Radium

Having finally gotten around to taking the new AdWords certification exams, I’ve been thinking a lot about the basics of paid search. The two required qualified partner exams, “Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam” and “Search Advertising Advanced Exam” should both be considered basic knowledge to anyone actively practicing AdWords paid search management (I hope).

To test this theory and have a little Halloween fun, I decided to see how many advertisers were practicing what I consider to be the 3 basic principles of paid search.

Basic principles of Google AdWords (paid search):

1. Targeted (related) thematic keyword groupings
2. Compelling ad text with relevant keyword inclusion
3. Relevant landing page content

I’m sure we could expand the list to include other basic elements like ad delivery, budgets, conversion tracking, etc. but I feel these 3 items are the basic core to a solid paid search strategy because they drive relevance.

My testing methodology is quite simple; enter in a search phrase and review the first page ads to determine if the advertiser is using relevant ad copy and directing the searcher to the most appropriate page on the site. Keyword groupings are difficult to assume with only a few tests, and, are therefore excluded from this analysis.

Since Halloween is right around the corner I used variations of Halloween costume related search phrases for the analysis.

In the spirit of the holiday season, Radium is offering 5 promotional Google AdWords coupons valued at $100 each! These coupons entitle the recipient to $100 of free Google AdWords advertising. If you haven’t tried pay-per-click marketing yet, this is a great opportunity to test it out risk-free.

To be eligible for this promotion you must meet the following criteria:

• Must currently operate a functioning website. No under construction websites.
• Coupons can only be applied to new Google AdWords accounts (less than 2 weeks old).

To enter the contest simply:

• Leave a comment below (OR)
• ReTweet this post on twitter

Winners will be chosen at random. Good luck!

Even though the music industry gets all of the press about piracy, stealing software is still alive and well. Actually, with the proliferation of torrent sites, it’s probably easier than ever to pirate software. But this isn’t a post about software piracy. Nope, this is a post about reaching potential customers is places you might not expect.

Rosetta Stone is a leader in proprietary language-learning software. If you’re not familiar with the product, their language software is priced per level per language, i.e., level 1 Spanish. With each language consisting of three levels and each level costing around $200, the software is not cheap. And, needless to say, software with a high price tag will be subject to piracy.

So the question becomes:
Can a person actively searching for an illegal copy of software be convinced to pay for it?

Most companies would probably say no and simply pretend these people don’t exist and hope they go away. But Rosetta Stone doesn’t appear to be ignoring this group and actually is going out of their way to target them.

The landing page – one of your most crucial marketing assets. A well crafted landing page can catapult the profitability of your online campaigns into the stratosphere and a poorly designed landing page can destroy your conversion rates all together. In this post we’ll take a look at five paid search landing pages for athletic and lifestyle footwear brands and present general findings, trends and takeaways that you can use in developing your online campaigns

This is the first post in a series of landing page reviews. Subscribe to our RSS feed to be notified when new landing page reviews are conducted.

If you’re running a paid search campaign that includes keywords you rank well for organically, you need to be careful that your paid search campaign isn’t generating sales at the expense of organic search. Cannibalization occurs when a user that would have clicked on your organic listing clicks on your sponsored ad listing. Because you pay on per click basis, a free click is now costing you money.