Bing or bust? (Will Microsoft's new search engine succeed?)

June 23, 2009 by · Leave a Comment

At this point, of course, it depends a bit on who you ask and how long you’re prepared to wait.  Bing did have a good second week:  based on ComScore numbers, Ina Fried over at CNET News reports that Bing added another percentage point (now up to a total of 3 points, post-launch) to its share of all Web searches.

For a longer view, check out Christopher Hosford’s B to B Magazine piece (we liked his title so well, we borrowed it above!), which presents opinions both pro and con.  The consensus seems to be that the all-important ad dollars won’t swing in Microsoft’s direction until Bing materially changes the relative shares of searches conducted (historically 64% Google, 8% Microsoft Live Search) …and no one expects that to happen very quickly.  However, Chris quotes a Forrester Research VP (Shar VanBoskirk) opining that Bing “could be a game-changer” that will “appeal to the savvy searcher seeking more relevant search results.”

Bing represents Microsoft’s 5th run at a search entry – at least in terms of branding – and they do have a track record of getting things right (enough) …eventually.  We’ll be watching, and keeping you up to date.

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, PPC, Search Engine Marketing ·

Your creative needs to be doubly effective in difficult times

January 5, 2009 by · Leave a Comment

No doubt it’s getting a bit old for you, too:  you can’t go anywhere or strike up a conversation without the topic turning to the economy.  Invariably the question is asked, “How’s business?”

We’ve seen this movie before and lived, and so have our clients.  We’ve blogged already about how smart companies will seek to grow market share in such times, avoiding the knee-jerk reaction to cut budgets, reallocate funds and tighten the marketing belt.

But let’s say your company isn’t quite that foresighted or aggressive.  You’ve still got a communications budget, probably smaller than originally planned.  Clearly, you need to maximize the impact of what you have to work with;  so like most companies, you’ll no doubt [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Lead Generation, PPC ·

Who’s calling? Very likely, it’s a respondent to your PPC ad

November 20, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

Ever wonder whether some of your PPC responses happen offline (usually by phone), rather than via the usual click-through …perhaps days after the ad was viewed?

We here at eMagine were curious about this in our own Web marketing, so we did a little study.  We were astonished to discover that more than 60% of our ad responses came by call-in, not click-through.  Put another way:  the true ROI of our PPC campaign was more than twice as strong as we had thought up until then. On digging around a bit, we learned that research by comScore indicates that 63 percent of searchers [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Online Marketing, PPC ·

When outsourcing your PPC, it’s still best to remain involved

November 6, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

My team manages Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns for a number of B2B clients, and of course we’re always gratified when new ones choose to outsource their programs to us.

A few clients, however, seem to operate as though there was some mystical connection between outsourcing and hand-washing (as in the Pontius Pilate story):  so that once they let go, they feel they never need to worry about this subject ever again.  And as long as the monthly results look OK, we may actually never hear from them again.

What is the danger in this?  It’s simple:  [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, PPC ·

PPC “vs.” SEO – a choice that really needn’t be made

October 9, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

It seems like once a week – at least – a client asks me, “Should we be doing SEO …or PPC??”  So it was nice to come across a piece by Julie Batten for ClickZ, “Coordinating Organic, Paid Search Efforts” …with its title giving a pretty strong hint that the answer isn’t going to be one or the other.

Some of this persistently perceived dichotomy probably stems from the illusion that SEO is somehow “free”, which then begs the query:  “why should I pay for a ranking when I can get one for free?”  Of course, the last time that was even somewhat true was back when all you had to do was throw some keywords in your meta data and you scored a great position.  But that was back when Larry and Sergey were still undergraduates …certainly before “google” became a verb.  These days, it requires quite a bit more effort and dedication to secure and maintain strong organic search rankings.

As background to debunking the forced choice of our mythical client’s question, Julie presents a nifty summary of [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Lead Generation, PPC, Search Engine Marketing, Traffic Generation ·

Search engine marketing: Don’t expect to be #1 by Monday!

August 7, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

We sometimes get a call from a frantic prospect who says something like “I absolutely have to rank Number 1 on ‘convertible frammis’ by Monday.”  Never mind that it’s Thursday afternoon, and that he means through organic search only …no PPC allowed.

We can only speculate as to what motivates a normally sane marketer to take on such a fool’s errand, though naturally a fit of sudden top-management interest/pressure springs to mind (think Dilbert).  Of course, we always do our best to help such people… although they rarely end up becoming clients, because their circumstances generally keep them from even hearing our message that [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, PPC, Search Engine Marketing, Traffic Generation ·

Can’t we do without PPC once we get a good organic search ranking?

June 27, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

It’s a fairly common narrative:  our client XYZ Co. starts up a PPC program while waiting for their search engine optimization (SEO) to kick in …typically following a website redo.  Once they see their results-page ranking move up to acceptable levels, we can expect to get the plaintive question:  “Can’t we stop spending on PPC now?”  (Sometimes the thought has been planted by a certain segment of SEO houses, who trumpet those savings as much of the payback that justifies their fees.)

As professional Web marketing consultants, we would advise “no”, in most cases.  So does Kevin Lee, in his thoughtful ClickZ piece, “Is organic search enough?”;  in fact, he says that “pulling PPC ads after achieving high organic position may, in fact, be a very bad idea.”

There are a number of reasons for this.  For one thing, [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Online Marketing, PPC, Search Engine Marketing ·
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