The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

One of the major advantages of using Clickable Pro is the ability to expand your search advertising across networks without adding significant complexity. Clickable’s Manage section allows you to create and manage campaigns in Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter―with a consistent and simple interface. And Clickable’s ActEngine(TM) will optimize your performance no matter where your ads appear.

That said, Google’s market share hovers at somewhere around 65%, with Yahoo and Microsoft lagging far behind. (The widely-publicized launch of Bing only drove a 1% increase in market share for Microsoft, which is now at about 9.4%.) With numbers like these, any savvy advertiser is bound to ask: is it really worth advertising anywhere other than Google? The quick answer is: Yes.

Search marketing isn’t about absolute budgets, but about maintaining a precise relationship between costs and revenues. More to the point, it’s about keeping revenues ahead of costs by a specific amount. This philosophy is built directly into Clickable Pro’s Goal Values Wizard, which allows you to set either a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) goal that the ActEngine(TM) will help you achieve. However, if you make your goals too stringent, meeting them will mean a reduction in overall sales. On the other hand, make your goals too slack, and you’ll be cutting too deeply into your margins. The trick is to find the sweet spot between efficiency and total returns.

How do you find that sweet spot? That’s the topic of next week’s tutorial. And once you’ve found it on Google, what should you do next? Move on to Yahoo, and find your sweet spot there. Then, move on to Microsoft, and repeat. Each of those networks has its quirks, which we’ll discuss in more detail over the coming weeks. At the end of the series, we’ll look ahead to the impending partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft, and what it means for you.

Of course, if you have specific questions you’d like to see addressed in this series, please let us know on our Blog or in our Forums, and we’ll be sure to cover them.