Author Archive: Joseph Vivolo

Yesterday Google released it’s Automatic Matching Beta.

Automatic Matching is an opt-in feature that allows your ads to be shown on additional search queries that Google finds are both relevant and that are not covered by your keyword list.

We’ll get more into that in a moment, but first I wanted to point out some of the good things Automatic Matching has going for it.

Pros for Automatic Matching:

Cost Controlled
It will only provide additional traffic if you are spending less than your maximum daily budget in a given campaign.

I’ve found that its common for advertisers to overstate the value of having a high Click Through Rate (CTR).

The fact of the matter is, that in and of itself, click through rate is useful is measuring how successful you are at engaging a particular audience with a specific ad message, but beyond that it does not necessarily translate to business results.

Lets First Take a Look at Some of the Benefits of Having a High CTR:
Click Through Rate is one of the most important (if not the most important) factor in Google’s Ad Rank formula. This means that CTR is very important in determining your Quality Score. This in turn affects several things:

The most prevalent difference between B2B and B2C paid search management is seen in what activity each type of client views as a conversion.

Evaluating Business to Consumer (B2C) Conversions

When a paid search campaign is pulling consumers to a landing page, the conversion action almost always results in traceable revenue. This data can be used to evaluate the return on investment generated by the paid search campaign, all the way down to the keyword level.

In this case it is very simple to set benchmarks & goals. We want to create as many sales as possible at the highest rate of return per sale.

The majority of our paid search clients are Business to Business advertisers, so our focus is less on retail marketing. However, with the election less than one year away and this study from the Rimm-Kaufman Group fresh on my mind, I wanted to take a look into providing some insight to the value of using paid search for potential candidates in the 2008 election and beyond.

According to the article, politicians are some of the slowest and least sophisticated adapters of paid search.