I noticed today while logging into my Adwords account, Google has begun offering and promoting a new Adwords consulting service: “Get started with expert advice on Adwords.”
Google Adwords Expert Advice
From the Adwords home page:
This service is only available for new AdWords advertisers in the US and Canada. Only businesses with an advertising budget of more than $250/month will be considered for this service.
I guess it was inevitable Google would eventually publicly offer advertisers help. However, further down the page Adwords asks a loaded question:
Is your company an advertising agency/SEM/SEO? Yes / No. If yes, indicate the company name of your client: ______________________
In the early days of paid search I believe there were concerns by Pay Per Click Agencies about Google circumventing the agency client relationship to distntermediate the paid search agency.
Could this expert advice service for new Adwords advertisers be Google’s first step toward disintermediation of pay per click agencies?
Or is Google Adwords actually trying to help new advertisers get the most bang for the advertising buck?
For profit educational institutions like FullSail.edu appear to be the first to offer degrees in the Internet Marketing field.
According to the Full Sail website:
The future of marketing is online, and successful web marketing requires a new set of skills, and a unique language of its own. The Internet has changed the way companies attract and keep customers, requiring fresh advertising strategy that utilizes e-mail, websites, and wireless media.
Indeed.
I can’t imagine any student landing a marketing related job after college who isn’t familiar with doesn’t basic internet marketing terms and concepts.
Full Sail touches on four of the basics – Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Pay Per Click and Web Analytics – on their landing page for attracting potential internet marketing students.
Any marketer student or otherwise will need to be able to speak “internet marketing” language if they hope to work in the field of marketing tomorrow or in the future.
Getting a degree in internet marketing would be one way a future marketer could convince prospective employers of their employment potential within the marketing field.
Internet Marketing Degree
I have recently had some issues with a client’s account in Microsoft’s adCenter.
When Microsoft first launched adCenter – their search advertising system, I signed up and called in for some reason and realized at the time “customer support” was being handled by a call center.
During my call, I asked the CSR if they were an employee of Microsoft and she replied she wasn’t.
I thought maybe they had outsourced customer support initially because they were just launching their service.
I hadn’t called them since.
Yesterday I called in to investigate why my client’s ads were not being displayed under search queries for their brand name.
After a series of questions about the account from the adCenter customer support representative, I told her all I did was load two new text ads – over a week ago.
The entire account hasn’t generated any impressions let alone clicks since.
I then heard some additional voices on my call at which point I asked “is this call being monitored?”
She said “all calls may be monitored.”
I then asked are you in a call center offsite? Yes.
Are you a Microsoft employee? No.
If you have some free time on your hands, call adCenter’s customer support telephone number to discuss the nuances of pay per click advertising with “Microsoft’s” “customer support” staff.
You might be glad Microsoft hasn’t bought Yahoo’s search marketing business.
Microsoft adCenter Customer Support Telephone Number
There are many tactics search engine advertisers can use by design to either induce searchers to click or not click on their ads until after the ad viewer has self qualified their interest in the advertisers’ message.
Placing an offer’s price in the ad is one tactic often discussed.
Placing a lower price than other visible or known offers can reduce pay per click ad friction with its audience and tends to increase an ads click through rate. However, placing low prices in a pay per click ad doesn’t necessarily translate into more qualified searchers or buyers nor will it translate into high transaction volume.
Another tactic not mentioned as often is placing high price points in the pay per click ad which increases click friction. High price points within pay per click ads purportedly dissuades dis-interested and the budget conscious from clicking through to view the advertiser’s offer.
Today, I came across the most extraordinary example of an advertiser’s use of premium pricing to qualify search traffic I ever recall ever seeing.
Pay Per Click Friction
Theoretically, in this example placing their minimum annual fee requirements of $150,000 in the ad would create click friction and cause searchers unwilling to spend $150,000 a year to pass the ad over – thus sparing the advertiser unwanted clicks and costs from disinterested searchers.
However, by placing such a high barrier into their ad this particular advertiser will more than likely experience extremely low click through rates which in turn will create the ultimate form of pay per click advertising friction for instead – the advertiser… lower click through rates, lower ad quality score and ultimately an ad that requires higher bids just to be shown at all.
Will the above example prove to be a successful marketing strategy for the advertiser or will their ad’s premium pricing cause fewer clicks and lower click through rates – ultimately bringing their pay per click advertising campaign to a screeching halt?
I went to the Yahoo Search Marketing blog for refresher tips on how to optimize Yahoo search marketing pay per click accounts.
Their most recent blog post gave some general ideas on how to improve an ads quality index.
From the Yahoo Search Marketing blog:
“Improve your ad quality by grouping related keywords
If you group your keywords the right way (by themes, such as product or service type, or special offers) and achieve high quality, you could receive a better rank in search results and/or a lower bid.”
These tips along with many others come from Yahoo’s Smart Start Guide.
The Smart Start Guide according to Yahoo, “is a guidebook geared especially toward the beginning search marketer, but it also offers tips for the more advanced Yahoo! Search Marketing advertiser.”
The Yahoo Smart Start Guide chapters include:
The Yahoo Search Marketing blog then provides a link to download a pdf version of the Smart Start Guide.
Unfortunately numerous attempts to download the Smart Start Guide to Yahoo’s pay per click advertising system, I ended up with an unreadable pdf document.
yahoo-smart-start-guide-pdf
I don’t know why the pdf failed, but I don’t think the download error occurred on my end.
Hopefully the Yahoo Search Marketing blog team will receive news of this blog post ping and fix their Smart Start Guide pdf download.
Otherwise, I will have to keep searching for answers to my Yahoo pay per click advertising questions elsewhere.
Update: Jeff the Yahoo Search Marketing blog editor contacted me and suggested I use Adobe Acrobat to open their Smart Start Guide which I did – successfully.
Apparently, my Apple Reader has some compatibility issues with viewing that particular Yahoo pdf.
Thanks Jeff…
Search Marketing Communications 
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