Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) has been on the top of advertisers' priority lists for a while now. These have historically been the primary and least expensive ways to drive traffic to a Web site. But what if you're among the top search results and the traffic doesn't come? Microsoft's new Bing "Decision Engine" is starting to change the landscape for search engines. It's goal is to push relevant, quality content directly through to the user, keeping traffic from clicking off.

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The simple answer is one word: Relevance. In fact, the only reason to even bother enhancing and fine-tuning your targeting strategy is to be able to speak to a specific audience with a relevant message of interest to them.

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You know who your best audience is. You've done the market research and compiled mass amounts of analytics on past campaigns telling you exactly what segments of the consumer population are most likely to become your customers. Now, how do you reach them?

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The Fourth Digital Advertising Campaign Type - PART 2

A dynamic CPM or dCPM campaign works the same as a CPM campaign in that you set a bid that is a flat price for one thousand impressions and add a CPC or CPA goal to optimize toward. The important difference is that with CPM, the ad server can only pay the exact bid amount for each impression, regardless of the goal. With dCPM and with the advent of RTB exchanges, each ad call can be evaluated in real time to determine what the impression is worth and the DSP can bid that price. In the end, it will average out to the set bid price or just under.

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Everyone's intimately familiar with the standard available pricing models for online advertising campaigns: cost per action (CPA), cost per click (CPC), and cost per thousand impressions (CPM). What's emerged in the industry along side RTB exchange technology is something called dynamic cost per thousand impressions, or dCPM.

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Given the ever-declining response rates from e-mail marketing initiatives, e-mail list management is a top priority for retailers. Consumers who opt-in to receive e-mail from a retailer will hold that brand personally responsible for how it uses e-mail. When they unsubscribe, they expect to do it once. Having a central system for list management simplifies the process, ensuring unsubscribe requests take effect system-wide. Further, a centralized list management system can help ensure compliance with CAN-SPAM and reduce SPAM scores by improving the quality of the messages.

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There are a few clear benefits to multi-location retailers for keeping a single Web site rather than maintaining multiple and separate sites per location or category, which we discussed in part three of this series. There are also some clear pitfalls that can easily be avoided, such as the following top five:

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Content Optimization

Knowing how to optimize your content means knowing your audience. What key phrases do they type in when looking for your products or services? What language do they use? Your audience conduct queries using their own vocabulary, so plain spoken content rich with these specific phrases is always the way to go. Avoid using industry jargon or clever turns of phrase. Headlines are the most important pieces of content on the page to optimize linguistically...

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Strategic Versatility

The beauty of Internet marketing is that you can adjust strategy based on performance. If you're attracting a good amount of traffic for certain phrases, you can easily look at how that traffic is behaving and adjust your strategy accordingly.

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The Rewards of Research

The first step in any search campaign is research. Build lists of keywords and phrases to target, bucket them into groups such as audience segments and employ a tool to accurately forecast your results based on budget.

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