets.