Wednesday, December 24, 2003

Contextual advertising update (Google & Overture)
Search Engine Contextual Ads Gain Momentum: "Susan Wojcicki, one of the creators of the AdSense program at Google, spoke about the benefits of displaying targeted ads.
'Selling inventory, especially very specific inventory, is hard for a lot of publishers,' she said. 'Given that Google has over 100,000 advertisers, we have the ability to find and match the right ad with the right page. So, one of the opportunities we saw was that there area lot of pages out there that are serving untargeted ads.'"

Google

Local search/ personalisation
DMNews.com | News | Article

Consumer habits are expected to foster some shift to search,(from yellow pages...) as 57 percent of consumers told The Kelsey Group they used search engines during the past year. (Search engines remain a much cheaper way to generate leads, with the average cost of a lead at about 35 cents compared to $1 for offline directories.

Google has experimented with a local search engine that returns results and a map keyed to a person’s location. Yahoo’s Overture Services is also experimenting with local search on its AltaVista search engine. In its testing phase, Google’s local search does not return advertiser links. Overture’s local search has only a small sample of advertisers participating in the test. Google offers keyword advertisers the opportunity to show their ads only to Internet addresses in their geographic target area.

CitySearch “They definitely are a model in many ways for where the market is going,” said Greg Sterling, the author of the report...paid search is still too complex for many small businesses, and scarce search inventory remains a problem.

The city guide to entertainment, restaurants, events, hotels, movies and businesses

Google

Friday, December 19, 2003

Xmas reading??
ongoing · On Search, the Series
a series on search, by which I mean full-text search. Anyone who uses computers now uses search pretty well every day, so this is an important chunk of our technology spectrum. This piece covers the business and history angles; future instalments will explain how search engines work and the interfaces to them. I plan to conclude with a description of the next search engine, which doesn’t exist yet but someone ought to start building.

Google

Thursday, December 18, 2003

Is 2004 the year of local search?: "Currently, Google claims 150,000 paid search advertisers worldwide. Overture reports 100,000. FindWhat/Espotting (if the deal still happens) has a combined 40,000. LookSmart, if it doesn't lose too many customers post-MSN, has 30,000. Ah-ha claims 20,000. But if one were to draw a Venn diagram of all these advertisers, the area of overlap would be substantial. "

Google

It is that time of year - review of online marketing...
The Year of the Black Sheep - Marketleap's Look Back at 2003: "The take away lesson of 2003 for all marketers is consumers like being in control and their capability to take control is just warming up. Technologies have enabled them to construct their world in unique and individual ways. The Internet ties it all together and the businesses that use them wisely are experiencing record growth. All marketers should adapt and insert themselves into the consumer's world at the right time, rather than flinging creative swings into the ghostly apparition of marketing past..."

The Marketleap Report: "business can evolve as long as it understands that software won't change everything without careful planning. Web initiatives aren't six-month projects funded with a leftover marketing budget, misguided executives dictating results with dollars...

Why do we build software? Why do we want to connect? Think of those basic questions every day. They are a mantra for where we are. The Internet and software can purify business. That was the real excitement that tickled our noses to begin with. Streamlining process and information into a tool that pulls more from us all.

In the economic world these concepts stand to create stronger relationships, smarter workers and more profitable businesses. But only if we design them to. The organization at every level should understand the commitment.

The impact that we expect technology to make is possible. We don't have to knock our heads together because the information age will not be built overnight. Get back in line. And this time, no cutting
"

Google

Why ethics, morals & evil keep cropping up...
TIME.com: Search And Destroy -- Dec. 22, 2003: "Whoever wins the search wars owns the keys to the kingdom of knowledge. That's a big responsibility. Are search engines up to it? "

Letting the market solve these problems by itself is the American way. We like to assume that the most objective, least biased search engine will naturally win the search wars. (A typical European approach, by contrast, would be to nationalize Google at once, before it's too late.) This means that, for now, we're relying on the integrity of people like Larry Page. But when the competition gets stiff and Page has to answer to his shareholders, integrity may be a luxury Google can no longer afford.


Google is a highly unusual company, one run by true technologists with a genuine love of banging on things, shaking and breaking them, and making them better. Behind the simple, unassuming Google home page is a wizard's workshop of experimentation, much of it useless, some of it brilliant. "Invariably we try 10 things that don't quite work out in order to do one thing that's successful," says Page, who speaks in a slow, deeply nerdy, singsong voice. "And we learn a lot in doing the 10 things that didn't quite work." For example, you can call a phone number in California — it's 650-318-0165--and do a Google search over the phone. Why would you ever want to? Who knows? Or go to catalogs.google.com, and you'll discover a service that searches 6,000 mail-order catalogs for you. Some lost soul at Google literally sits there and scans catalogs...

Do they even make money from it? "No," Page admits affably. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. And catalogs are part of the world's information." But let's get this straight, you aren't doing this stuff altruistically, for the general good of humanity, are you? "Well, we kind of are. We always kind of figured that if we did a good job of providing the right information for everybody in the world, all the time, that would be an important thing to do...

Microsoft held talks with Google this fall, but no deal was struck. Plan B, already well under way, is for Microsoft to build a better search engine. A prototype Microsoft webcrawler (the software that search engines use to index the Web) was spotted online as early as last April. Kirk Konigsbauer, general manager of the project, says MSN Search isn't ready for prime time quite yet. "We decided to take a deep dive into the search business about a year ago," he says. "We're learning a lot. This is a really hard computer-science problem. In fact, our engineers say this is the hardest computer-science problem they've ever had to face." But if there's one thing Microsoft is good at, it's entering profitable markets late and strong — just ask Netscape, Apple or IBM. If Microsoft integrates its new search engine into MSN, its Internet service provider, and Longhorn, its next-generation operating system (E.T.A. 2006), the game may be over...

"Google's most enigmatic foe isn't a search engine at all. It's a bookstore. In October Amazon debuted a service it calls Search Inside the Book that's both simple in conception and staggering in its implications. Amazon scanned every page of 120,000 books into a database, and it now lets customers search the books' complete contents online. In one stroke, Amazon made a new and immensely valuable kind of information available on the Web. Zenodotus would be livid with envy. "I would compare it to the invention of the encyclopedia,"

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos isn't done yet. Behind a smothering veil of secrecy, he's setting up a new search company in Palo Alto, Calif., called A9.com. "All I can tell you is that we're working on some interesting things that we simply cannot talk about at this point," says Bezos. The scuttlebutt is that A9 will be focused on product search, so it will compete less with Google than with Froogle — a relatively small slice of the search market but potentially the richest.

Yahoo is spending a fortune on mounting a comeback. Yahoo bought Inktomi, a top-flight algorithmic search engine, in March for $235 million. In October it swallowed Overture, which specializes in so-called paid search (we'll get to that later), for $1.63 billion — while Overture was itself in the middle of digesting two recent acquisitions, AltaVista and AlltheWeb. The plan, as near as anybody outside Yahoo can make out, is to stitch all those disparate organizations into one huge Frankenstein's monster of a search engine that will strike terror into the hearts of all who behold

Paid search combines two things that advertisers desperately want: targeted ads (ads that are shown only to consumers who have demonstrated interest in the product) and performance-based ads (for which the advertiser has to pony up only when a user clicks on its links).

"Nothing is more valuable than the user at the moment of desire," says Gartner analyst Whit Andrews. "When a user searches, that user has a demand. At that moment in time, they want."

The Web is rapidly supplanting other media as the primary means by which people get information about the world — not just sports scores but news, car prices, history, famous quotations and potential dates. This is information that matters. Google — or any search engine — isn't just another website; it's the lens through which we see that information, and it affects what we see and don't see. At the risk of waxing Orwellian, how we search affects what we find and by extension how we learn and what we know.

Some search engines are owned by large, diversified corporations. Should they be allowed to push the websites of their own businesses to the top of the stack? Could a search engine suppress the website of a political party with which its CEO disagreed? Or a particular version of the Bible or of the Battle of Midway? These are important questions, and regulators have barely started asking them.

Google

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

Search Engines Strategies – Chicago December 11th – Day Three

First up was Jon Glick from Yahoo! who gave a quick overview of the new stuff going on at Yahoo!. One thing you can now do is access all your paid inclusions for Inktomi, AV, etc. at one place - Overture. Yahoo! Shopping came out with SmartSort a new and more intuitive way to filter what you really are looking for in Yahoo! Google said that they have no plans to personalize results based on user. They said that will just make things more confusing and is not the best way to go about search.Shopping (pretty neat interface). He also mentioned that if you do an Inktomi feed, you can be included automatically (no extra charge above the feed) in Yahoo! Shopping.

The next question was about personalization and how the search engines will use a person's location and demographic information to enhance the search. Basically, the concept is - since I know who you are and what you searched for in the past, provide different results that are tailored to you versus the guy sitting in the next cubicle. They all said they do track this information if you have the tool bars installed but they would never sell or give this information to a third party. Yahoo! said that we can expect to see this as an OPTION in a year or two but will not be required. Most the others said the same except for Google, Google said that they have no plans to personalize results based on user. They said that will just make things more confusing and is not the best way to go about search.

How many people and resources does each search engine put towards spam reports? All but Yahoo! said they did not have any specific team or individuals responsible for spam. Yahoo! said they have 3 full time engineers who handle spam and send your spam reports to either spamreport@inktomi.com or spamd@av.com. Google said they will rarely (almost never) block or ban a specific page or site, they said they will look at the spam and build into their algorithm to filter out those types of sites. Teoma basically came out and said that they do not have spam based on their unique method of ranking site. That was a bold statement and I liked it, I am starting to like Teoma.

Tracking:
Desired keyword phrases and ranking in each search engine (we only choose the top five);
Traffic as noted from each search engine in WebTrends/Urchin/NetTracker/Hitbox/other;
Adwords click-thru & cost;
Overture click-thru & cost;
Internal administrative data;
Manual checking of search engine listings to identify other factors which many affect search engine rankings, traffic, conversion rates which could in time lower rankings if people do not stay on your site;
Monthly leads, sales, other;

Google

Monday, December 15, 2003

On the new BrainBoost search engine: " BrainBoost, the 100% automated natural question answering search engine. (December 11 2003) Admittedly, it has been done before. Ask Jeeves started out as a search engine capable of answering 'natural question', i.e. search queries formulated as regular questions: 'Where can I find information about how to search the Web?' instead of 'web searching tutorial'.

However, Ask Jeeves has partly relied on a directory of questions and sites edited by human beings in order to deliver such queries. The new BrainBoost search engine, on the other hand, tries to analyze the meaning of the question at hand automatically and then match the query with web pages that include sentences that (hopefully) give a relevant answer"

BrainBoost - Question Answering Search Engine: "BrainBoost is a Question Answering search engine. It was specifically designed to answer questions, asked in plain English."

Google

Friday, December 12, 2003

JUPITER RESEARCH REPORTS THAT SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING REQUIRES A NEW APPROACH TO CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT: "A report released this week by Jupiter Research, a division of Jupitermedia Corporation (Nasdaq: JUPM), highlights the dramatic growth of the search engine marketing (SEM) space and emphasises that a new approach to campaign management is demanded by the practice. "

The iterative keyword selection and bidding processes involved in SEM mean that advertisers must constantly watch over a campaign in order to maximise ROI. The constantly evolving nature of SEM campaigns requires a different mindset from the "set and forget" one often adopted for online display advertising.

Google

Search Engines Strategies � Chicago December 10th � Day Two (Part I) at Search Engine Roundtable Weblog:

12 steps one has to take to complete Google Anonymous. by Danny Sullivan:

1) Honesty: Be honest with yourself. Should my site be in the top 10? Is it really better then the other 1 million results found? Are things worse off for the searcher? He was clear to say that Google is having issues but he also was clear in presenting the honesty portion of the step.
2) Faith: Have faith in Google that Google will do what is best for the searcher.
3) Surrender: Forget SEO and go with AdWords. This was a joke of course but he also made his point well heard. His point was to do both paid and organic because of the old saying, �don�t put all your eggs in one basket.� Just like all good firms have a PR and Ad budget, the same should be applied to search engine marketing. And finally, those that pay always have a larger say in what is done.
4) Soul Searching: Start thinking about if search engine marketing as we have it today will continue to be managed the same way.
5) Integrity: Basically, you need the best possible site � you need to be the authoritative resource in your area of expertise to consistently do well in rankings.
6) Acceptance: You need to understand that search results will always change and that there is no guarantee that if you have a top 10 result today that it wont be here tomorrow. You cannot depend on free listings.
7) Humility: skipped over
8) Willingness: skipped over
9) Forgiveness: skipped over
10) Maintenance: You need to constantly maintain to keep your rankings. I used to feel that once you optimize you were basically done but with these recent changes, there is always more work to do.
11) Making Contacts: File the spam reports, file the bad search results, follow up as necessary – they will listen.
12) Services: Well this part upset me. Danny, as he normally does, leaves out the second largest SEO/SEM related forum on the Internet. He brought up the URLs of four forums that have discussion on SEO/SEM including WebmasterWorld, HighRankings, JimWorld, and BestPractices.


Stats:

Google today has about 77% of the market and MSN I believe was 17% (numbers are not a 100% accurate – this is from memory of this morning). The picture for the end of January 2004 after Yahoo! does its merging, Google + AOL 51% and Yahoo + MSN 43%. How big of an impact is that to use SEO/SEMs out there? We need to start looking at MSN and Inktomi (Yahoo!’s new search technology believed to come into play the end of January) and how to best optimize for those engines.

Invisible tabs

What SEOs will need to do is (1) understand the “tab” sources, (2) understand when the “tab” content is more visible to the searcher and (3) understand that specialty services will more likely charge for inclusion – there will be less free listings around in the future. So Danny believes Google will figure this stuff out for you, including local search

Links & Google PR

Marissa Mayer from Google was up first; let me tell you she is a confident woman – gives off the Google persona. “Links are proxies for human judgment of page value”, so the more links and the better quality of those links (I should probably reverse the order of that) determine page value (i.e. PageRank). However, PageRank is not the only factor, if it was Adobe Acrobat Reader would rank number one for the search term water buffalo (she gave a different example). Relevancy = PageRank + Hypertext Analysis (the exact formula and weights remain to be secret). Marissa explained PageRank as a function of important pages linking to that page. The more links and the more relevant those links are the better off you are in terms of PageRank. She also said that you could be downgraded for having certain links. Yes – I know, we all think that is not possible but she said that if you use “bad neighbors” or “free for all” link exchanges, your PageRank will suffer. Avoid getting links from pages that are too general and unrelated to your site as well as the FFAs. Anchor text as we know is important and do not go overboard, place links where your users find them most useful. During the Q&A she said the XML feeds can help and Google does look at the data collected by the Google toolbar for quality purposes and is not included in the ranking algo.

Eric Ward...built links for Amazon 9 years ago, yea that’s right – 9 years ago. Besides getting links from the directories, he said to get links from the Teoma Resources section, which can be found directly under the refine your search results on the bottom right. Deeper the link in your site, the less likely it will be found, the less likely it will be indexed. More information at: http://www.ericward.com/linkanalysis.html.

Teoma

Paul Gardi from Teoma/Ask Jeeves. He explained how Teoma is unique to other search engines, and it impressed me. Teoma is unique in two ways; (1) Subject Specific Popularity and (2) Communities. Teoma analyzes the local subject communities which brings the power of communities in search leading to (1) better vision, (2) expert validation (3) contextualization (4) Experience. How it works is by the “Teoma Approach”, first search the Web index then break the data down into communities (communities can be found in the refine search option on the right of the teoma results – example search on football), third it calculates local subject specific information and finally aggregates all the pertinent information for the searcher. Since Teoma’s goal is to use the power of the “expert editors” of the communities to rank sites, to rank well you need to become an authoritative expert for your area.

Google

Search Engine Optimization Newsletter Archives - High Rankings Advisor: "December 2003" Issue 081

If you are short of time the following points sum up the main thrust of the newsletter's message:

If it doesn't really make sense to your user, it's not going to be good for the search engine
Your site will always go up and down in the rankings; everyone's does
Never try to do everything with your home page alone
What is real unique content?
Perils of relying on free traffic from Google


Real content that sets you apart from your competitors, both in the
search engines and in real life, is more the added-value kind of
stuff. Information on how to best use the products, other things that
might go with them, what other customers of yours have done with their
products, reviews on various brands of your product, special offers
for special customers, etc...

nobody ever should have been counting on free traffic from Google for their livelihood.
Search engine traffic from the free results should always have been
your gravy, not your meat. Think of Google traffic as bonus traffic.
Obviously I'm a great fan of search engine marketing, because it
brings highly targeted visitors who want exactly what you're selling.
But common sense has got to tell you to diversify. Just as you
shouldn't put all your money in one type of stock, you shouldn't put
all your marketing efforts in the search engines...any other marketing promotions you do
can also help your search engine rankings. For instance, having
special promotions each week and announcing them to your newsletter
list or through press releases can often bring your site attention.
Any attention to your site is good attention, and it often comes with
links. Links in turn help search engine rankings....

Relying on things that were never intended for SEO purposes to begin with is starting to
catch up to many sites
. There's certainly nothing wrong with using
header tags, nor alt attributes, nor link title attributes, nor
keyword-rich copy, nor keyword-rich Title tags, nor anything else that
we've all discussed and used for years. They are fine to use where
and when it makes sense for your particular page. Just don't go crazy
nutty obsessive with all of them, all at once. If a page doesn't call
for an H1 tag, don't force it in there. Don't list keyword phrases at
the top of your page because it seems like the search engines might
like it. Don't place your keyword phrase into your copy 50 million
times just because you can. If it doesn't really make sense to your
user, it's not going to be good for the search engine.


Your site will always go up and down in the rankings; everyone's does. Target lots and lots of relevant, specific keyword phrases so that when some go down, others go up.
Your site will always go up and down in the rankings;
Never try to do everything with your home page alone.



Search Engines Strategies – Chicago December 9th – Day One

Highlights:

1) one minor change was here thoughts on DHTML navigation. She said (based on internal data collected) that Google has been crawling DHTML code over the past few months.

2) I did not know was that Teoma finds links and resources pages on your site important. So for Teoma, unlike other search engines, having relevant external links in a resource or link page is a relevant factor in your overall sites ranking.

3) Keywords: 78% of people use search terms of 1 – 3 words in length. He also said that “generic names dominate” the searches performed in contrast to brand searches.

4) One point he said was rank checking could provide skewed results, that means if you are ranking well for a search term that does nothing for you in revenue – then who cares! He has a point and many SEOs want to rank well for keyword phrases but do not conduct the appropriate keyword research to rank for keywords that drive revenue. Also you cannot simply determine competitiveness of a keyword by WordTracker’s KEI feature nor by the total results found in Google, it’s just not an exact match. He uses a much more detailed process to determine competitiveness including reviewing the value of search terms in the pay per click module, the higher the dollar per click the more competitive. Also conducting a feed and then researching the results over a two-week period. Finally he said that a complex search term is rarely used compared to a simpler term (we know that but he took time to say it).

5) Writing for Search Engines

a) 2 – 3 keyphrases per page, if you are editing a large site – start with the top 20 pages in terms of top products and then work your way to the other pages
b) too many links (anchor text) makes a sites usability extremely poor
c) repeat the keyword phrases 3 – 4 times within a 250 word page
d) you should not look at “keyword density” when writing copy because (1) the content will come out unclear and urge the visitor to hit the back button and (2) with the current Google changes (Florida update) Jill feels that Google might be filtering out “over-optimized” sites. I personally disagree with that but who am I :)?

6) Jill Whalen:

a) Jill said right out “don’t worry they [Google] will fix things” when she discussed certain terms such as chicago real estate. Jill repeatedly said that her clients results were not affected but also brought examples of her clients terms that were affected, so I am not too sure about that.

b) She said “don’t use formulas” just write with keywords in mind and keep the percentages and templates out of SEO copywriting. She then went on to say that “floating keywords around” is why Google kicked out the sites that have disappeared.

c) An other point she made was that if you have words like e-mail/email or t-shirt/t shirt, do not optimize for both on the same page – use different pages for each variation because your Web visitor will think you are crazy for using different spellings on the same page (they might not notice if its spelled differently on a different page).

And for the big statement, Google no longer reads alternative text tags since that last update.

7) Danny Sullivan:

believes that’s search engines in the future will be more paid oriented and less organic oriented because that is the nature of advertisers and this industry is still in its infancy.


Google

Promotion Tip: Search For Link Opportunities: "add another search term to your keyword search:
'add a link' 'handmade quilts'"
Add a URL
Suggest a site
Add a site
Suggest a URL
Submit a site
Submit a URL
NB avoid obvious link farms & below PR4

Google

Slashdot | New IE Bug Hides Real Site Address: "New IE Bug Hides Real Site Address"

Google

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

Search engine news, on Web searching and search engine optimization: " LookSmart, the search company that started out as a Yahoo!-like directory and ended up as a pay-per-click search engine, is closing its UK offices"

Google

Search Engine Spam: "Tricks to Avoid"

Google

Example:
SEO Report: "SEO Report"

Google

Should really be in "netty news" ...Participation: World Summit on the Information Society: "

WORLD SUMMIT ON THE INFORMATION SOCIETY : GENEVA PHASE, 10-12 DECEMBER 2003

Google

Slashdot | World Summit On The Internet And IT: "World Summit On The Internet And IT"

eegad writes "The [0]Seattle PI reports on the upcoming first phase of the [1]World Summit on the Information Society to be held in Geneva on December 10-12. 192 nations are involved in the effort to set some ground
rules for the Internet (a little late, eh?) including ways to deal with spam, a possible "digital solidarity fund" to help developing nations, and discussion of UN regulation. The goal of this phase is to adopt a "Declaration of Principles" and "Plan of Action". Some countries plan on asking for a UN commission to study new ways of running the Internet
aimed at the 2005 phase. The official website will provide [2]coverage of the event. How come I wasn't invited?" The [3]Washington Times also has a piece on it, as well. We had [4]covered this a bit before.

Google

Wednesday, December 03, 2003

THREAD TO FOLLOW...
2004 SEM predictions: "I'd love to hear what predictions people have for SEM in 2004 in terms of industry trends, technologies that'll come to the forefront, and any other interesting thoughts about how things will change in the SEM world next year."

Google

PPC
Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising: Smart Campaign Management Tips: "basic advice about bidding and keyword selection to help you run a smart PPC campaign. "

BASIC MATHS:
.the typical e-commerce site converts about 2% of its visitors. That means you need to bring 50 visitors to your site before you make a sale. At $5.00 per click, you'll spend $250 dollars to generate one sale. Ouch!
..usually want one of the top 3 listings for a keyword. These are the listings distributed to most of the PPC engine's partner sites. For example, a #3 ranking on Overture will place your listing on Yahoo, MSN and Alta Vista. A #7 listing won't appear on any of these search engines

Google

Features

Thinking maybe contact Mike Grehan as TT Uk should be a great example of what he wants to cover...
"As we move into 2004 it will be essential for marketers to understand the various intricacies of natural (or organic) search and the budgetary considerations of paid inclusion and placement in order to be able to perform competitor and situation analysis for marketing planning.

There are many new marketing challenges in this dynamic, new and fascinating field. Over the course of the coming year, I want to explore the channels, media vehicles and tools of search marketing and how they're impacting your business.

And to that end - I'd like to hear from you personally. No, this is not about to become another search engine forum or mailing list. I simply want to know about your real world challenges. What's working for you and what's not. And then hopefully, I can "zoom in" on specific aspects with each issue and help to unravel and find answers to those burning issues.
"

Google

Monday, December 01, 2003



Trusted Feed, which works by submitting site data directly to the search engine’s index via XML
feed. Trusted Feed is ideal for database-driven sites such as shopping, travel and auctions which, because of their vast, constantly changing content, would be impossible to optimise any other way.

Case studies:

For every £1 MGOMD spends with Overture, thetrainline.com gets a return of nearly £30.

You’ll know search engine marketing has hit the big time when:

- Ad agencies pilfer talent from search engine optimisers. As more and more marketers optimise their pages, optimisation will no longer be unique or difficult. Rather, marketers will treat search as part of their overall media buy, and search optimisation will become a default service provided by agencies. While marketers may
still turn to boutique SEOs for help listing with specialised search engines, most SEO will be managed by traditional agencies and their newly poached experts.

- Directories partner with search engines. As broadband penetration increases and consumers assume an ‘always-on’ mentality, they’ll shun the phone book for more dynamic online directories. Anxious to attract advertisers, directories like Switchboard.com will partner with comparison sites like My Simon to create local, editorialised directories. Customers searching for ‘10-foot garden hose’ will find not just the phone number and address of the right store,
but also feedback from past customers and a comparison of prices.

Google

'Tis the Season: Build a Search Engine Marketing Budget: "Search Engine Marketing Budget"

Google's and Overture's PPC programs are difficult to budget. You can spend as much as your risk tolerance, business model, and conversion rate allow. Prices for individual keywords are set in an open-auction model. They rise and fall with the ebb and flow of competition.

There are two schools of thought on how to set a PPC budget. The direct marketing strategy is to set a testing budget, then run a test to determine CPC thresholds by keyword and conversion...
or view the problem in terms of brands understanding the value of a click. "How do you know how much a click is really worth?" asked Gary. "I was talking with [a beverage client] about search engine marketing, and they're doing pure branding. They're happy to do it, but what is that click worth to them? It's difficult because you have to start getting to a place where you understand what intent is worth."

By using these tools, you can investigate keywords and bid prices -- on Overture, at least. It's a bit more difficult to look up Google bid prices. Determine an average CPC rate across several dozen keywords and multiply by your desired traffic based on your conversion rate and ROI. Imperfect, but you will arrive at a number.

Expert PPC search advertising campaign management performed by an experienced SEM firm is typically billed as a service fee of 10 to 15 percent of the campaign spend. Consider this cost when building your budget.

For a Google budget, multiply the Overture number by at least one and a half to account for Google's higher traffic volume.

Overture's ROI calculator may be of some value in determining bid threshold. In reality, some keywords convert at higher rates than others. These numbers will change as you execute your campaign.

Tools:
Overture- Search Term Suggestion Tool
Overture ROI Calculator
Overture - View Bids
Google Adwords: Keyword Suggestions
CTR - Webopedia.com: "click-through rate"

Google
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