Our Posts This Week

I am on vacation this week and so my blog posts are reprints of popular newsletter articles or tips that have been published earlier this year that you may have missed.

I will be back writing the first week in January.

I hope that you are having a great holiday and taking it easy this week too.

Best Regards,

Nancy McCord

Bing Now Hits 10% of Searches

ComScore released the search market share results recently showing a nice increase in Bing’s market share. Bing has now hit over 10% of market share with Yahoo dropping to about 17%. That still leaves Google as the dominant player with over 65% market share.

What I find interesting is the feedback on Bing. Some of our writers use Bing first for writing research as the search results are more oriented to information than some of the spammy results for searches found on Google. Clients like Bing and are focused more on organic performance there. It appears that slowly the shift in consumer viewpoint and use of Bing is positively increasing.

Remember when Firefox was new and only 5% of the browser market? Look where Firefox is now a mainstream browser that is the first choice of many business networks and users worldwide. Could acceptance of Bing be headed in this same direction?

Personally I like the Bing interface it is clean, uncluttered and provides quality search results. It will be interesting to see if Google’s new Caffeine update addresses some of these issues and improves quality and has some of the most likable Bing tweaks.

When Should You Raise Your AdWords Budget?

On Wednesday this week I wrote about when you should consider dropping your AdWords budget, now let’s talk about when you should consider raising it.

1. If you are not tracking conversions or leads I would not consider raising an AdWords advertising budget until those tools are implemented. If you are making strong conversions and leads I would recommend that you increase your advertising budget for a two to three week test period. In many cases doing so will bring more conversions, but not in all cases.

2. If you have very few impressions in your account you should consider not only increasing your AdWords budget but your maximum cost per click. In a case such as this, typically you have simply fallen out of the auction and AdWords will very slowly serve your ads. In other cases where you have very few impressions it is a possible problem with a high cost per click and a low daily budget. Raising your daily budget will allow you to identify where the problem really lies.

3. It is very important to monitor your AdWords program when you do increase your budget. Use all the tools that AdWords has available to monitor your activity. It is possible that you will need to raise your budget again if you are getting results or that you will need to lower your budget if you have not stimulated leads or conversions.

If you need an experienced Google AdWords account manager, don’t forget to check with me first.

When Should You Lower Your AdWords Budget?

Most everyone know when to increase their AdWords budget, but many do not know when they should start to lower their AdWords budget. Here are a few tips to consider as you review your own AdWords budget and decide if you should keep it the same or lower your budget.

1. If your business is seasonal and you have a historical market drop in sales at specific times of the year, as you approach those slow sales or booking times, you should equally drop your AdWords budget. There is no point in continuing to spend at the same level as you would in peak selling times.

2. If you do not have historical data on sales and bookings then you should watch for flat periods of activity. AdWords will try to spend all the money that you allow it even if you get no sales conversions. If sales are flat for a week and you are at your same budget, first review your keywords, cost per click, and create new ad text. If you have not generated conversions in the second week, I would strongly consider pulling back on your budget especially in December. There are simply some businesses that will sell strongly in the holiday season and others that will not. Your product or services may be one that would be best served by keeping a toehold in now and bumping your budget back up in January.

I’ll talk on Friday on when you should increase your AdWords budget.