Free is always good right? Not necessarily. So there is no free lunch right?  That's not always true either.  So what am I babbling about?

A practice quite common in the online media world is giving out free banner impressions. Publishers do this for various reasons. Sometimes they are not able to sell all banner inventories to advertisers and rather than running self promotion banners, it looks better on the properties if ads from real advertisers are shown. Other times they just like to under promise and over deliver so every time advertisers and agencies think they are getting a good deal.

So what's wrong with this you say?  What's the harm in getting more exposure if it's free?

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I've finally decided to scrap the site of syndicated links and start writing again. 

Guess I simply realized that it's more rewarding to write than to tag and redistribute industry news. 

So, I am officially back and I look forward to seeing more people subscribe (I hope) to my humble blog.

I had been watching some of these TED Talks and I notice Seth Godin did one of these in 2003. I am a subscriber to his blogs and am quite impressed by his ideas and volume of posts.

If you have 17:13 minutes to spare, I'd highly recommend watching his presentation.

Knowing your target audiences' search behaviour is extremely important in PPC advertising.  It affects your click costs, advertising message, bidding strategy, and of course the campaign's ROI.

Besides keyword research tools and historical data from campaign and site analytics, another useful but not often mentioned tool is Google Trends.

Trends allow one to enter multiple keywords and compare historical search 'trends' of those words in Google. Therefore one can easily see the dynamics between marketing/news and search behaviours. (at least of Google users)

To illustrate, let's pretend I operate an online video games export web site and am looking to use PPC in Google to promote my products to the China market.  (in this case Google might not be my only vehicle as their penetration of the Chinese search market is not substantial)  I got a list of keywords using Google's keyword research tools, have a set budget, my maximum cost per acquisition calculated but I am at a lost as to how popular each platform is in this market.  Since I am new to the market, I am also not sure which city has the highest demand.

So I call up Google Trends and type in a few popular keywords.  (click on the image below) 

From the result page, I am able to tell there are more people searching for "PSP" and of those searches, most of them came from the city of Shanghai.
This means that I'll most likely exert more efforts in targeting the PSP crowd and will also geo target Shanghai.  Of course I might discovered that bidding for PSP related keywords might be fierce and those searching for the popular keyword might not turn out to be a customer.  But at least now I have more insight into the market and can plan my campaign strategies more effectively. 

I think Google Trends still have a lot of room to improve, eg: can't compare results between countries, geo info not always accurate as it relies on IP tracking, limited database prevents research into less popular keywords, 4 months lag in data, etc. but it does show promise and is a good visualization tool for assisting in campaign research.

* Google Trends is also available in Simplified Chinese

Last week I was asked what I thought about the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) industry in Asia right now compared to a few years ago.  From the amount of activities such as seminars, workshops, and even advertising in mainstream media (mostly targeting SMEs for Pay-Per-Click services) the market is definitely being educated.  This is a good sign, especially when the rest of the "developed" SEM markets are reporting double digit percentages of their overall media spent being used online while most of APAC is still stuck in single digits, SEM can be a strong driving force in advancing the use of this extremely effective medium. 

I think most online marketers in APAC will agree that compared to the US and Europe, our industry is still in its infancy not because we are technically behind but because consumer demand is simply not there yet.  While we see a staggering increase in online users and stronger growth rates than the rest of the world, online commerce is still not widely (or not as widely) accepted compared to the developed markets.  There are various reasons for the slowly than expected growth - geographic conveniences, language barriers, slow adaptation of medium by sellers, etc. but I think we are at the point where we can expect to see some strong growth in this region in the next few years as the economy keeps marching ahead.

Let's hope advertisers do something creative in the process to spice things up.