Search Marketing

SUMMARY: Tweaking your search marketing to boost revenue can be tricky, especially when you have half a million keywords in play at any given time.

An eretailer set up an automated system to balance higher and lower rankings. Includes copywriting tips and four steps that lifted revenue 28% and ROI 83% while cutting search costs 30%. read the complete case study

SUMMARY: Is collaborating with people in your organization on running search for an international brand giving you headaches? According to MarketingSherpa data, 35% of firms generating more than $100 million in revenue do their SEM in-house.

A Hewlett-Packard division’s paid search campaigns were in the hands of at least 16 US staffers and numerous worldwide employees who never communicated. Worse, they were unknowingly bidding on the same words.

Discover how they created a plan that lets team members communicate directly and track results. Plus, see how they increased search revenue and penetrated elusive European and Asian markets more effectively. read the complete article

SUMMARY: "In Q1 2008,Google accounted for 77% of total search spend, gaining 3.3 percentage points in share of search spending from Q1 2007." "Return on investment (ROI) on Google improved by 24%, click-through rates (CTRs) improved by 19%, and cost per click (CPC) rates increased by 11% in the period between Q1 2007 and Q1 2008, suggesting that large-scale advertisers are benefiting from Google's quality updates and can continue to afford its higher CPCs, particularly given the... view the complete research record

SUMMARY: For the past year, pay per call search ads have been hyped like crazy in the press and at conferences on search. But is anyone actually having success in pay per call? Check out MarketingSherpa's interview with a real-life marketer in the pay-per-call trenches. read the complete interview

SUMMARY: A big thank you to everyone in the Sherpa community who responded to our annual call for real-life search marketing data this summer. 3,186 of you answered.

Download this special 23-page PDF report for four practical data charts, featuring new stats on:
- How much will marketers' SEM budgets increase in 2008?
- What tactic gets the highest ROI: SEO, PPC or email?
- The biggest challenges in hiring SEM staff

The PDF also includes a new eyetracking heatmap looking at how URL addresses affect ad viewing. Plus, a new way to evaluate click fraud: read the complete article

By Anne Holland, Content Director

Search pay per click (PPC) URLs are fairly short because of the nature of the beast. You are not given much room to type in a long URL.

So, the hot search PPC testing tactic is specific wording and capitalizations. Example: Should your text ad say www.ClickHere.com, or will you get better response with www.ClickHERE.com, or perhaps www.ClickHereFREE.com?

As all experienced search marketers know, organic search results get the lion's share of... read the complete blog post