Archive for September, 2005
Friday, September 30th, 2005
3,271 Marketers Reveal Search Marketing Data
MarketingSherpa has released their 2nd Annual Search Marketing Benchmark report. 3,271 search marketers provided real-life results data for the survey, making it the biggest SEM study respondent base ever.
The new report includes:
- New stats on clicks, costs, conversions (and fraud)
- Which SEM tests work and which don’t
- Differences between agency-side vs in-house SEM results (Should you hire an agency or do it yourself?)
- How much marketers are budgeting for SEM for 2006 (breaks out b-to-b vs b-to-c)
Some excerpts:
Only 34% of 3,007 active search marketers that MarketingSherpa surveyed in July 2004 said their PPC ad results were “very good.” 13 months later, 43% of 3,271 surveyed MarketingSherpa readers said PPC ad results were “very effective” — a nine-point jump.
Search optimization (SEO) campaign satisfaction didn’t fare nearly as well. Last year 31% of surveyed marketers said SEO results were very good. This year 33% say SEO is very effective. It’s a gain, but only two points.
Even then, SEO came out far ahead of non-search tactics such as email marketing (25% “very effective” rate) and affiliate marketing (22% “very effective” rate).
No Comments » - Posted in General, PPC Advertising, SEO / SEM by Azam
Friday, September 30th, 2005
AdSense Competitive Ad Filters Can Reduce Income
The post Preventing leaky filters on the Adsense blog brought something to my attention about the effect of using Competitive Ad Filters that I hadn’t considered.
It may be just because I don’t use the feature myself, but I’m betting more than a few users are unaware that filtering out ads from being displayed on their site can potentially reduce their Adsense income:
Tip 2: Don’t believe the myth about blocking ‘low-paying advertisers’
Our auction system automatically selects the best performing ads for each page to help you earn the most possible money. This is especially true with our new expanded text ads. By filtering ads you think are low paying, you could actually be cutting out the most optimized ads and decreasing your revenue potential. Each ad that is filtered is one less bid in the auction, lowering the price for the winning ad on your site. You benefit most when there is a larger pool of advertisers competing for a place on your site. Additionally, when we calculate the auction, we take ad clickthrough rates (CTR) into account - an ad with a $0.25 cost-per-click (CPC) with a 5% CTR is more valuable than an ad with a $1.00 CPC but a 0.1% CTR.
