I ran across a post with the above intriguing title by Kevin Lee over at ClickZ, citing a number of reasons why advertisers in particular have become concerned about some of Google’s recent policy shifts and – more importantly – the possible intentions that can be deduced from those policies.

Here are just a few of the points Kevin raises:

• the proposed Google/Yahoo alliance, that would have made AdWords the gateway to nearly all Internet search advertising:  not only marketers, but also US antitrust regulators perked up at this move toward potential monopolistic control.
• Google’s current PPC search results scheme, with the addition of query-specific Quality Score calculations and a bunch of unpublicized Quality Score factors:  marketers have become increasingly nervous about [Read more...]

I recently saw an interesting post about Pay Per Click …actually an interview of CPC Search’s Terry Whalen, conducted and written up by Jep Castelein over at LeadSloth.

Having done both myself, I can agree with Terry that B2B PPC is more of a challenge to get right than B2C …mainly because the lower lead volumes and longer sell cycles imply longer testing periods and ROI measurements.  As a result of this, it pays to be much more cautious in crafting ad text and keyword selection;  whereas in a B2C, we can test some really crazy-seeming ideas, because they can be killed fairly quickly if needed.

This “law of numbers” further varies with… [Read more...]

In these times when every dollar counts, I wanted to provide some actionable tips for writing better pay per click (PPC) ad copy …beyond the elementary hints that can be found almost anywhere on the Web.  They can be introduced – and hopefully remembered – using just three words:

Empathize     ***     Identify     ***     Specify

B2B advertisers need to empathize with their buyer’s needs.
Users are searching because they must satisfy a need, or have a problem that needs solving.  Recalling our blog post “Is your website selling when it should be solving?”, marketers already have a general understanding (and God help them if they don’t!) of their buyers’ problems which their product solves.  So, leveraging that understanding…