May 08 2008

Search Industry Job of the Week: Account Executive Paid Search

Tag: jobs, pay per click, search industrySarah Parker @ 1:20 pm

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Job Title: Account Executive Paid Search (PPC)
Job Reference #: Unknown
Position Type: full time, permanent
Name of employer: Steak Media
Location: Soho, New York City
Date Posted: 1 May 2008
Position description:

Steak Media are looking for a reliable, ambitious and organized individual with a genuine interest in learning about search engine marketing. The right person will need to display initiative, enthusiasm and integrity while maintaining a high degree of professionalism and maturity. This is a fast moving, fast paced sector with plenty of opportunity for career development.

The bottom line: you’d be responsible for the execution and optimization of paid search (PPC) marketing campaigns for their clients.

They’re looking for a person that is willing to take risks and learn from their mistakes. You will receive hands-on training, but you will need to ask questions to accelerate your growth. You’d be a part of a growing company that is in the ever changing industry of search engine marketing. You’ll be able to learn from the best and develop excellent business skills.
Their logo is a purple bull and you will play a key part in making sure they have ‘Happy Bulls’. Namely, making sure clients are happy.

What exactly will you be doing?

Execution & optimization of paid search accounts can have a lot of moving parts, but here is a general list of everyday tasks that you will be involved in:

  1. Launching new campaigns, ad groups, and keywords.
  2. Generating reports and analysis of past performance.
  3. Reviewing performance of ad copy/creative.
  4. Bid optimization through 3rd party technology platform (e.g.: DART Search).
  5. Generating keyword lists that are relevant to the client’s business objectives.
  6. Quality assurance of tracking, budgets, creative and landing pages.
  7. Updating and monitoring budgets.
  8. Working with 3rd party technology suppliers such as DART.
  9. Search for all aspect of paid search campaign management, including implementation, bid optimization, and reporting.
  10. Generating performance reports and analyzing data to communicate key findings and strategic next steps.
  11. Monitoring budgets and performance to identify new opportunities for improvement.
  12. Speaking with clients to update on status of projects and brainstorm new ideas.
  13. Supporting communication with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other search engines to improve campaign performance and implementation.

Other important bits:

You don’t need to have any previous experience in search marketing. As long as you bring passion and enthusiasm to your training and they’ll turn you into a pro. They’re looking for a recent college graduate or someone with 1-2 years of work experience that wants something new.

Essentials:

You’re not afraid to ask questions, you think of yourself as an excellent writer, you are comfortable speaking within a group, you have a working knowledge of Excel and even know how to use formulas and you pay close attention to detail. They are more interested in the quality of work and not quantity, you enjoy working within a team to achieve a common goal, you can exert yourself professionally over the phone and outside of the office, as you will be representing the company externally and you like working in a busy environment where you’re learning new things every day. You have a college degree. All majors welcome, though you may have an edge if you have a background in Business, Finance/Economics, or English.

Even though they are called Steak, they also welcome vegetarians to apply for the role.

Salary range: Very Competitive
Closing date: Unknown
More info from: [www.steakmedia.com]
Contact: Send resumes to contact.hr[at]steakmedia.com

For more search industry job vacancies visit Search Engine College Jobs Board.

Popularity: 7%


Jan 04 2008

Industry Flashback: Overture Gets Greedy

Tag: flashbacks, pay per click, search enginesKalena Jordan @ 12:18 am

flashbackIt’s a New Year so I’m rolling out a new blog feature: Search Industry Flashbacks.

Some of you new to this blog may not know this, but I actually started blogging about the search industry in July 2002. I was wading through the old blog archives today and having a good old chuckle at the stories that made search headlines back then when it struck me. Those old posts would make blogging gold today! Plus they’ll save me from thinking up new ones.

So without further ado, I give you the first Industry Flashback:

Date: 21 August 2002

Original Post: Overture Gets Greedy

Summary: It’s August 2002 and Overture (later to be bought by Yahoo! and re-branded as Yahoo! Search Marketing) is the main pay per click engine with Google AdWords still playing catch up at this point. As an Overture advertiser, I’m fired up about a new feature they’ve rolled out. I must have been pretty upset as I’ve even compared them to LookSmart:

Content:

An email from Overture to advertisers has sent some shock waves around the SEO community today. Not content to disappoint us with their sneaky Auto-Bidding tool, now Overture calmly announce that their Match Driver tool will ensure your listings will appear for search terms you haven’t even bid on!

That’s right - your ad will appear for searches that you haven’t blatantly specified, meaning you will end up having to pay for clicks you didn’t even want!

In their email, the spin doctors from Overture worded it like this: “The new expanded matching enhancement allows you to receive traffic from more complex user search queries. This feature looks at your term, title and description to match your listings to searches where we believe the intent of the user is to find your product or service even though they have not typed in the exact keywords you’ve bid on”. Makes me wonder if they borrowed LookSmart’s PR team especially for the occasion.

Search engine forums are already abuzz with talk of the so called “enhancement” and it’s not pretty. I’ll keep you posted on developments.

Postscript: The Match Driver tool turned out to be a pre-cursor to the Broad Match or Advanced Match keyword-matching options later introduced by most pay-per-click search engines. And I still don’t like them!

Popularity: 47%