Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category

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Here’s a statement that might shock some PPC managers:

If it is an appropriate time of the day for your ads to show, you never want them to be shut off because your account has hit its budget. If this is happening, you are not spending your money as wisely as you could be.

Let me say that another way: you don’t want your campaigns to hit their daily budget.

Now you’re thinking questions like…”Huh, don’t I want to spend my money to get visitors to my website? Isn’t that the point of PPC advertising?  If I don’t have a budget, how do I keep from spending too much?”  The short answer is bid less.  Let me explain the longer answer with a very general description.

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I love counter-intuitive subjects, games and the like because with some extra study you can put yourself head and shoulders above others.

This is why I make money when I play poker.  In the game of poker, the correct play is often not what an amateur player would expect.  If an amateur sits down at a table and plays with me, they typically make plays they think are right without knowing their odds and how it affects their total profit in the long run.  Most of the time I end up with their money.

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So, I bought a new house and have to get all new appliances.   First stop…Lowe’s.

I go in and have tons of questions.  I’m just starting to look and I don’t know any of the particulars about size, color, functionality, yada yada yada.  I was very happy with the salesman’s knowledge of the products and ability to give me all of the answers I was looking for.  Then, he tried to close me.  Of course, we all have the “one night stand” addiction.  We want everyone to buy on the first encounter.

But, I wasn’t ready for commitment.  I mean, I’m droppin’ over two grand here!!  I had to go and compare, see what the deals were, what sales were going on for President’s Day weekend, yada yada yada.

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A common mistake I seen made when reviewing PPC campaigns is the failure to match keywords with their correct landing pages.  Why does this happen?  Probably because people are taught that their ad groups need to contain keywords that have similar words in them.  What? Isn’t that right?  Well…yes…and no.

It is true to an extent; but only to the extent that each of the keywords that you are grouping as similar should be landing on the same landing page.  Ad groups should be organized not only for keywords, but also for landing pages.

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We regularly get email something similar to this:

I’m just one guy running my business. I want a great PPC program and I heard you can cater to someone like me. Can you help me?

I typically respond to questions like this very carefully because there isn’t a simple yes/no answer. I don’t want to provide false hope because yes, I do create great PPC programs, but much of the success is going to depend heavily on the website. Let’s look at a few things relevant to the campaigns first.
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I attended ion Interactive’s “Extreme Makeover: Landing Page” series this week. On Wednesday landing pages for lead generation were addressed, then today landing pages for transactions were covered. I found both of these webinars provided good information, however I felt they weren’t much different from each other. The advantage for attending both was that I was able to see/view more examples.

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Over the previous weeks I have made a deliberate point of talking about how important it is to use Keyword negatives to save money in your paid ad campaigns. I thought I would put together a quick lists of these top ten ways for saving money.

Let’s keep it really simple, counting down from #10:

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We’ve previously looked at Paid Search Advertising Roadmap, Paid Search Rules and Alphabet Soup and PPC. Now let’s start looking at keyword matching. How well do you understand match types?

Each of the three major PPC platforms follow a similar approach, with Google AdWords and MSN adCenter using essentially identical match types and Yahoo! Search Marketing being a little more confusing. If you can get your head around the different terminology in the three platforms then you’re going to be just fine.

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• What Not to Do When Managing PPC Campaigns
• Judging PPC Performance: Focus on Conversions
• Using PPC To Mess With The Competition

• PPC Management: Keyword List Expansion + Negative Keywords
• Don’t make this mistake! How your landing page headline may be driving customers away.
• Q&A: What is a good Click Through Rate?
• Landing page strategy