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For many catalogers, pay-per-click (PPC) search represents the largest line in the Web marketing budget. Just as you should visit your dentist or doctor twice yearly for a checkup, so too should you conduct a routine search marketing audit every six months. Regular checkups ensure your PPC campaigns stay healthy, whether managed by an in-house team or an agency. A PPC audit has three components: a sales data audit, a cost data audit and an economic performance audit. The two data audits ensure you're working with accurate numbers, and the performance audit leaves your

By Matt Griffin, Alan Rimm-Kaufman and Joe Dysart There's never a lack of new ideas in online selling. The trick is finding those approaches that work for your business and implementing them properly. Everyone's looking for the next big thing in online marketing — namely, a tactic that will allow marketers to connect with their online customers in hitherto unparalleled ways. And while you're searching for that singular method to drive customers straight to your checkout page, this special report is designed to expose you to a few tactics you may not have considered. Or, if you've considered some or all of these ideas,

While comparison shopping sites such as Froogle, Shop.com and Shopzilla can provide an opportunity for multichannel marketers to reach new customer universes, they also present a unique set of challenges. Because there are myriad formats of product data feeds (the information you provide to the sites), this creates problems if you want to sell products on more than one site, says Alan Rimm-Kaufman, CEO of interactive marketing firm The Rimm-Kaufman Group. In a move to combat these dilemmas, merchants, search agencies and search engines met at Shop.org’s FirstLook 2006 in Atlanta in January to discuss the need for a common standard for describing

"Google can't stop another company from buying your brand name as a keyword in pay-per-click search campaigns," says Dave Pasternak, president of Did-it.com. "What Google will do, however, is stop running an ad that uses your brand name in its title or creative. While officials at Google won't specifically monitor ads for brand-name infractions, they will react quickly once informed," he says. Check for it every once in awhile. When you "google" yourself, do you actually come up? Always "be aware of how other company's use your brand name."

Sure, you have programs for search engine marketing (SEM), e-mail and affiliate marketing. But how extensively have you plotted out your overall strategy? A key to your success involves a closely integrated program that involves all forms of online advertising. Following are some strategies revealed. Gordon Hotchkiss, president/CEO of search engine marketing firm Enquiro, noted in his presentation during the Annual Catalog Conference in Orlando last week several key factors to managing a viable SEM program. He discussed two primary kinds of searches: Mapping searches are when consumers search by subject; transporter searches are when consumers search by company names or URLs. Be prepared for both,

The rise of the search engine as a marketing tool has brought with it a bevy of other online-selling opportunities. Not least among these are the shopping feeds, Web sites that act as online aggregators of merchandise and that allow consumers to compare similar products online, then choose merchants to supply the items. Often shopping feeds are referred to as comparison shopping engines or Web co-ops. Notable examples include Google’s Froogle and Amazon (see “Five Feeds Examined,” below). While few catalogers are claiming that shopping feeds are bringing in huge amounts of money, many in the e-commerce world do admit that they’re

I’ve been thinking a lot about Google these days. Its IPO has been in the news, and “60 Minutes” recently ran a fascinating profile of the company. But there was other news about Google that got only brief media attention and deserved much more, because the announcement was no less than historic: Google’s plan to scan all text from books in five libraries (e.g., the New York Public Library, University of Oxford) and make that content available online and easily searchable. Something like this was a dream of Vannevar Bush, Ph.D., science advisor to President Roosevelt, former director of the Office of

Problem: Sea Eagle needed a way to gauge whether its advertising investments were paying off. Solution: It developed a proprietary ad-tracking solution that ties back to sales data. Results: The merchant of boats and gear now can track back 21 percent of its sales to the cost of promotions, vs. only 10 percent last year. As more and more of its customers migrated to the e-commerce channel, Sea Eagle was losing sight of how it was generating leads. Were they coming from print advertising, search-engine marketing, natural search on the Web or some other method? “We spent $400,000 in print ads

Few catalogers would dispute that e-mail marketing is one of the most cost-effective methods for communicating with customers. And in this day and age, it’s also one of the most hotly contested. Indeed, the e-mail channel is fraught with legal, technical and marketing challenges. This article provides suggestions for keeping your e-mail program legal and ethical, and it offers tips on increasing the chances that your e-mails make it to your customers. The Can Spam Act and You In December, President Bush signed the legislation known as “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Market-ing Act of 2003” or Can Spam. The law,

A computer programmer visited Guess.com last year to look for jeans. Before entering his order, he keyed into the site’s address bar a string of characters, and up popped about 200,000 of Guess.com’s customer names and credit card numbers. His selection of characters wasn’t random. Rather, the code he keyed in is well-known among programmers, and plugging it in is called an SQL (Structured Query Language) injection attack. In June, Guess.com settled for an undisclosed sum with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on charges that it misled consumers by stating in its privacy policy that it protected consumer data when, in fact,