About Google Print Ads
Recently Google has launched a new Adwords feature by the name of “Print Ads”. Through print ads, advertisers can place their business ads in selected newspapers throughout the United States. In fact the best part of this feature is that Google itself helps you to find prospective newspapers and placement positions for your ad and goes as far as coordinating the submission of your offers and ads to the newspaper agencies. It can also help connecting you to a professional ad specialist in case you want him to design ads for your business as per your budget and schedule.

How Google Print Ads work for you?
The basic steps involved in creating a business print ad involves:
1) Designing a print ad suited to your business profile.
2) Selection of newspapers you like to advertise in.
3) Deciding on the factors like newspaper sections you want to put your ad in, days of the week you want your ad to appear and ad size that affect your ad effectiveness.
4) Entering the price you can pay for that insertion. Unlike an adwords like auction system, you have to choose your own offer price here.
5) Your bid gets reviewed and depending upon a number of pre-defined factors, your offer gets rejected or accepted.
6) If your offer gets approved, you can directly upload your ad into the system and it starts running. In case of disapproval, you can try resolving the issue by communicating with the newspaper to reach a mutually beneficial offer.

Unlike a traditional newspaper advertising system, through Google Print Ads you can advertise in multiple newspapers all at once through an easy online interface. Moreover, you can view how your ads are progressing and manage all your account details through a single user-friendly account. Working carefully on various factors such as creating effective ads, choosing the right newspaper placements and coming out with an optimal bidding value can really help you to come out with an effective print ad campaign for your business.

Google Print Ads provide you with an easy, low-risk way to test the success of your ad campaigns.
Google Print Ads when used with Google Adwords can really give an extra edge to your ad campaigns by strengthening your message and reaching local audience more effectively.

If you are still unsure about how these print ads and other PPC services can help your business grow fast, you can hire a capable Internet Marketing firm which can effectively implement these strategies for you.

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is the optimization of your website’s attributes to increase its transparency to web search engines like Google, Yahoo! Etc. Let’s just say the more ‘transparent’ a website is to the search engine, the better its chances to appear higher in the list, when a user searches for terms related to that particular website.

The human creed to better everything that they have done before can be classically exemplified in this respect too. The much hyped Internet advertising and marketing tool implemented by Google, AdWords as we know it today, was seen by many as Go(ogle)d’s gift. It not only simplified the way Internet marketing was done, but opened new avenues to people looking forward to start up new businesses in this area. Hence, we witnessed the rise of the SEO industry.

Now, over the years, this industry has risen so fast, that the term ‘optimization’ which was applicable to the macro ’search’ term, now needs to be attributed and implemented even to the elements that optimized the search in the first place, that is, AdWords, which actually optimized search results in terms of advertising, needs to be optimized itself, in order to actually be beneficial to the advertiser.

Thus, this opens up a whole new channel of information with which SEO executives must equip themselves before they take the plunge in the cut throat competitive field of Internet marketing and search engine optimization. As always, we have put together select information from all over the Internet, coupled it with our own experiences and insights, to present an extremely helpful and informative article on AdWords Optimization. We will shortly be updating it on our website, so stay tuned.

In order to create an effective PPC Campaign some basic things should be kept in mind:

1. The right keywords: This is the most crucial part of any PPC Campaign. Keywords should be related to the theme of your site and match the profile of your website visitors. Personally, I use wordtracker and Trellian to widen my search for relevant keywords once I have shortlisted broad key phrases for a website. Try to use multi word phrases. Initially you can bid for a large volume of keywords and later on that list can be fine tuned based on which keywords are performing well and which not.

2. Find Best Value Bid Position: Many people rely on getting number one rank for their search phrase. That may not always be a good thing. Be on a lookout for “bid gaps” where there is a notable difference between the bidding amount for different ranking positions. Decide if the extra amount you want to spend is worth being at the top in search results.

3. Determine your website conversion rate: Conversion Rate basically implies how much people visiting your site actually gets converted into buyers. For example if your website achieves 5 sales (five unique customers) for every 100 visitors then the conversion rate is 5%. Knowing your website conversion rate can be helpful in setting up a PPC Campaign as it will provide you with a signal on how high you can bid.

4. Setting up an optimum budget: This is another important step in setting up an effective PPC Campaign. Setting up an optimum level of budget plan for a PPC Campaign is not an easy task. It involves continuous monitoring of number of clicks and Return on Investment (ROI).

5. Create effective ads: The next step is to design effective ads for your an effective PPC Campaign that captures the essence of your website and makes the user click on that advertisement. You should be well aware of what you are competing against while creating your ads. Use your key phrases within your ad title and copy. Be sure to target the right audience in terms of countries and languages. Try to create multiple ads and keep on testing these ads to find which one produces a high Click Through Rate. The weaker copy can then be replaced with a better one.

6. Look at your landing pages : Have a thorough look at your landing pages. Be sure to design your landing pages in such a manner that they are able to convert visitors to your website. Try to include some call for action in your landing pages such as “filling up a form”, “subscribing to a newsletter” etc.

Advertising through PPC can provide you with real time statical data on how many people clicked on your ad and where they came from. While evaluating a PPC campaign, be sure of what you want to track. In most of the cases it is not the number of visitors who click on ads (Click Through Rate), but rather the number of visitors who shopped something or returned to our website (Conversion Rate) that determines the effectiveness of a PPC Campaign. PPC is a really effective technique associated with less set-up time and long term value and if used judicially it can really make a big difference for your business!

The gauntlet has been thrown!!

People have been talking about Google’s Pay Per Click Video launch over the past week and the phased launch of the service. However as a true tribute to Internet’s role as a great leveler, a startup by the name of “Internet Television Channels” has stolen the limelight from Google by being the first to formally launch the service.

Almost like a Ninja style sudden attack, Google has been caught totally unaware disrupting their announcement to be the first and only company to take a slice of the Pay Per Click video advertising pie.

We did some snooping around and found out more about what they are offering.

It was interesting to read how they drew an analogy on how they are to PPC Video Advertising what Google is to “PPC Text Advertising”.. turning a blind eye to Google’s own efforts to be the front runners for the PPC video advertising race.

From Internet Television Channels.com:
“Our goal is to be to pay-per-click online video advertising what Google is to pay-per-click text advertising – the Google of Video. We are also determined to become the premiere Internet Television Network – broadcasting TV programs, movies, music videos… and web commercials people want to see because they relate to the content of the website they are visiting.”

# There are other exciting differences between Internet Television Channels and Google’s video ad network.

1. Internet Television Channels.com does not plan to just broadcast video ads that are highly targeted to a large network of websites, but they will also broadcast Movies, TV programs and Music Videos as well.
2. Advertisers have a choice of running a video ad solo or before video programming. “We plan to turn thousands of websites into an internet television channel in 15 minutes or less by providing websites not only with highly targeted video ads but movies and TV programs that match the content of the website. Visitors will stay at a website longer when there is video programming that matches the content of the site. It is win-win for the website publishers, film producers and web consumers. Think of us as an online video syndicator just like Kings World Productions is in the offline world.” says Samuel Salter CEO of Internet Television Channels.
3. While Google video ads play on the publisher’s website after the user clicks a graphic display ad. Internet televison’s.com video ads and programs play silently without sound non-intrusively on the publisher’s website and underneath is a text description of the video. When the user clicks the text link, a page pop ups and the user experiences a video with sound that takes up half the screen. As an added bonus advertisers can put links to their site, banner ads and other information about their product or service on this page.

Salter believes their network is not only for direct marketers, but also brand advertisers who are interested in pay for performance pre-roll video advertising opportunities. The site also gives Merits of having the Video uploaded and served from the publisher’s website:
a. What if a prospective customer clicked on your Targeted Online Video Ad™ and the ad took them to your site and the video did not play? What would you do?
b. What if when they arrived at your home page the home page says nothing about the offer in your Targeted Online Video Ad and there is no video on your home page with sound.
Do you think they will search your site looking for the offer promised in the online video ad?
c. By setting up your landing page in the Internet Television Studio, you never have to worry about these things happening. Because once you upload your video, we encode it so that it is ready to stream to your prospects from our redundant servers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Plus you can further enhance the studio environment by uploading a display ad. A winning headline and a warm sales messages provide an even more interactive experience for your new customer.

4. The different landing page options allow you to split test your landing pages.
5. No changes required on your website to include your webcommercial on your website. And no efforts to accommodate video streams for the movies and TV programs your commercial may play with?

# Internet Television Channels also offers the services for creation of web/TV commercials.

Which of the two (and possibly other entrants) succeed in being no. 1 still remains to be seen, but competition is always good for the users. This certainly would be one company to look out for in the times ahead. I do hope that they remove the frames from their site design in the next redesign

Panda Software discovered a network of computers infected with Clickbot.A bot which is being used to defraud pay per click systems. The data collected so far shows that the scam is exploiting a global network comprising more than 34,000 zombie computers (those infected by the bot).

“The bots are controlled remotely through several Web servers. This allows the perpetrators to define, for example, the web pages on which the adverts are hosted or the maximum number of clicks from any one IP address in order not to arouse suspicions. Similarly, the number of clicks from the bot can be monitored as well as the computers online at any one time. The system used can evade fraud detection systems by sending click requests from different, unrelated IP addresses.”

Panda did not name the company whose advertisements are being targeted by the ‘Clickbot.A’ network. The Trojan activates on infected machines whenever a user launches Internet Explorer.

Read the complete press release.

This detection by PandaSoftware has added fuel to the PPC click fraud debate and the growing concerns of companies investing in PPC as a marketing tool. The financial impact of the fraud scheme could be tremendous. Depending on the number of clicks and cost per click of each ad, the numbers may reach into the billions.

Read more about PPC Click prevention tools:
- Who’s clicking who
- Click Detective