Bidding on Competitors’ Brands 2

I nearly choked on my afternoon tea when I searched for 'Efficient Frontier' on Google today.  Sitting there, bold as brass, was an ad for one of our competitors:

Organising a Paid Search Marketing Team

Yesterday I noticed this question on LinkedIn:
What is the best structure for a Paid Search Marketing team?

How have you defined the roles within your teams?
Have you split your team into specialists or generalists?
Are you outsourcing some of your responsibilities?

I am particularly interested in what your experiences are in structuring a large Paid [...]

SES Chicago on European SEM

A colleague, James Beriker, spoke at SES Chicago on Monday about search marketing in Europe.  I like this excerpt, courtesy of the aimClear blog:
Many agencies charge clients nothing and keep commissions. Other agencies share some of the commission with the client. This will end at the end of 2008 making the market more accountable to [...]

Walmart SEM

From this week's NMA, an article on Google's BPF withdrawal: "[Google] admitted loopholes had been exploited… [some agencies] had used the discounts as bait in the pitch process."
And for some, the discount was their pitch - as seen this week at Adtech London!

Goodbye and good riddance to Best Practice Funding

The most predictable announcement in Search Marketing leaked out earlier today, when Google announced that they are to end their Best Practice Funding (BPF) after next year.
The BPF was introduced in 2006 after Google scrapped the 15% agency discount. It was brought in with the right intentions: partly as a parachute payment but mainly [...]

Netimperative Search Marketing roundtable

I attended a Netimperative Search Marketing roundtable last week to discuss bid management and the future role of agencies in search. It was a good debate but though we started on topic, we roamed through the full spectrum of digital media leaving no pixel unturned.
There seemed to be a sense that as Yahoo was [...]

Internet World

I spent part of last week at Internet World, a three day event at Earls Court Exhibition Centre. More accurately it was at ‘Earls Court 2′, a name entirely without imagination. Surely ‘Earls Court: The Reckoning’ or ‘Earls Court Strikes Back’ would have given it a bit more umph. Anyway, it is a [...]

Bidding on Competitors’ Brands

One thing advertisers love to do their competitors is bid on their brand keywords. And of course, they hate it when it's done to them. It's not something I'm personally fond of, and opinions on this practice vary across the industry. But I think I know what one UK SEM agency's opinion is! [...]

Analysing the analysis of the search market

I’ve always thought that there isn’t enough market analysis in search, so I was very interested to read the latest white paper from Latitude. “Is the UK paid search market more sophisticated than the US?” is the question that they have asked, and they’ve answered with a resounding yes. Before I hoist the Union Jack [...]