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Wordpress is a wonderful thing!  The site redesign is now live, and the only thing left to do is a little bit of site monetization to pay the bills, and small finishing touches here and there.

The Google Adwords team has released a number of very highly sought after reporting tools over the past few months, one of which is the Search Query Report. If you’ve been in the pay-per-click arena for any length of time, you’ve probably had at least a passing desire to find out exactly what keywords people are using to find your ad. The report is powerful indeed, but it also reveals some of the inner workings of the machine that is Adwords.

An important first step in establishing successful pay-per-click advertising campaigns is picking the keywords that will drive traffic to your site. Easy, right? Not necessarily. In this post I’ll touch briefly on some good starting points for beginners when finding and bidding on keywords. We’ll review match types, search estimates, and other best practices when starting new PPC campaigns that translate well to Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter.

Sick of all the incestuous search marketing acronyms yet?  Well too bad, it just keeps getting worse.  Now each search engine is actually making their own acronyms.  My theory behind this is that they are trying to find out which account managers are really up on their reading, and penalize your quality score if you’re not.  All jokes aside, an important tool in my everyday use is the “My Client Center” screen.  Even if you don’t have multiple accounts within your organization, I’m going to tell you why you should.

Seems that I wasn’t far off when I wrote just yesterday on the dangers of the content network.  Robert Andrews of Forbes.com recently published an article called “Web Ad Nets Scrutinized As Brands Bail from Dodgy Sites.”  Pretty soon you won’t be able to blame the advertising network responsible for bad placements because the advertiser does have a lot of power to dictate where ads should and should not go.

Geo-targeting is not a new feature in sponsored search, but just selecting certain regions or countries does not mean that your default “write once” ad will translate well and result in higher click through rate.  Advertisers need to take advantage of knowing that their ads will be shown to a select audience, and gear their ads towards relevant regional sensitivities.

For those of you that may not know, all of the major search engines have partner sites that offer paid advertising space as a means to monetize their pages.  These advertising campaigns aim to match keywords you specify in an ad group or campaign with content on the publisher’s site. If your keywords and ads are relevant to articles on big name sites such as CNN, it could mean a lot of high quality links. However, if you don’t target your content network ads carefully, you’ll fall prey to low quality placements, which can quickly amount to unwanted click fraud. So, how do you target your content network ads successfully?

Yahoo is certainly a giant in the search industry, however over the years Google’s David certainly has whopped Yahoo’s Goliath. However, they still remain the number one directory on the web, and have a loyal following. They’ve made great strides by partnering with local ISP’s such as Rogers Cable in Canada, Verizon in the United States, and British Telecom in the UK. And some of the features they offer to online marketers are just plain cool.

Microsoft’s adCenter pay per click program is the newest kid on the block, at least this time around. You’ll still be hard pressed to find traffic estimates living up to their claims, but they do have some cool features that no other PPC program can match thus far. Demographics-based ad targeting is possibly the latest and greatest feature adCenter has to offer. You can now pay CPC premiums for clicks from your choice of user gender and age, on top of the old pillars of search including geographical location, time of day, etc.

Perhaps the most important rule of online marketing is to ensure that everything you do to drive visitors to your site ends up being tracked. Even if you do not run any online marketing campaigns, you still need to track traffic on your web site to find out whether your goals for visitors are being met.

If I were to have a top-3 list of free analytics tools that are available to most website owners, it would probably go something like this:

I feel that the initial posts on this site should probably include a bit of a background of my past relationships with individual search engines, and will undoubtedly reveal emotions of frustration, angst, fear and loathing (not necessarily in that order). Other authors in the blogosphere will tout Google’s praises, but the relationship I have with Google is more “love/hate” in nature.

Pay Per Click advertising goes by many names including paid search, sponsored search, cost per click, sponsored results, etc. I’m sure many readers of this blog have at least a rudimentary knowledge of PPC and how it works, but in the name of etiquette I should at least give some kind of introduction so we’re all clear on the fundamentals - please bear with me.