Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Honestly, I don’t understand why every single company or person trying to sell a product or service is not doing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Sure, you can run a newspaper ad and just hope the right person reads it at just the right time when they are looking for your product or service. Sure, you can run a TV campaign and again hope that people who might be interested in your product or service are actually watching TV at just the right time when you run the ad. Sure, you can throw up a billboard on the highway and hope that just the right drivers are seeing your advertisement just when they need your product or service. You can even throw up flashing billboard displays on thousands of websites and hope that just the right customer base is searching the web at just the right time when they are in need of, or desire, your product or service.

Or you can run a PPC campaign with Google AdWords, or Yahoo Search Marketing, or MSN AdCenter, and show your ads to precisely those people who are already looking for your product or service! Obviously, there are other reasons why you wan to run newspaper ads or television campaigns, but PPC advertising really should be a part of your marketing efforts. Yes, there is an expense involved, but that’s true of any type of advertising, and I’m hard-pressed to find any other type of advertising that is more directly focused on the exact type of customer you want for a business. By putting a keyord term or search phrase into a search box, these folks are looking for you so you should be doing whatever you can to help them find you — and that means running an online pay per click campaign.

Of course, at JumpFly we have a vested interest in pay-per-click advertising because our business is to help others manage their ppc campaigns, but we also run our own PPC campaigns because we believe in the value of it and we have seen excellent new partnerships and clients result directly from our own use of pay-per-click marketing. We’re always looking for new customers, too. If you’ve been hesitant or unsure about using pay per click marketing for your business, I encourage you go give it a try. Even if you don’t want or need JumpFly’s services, we have seen such incredible results with other business owners that I encourage you to at least give it a try. Your holiday sales figures might turn out much better than you hoped for if you do.

Learn more about Jack

One of the running jokes around the office here at JumpFly concerns MSN and their PPC platform.  When MSN PPC is mentioned aloud, the inevitable astonished question arises – “MSN has a search engine?”  That always gets a few chuckles.

Yes, MSN does indeed have a search engine.  I’ll be the first to admit that the volume isn’t huge and the management interface for their PPC platform can be quite tedious to work with, but it can deliver some incremental traffic for your business. 

One valuable change they just made in the Microsft Avertising adCenter is that they now allow you to pause keywords or ad copy (learn how here).  Prior to this change, you had to actually delete keywords or ads to stop them from running.  This made it difficult to keep track of which keywords or ads you had tried that were not working as well as you had hoped they would.  Before this change, you had to go in and delete the keyword itself instead of just pausing it.  This would also remove any history that the keyword might have had in the account from the keyword tab screen.

The biggest advantage of all this is just the increased flexibility you now have in how you can manage your keywords and ads in adCenter.  To me, that’s the best part about this.  Sure, you will always be deleting keywords and ads that you don’t want, but it’s nice to have the flexibility to pause keywords or ads that are seasonal or might see the light of day in the future.  You might run a new sale perhaps, or revise a landing page to make it a stronger converter.  Again, it’s just nice to have more flexibility in your PPC advertising strategies than to always have to use the final axe chop.

More about Jack

The PPC advertising industry is constantly evolving, and the coming days or weeks will likely substantially modify the landscape as we know it. Microsoft recently swooped in and offered to buy Yahoo! for about $47 billion, which was greater than a 50% premium to what Yahoo!’s stock value was at the time. Yahoo! co-founder & CEO Jerry Yang killed the deal, demanding even more money to make it happen. Microsoft walked away.

The reality is, Microsoft really could benefit from Yahoo!’s 500 million+ worldwide users. That is a lot of users. Microsoft knows they need to do something drastic to compete with Google’s enormous, and constantly growing search query dominance. According to ComScore, Google again increased its leadership position in April, capturing 62% of all U.S. search queries – roughly 6.5 billion searches. 20% were performed at Yahoo! and 9% at Microsoft Sites.

Last week, Microsoft launched an initiative to reward their searchers with cash back if they buy something online. This may prove successful, but is not likely going to provide the answer Microsoft is looking for. So, has Microsoft really walked away from the Yahoo! deal?

To add to the current mix, in walks billionaire Carl Icahn. This guy has an impressive track record, and just picked up 50 million shares of Yahoo! He intends to wage a proxy battle to fire the current Yahoo! board and get the Microsoft deal completed.

Yahoo! argues that the buyout may not be in their best interest and that they are considering a partnership to run Google’s PPC ads alongside Yahoo! content. Testing has been completed and both parties are excited. Yahoo! can potentially earn far larger income from Google’s ads and save a small fortune on running their own PPC platform. Hmmm.

So how will this all play out? Time will tell, and likely soon. I am thinking Microsoft ends up buying Yahoo!. It would certainly be nice to see Yahoo’s new and improved platform replace the current Microsoft adCenter platform. Microsoft no doubt spent substantial time and effort in determining that they wanted to buy Yahoo!. I suspect that will still be the end result. Plus, it does not seem wise to bet against Carl Icahn. One thing is for sure; change is on the way.