Online marketing is no different, and in competitive markets, saturation can be a challenge. Here are some tips to ensure you’re controlling as many spaces on a page as possible.

First, let’s define how many spots are available. For any given query, Google will return 10 organic listings and approximately 11 paid listings. That’s, on average, 22 opportunities for you to gain or lose a click.

Your job, as someone who wants to control the market for that query, is to place yourself in as many spaces as possible. There are a few ways to do that.

Read the entire article at Search Engine Watch.

Contextual advertising systems scan a web page for some specific keywords and then display the ads related to that page. Contextual ads can also be placed on the search engine result pages which are relevant to the search topic. This way contextual advertising makes it possible to distribute your company’s brand across numerous web pages.

Contextual advertising offers a multitude of advantages. It allows advertisers to reach their target audience and drive massive traffic to the website. The vast majority of contextual advertising providers use pay per click (PPC) systems, meaning you pay only if your ad has been clicked. Another big advantage of contextual advertisements is that they’re less annoying in comparison with pop-up ads or huge banners. If the information you provide is helpful, the chances are the visitor will become your loyal customer or recommend your site to friends or co-workers.

Read more from Ecommerce Journal.

The company has built its fortune almost entirely on the back of small text ads, which appear alongside its search results and on sites across the Web. Now it is stepping up efforts to make inroads into graphical display ads, a business long dominated by Yahoo.

On Friday, the company plans to introduce a long-awaited new version of an ad exchange, like a stock market, where advertisers and publishers can buy and sell advertising space, filling spots in Web pages on the fly.

Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, has said repeatedly that display advertising offers one of the company’s best prospects for expansion, now that growth in its text ad business has slowed significantly. The new advertising exchange is a cornerstone of Google’s display strategy, and one of the main reasons Google bought the ad company DoubleClick last year for $3.1 billion.

More from The New York Times.

2009 will be the first year that ad spending online is greater than local and national spot TV, with online expenditures rising from 10.6% of the total in 2008 to 12.2% this year. The rise in market share will occur despite a 0.5% drop in spending forecast for online in 2009, to $24.55 billion.

Read more from eMarketer.com.

Pay Per Click Ads the Price of an Appetizer

Can you entice a hungry person to visit you with just a few words? One might think compared to television ads that showcase a delicious dish in all its glory, a simple text ad along the right side of Google search results won’t attraction much attention. Truth is, PPC advertising, if budgeted correctly, is more affordable than radio or TV, and can be customized to reach specific markets – so you’re not advertising beyond your physical locations. Whether you specialize in steak, seafood, or ethnic cuisine, you can create a list of search keywords on which to bid. Giving Web users the name of an actual restaurant alongside standard directory listings lets people know they can find more information with an actual source.

PPC Cooks Organically

Operate an effective pay per click campaign, whether through Bing, Google Adwords, or Yahoo Search Marketing, and you might find your organic search results improve with the keywords on which you bid. It’s no secret that the cost per click on certain words in Google comes cheaply if you are able to create a high quality score ad (that is, the landing page and ad text are relevant to the keywords), but a bit of PPC help may offer a boost to traditional results, so much that they exceed in click-throughs to your site.

PPC Boosts Social Presence

Restaurants with Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts will see an advantage in specialized pay per click programs with Facebook. Since these ads can be geographically targeted, you can select as specific an audience as you want to advertise your business. Entice visitors to join your fan page to receive discounts or free appetizers and desserts, and build trust among diners who could become regular patrons, and in turn do the advertising for you via word of mouth.

However you choose to advertise your dining establishment, don’t discount the advantages to online paid advertising.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on local pay per click advertising and professional social media services.

The search giant on Thursday took the wraps off a revamped DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a public exchange that allows publishers to offer excess ad inventory they can’t sell to advertisers looking for a bargain. Google said the exchange will meld DoubleClick’s ad exchange with Google’s own technology.

Read the entire article from CNet.

A ranking emerged based on the number of clicks each ad received out of the number of pages it appeared upon. His original idea came in at a .21 percent click-through rate, Sloan writes, while a name he’d been most fond of netted a paltry .07 percent.

Sloan admits the exercise was “mostly an excuse to try a new tool,” but he’s also got his eye on the possibilities. “I mean, imagine—this is the sci-fi extrapolation—imagine highlighting a block of text, choosing a menu item called Test the way you’d choose Spellcheck today, and when you do, a little timer appears next to it,” he writes.

Read more at The Utne Reader.

Hiring PPC Management vs. In-House

Think of your own business and the methods employed in hiring new workers and integrating them into the company. Do you have training procedures, or orientation seminars? Depending on the scope of your business, training could take time, and it does cost money. Now consider having to train workers to better handle new paradigms in marketing. To ensure excellent service in pay per click advertising, you will want your employees to work at certified level.

Or, you can outsource a local PPC firm with certification to handle the work for you while your marketing department oversees the reports and approves the budget. You save the time it would normally take for your workers to become familiar with AdWords, and your marketers can concentrate on other aspects of work. Training for certification can become a gradual process while your PPC firm kick-starts the program.

PPC Advertising vs. Other Media

Why do Google and Yahoo and others offer certification at all? PPC advertising vastly differs from other media – with print and broadcast marketing one can deliver a message with impact using imagery and sound. PPC text ads offer an abbreviated space to relay a message, and the words used must be chosen carefully. Not only will the ad’s words determine whether or not a visitor clicks through to a site, but the relevancy of the ad on the keywords bid can determine the overall cost of the ad. Training to better understand how the ads work can help you not only craft an ad that works, but help you get the most out of your daily spends.

If your marketing department has no certified ad consultants on staff, outsourcing a firm specializing in AdWords and other search programs is a good way to maintain a successful PPC campaign for your business. Let those who know which words to use create the ads that drive your traffic.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on local PPC advertising firms and professional SEO writers.

What Are Negative Keywords?

Google Adwords applies this term to words and phrases one doesn’t wish to trigger an ad impression. Let’s say, for example, you have a campaign to advertise your collectibles shop. You have set up ads to promote baseball cards, but don’t wish to attract people looking for other types of trading cards. Consequently, you don’t want to waste bid money on phrases that may bring up your ad when searched by people not looking for baseball cards. Setting your negative keywords can help prevent the unnecessary impressions.

So in your keyword list, you might add “-pokemon” or “-movie” to filter out searches for these kinds of trading cards.

Using Negative Keywords

Setting up negative keywords in your ad campaigns is quite simple. They may be included in each individual ad group, or set to affect the campaign as a whole. Depending on how you wish to see your ads perform, you may want to limit specific words to ad groups, so as to better manage performance. Google provides a tool within the Adwords program to assist you in determining which words are best to use.

By customizing your PPC advertising to filter out certain words and phrases, you provide for a more streamlined online ad campaign that can reduce the cost per click on your ads, and in turn raise the return on investment. You will attract visitors truly looking for the products and services you offer, and your bids won’t go to waste.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on local PPC advertising and professional SEO writing services.

So how can you really mess up your PPC program? If you know what not to do to succeed, it’s quite easy.

Use one ad for the entire campaign – Especially for multi-faceted businesses, keeping one ad to sustain a PPC campaign is a killer. You’re forced to squeeze the whole scope of your company into three short lines, thereby risking the loss of click-throughs by people searching for something specific.

Target only one demographic – If you’re business caters to more than one geographic target, putting all your PPC eggs in one region alienates would-be customers from other places you serve. Online businesses with a nationwide reach, too, stand the chance of losing visitors who utilize local search to find products and services.

Don’t create landing pages for ads – Let’s say you do use multiple ads in your campaign. Sending all ads to the same Web page, whether relevant or not, could result in a drop in visitors. People click on ads and expect to be taken right where they want to be, without having to mine through pages. Forcing people to search further only irritates, it doesn’t convert.

Don’t use proper keywords in the title – Assuming a person uses “baseball cards” in search, he’s likely to click on an ad that uses that phrase in the title. Placing irrelevant keywords in the title – especially your company’s name, if it doesn’t appear to have anything to do with your line of business – will probably cause people to scroll past your ad.

So pay attention to these tips, and do the exact opposite to ensure you don’t fall into any traps.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on local PPC advertising and SEO writing services.