JumpFly Blog: AdWords, Yahoo & Microsoft Advertising

Welcome to 2009! It’s back to life, back to reality for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising after the holidays. First things first, turn off those Christmas ads - I’ve still been seeing a lot of “Free Shipping in Time for Christmas” and “Start Planning for 2009 Today” ads out there.

Have you looked at your PPC ad copy lately? Now is the time to take a look at your ad copy and make changes. If you have multiple ads running, is there a clear loser that you can pause? Is one of them performing really well? Can you test a variation of it to see if you can beat it, or use it in other AdGroups to improve performance elsewhere? If you are planning a Winter Sale, go ahead and do new ads to highlight it.

One thing I really wish the search engines had was start and end dates for ad copy. It would be wonderful to know a client was going to start a sale on a certain date, create the ad to start running on that date (instead of creating it and pausing it, then going in to make it live when the sale starts) and then having it end when the sale ends (instead of manually having to remember to pause the ads). In fact, Google is usually so far ahead of the curve on things like this, that I’m amazed they don’t have that feature already.

But until the search engines add this functionality, you’ll just have to remember to end your holiday ads and start and end your sale ads.

Another thing to check is your PPC advertising budget. Did you raise it for the holidays? Do you need to bring it back down to a lower level? That’s another thing you can look at. Did you do a new marketing budget for 2009? Now is the time to make changes to your PPC budget to be in line with your overall marketing strategy.

I wish you much success in your PPC marketing in 2009. If you are managing your own PPC accounts and spending over $1,000 per month, you should definitely consider starting the new year with a free PPC account review from a qualified PPC management agency. Many advertisers needlessly and unknowingly waste a large portion of their budgets by improperly using the constantly changing PPC platforms. Don’t be one of them.

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Now you can reach YouTube’s 74 million U.S. users with targeted pay-per-click (PPC) video ads. This recently launched YouTube advertising interface links directly to your Google AdWords Account for billing and reporting. In order to participate in this advertising medium, businesses need to have three things:

1) A company YouTube “Channel”
2) Video ad/ads production
3) YouTube campaign development, implementation & management

The newness of this platform provides early adopters an exciting opportunity to capitalize on YouTube’s massive user population as well as the current lack of advertisers and resulting very low cost-per-clicks (CPCs).

Founded in February 2005, YouTube was purchased by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock roughly 1-½ years later. Today, YouTube is the #2 search engine and the #3 most visited website in the world. YouTube serves close to 1 billion videos every day and its users upload 13 hours of video every minute. According to HitWise, YouTube’s market share in the U.S. video sector is 73.18%.

Right now, advertisers can get started with really low CPCs before the advertising at YouTube gets competitive. I created a simple campaign for JumpFly as a test and was able to attain impressive first page results for as little as $0.15 per click. As YouTube’s growth continues and video becomes more mainstream, YouTube will likely represent a valuable advertising avenue for many advertisers who properly go after this new marketplace. Learn more about YouTube Sponsored Videos or consider having a professional PPC Management firm assist you in developing your YouTube Sponsored Video campaign.

More about Brad
JumpFly YouTube Channel

The latest confirmation of consumers tightening spending arrived with news from comScore that online holiday sales registered the first-ever year-over-year decline since tracking holiday e-commerce sales began in 2001. The firm said online spending for the first 49 days of the critical November-December gift-buying period fell 1% to $24.03 billion compared to $24.15 billion over the same period last year. This decline is a bit alarming and may be indicative of an overall slow down in holiday sales this season.

The National Retail Federation (NRF), the industry’s largest trade group, still estimates that total holiday sales will grow 2.2% this year, which may prove optimistic and would still represent the weakest gain in six years. However, several other retail experts expect a worse performance, and are even forecasting the first-ever decline in overall retail sales. Since online sales are down, I personally fear overall sales will follow suit this holiday season. Here at JumpFly, we are hearing clients citing economic concerns with increasing regularity.

Following a strong week for online sales after Cyber Monday, driven by large discounts on consumer electronics products, comScore said sales slowed significantly in recent weeks. The softest categories included music, movies and videos (down 24%); office supplies (down 19%); jewelry and watches (down 17%); and home, garden and furniture (down 16%). Some bright spots included sport and fitness (up 31%); books and magazines (up 18%); and video games, consoles and accessories (up 17%).

A recent NPD survey conducted earlier in December indicated that 31% of consumers said they were concerned about their job security and had cut back on their spending. Fear is a powerful motivation to curb spending, as witnessed by this year’s dismal holiday sales season. Let’s hope that 2009 brings better times for our struggling economy.

Happy Holidays to all. May 2009 bring you all great health, wealth & happiness.

More About Brad

About JumpFly:

JumpFly professionally develops, implements and manages Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising accounts, JumpFly is a Google AdWords Qualified Company, Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador and Microsoft adExcellence Member. JumpFly was recently named the #1 PPC Company in the country by TopSEOs.com.