Truth, Scare Tactics, or Just Bad Math?

Written by PPC Handy Man | February 21st, 2008 |

In a recent post on the ClickForensics site, the claim was made that in Q4, click fraud rates climbed to 16.6% of all search traffic. This would represent a two percentage point increase in fraud from the previous year, if it were true. The thing is, beyond my assertion that click fraud is wildly overestimated; there seems to be some funny math going on.

~PPC Handy Man

MicroHoo! $44.6 Billion for Second Place

Written by PPC Handy Man | February 18th, 2008 |

After a tumultuous two weeks of bid, counterbid, parry, complain, repeat, it is seeming like the Microsoft – Yahoo! merger is getting ever more likely to take place. While the M & A bankers lick their chops over calculating their 1% fees off of 11 digit figures, we in trenches of the search marketing industry have viewed this chain of events with tepid malaise typical of any kind of promise we hear from Microsoft.

~PPC Handy Man

Why Bid Automation Does Not Work

Written by SammieAnnie | February 12th, 2008 |

Many tools out there push bid automation on search marketing. For some, this detached method can deliver sufficient results; oftentimes, however, bidding on autopilot simply does not work. Sadly, automation does not cover many other angles, such as syndication partner results.. With so many factors affecting success rates for search, you cannot possibly automate such a wealth of data.

~SammieAnnie

The Secret to Language Targeting

Written by Sarah | February 6th, 2008 |

I’ll start by stating what may be obvious for most readers—the Google interface defaults to English unless a user actively sets his/her preferences otherwise. But as the AdWords Help Center explains, “A Spanish-speaker living in the United States, for instance, may want to perform searches on Google.com but change the interface language setting to Spanish.”

~Sarah