SEOOptimize blog recently posted on the ComScore travel study about “10 Ways to Improve your Google PPC Campaign“.  Some of these tips make sense only for the biggest businesses, but there’s information in here about the purchase decision timing and marketing targets that could be helpful for many kinds of travel businesses.  For instance, people are 30% more likely to purchase a vacation package on a Monday or Tuesday — so you might consider targeting more of your PPC budget to those days.  Everything helps in this lousy market.

Ad position is important — higher on the first search result page translates into more clicks (not always more sales!). Google’s Quality Score for your ad is one factor that determines position. It is based on the keyword match between query and ad, your maximum CPC bid, and the quality of your landing page.

Now Google is updating how the Quality Score is calculated. The Score will be calculated dynamically. Instead of a minimum CPC, you will be shown the estimated bid price for a first page ad position. And, the system will no longer mark some keywords as unavailable to an advertiser based on a past Quality Score. See the details in Google’s blog post on Quality Score Improvements.

Microsoft reaches into its deep pockets to offer cash back on its comparison shopping site. A challenge to Google?

Steve Baldwin has a nice post about it over at Mediapost, with some thoughts about whether or not it moves us closer to the CPA (cost per action) holy grail.  I wanted to check this out for myself, even willing to sign up for the service by giving the Empire my name, but when I went to search.live.com and tried to click on the Cash Back image link, I got an error message.  On the actual Microsoft site.  Isn’t that perfect?