Imagine being surrounded by thousands of Search industry professionals, all focused around one key objective: discovering the latest and greatest tips and techniques to overcome the ever-changing world of Search. This is the reality of attending a Search Engine Strategies Conference. (more…)

The fanfare surrounding Google+ died down a long time ago (aside from a brief resurgence while everyone threatened to leave Facebook following their redesign in September).  Google’s “Facebook killer” has so far been nothing more than another flop in the line of Google Buzz and Google Wave.  There are a number of reasons why G+ has not lived up to expectations, but one big change yesterday may be Google’s best chance at turning things around. (more…)

Search experts, search clients and web aficionados everywhere took to Twitter as news of Google’s new secure search roll-out broke.  The search giant announced that it would begin encrypting searches by default if people were logged into Google.com via a secure connection, thereby keeping the search query a user enters and any websites they visit afterwards inaccessible to third parties. (more…)

Google AdWords has yet another way to refine your search campaigns called “Audience Targeting”.  Audience Targeting allows advertisers to select Audiences from a list of vertical segments defined by Google.  Using this tool can help advertisers refine their Paid Search efforts to target people based on their interests as established through user profiles Google has compiled. (more…)

The goal of Google’s search engines has long since been to deliver a quality user experience, using a complex algorithm to deliver the most relevant search results to satisfy a user’s query.  It does this by crawling page content and identifying the most relevant and highest quality pages using keywords, title and header tags— to name a few.  This is, in essence, what drives quality SEO efforts, with page owners motivated to choose the best keywords for their page, putting those keywords into quality, useful and engaging content and avoiding keywords that may rank well but are irrelevant to the page. (more…)

Among the various intellectual properties at Rise Interactive, PPCR stands out as a significant competitive advantage for paid search advertisers.  PPCR is an automated paid search reporting tool created by the product development team at Rise Interactive.  PPCR combines data from multiple search engines to give all users an aggregated perspective on their paid search advertising performance in one central location. (more…)

One significant bit of news this week surrounds the testing of click counts in Google AdWords paid search (PPC) advertising (on a very limited basis).  This move reinforces Google’s general intent to integrate social media tactics into its existing platforms.  Just as users are becoming accustomed to seeing their social network’s “likes” and “shares” appearing in the natural search results (via Google Social Search), Google is now taking another cue from Facebook – introducing a viral feel to PPC advertising.  The concept is simple – if people believe the “crowd” is very interested in a particular ad, it will increase the likelihood that they’ll click through to the advertiser’s website.  (more…)

Based on the public reaction to Google’s launch of the +1 feature for paid search ads, players in the SEM industry can be categorized into two camps: the folks who are immediately dismissing it as the next Google Wave (i.e. a soon-to-fail attempt at competing against Facebook in the social media sphere) and the folks that are choosing to just wait and see.  For those not in the know, the +1 feature allows people with Google profiles to click on a +1 button to recommend either a paid or an organic search result.  That person’s recommendations are publicly shared with his or her contacts on Google. (more…)

As a rapidly growing agency, Rise has the opportunity to audit a plethora of Paid Search (PPC) programs, and we’ve developed a strategy for analyzing PPC marketing campaigns that includes what we believe are the primary areas to focus on.  When analyzing a PPC program, you should always consider campaign structure, budget allocation, text ad copy, landing pages, quality score, bid strategy and reporting.  All these areas are crucial in a PPC program and should be part of any PPC audit process.  More detailed audits can include other components but an analysis of these seven components will provide significant insight into an account’s  status and how to improve performance if necessary. (more…)

Dayparting (as it relates to Paid Search) is a fairly simple concept, but one many companies have failed to utilize.  Simply, dayparting is the act of limiting or suspending part of your PPC program during certain periods (and running more advertising during your peak periods).  Today I will answer two main questions:

1. Who should be using dayparting (and why)?

2. How do I determine my peak periods? (more…)