New Changes in Pay Per Click

What’s New in the Pay Per Click Game

It seems like one can’t blink without missing a new product, feature or service that Google, Yahoo or MSN has introduced. Hopefully this article can shed some light on some helpful (and some not so helpful) items that have been added to the PPC game.

Google Analytics - Helping you Understand Website Visitor Behaviour!

As one more step in Google’s goal of "organizing the world’s information," Google has released their free Google Analytics program to users of their Adwords system. The system (once known as Urchin) places a small java script code onto each page which tracks virtually every aspect of a user’s behaviour while surfing on your website. The most powerful feature for those of us in pay per click is located in the search engine marketing tab where an advertiser can see the effectiveness of each ad group, ad and keyword. Assigning a value to the end goal for each user, be it filling out a lead or purchasing a product, will allow the advertiser to see the return on investment for their campaign.

The end result of this service is that further "guess work" is taken out of online and search engine marketing. This feature is an extremely useful tool but one of hundreds available to search engine marketers, webmasters, business owners and anyone looking to maximize their return on their internet investment.

Google Ad Timer - Keep your Google Ads on when you want them!

Google introduced an ad timer feature for their adwords system and the pay per click community simultaneously exclaimed "finally!" This system allows pay per click managers to set schedules for when their ads will run. Even more useful is the bid scheduling feature which gives the account manager the option of bidding higher for keywords during peak search times and lower during off hours, thus improving the return on investment for their campaign. One can only hope that Yahoo Search Marketing or Overture (as it was once known) is taking notes and adding features like this to "Panama!"

Google Local - Do we really need the Yellow Pages anymore?

As more and more business embrace search engine and internet marketing, it will be important to focus ads to local areas rather than competing in bidding wars for national space. Part of a local strategy, "bricks and mortar" business can now utilize the Google Local feature and run their ad in Google Maps in addition to serving local results ABOVE the top organic search listings. For example, a client of TechWyse Internet Marketing receives an extremely high return on investment for the Google Maps local ad that appears while users search for laser eye services in the north Toronto market.

Yahoo! Panama - Finally doing away with the old pay per click system!

All frustrations aside concerning Yahoo’s current pay per click product, there is a faint glimmer of hope for the Yahoo’s new "Panama" system who’s current release date is slated for first quarter 2007. Apparently many features unique to Google will also be available in this new system but one nagging, tiny, little almost insignificant detail still remains…they still don’t command the user traffic that Google does!

Without user loyalty, Yahoo! won’t see the same volume of revenue that Google enjoys. In the fickle world of the internet however, anything is possible and Google could falter or make bad business decisions opening the door to Yahoo! or possibly MSN search. Ohh, nice segue…

MSN Ad Centre - A New Player in the Search Engine Marketing Arena

Microsoft committed to investing millions of dollars into their search product hoping to push Google off of it’s mountain of dominance. MSN Ad Centre has had it’s complications and certainly turned some users off but a continued investment into this product will pay off long term. One unique feature MSN offers is a user demographic data centre which organizes search data on keywords into age brackets and more. This tool can be extremely valuable in helping to write relevant ad text. Read more about the exciting release of MSN Ad Centre by visiting this link. Its still a baby… but as we know with most things done by MSN - baby’s do grow up one day!

Change is Constant!

The Pay Per Click and Paid Search landscape is, perhaps, one of the most exciting and quickly growing areas of the advertising arena today! (and we are talking both online and offline!) Infact by the time this article is finished and published to the TechWyse site that 50 new products, services and features will be added and ready to be utilized in the pay per click game. An internet marketers job is never finished!