As a rapidly growing agency, Rise has the opportunity to audit a plethora of Paid Search (PPC) programs, and we’ve developed a strategy for analyzing PPC marketing campaigns that includes what we believe are the primary areas to focus on.  When analyzing a PPC program, you should always consider campaign structure, budget allocation, text ad copy, landing pages, quality score, bid strategy and reporting.  All these areas are crucial in a PPC program and should be part of any PPC audit process.  More detailed audits can include other components but an analysis of these seven components will provide significant insight into an account’s  status and how to improve performance if necessary. (more…)

For those of you that might not be aware, Blekko is a search engine that launched in July 2010, with the goal of providing a unique method for clearing through the clutter of search engine result pages to find the information you need – slashtags.  This syntax allows users to filter as part of their initial query.  For example; per the Blekko site demo video a search for “global warming” will return results about global warming in general ranked by relevance (ostensibly in the same manner Google or Bing would return results), whereas a search for “global warming /conservative” will only yield results from sites with a conservative point of view.

In addition to providing a new method for search, Blekko also introduced some SEO tools that were well received by the Internet marketing industry.  Today, we’ll focus on using two of these tools to provide actionable insight for your program.  Specifically, we’ll discuss how to use this information to develop a plan for surpassing unusually “sticky” listings above your own. (more…)

For some time, brick and mortar stores have complained about the fact that they have to pay sales tax while online retailers are released from this requirement, placing the burden on the purchaser to disclose their online purchase and pay the relevant sales tax, which many (if not most) purchasers don’t bother doing.  Bottom line – the cost for products from online-only (or out-of-state) retailers is less than brick and mortar stores.  Considering this advantage, many offline retailers are lobbying to change the current tax system. (more…)