Beyond the Basics Pay Per Click Advertising

by Conrad Saam

Pay per click, or PPC, is a common method of paying for advertising impressions. People who advertise via PPC only pay when someone clicks on their ad. Google AdWords is the largest PPC provider due to their massive reach.  The other major players are Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo.

The Quality Score
In the early days of PPC advertising, the advertiser who appeared the highest was the one with the highest per-click bid. But now your ad ranking is determined by both your per-click bid and your Quality Score. For each keyword you bid on, you’ll get a Quality Score (QS) between 1 and 10. Your ad ranking for each keyword is based on factors that include both the pay-per-click bid and the quality score for that keyword.
The QS is the search engines’ way of favoring ads that have a high click-through rate. Those ads are favored, both because people click on them (which makes them money) and because they’re likely to be the most relevant ads (which also makes them money). They also want to avoid favoring ads that nobody clicks on or that turn out to be misleading, because that harms the AdWords brand. The QS helps Google to make sure that ads are both relevant and high-quality – that is, so that visitors who click on an ad get to a landing page that satisfies them.

How is QS Calculated?
As with the engines’ methods of determining which pages rank for given queries, the search engines deliberately keep the inner workings of the quality score secret as proprietary information. But Google has released the following list of factors that affect the QS:
• The click-through rate for the keyword and the ad on Google.
• The click-through rate of the ads and keywords in your account.
• The click-through rate for display URLS in that ad group.
• The quality of the landing page that your ad leads to.

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Social Media Trifecta for Restaurants and Hotels Generate More Revenue, Builds Brand Loyalty

By Scott Lambert

Social media may be one of the newer kids on the Internet marketing block but it has rapidly taken off over the last year. Just about everyone, from your neighbor to your parents, has a social media profile.
But social media is not just for individuals who want to share pictures of their pets or post random comments. Businesses are using it to their advantage too.

According to the latest research by StrongMail, 57% of businesses plan to increase their spending in Social Media in 2011, second only to Email marketing (65%) and ahead of Search Marketing (41%).

Hotels, Restaurants Benefit Greatly from Social Media If Done Right
Hotels and restaurants are some of those businesses realizing that they too can use social media to market like never before. But most are unsure how to best utilize the different social media networks and how to focus on the ones that will work for them.

If that’s you, you’re not alone. But first things first – let’s talk about the three social media platforms that are ideal for hotels and restaurants and how you can use them to generate revenue to your place of business.

So what is the Social Media Trifecta?
There are several types of social media platforms on the market but the key is finding the right mix for the hotel and restaurant industry. We’ve done the leg work for you upfront and determined the following three to be ideal for the food and lodging industry:

1.    Facebook
2.    Twitter
3.    Foursquare

Each one of these social media sites can stand alone or be integrated to work together for a more powerful marketing punch. They will help you brand your company, provide a platform for meaningful dialogue between you and your audience, and set your business apart from the competition that may have yet to harness the full potential of an effective social media campaign.

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Filling Empty Seats Cheap!

Mobile Marketing is a Proven, Cost-Effective Means to Increase Store Traffic and Profits
By Conrad Carney II

A customer and her family visit a restaurant on an otherwise slow night.  She shows her cell phone to her server and shares that she had received a mobile promotion on her phone that day from the restaurant offering free kids meals with each adult entree purchase.  “With three kids that’ll save us over $10, which is great,” the customer says, adding that her family had planned on going to another restaurant until receiving the mobile promotion.  The manager and owner are happy to hear about this exchange as they were able to reach this customer for just a few cents compared to the significantly higher per-customer cost of traditional advertising.

Many restaurateurs hear of mobile text marketing and wonder, “How can I get started?  What do I need to do?”  Relax!  It’s not rocket science and you don’t have to be a “Techie” to have a mobile media presence for your restaurant.  

The decision to add mobile to your advertising and marketing mix is an easy one.  Nearly all of your customers, and potential customers, carry a mobile phone.  As an ad medium, over 95% of text messages are read by the consumer within 4 minutes of being received. 

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