In an interesting post, John Ellis points out the "Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Pay-Per-Click Advertisers".

A brief introduction to the Seven Ways to score include:

• Separate Content from Search: "The separation provides much more insight into what is working, and more importantly what is not working."
• Control spending by adjusting bid amounts, not daily spend budget
• Create a negative keyword list
• Conversion matters, not click-through rate (CTR)

According to Click Fraud Index, as high as a quarter of all clicks for high priced search terms could be fraud. The report findings show that the industry average of click frauds has gone up from 13.7 percent in the first quarter of 2006 to 14.8 percent for the same period in 2007.

The figures for the content network are higher at 21.9 percent. But the highest rates of click frauds are for terms priced above $2.00. The industry average in this segment stands at 22.2 percent.

The search engine marketing industry is all set for growth owing to significant increase in spending by big advertisers. According to MediaPost, Jupiter Research has found that companies with annual revenues exceeding $50 million plan to spend 25% more on search engine marketing. While these advertisers form a significant 26% of total advertisers, another 28% of advertisers will be spending 11% to 25% more.

If your PPC campaign is not exactly gold standard, how many mistakes do you think you might be making? There is a post by IgorMord at SEOmoz which lists as many as 17 mistakes that are common in PPC campaigns. Now, the interesting part is he says taht with fixing of each mistake you can earn upto 70% revenue or save thousands of dollars every month.

A leading search technologies firm, FAST, has developed AdMomentum which is a private-label contextual advertising and monetization platform for online media companies, retailers and telecommunications service providers.

The service aims to do away with third party contextual advertising service providers, such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN. John M. Lervik, CEO of FAST, says that:

Publishers want to maintain control of their revenue, serving their advertisers and audiences more effectively, and this has been difficult to do with third-party platforms. With FAST AdMomentum, we give that control and independence back to publishers – enabling them for the first time to fully monetize their assets without having to share revenues or risk customer disintermediation.

Microsoft adCenter has sent out a notification to some publishers stating that they will be automatically included in a Content Ads Pilot Program beginnning 1/25/07. A member at WebmasterWorld Forums stated that:

The email stated that my current settings will be changed and I will HAVE to start using the new Content Beta. With NO option to opt out, just stating that it is going to happen on 1/25/07.

MIVA has launched the MIVA Monetization Center which enables webmasters and publishers different options to monetize their website. The new pay per click service actually comprises of three different kinds of ads on their site. These are:

Content Ads:
This contextual ads score over similar offerings from Google and Yahoo! by offering the publishers an option to specify keywords for placement of relevant ads.

Many Microsoft adCenter advertisers have reported having received mails saying that their campaigns may undergo an editorial audit. One of the members at WebmasterWorld Forums reported that:

hhh, i just received an email from AdCenter that my campaigns 'may' undergo an editorial audit. Is this based on what? a random audit?
PS: earlier in the day , there was another email welcoming me to 'contents' network.

Google has updated its AdSense policies which have only gotten more sterner for the publishers. Publishers will get affected a lot by this change.

There was a time when search ads on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and others was a powerful marketing tool for small and medium online retailers to directly reach their customers and make large and quick bucks. But now the story  has changed drastically with coming of big brands such as Best Buy Co, Zale Corp and many more who are investing large bucks in search ads. This has led online buyers to the big companies which they know instead of clicking on ads and purchasing from small and unknown retailers. The price per click on the search ads have gone by 31% in a year. The result is small merchants are going back to the traditional source of advertising - print and radio. They are buying less keywords and phrases and trying out ads on sites like YouTube, MySpace besides giving ads on blogs and niche shopping sites. But for now Google and Yahoo! are not worried as the big brands are pouring enough money in search making up for loss suffered from small merchants.