Oscar Pico, a Senior Natural Search Specialist at Apogee Search, recently took time to get me acquainted with Google’s SearchWiki. He discussed what Google’s SearchWiki is and how it can affect search engine marketing campaigns.
Launched in November 2008, the Google SearchWiki allows searchers to personalize Google search results by ranking, removing/adding web pages and sharing [...]

Tanya Green, a Paid Search Analyst at Apogee Search, took a few minutes to tell me about paid search content campaigns. She shared insights on how content campaigns differ from traditional pay-per-click campaigns, how to implement a content campaign, and optimization tips.
A content campaign is a type of paid search campaign that enables your ads [...]

I recently attended a Search Marketing Now webinar that outlined the “myths and misconceptions” of Google’s Quality Score. Below is the information I found most useful for paid search analysts. While some of these points are well known in the industry, there were many other interesting bits of information throughout the presentation:
First, some background:
Quality Score [...]

Yesterday Yahoo! announced that they will now be including videos, images and custom search boxes in their paid listings to create what they are calling “Rich Ads in Search.”
This new ad format, which has been in testing for the past year, is aimed at increasing not only brand exposure, but click-through rates and conversion [...]

Google SearchWiki was launched in November of 2008 with the purpose of personalizing searches and providing an opportunity to share comments among Google users regarding websites and search results. Since then, many SEM experts have been asking themselves, “where is Google going with this?” As with any new innovation, this new feature comes with pros [...]

“Why do I need to pay for clicks on my brand name?”
Does this question sound familiar? The reasoning for asking this question usually follows shortly after and sounds something like, “If they’re already searching for me, won’t they just click my natural search listing?” Clients ask this question far too often, and as tough [...]

Google Hot Trends is one of the most useful tools Google offers. It shows a list of keywords that have seen a spike in search traffic recently.
Unlike most search marketing tools, whose data is at least a day (if not months) old, Google Hot Trends generally shows data from the previous hour. That is about [...]

Google may have finally answered my PPC prayers.
The ability to set monthly budgets on my Google AdWords campaigns has been a constant item on my wish list. Google’s current daily budget system started for a valid reason: set only a monthly budget and you risk running out of dollars early each month. But the reality of today’s [...]

It is said that in every market (even down markets) there is opportunity, and nobody wants to remind advertisers of that more than Google.  And for good reason – media speculation abounds with optimistic predictions of SEM being relatively insulated from economic recession.  As advertisers demand more accountability from their dollars and rein in once bountiful [...]

At the beginning of the year, this post on the Apogee Search Marketing Blog made some predictions about search marketing in 2008. Before we try to make any predictions about 2009, let’s take a minute to review 2008’s search predictions compared to what actually occurred over the last 12 months.
Apogee’s 2008 search predictions were as [...]