aimClear Search Marketing Blog

We had one of our clients budget substantial spend-cash for Christmas weekend PPC, as holidays are always a serious hotbed of activity for their product. Last year the same December days resulted in leads that generated hundreds of thousand in sales.

Last Friday’s 5:15PM email from their CFO was ominous: “Marty, I had to cancel the cc due to fraudulent charges. A new one will be issued within 5 business days.” This “legacy” client represents the only remaining aimClear account which still uses their credit card and, due to regulatory issues, we can’t use ours. The Grinch was screaming bloody murder at the door and it seemed Christmas was ruined. Read the rest of this entry »

Most small SEMs give their clients’ credit card and billing information to search engines which can actually cause palpable accounting hurdles as an agency scales. This common practice also raises interesting questions as to who “owns” the account when a client leaves someday.

Though seldom discussed, failing to engage clients in preemptive dialog has the potential to cause accounting, intellectual property ownership, and even legal nightmares. If not proactively addressed and contractually codified, the account-ownership issue can come back to bite you. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last 10 months the number of PPC accounts aimClear handles has multiplied by more than 20X, which has been seismic to say the least. At the same time the ever-evolving PPC landscape continually undergoes its own “global warming crises,” as heated paradigm shifts pile upon chilling conceptual overhauls at the advertising platform level.

Any search marketing agency handling small, let alone voluminous, PPC accounts knows the serious challenges. Reporting, billing, conducting multivariate ad message/landing page testing, conversion tracking, making analytics actionable, communicating with the client, and dealing with monthly cash flow makes any PPC intense- if not daunting.

Obstacles the small SEM shop encounters, when scaling to big PPC management operations at the portfolio level, can make for stormy afternoons. Read the rest of this entry »

For years there has been frustrated chatter among PPC media buyers regarding draconian big brand franchise PPC trademark rules. After experimenting all over the world for 2 years, Marriott is now taking assertive steps to standardize and solidify global policies. Whether SEMs like the new US rules or not, Marriott’s taking an industry leading role in organizing an approval process for hotel franchisee trademark usage. Read the rest of this entry »

News flash: How about if we begin an industry wide dialog regarding PPC trademark usage rules as concern big brand franchisees? The messed up paradigm is not really Google’s fault, though Google certainly lays down, and sucks up to big business without nary a protest regarding trademarks. We can’t blame Google-they’re just protecting themselves as is prudent.

Say you own lots of hotels, some of which are Best Western franchise products. Track this: you OWN these hotels, having paid millions of dollars for the privilege of flying franchise flags above the doors. Still, according to Google rules, you’re not allowed to use the keyword “Best Western” in PPC ads if Best Western so requests. You also can’t buy brand name keywords to trigger ads EVEN when Best Western chooses not to purchase PPC in the hotel’s local market-which often happens. How screwed up is that? Read the rest of this entry »

Organic landing page conversion measuring is a time tested after-deployment technique which, though highly effective, can take days, weeks, or months to fully tune.

As optimized pages gradually rise in the SERPs, conversion is measured and pages modified to achieve better conversion ratios. However we’d rather definitively test and tweak landing page concepts to focus conversion, prior to deploying them for organic indexing, using “fixed length short burst paid search.” Read the rest of this entry »

Well known writer Rose Sylvia (aka flyingrose.stumbleupon.com) has started ppcThink, a new blog which promises to be an authority online publication focused on “Cutting Edge Internet Marketing Strategies to Increase Your Profits.” You may also know her work as long time moderator of Search Engine Forums PPC forum.

Zero to Sixty in Three Seconds
Rose joined the Sphinn community with vengeance about 2 weeks ago, bringing her StumbleUpon power-user savvy and blogging experience to the young search marketing social community. In 11 days Rose had 9 submissions that “went hot” and quickly became a top Sphinner. Read the rest of this entry »

This afternoon at SES San Jose, on the Issues Track, search marketers and audit firms gathered to discuss the click fraud problem. In this session issues surrounding fraud and tactics designed to safeguard media buys were explored. For many of us this session was the first time we’ve seen data to support our long-held suspicion: In terms of conversion, search networks outperform content networks at a rate of approximately 5/3 (Click Forensics).

How Much Does Fraud Hurt?
Traffic from Made for ad sites (MFAS) and parked domains convert at 1/20th the rate other PPC. 71.8% of sites that participate in the Yahoo publisher network are MFAS or parked domains as are approximately 60% of Google ad sense sites (Click Forensics). The victims of fraud are clients and advertisers who suffer lower conversion rates and higher CPAs, SEMs/Agencies whose usable budgets are lowered as a result, and search engines who make less money for clicks sent after writing off bad traffic. Average click-fraud rate across search advertising industries is 15.8% . Read the rest of this entry »

SES San Jose 2007 | Advertiser Track| Post-Search Ads
Moderator Misty Locke

This session was first of the day here @ SES San Jose but it was fascinating and densely packed with useful information. I must say that I’m impressed with the sheer relevance and depth of the advanced content offerings right out of the chute at this conference.

Conversions Can Take Time and Repeated Customer Engagements.
The art of re-targeting return traffic (with more and more relevant ads) well after someone queries a phrase for the first time is at the forefront of technology enabled media buys. Now we can plug in and stalk potential customers based on previous behavior across our site and other channels. It’s called Search Profiling. The strategies, tactics, and targets of post-search will probably define the very future of the SEM industry. Read the rest of this entry »

There has been chatter about it for months. Now, fellow SEM Google adWords-watchers are trafficking blog posts highlighting fascinating examples of Google PPC results which are based dynamically, in part, on previous searches. This algorithmic shift, which ostensibly makes commercial search results more relevant to the user, foreshadows upcoming generations of smart-SERPs which take users’ search behavior into account more when targeting paid ads. It’s not hard to imagine scene by scene self-configuring video ads contextually related to a user’s current session and historic inclinations.

Whereas personalized organic search affects only users who are logged in to a Google service like Gmail, the adWords algorithm modification seems to impact sponsored results whether or not the searcher is logged into a Google account.

It’s easy to test for yourself. For instance search for airfare and you’ll see generic airfare sponsored results:


Now search for Minneapolis Hotel. Note that a sponsored airfare ad shows up-NOT a hotel ad:


A new search for airfare returns ads for Minneapolis airfare.

This has far reaching implications over the long haul. Read the rest of this entry »