Introductions and the beauty of pay per click..
I’m a search manager for an media agency, I manage accounts and deal with clients to do with the search spectrum - something that I hold more than a passing interest in. My first exposure to search was running a small adwords campaign several years ago, prior to my undergraduate degree. In a professional capacity, I started in an entry level grass roots analyst role and worked from that role to an executive and beyond. This time has given me experience across almost every online marketing vertical, most of which were extremely competitive in both click cost and conversion achievement costs.
I’m young - only 24, but I’ve always been involved with the internet since an early age and i have always wanted to be on the cusp of an emerging technology in order to be able to ride the exciting changes and problems that this early uptake could introduce. It is clear for anyone to see that online marketing and in particular search marketing is still extremely immature and direction for advancement is clear by taking components from various sources. The great thing about search is its current state of constant flux, that someone who operates outside of it for six months is already a proverbial dinosaur in the field. If you are entering it now, outside of the basics - be wary of what people teach you as fact and “best practice”, particularly if they haven’t had search exposure in the past 12 months. “Best practice” is one of those brilliant misnomers that is consistently miss-used. “Best Practice” 12 months ago meant spending £50,000 a month on some accounts that can now barely shift a tenth of that at a acceptable rate. Things change, engines change and the search world moves extremely fast.
What I find most interesting about search is the way in which the market essentially calculates its own value based on the profit margins of the companies involved. The jostling for position and attention by advertisers certainly mimics something that you might expect to see on an Attenborough documentary. If you could significantly lower your bottom line costs for your product, you could potentially engulf your selected portion of the search market - although this high level of change and spend attitude is not something that has happened in my experience yet.
One of the beauties of Pay Per Click is the way in which it discards popular marketing paradigms in its transparency when it is employed correctly. You generally know exactly how well that it is working, and if a desirable level has been achieved - pushing it for superior performance is possible. Currently, pay per click is treated in a different way to that of regular advertising and marketing media in that its accountability is considerably higher and it is kept on a significantly tighter leash - however I think this attitude is likely to leak across into other mediums as the assimilation and conversion of technologies continues to occur.
The purpose of this blog is really an information and technique sharing device, detailing some of the more important rules of pay per click and changes within the field. I will elaborate and clarify upon the themes mentioned above..
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