PPC News – 17.04.11 Spring edition!

Updates are in! Industry Overview:

• SEMPO’s (search engine marketing professional organization) state of search marketing report ’11 is out, and things are looking good – the US SEM industry is projected to grow 16% this year, from $16.6 billion to $19.3 billion. The study projects 2011 spending to go up in the following areas:

o   Paid Search o   SEO o   Facebook PPC o   Search-Related Technology o   Mobile http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110415-150000

• Affiliate marketing in 2011 – the industry is maturing, as shown by the predicted US market spending of $4 billion by 2014. An interesting overview and predictions can be found here: http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/state-of-the-industry-affiliate-marketing-in-2011

 

ComScore March data is out, and as usual the big news is that Yahoo and Bing now hold 30% of the US search market. Google has remained unchanged since last month.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110412-132251

 

 

 

 

Google:

 

• You can now know if you are affected by a problem with your landing page – you get an indication from within the Keywords tab in case your landing page is affected by a policy issue:http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/04/more-clarity-in-adwords-for-advertisers.html
• The Position Preference feature that was around since 2006 is being removed from AdWords starting May 1^st – from now on, if you would like to have a keyword to be in a specific position, it will need to be done with an automated rule that will change the bid of the keyword if it deviates from the target position. Remember – you can still be profitable in low positions on certain keywords, and a high position by itself is not a good indication of performance.

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/04/adwords-position-preference-feature-is.html

• Google recently introduced the +1 button to their organic and paid search results (right now only in English searches on Google.com). It’s similar to a Facebook ‘like’ and works almost exactly in the same way. Officially, ‘likes’ do not affect AdWords quality score (but they are relevant for organic rankings), but I believe they will have a weight on search ads as they will affect CTR rates. This is the biggest news we had from Google in a while, let’s hope this won’t go the way of Wave and Buzz

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/03/1-button-adwords.html More here: http://searchengineland.com/meet-1-googles-answer-to-the-facebook-like-button-70569?

• The topic targeting is out of Beta and it’s is now possible to target Topics instead of keywords on the Display network. When using topic targeting, the ads will be shown on a wider set of websites than with specific keywords.

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-way-to-contextually-target-your-ads.html

• A small improvement to language targeting options: If your campaign contains keywords in Hebrew, Greek, Thai, Korean or Japanese, a user that will search for one of those keywords (in those languages) will see your ads no matter what his interface language is. For example, if you’re targeting (in the campaign language settinss) Hebrew speakers with a Hebrew keyword, a user that searches for it will see your ad even if his interface language is English.

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/03/language-targeting-refresher-and-update.html Bing:

• AdCenter is changing the way it’s daily budget limitation works – from now on, you only need to set your budget on a daily level, no need for monthly budgets.

http://community.microsoftadvertising.com/blogs/advertiser/archive/2011/04/14/budget-option-improvements-coming-soon-to-microsoft-advertising-adcenter.aspx

• Another budget-related feature in AdCenter – you can now view the recommended budget for your campaigns. To view, click on the opportunities tab, or on the campaign budget status tool, located in the lower right corner.

http://community.microsoftadvertising.com/blogs/advertiser/archive/2011/04/07/budget-suggestions-coming-to-adcenter-this-spring.aspx

• One of the most interesting upcoming features in AdCenter is the quality score. It will work in a very similar way to the AdWords quality score – here is an overview:

http://searchenginewatch.com/3642189 More updates coming soon! Thanks for reading, Orit