Our friends at Marketing Experiments are working with one of our clients on their marketing content strategy. They’re inviting everyone to compete in this creative experiment. Read about their Ad Writing Contest and then submit your best entry as a comment to their blog post .

In November 2011, MSN began supporting exact match negatives. It was a long time coming since Google has supported the match type for years. Although MSN differs a bit from Google in other match types such as their use of broad match, exact match negatives work the same in both MSN and Google

Google’s upcoming privacy policy overhaul addresses two themes: 1. Providing users with more intuitive functionality across Google properties (Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.), and 2. Providing advertisers with more relevant targeting options across Google properties

I’ve managed paid search accounts here at ROI Revolution since 2005, and 99% of the time when I look at a new account there is room to improve results through ad testing. Over the years much has changed in paid search, but the need to continually test and optimize ad text has stayed constant. Ask yourself if any of the following top 4 pitfalls are currently hurting your paid search performance

YouTube has launched a new ad format out of beta: TrueView Video Ads . The basic concept is that the user has a choice whether or not to continue watching the ad. The advertisers only pays when the user watches at least 30 seconds of the ad (or to completion, whichever comes first).

Hey Google:  Instead of spamming the known universe with Adwords coupons for “new accounts only”, why don’t you let new advertisers actually run some ads for once? There’s something completely broken with the logic of doing everything in your power to bring new businesses to Adwords, then arbitrarily making them pay a “newbie tax” combination of high bids/low Quality Score before their first ad has even had a single impression.

When I’m generating landing pages for PPC or SEO purposes, I’m always looking for quicker ways to deploy and maintain my personal and client sites. I’m a big fan of automating repetitive tasks, outsourcing, and making sure projects have less room for error and a more “templated” approach. As WordPress is in many ways becoming the de facto standard for the back end of the web, it makes sense that things are evolving quickly in the customization of the WP platform as well

As most search marketers now realize, whether you’re marketing through Adwords or SEO, your site needs to be Googlebot-friendly as well as linked up in an authoritative and trustworthy manner.

Name-brand keywords are some of the best performing you can find. In competitive markets, searching for trademarked terms usually reveals a dogfight, with the rightful owner at the top of the pile. Although bidding on competitors’ trademarked terms will often lead to poor quality scores (and thus a large bid surcharge), those low quality scores can be offset by the high conversion rate of these ready-to-buy visitors

Eight months ago  I wrote a post highlighting how Google was effectively telling Adwords advertisers they were now approving of the use of Adsense ads on Adwords landing pages. Some readers pointed out that the example they highlighted in that Inside Adwords blog post was only using Adsense blocks below the fold , and in some cases only in their footer area.  This meant that they were actually in compliance with Google’s advertiser guidelines on the practice of Adwords-t0-Adsense arbitrage.