Lessons on Paid Search Marketing

With more websites competing for eyeballs and sales, paid search has become a critical marketing strategy for online businesses.

Whether your ad budget is $100 or $10,000 per month, here are useful lessons in paid search marketing from ChannelAdvisor’s “Top 12 Paid Search New Years Resolutions”

• Spend as much money as it takes to yield your desired Return on Ad Spend or Cost per Acquisition (an advice that may be better suited to deeper pocketed big businesses rather an a home-based operation)
• Manage more keywords on MSN and Yahoo Search Marketing
• Extensively test variations of ad creative
• Target specific campaigns and ad groups
• Apply successful generalizations: knowing which keywords sell which products and when to bid is crucial
• Target international markets
• Leverage the lessons of 2007
• Know your search seasonality
• Implement landing page improvements
• Monitor affiliates
• Know what your competition is doing
• Consider outsourcing