Paid Search In The News

Two good articles caught my eye today. The first is about the folks who work for Google writing Adwords ads (from the LA Times):

She crafts text ads to intrigue Web surfers because advertisers don't pay Google unless the ads are clicked on. She has only three short lines — of 25, 35 and 35 characters each — and a link to make her pitch.

The other is about a topic near and dear to my heart - why paid search gets 95% of the budget when it only delivers 15-20% of the traffic. In this case, wise man Gord Hotchkiss calls it the 70/30 rule:

I asked the audience which section of the page they normally look at first. Almost every hand in the audience went up when I got to the top organic results. This was no great surprise. From our research into search user behavior, I was pretty sure this would be the case. Then I asked who in the audience dedicated at least 30% of their search marketing budget to organic optimization. A very few hands went up, probably less than 3% of the audience.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at June 7, 2005 07:02 PM