PPC Can Make You Smarter

PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns are a great way to gather data on your web marketing campaigns and consumer use of keyword streams while also testing different website conversion strategies.

1. PPC Analysis can be a great way to test sales strategies. You could gain insight on things like:

• Deciding to focus on one product or service over another based on sales cycle, margin, and customer satisfaction.
• Testing pricing strategies to determine the online “sweet spot” for pricing your services.
• Testing different specials and coupons to determine which convert more often and bring you repeat customers.

2. PPC will give you quick and accurate answers to the marketing questions that you have. Your ideas will get quick exposure to an audience already looking for the goods and services that you provide.
3. A PPC campaign will allow you to analyze not only CTR (Click Through Rate), Quality Scores, impression shares, ad position, cost per conversion, conversion rate, and more, but will also give you meaningful statistics that can be utilized to evaluate your marketing campaigns.

Where is your dollar best spent for PPC?

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Good News: Yahoo CEO Announces Yahoo Traffic Increases

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer revealed that Yahoo properties hit a two-year high in September, saying that Yahoo’s “product sprint and increased engagement effectively erased two years of traffic declines.” Mayer also announced that Yahoo now has 800 million global monthly unique users and that Yahoo has more than 390 million monthly mobile users, up 15 percent from the second quarter of 2013.

Bad News: Mayer Announces that Yahoo Search Volume is Down

Mayer also announced that the US share of the search market was just 11.3% in September, according to comScore, an all-time low equal to the numbers posted this past July. Mayer stated that:

“It is true that, over the past several years, our search share has declined. In terms of the search alliance, we’re trading share with Microsoft.”

Mayer also stated that the future for Yahoo is bright, in part because of the following initiatives:

• Recently re-launched Yahoo Answers
• Yahoo’s new search results page design and new mobile (iOS) search experience
• Yahoo’s new search ad formats

Mayer said the company will try to reverse its continuing declines in search by creating more relevant results for users.

Bottom Line: Yahoo is living the good news/bad news scenario, but stockholders think that Marisa Mayer can help to revive this sleeping giant. Online marketers have always known that PPC advertising is a consistent, measurable proving ground for good marketing ideas. With the new “not provided” from Google, Google Adwords becomes a strong proving ground for keyword stream testing as well as offering an online sales analysis.

Eric Van Cleave is a Partner in Zenergy Works, a Santa Rosa, California based SEO, Online Marketing and Website Development Firm.