Those of you who are familiar with Google Website Optimizer (GWO) know the importance of testing your online marketing efforts.  Testing really is the best way to know whether or not proposed changes to your website are going to have a positive or negative impact on your bottom line.  If you haven’t tried a GWO experiment, I would highly recommend it.  For more info on conducting an experiment, you should read the blog post 6 Critical Steps for Starting you Google Website Optimizer Experiments.

The world of website testing is continuing to develop, which is great.  All online marketers should be testing their online marketing initiatives, whether it is elements on their website or keywords within their campaigns. Google AdWords has followed Google Website Optimizer’s lead and is now offering another way to conduct tests; this time with your AdWords campaigns. This new program, called AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE), will enable you to test changes to your bids, keywords, and ad groups before applying those changes to all auctions for which your ad could appear. 

For example, if you want to measure the impact of increasing a keyword’s bid, you can easily accomplish that without having to test all auctions.  With ACE, you have the ability to select the control / experiment split for your changes. You can choose 50% control / 50% experiment, 60% control / 40% experiment, and so on.  Similar to GWO experiments, ACE runs the experiment or test seamlessly with the existing campaign set up.

This tool can be found within the settings tab for your campaigns, and since you can set the experiment splits and the start and stop dates, you lower the risk of testing new ideas.  If you want to test increasing a keyword’s bid without ACE, the new bid would be applied to all auctions.  The problem is that even if the results were good, it is difficult to be 100% positive that the results were not due to other contributing factors.

So, next time you are thinking about making changes to your campaigns and would like to test the results first, look into using ACE.  It may help you to determine whether or not this change would be beneficial.

The search engine marketing landscape is ever changing, and the second half of this year will prove to be no different.  There is one change that we’ve talked about with many of our clients, but unless you are immersed within the industry on a daily basis, this still may be unknown to you.  Yahoo and Microsoft (Bing) have created a partnership called the Search Alliance. 

So you may be asking, what exactly will be happening? Essentially two major changes will be taking place.  One is with the organic search results and the other with the paid search results.

For organic search, Bing will be the driving force (algorithm) behind the results.  Therefore, once this transition takes place, when you conduct a search on Yahoo!, the results that you see will be determined by the same algorithm that determines Bing’s organic results.  That being said, we expect that soon Yahoo! and Bing will have the same organic results.  The testing for the organic results is said to begin this summer, with the full (organic) transition taking place in August / September.  Keep in mind that once this transition takes place, Yahoo’s search results may still have a Yahoo look and feel.  So if you’ve never really cared or paid attention to your Bing positions, you definitely need to now!

On the paid search side, a lot of changes are also being made. Until now, marketers have been using two different platforms for managing their advertising on Bing and Yahoo. With the Search Alliance, marketers will now use one platform – Microsoft’s adCenter – to manage their paid search. The paid search transition should be finalized before the holiday season, but it could be pushed back into 2011 if needed. While many are touting that this will be easier for advertisers as they’ll have one place to manage their ads for both Yahoo and Bing, there are a few critical things that should be considered. First, there will no longer be a way to monitor your Bing ads separately from your Yahoo! ads. Your ads will soon be eligible to show on the “Search Alliance”.  In addition, as you probably have experienced, Bing and Yahoo! have different searcher demographics. As this Search Alliance takes place, your campaigns will likely require lots of initial monitoring and optimization tactics as a result of this “new” market. Also, if you transition your campaigns from another account over to adCenter, you will be starting with a blank slate in terms of historical performance, which will have to be built up over time.

It is often that I get a question about why a company should bid on branding keywords when they rank well organically for those terms. While we have covered this topic in the past, it is always good to revisit common questions or concerns.

First, if you have a lot of competition online and don’t bid on your branding terms, you’re opening the door for competitors to bid on your branding and have a compelling ad sitting right next to your organic listing (that is if your website ranks for your brand when searched, which I hope is the case).

If there is a lot of search volume for your branding terms, imagine how many visitors you would be able to get if you had an additional presence (your ad) on the search engine results page along with your organic listing? Bidding on these keywords can certainly help you to capitalize on the volume of searchers. There are numerous tools available to determine approximate search volumes for keywords, including branding terms.

One thing that has always held true with paid search is that you have the ability to offer a tailored message, and test that message over time. Through your paid search ads, you are able to try different calls to action to determine the most effective message for your searchers. You are also able to drive visitors to specific landing pages from your ads, which can be different pages than those that rank organically for the same terms (often your homepage ranks for these keywords).

Search is evolving, and the results can be personalized based on users’ search history, and even more recently, real-time results are being incorporated into organic listings. What does this mean for your online marketing? Having paid listings can help to reserve your spot prominently on the search results pages for your company’s name.

Lastly, there are many steps in buying cycles depending on your industry. It is common to see that once searchers have completed their research, they will revisit their company or brand of choice, often by searching for that brand or company’s name. When you have a presence both organically and within the sponsored listings, you are able to ensure even more visibility for your company with a tailored message than if you were to just rely on your organic listing. Branding keywords are also typically not expensive, and therefore, through your branding keywords you are able to capture those searchers when they are ready to buy at a lower cost.

So the next time that you are debating whether or not you should bid on your branding keywords, consider the points above.