PPC Marketing or PPC Advertising (Price Per Click) is the best way to drive traffic to your website. Instead of paying for worthless CPM (cost per thousand impression) advertisements; with PPC you are actually purchasing traffic for your website. You can then do conversion tracking and determine which keywords are resulting in positive ROI for your product or service. PPC marketing is not the same as it was a few years ago. Nearly all of the large search engines now have huge display advertising networks, where you can have your advertisement that used to only show up in the search network, now appear in a large display network as well. Click fraud is a very small problem and should not scare you away from PPC advertising. Google’s display advertising network is the largest in the world serving hundreds of billions of impressions daily. We have helped numerous medium to large scale businesses utilize ppc advertising to drive tens of thousands of additional unique daily visitors to their web properties. Many PPC firms charge set-up fees, maitenence fees, etc… Banner Blindness Inc. only charges a percentage of your total spend.

If you are interested in having a cutting edge PPC advertising firm help generate your website tens of thousands of additional unique daily visitors (with an ROI focus) - please call 312-281-8931 or email Support@BannerBlindness.com

It has taken me forever to edit and post this video to YouTube. I hope you can learn more about PPC marketing on AdCenter with it. Microsoft introduced a new KW expansion tool that will basically generate insanely huge keyword lists - but I would debate the quality of these keyword lists. The results of one of their searches for “cars” didn’t seem relevant. Most PPC marketers will agree that though the volume on MSN and Live.com are a lot less than Google Adwords; it can offer higher converting traffic for a minimum click of .05. Editorial review and campaign de-activation are becoming a nuisance though.

Independent thoughts:

The increasing development of internet marketing for small business and individual web site hosting users is making the increasing costs of web design tolerable. Most owners use ready-made CMS platforms like Wordpress for web development, which makes a complete, and accessible web design comfortable for all who visit.

I was amazed at the incredible number of worthless tools to be found at Microsoft’s Ad Center Labs - there wasn’t one useful tool that a PPC marketer could use (please comment if you beg to differ).  Clearly Microsoft doesn’t get search engine marketing; hence the Yahoo purchase.  However, if Yahoo gets gobbled up by Microsoft doesn’t that mean they will be destroying one already deficient product, eating it, and pooping out an even more deformed product.  Sorry for the human digestive analogy; another good analogy I heard on TheStreet.com: “Microsoft buying Yahoo is like taking two people in a race that are weak runners and tying their legs together.  They still aren’t going to beat the third runner, because the third runner is faster and stronger.”  Check out the screen shots below for Microsoft’s Ad Center “labs”.  If you can find anything that is valuable to an online marketer, please let me know.

Yahoo reported lower then expected earnings Tuesday evening, and announced a soft 2008, sending the stock down over 10% after-hours. CEO Jerry Yang is upbeat but not till 2009 - how weak is that? I prefer CEO’s that makes bold forward looking statements that might not necessarily be true (at least when I’m the shareholder and looking to unload). At a market cap of around 20 billion dollars, Yahoo is looking very very cheap and should seriously be considered a take over target by numerous corporations and private equity funds. I might consider buying it myself ;)  Online advertising continues to grow 20% a year and Yahoo is strongly positioned to profit from this expanding market place. In 2007 Yahoo acquired numerous display advertising networks in order to compete against Google’s acquisition of Double Click. The remaining display advertising networks left on the block are: 24/7 Real Media, SpecificMedia, ValueClick, and Yahoo. At 20 billion dollars I would even contend that Google should consider making an offer to purchase Yahoo. Purchasing Yahoo would position Google as the undisputed master of the Internet, the only sector Google wouldn’t own is online auctions (eBay) - and who would want to own it, as consumers online are demanding quicker and quicker purchase times (auctions are just too slow and still too risky).

So the real question for stock holders is when Yahoo or another entity will announce that they are in talks to purchase Yahoo. Microsoft’s online marketing unit lost a few hundred million last year, and I don’t see them turning that around anytime soon. Microsoft can continue to make money losing investments in display advertising, but will never stand a chance in paid search. Paid search (and all online advertising for that matter) is a numbers game and MSN just doesn’t get traffic - therefore Microsoft will never make money through it. If Microsoft ever wants to compete with Google they will have to pay to get there (and thats exactly what they are doing). I would contend that the most likely suitor for Yahoo is Microsoft (and Microsoft’s only chance of online survival is to purchase Yahoo), and at these levels Yahoo looks Yummy!

Independent thoughts:

Maybe Yahoo should take after its own online marketing platforms and stay away from the web hosting aspect of online business. The world of pay per click campaigns which increase in CRT values with good website design are making stagnant prices for domain names like manna from heaven.