As promised, my presentation from the SMX Advanced session Writing Killer Ad Copy. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. And you’ll completely re-think how you write ads. Keep in mind that this presentation was created for advanced paid search specialists. The purpose of the session was to get people thinking “outside the box.” My job was to [...]

Are you tired of having to run a report in AdCenter every time you want some stats that aren’t: Yesterday, Last 7 Days, Today, This Month, Last Month, Last 3 Months, Last 6 Months, This Year, Last Year or Entire Time? Or in my case, I’m tired of deciphering just what would be 3 months [...]

We’re all familiar with the wedding industry’s spending power, no matter what the economic climate, the lavish wedding will always prevail. The industry is highly competitive with high barriers to entry, so how do you generate a positive ROI in a sector that can bleed your budget dry within an hour? Build Up & Be [...]

Since the latest Quality Score update, one of the new features was doing away with the “inactive” classification for keywords whose maximum cpc was below that of Google’s set minimum bid. Instead we have the “first page bid” qualifier which will label keywords with a maximum cpc too low to appear on the first page [...]

Continuing our coverage on 2nd and 3rd tier PPC engines, we’ve come to ABC Search. A little platform that could out of Encino, CA. ABC Search is a search engine themselves, but also rather a mediator and distributor of ads to partner sites from advertisers through their "Adentify" content network. They claim 1billion searches a [...]

Most optimization tips and instructional guides cover the big 3 of PPC search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN. But what about all those little guys out there? Have you tried any of those yet? I’ll review some 2nd and 3rd tier interfaces in the coming weeks, how the traffic was, how much it was, the [...]

If you're like me, you have your Google Reader set up to feed you all the latest, greatest and newest news, tips and tricks in the world of pay-per-click marketing. At the very least you're set up to receive recaps or topical news items. I noticed that when I receive recaps from Search Engine Land, [...]

The display URL in any PPC ad is a great place to stuff additional keywords, attract attention to your ad and/or increase branding. So it is definitely not a space to be wasted or ignored. Next time instead of simply putting “www.yoursite.com” as the display URL, try some of these simple tests and see if [...]

When you read that paid search and organic search require separate content strategies you might think, “Duh! That’s obvious.” Except that something happened to me last week, and this was not the first time. A Portent’s client earned a top ten ranking for an important keyword, one right near the top of the keyword chart. [...]

As I promised last week, here are step by step instructions for creating a free MSN’s Live Product Search feed. In case you are not sure what a Live Search Product Feed is, we will prepare a list of items to include in Microsoft’s product search engine. First you will need an Windows Live account, [...]