No matter how developed and well managed a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign is, your website (or landing page) must match the message and value proposition associated with that campaign.  You can drive the most targeted visitors possible through a strong PPC campaign but if your website cannot deliver on the message from the PPC ads, you will miss out on customers.  In addition, site usability plays a large role.

I have been working with a client for about a year and a half on their PPC campaigns and was constantly persuading them to re-design their website.  I had always felt that our campaign results were being hindered because their site wasn’t user friendly and didn’t match up with what they wanted to promote through PPC.  We developed a targeted campaign and managed that campaign closely for many months.  My client was happy with the overall results but I continued to feel we could do better if their website was improved.  Finally, they decided to re-design the site and chose MoreVisibility for the task.  We had a unique advantage in re-designing the website because we were so familiar with their products and services after managing their PPC campaigns for over a year.

The new website has been live for about a month and the increased productivity of our PPC campaigns cannot be overstated.  We only had to make a few minor tweaks to ad copy and keywords in order to match up the message between the new site and the updated PPC campaign.  In the previous 30 days (just prior to launch) we had 77 conversions from our PPC campaign.  For the same time frame, with the new site and updated campaign we had 118 conversions, an increase of 53%.  In addition, my client’s most important conversion metric (New Quote Requests) had an increase of 106%.  These are powerful reminders that where you drive the traffic (website or landing page) from your PPC campaign is just as important as the keywords you select, the ad copy you develop, and your overall campaign strategy.

Google now allows certain trademark terms to be used in ad copy for sponsored listings, even if you do not own the trademark. In the past, trademark terms were allowed only as keywords and but not in the ad copy. Ads previously were disapproved if they were found to violate the policy relating to the use of trademarks.

The reason for this change is to improve not only ad quality, but also user experience. According to Google, “Google’s goal is to provide our users with the most relevant information, whether from search results or advertisements, and we believe users benefit from having more choice.”

Using branded terms in ad copy allows advertisers to create ad copy targeted to particular products, services and inventory. For example, if you sell different brands of cameras, you can bid on the keywords and create ad copy for those products. Writing specific ad copy will decrease the amount of generic ads that show up when trademark terms are searched. This enables searchers to quickly find which advertisers have the exact products they are looking for.

If your ads have previously been disapproved due to trademark restrictions, you may want to re-submit them. Ads using trademark terms become effective on June 15. For advertisers who have Google Alerts set up for their trademark terms, an increase in the use of trademark terms may occur. As always, be sure to monitor your trademark terms carefully to ensure they adhere to the new criteria and are not being used inappropriately.

On May 28, 2009 Microsoft Ad Network unveiled Bing. Bing is a new decision engine and consumer brand that is set to provide searchers with the initial step in moving beyond search to help make quicker decisions while online (hence decision making engine). Bing was designed to do more than what current search engines do. Instead of having to click through a listing to see a website, Bing goes to the next step by providing a summary of a website with a preview tool. This enables users to quickly decide which website matches their query by eliminating clicks in and out of different sites. The user experience and instinctive tools were intended to help consumers make better and faster decisions and focuses on four major areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.

Bing is here to help users easily navigate through the overload of information on the web. Part of Microsoft’s study that helped the creation of Bing included results from a custom comScore Inc. study across core search engines which shows that as many as 30 percent of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result. The data also indicated that approximately two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement or re-query on the search results page.

As Microsoft began building Bing, they kept in mind an understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is Microsoft’s first step toward an effort to bring advancements in search that enables people to find information swiftly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smarter decisions. If you are already a Microsoft Ad Network customer, your ads are being exposed to the searchers of Bing. So depending on your product, you may want to modify your existing ads and make sure that you have strong, straight to the point call to actions for an engine that promotes quick decisions.