I’ve read that the best way to win an argument is to tell a story, so I got one for you. Well, no. I’m not a good story teller, but I can throw together a pretty decent analogy.

Let’s say you have a pile of money and you need to “invest” it. As with any investment there is potential to fail. The question is, where to invest?

You have two options:

1) Invest the whole pile in one place.
2) Split it up and invest in multiple areas.

The saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” comes to mind. After all, when playing poker, you usually don’t go “all in” on the first hand. You spread it around, (hopefully) winning more as you go.

Online marketing isn’t all that much different. Diversification is a good thing (unless you have very little to diversify to begin with, then you have to build up to that). Before diversifying, you have to make sure you have enough to invest in one area to ensure its successful return on investment. If your budget is frog-butt tight, this post probably isn’t for you. If you have–or dream of having–a larger marketing budget, then keep reading. The good stuff is yet to come.

Diversifying Your Online Investment

I want to preface this section by repeating that you can only diversify your online marketing if you have enough budget to ensure the success of each. If you invest too little into SEO or PPC, ultimately your ROI will be a loooong time in coming, or you will find yourself outpaced by your competition that is investing in business growth.

Aside from the fact many businesses are not willing to invest enough in online marketing, the next biggest issue is having an unbalanced approach. Throwing your entire marketing budget at SEO may reap you HUGE rewards. But, you’re still missing out on a significant portion of business, and therefore profits, if you ignore PPC altogether. Similarly, if you throw everything at PPC and ignore SEO, again, you’re missing out on a lot of lower-cost conversions that SEO delivers.

Let’s not forget to mention that if all your money is in one and something goes bad, you have no secondary source to keep the revenue flowing! The key is to take a more balanced approach to your online marketing efforts. That’s where the 3-3-3 approach comes in. Or, as I like to call it, the 3-3-3 Online Investment Model. Catchy, isn’t it?

The 3-3-3 Online Investment Model

There are three key areas of online marketing investment:

• SEO – search engine optimization
• PPC – pay per click
• CSML – content, social media and link building

The idea here is to split your spending between these three areas pretty equally. If you have $30,000 to spend on marketing each month, as tempting as it may be, don’t throw it all into your PPC ad spend. It boggles me when I see companies spending that kind of money on PPC but only a couple thousand on SEO.

Why does this kind of discrepancy happen? I think mainly because PPC is so much more trackable than SEO. This makes PPC appear much more lucrative than SEO, when, in actuality it isn’t. PPC accounts for only about 1/3 of the total clicks in the search results. Plus, it usually isn’t as cost-efficient, delivering conversions at a higher costs than you’d get with SEO. This means that it would be wiser to put more money into SEO than PPC.

I wouldn’t recommend dumping PPC for SEO entirely, but splitting up your budget between the two is smart marketing. You could easily get away with throwing $20,000 of your $30,000 budget toward SEO. But this doesn’t fit the 3-3-3 model. Or does it?

In a way, it does. Often times, content marketing, social media and/or link building are wrapped into SEO. All three are tied closely together as linking is, or at least should be, a part of any successful SEO contract. The problem is, linking is difficult and time consuming so it can often get bypassed by the sexier on-page optimization aspects.

By using the 3-3-3 model, you are placing equal investment into linking as you are on-page optimization. Again, that is smart marketing. Take your $30,000 budget, put $10K to content, linking and social, $10K to SEO and leave the last $10K for PPC. That gives you a robost on-page, off-page and PPC marketing strategy that is drawing traffic and building reputation through not one, but three different sources, all adding to the value and overall growth of your business.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

The question is, what do you do with your keyword lists once you’ve compiled them?

Just as there is no shortage of good keyword tools, there is also no shortage of metrics that you can use to determine the value of any given keyword. A few that tend to top our keyword selections lists are:

• Search volume: How many searches per day or month are being performed for each phrase. The higher the volume, the greater the opportunity to drive traffic to your site.

• Search competition: How many sites are displayed when performing a search using a keyword.

• Title competition: How many sites are displayed when performing a search for the keyword only in title tags.

• Direct Competition: Whether a specific competitor ranks for any particular keyword.

• KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index): A score based on how often a keyword is searched balanced against keyword competition.

Each of these metrics provides valuable insight, but they ultimately should not be used in selecting keywords. Stats like these can tell us what is happening with the keywords, but it can’t tell us why. And unless you know why something is, it’s impossible to make a smart decision about it.

Here is what the stats don’t tell us:

• Search volume: How many of these searches are actually relevant? Will the searcher find what their search intended on your site?

• Search competition: Are the sites ranking for these keywords legitimate competition? Are they truly optimized sites?

• Title competition: Are these competitors that cannot be defeated? How many of them will be easy to topple?

• Direct Competition: Do you know if your competitors are getting any value from ranking for these keywords?

• KEI: Does a competitive score mean you shouldn’t try to rank for the keyword? Is there long-term value in trying?

Looking at keywords in terms of volume or difficulty is a good measure for setting expectations in terms of time and budget it will take to get your site ranked. Looking at whether your competitors rank for that phrase only tells you whether your competitors rank for a phrase. For all you know they have performed zero keyword research, or went after a phrase because someone else did. That’s not a good signal by itself.

The problem with looking at any of the signals and data above is it does not tell you anything about searcher intent or whether you can convert those keywords into sales. It’s good data to have, but not the data you need to make good keyword selection decisions.

To do that, you need to apply this simple three-rule test for keyword selection:

1. Is the keyword relevant to your target audience? There are a lot of keywords that are seemingly relevant, but when you look closer at visitor intent, you find that the searcher is looking for something different entirely. Not even all “industry relevant” keywords will be relevant to your products or services in particular. Be sure to analyze visitor intent for each of your keywords. Unfortunately, the only tool that can do that is your brain.
2. Will the keyword deliver traffic? This question cannot be answered until the question above is. Not all traffic is the same, so you need to make sure it’s targeted traffic. Don’t let high search volume bias you. Even low volume keywords can deliver a fantastic amount of targeted traffic when combined with other long-tail phrases.
3. Will the traffic sent by the keyword convert? You can take your best guess here, but only time and analytics will tell. Every keyword you invest any significant amount of time in optimizing for SEO or PPC should be able to convert your visitors into customers. Spend more time investing in keywords with higher conversion rates.

The simplified version of this three-rule test is: Relevancy, Traffic and Conversions. Every good keyword should be able to satisfy each of these satisfactorily. If they are lacking anywhere, then the value of the keyword will also be lacking.

You can select relevant keywords that drive traffic, but if you can’t convert them, maybe it’s not as relevant as you thought. You can select relevant traffic that converts, but if the traffic isn’t there. Conversions will be sparse. If you select high-volume keywords that occasionally convert, but without the relevance, the conversion rates will be low and your effort will be high. Not a good mix for productivity!

There may be some wiggle-room between each keyword, but ultimately, you only want to select keywords that will deliver performance on all three levels. If not, then you may just be wasting your time! The best keywords are keywords that you have determined to be relevant and have tested to get results. Nothing else really matters.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Final Lap time again! Check out some of the great stuff our team The Pit Crew read during the week of October 24.

Stoney deGeyter (@StoneyD)

Discussion: Should SEOs Accept Clients That Compete With One Another?
by Matt McGee

Whether you’re a solo consultant or part of a bigger agency, chances are good that you’ll eventually be faced with this situation: the opportunity to provide consulting for two companies that are in competition with one another. In our “Discussion of the Week,” we’d like to hear your advice for handling that situation. Should SEOs accept clients that compete against one another? If so, what are the best ways to deal with potential risks of doing so? The floor is open!

Mike Fleming (@mflem25)

How Search Conversions Are Driven By Display Impression Frequency
by Manu Mathew

Along with the most obvious campaign attributes that impact cross-channel marketing performance — traits like publisher, size, creative, keyword, placement, etc. — are a number of less intuitive factors that can significantly influence your results. Among these more ancillary factors is “frequency” — specifically the frequency with which online users are exposed to a given marketing tactic in advance of an eventual conversion.

5 ways to use the new Google Analytics Real Time features
by Helen Birch

In certain situations real-time data can be a very powerful tool in the analyst’s kitbag. I’ve been testing the real-time reports for a few weeks now and whilst there is still room for improvement, I’ve been able to help a client find out some great insights on events that have been occurring which otherwise would have been a lot harder to discover.

LANDING PAGE QUALITY SCORE
by George Michie

As Pamela Parker described at SEL earlier this month, Google has announced that going forward, landing page quality will be a larger factor in an ad’s overall Quality Score. Given that my last post for SEL was on Quality Score and suggested that landing page quality was mostly a hammer used to beat up bad actors and didn’t have much meaning for legitimate businesses, this announcement was a bit embarrassing. It also made me curious as to how quality will be defined.

Jen Carroll (@martijen)

Pinterest stands out in crowded social media field
by Adam Belz

Time magazine called Pinterest — a website where users post collections of images of their favorite food, clothes, places and everything else — one of the five best social media sites of 2011, along with Google-Plus and Klout. The company has raised $27 million in venture capital led by the firm Andreessen Horowitz, which several tech news outlets have reported as valuing Pinterest at $200 million.

Nobody Gives A Damn About Your Klout Score
by Alexia Tsotsis

Klout’s pervasive problem is that the deeper among us are never going to judge anyone based solely on some arbitrary decimal score. Especially when that decimal number ranks teenbot Justin Beiber at 100, but precludes me from claiming Windows Phone 7 “Klout Perk” and tickets to a Matt and Kim concert because I don’t have enough technology Klout.

Google Plus Finds Sweet Spot Between Facebook & Twitter
by Jon Mitchell

Google Plus got a few more fun features today in addition to workplace ones. There’s a new feature called What’s Hot that surfaces popular posts (don’t call them “trending”), and a very cool visualization tool called Ripples that lets you watch Plus conversations flow out across the network. These are neat ways to track social activity that Facebook and Twitter don’t offer.

What’s the best thing about online marketing that you read this week? Leave us your comments.

Our team The Pit Crew has read some informative and helpful articles on Web marketing this week. Here are our picks.

Mike Fleming (@mflem25)

PPC Streamcap – Dealing With PPC Struggles
by Matthew Umbro

In the transcribed Streamcap from live chat, Matthew explores questions like, “What proactive measures do you take to ensure client satisfaction when results are less than satisfactory?” and “What has been your primary reason for losing PPC clients?” Lots of insight here!

Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value
by Avinash Kaushik

I am going to break one of my unspoken cardinal rules: Only write about real problems and measurement that is actually possible in the real world. I am going to break the second part of the rule. I am going to define a way for you to think about measuring social media, and you can’t actually easily measure what I am going to recommend. So why break the rule?

How To Save Money On AdWords Placements With Google Analytics
by Brad Geddes

Google’s display network can bring you tremendous amounts of clicks and conversions if used correctly. If it is not used correctly, you can quickly spend mass amounts of money and have nothing to show for it.

Annalisa Hilliard (@ahilliardm)

The various forms of influencer currency
by Hugo Guzman

One of the hot new catch-phrases in social media marketing circles is the word “influencer“. In a nutshell, it’s a person or entity that can influence consumers, readers, etc. and marketers large and small are trying to figure out ways to identify these influencers and then get them to behave in a manner that benefits branding and marketing efforts.

Link Building for Bloggers
by James Harper

Whether you’re a pro or amateur blogger, everyone wants traffic to their sites. And building links to your website is a great way to do this. Not only can it improve the visibility of your website in the search engines, but also if you pick your sites wisely you can benefit from referral traffic.

4 Reasons Blog Comments Are Great for Link Building
by Nick Stamoulis

Blog commenting is one of the best components of a link building campaign for numerous reasons. Aside from the obvious value of the link, there is a lot of long term value associated with developing a strong blog commenting campaign that can impact the overall success of your SEO and website. Here are 4 reasons why you should amp up your blog commenting.

Jen Carroll (@martijen)

Jobs’ Apple Standard vs. Page’s Google Standard
by Scott Cleland

The worldwide outpouring of respect, admiration and eulogies for Steve Jobs, Apple’s legendary leader and creative genius, proves his standard and legacy of innovation is one to measure other aspiring tech industry leaders by. Given that Apple and Google are the #1 and #2 most valuable brands in the world and that Google has invaded all of Apple’s markets in the last few years as a new competitor, it is illuminating and instructive to compare and contrast the radically different visions, values, and standards, of Apple’s former leader Steve Jobs and Google’s current CEO Larry Page.

5 Page Quality Indicators That Can Outweigh PageRank
by Bradley Zarich

PageRank would be a great indicator of page quality and relevancy if there is no link selling or artificial link building involved. Lacking that, Google has to implement a quality scoring system independent of link popularity. Let’s explore how to gauge page quality in a more sophisticated way using these 5 metrics.

The Holy Grail of Globalizing Editorial Planning
by Pam Didner

Social networks and search engines have changed the behavior of Intel’s business marketing audience of IT managers who are constantly searching for information and evaluating new technologies even when they are not purchasing them. As marketers, we need to engage with them on topics they care about and that are relevant to Intel on a timely basis. This is where an editorial planning process comes into play.

What’s the best thing about online marketing that you read this week? Leave us your comments.

Top of Page Bid Estimates

Previously, you could only see “estimated first page bid” for your keywords.  Now, you can see “estimated top page bid.”  This is important because CTRs are so much higher on top vs. side ads.  (Note: Don’t bid to be on top unless those positions make you more profit.)

Google Testing Landing Page Snippets in PPC Copy

Google is testing taking snippets of text from your landing page and including it as an additional line of text in your ads.  This is another step in blurring the lines between SEO and PPC listings, as well as another reason to have great landing pages.

Google To Begin Reviewing Paused Ads in AdWords

Google is now reviewing ads while they are in a paused state.  Why is this good?  Advertisers can create and get their ads approved before they want to actually begin advertising.  This helps to plan ahead and be ready to go for various contexts that have specific seasonal launch dates.

Report: AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo To Team for Display Ads

This agreement is aimed at reducing the amount of inventory going to ad networks, where pricing is lower than the companies think they can charge themselves.

More Dynamic Ads with Ad Parameters

Ad parameters allows you to change numeric information within text ads while keeping the history and statistics associated with the ad using the AdWords API.  This could help in situations where you might have price and availability fluctuations.

Because SEO is relatively so inexpensive compared to other marketing efforts, I am often surprised by the amount of dollars companies are willing to invest into PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, while at the same time balking about a similar investment in SEO.

In my experience, SEO often translates into better ROI than PPC! But the primary difference is that PPC is far more trackable than SEO. PPC analytics can give you amazing flexibility into your campaigns and insight into your conversions that just isn’t available with SEO.

Another benefit of PPC over SEO is the immediacy of it. SEO takes time to get results and drive traffic. PPC is easy to set up and can start delivering traffic near instantaneously.

But that’s also the biggest problem with PPC. Because they are so quick and easy, most PPC campaigns are simply not managed properly. I often talk with people who believe “PPC doesn’t work” for them. It’s not that PPC doesn’t work, it’s that the campaign was built to generate traffic rather than managed to generate a profit.

If you don’t know the difference between the two, then it’s likely you’re not managing your PPC campaign to be as profitable as it should be.

PPC Marketing is Like Investing in Stocks

Investment in the stock market and PPC marketing has a host of similarities. By drawing these comparisons, I hope to shed some light on the expectations of a well-managed PPC campaign and provide some solutions to effectively managing your PPC “portfolio.”

Like stocks, PPC is an investment

Before you buy a stock, you should research the company you’re investing in. You’re looking for growth potential, price-to-earnings ratios and a whole lot of other stuff. Using this research data, you can analyze and set realistic expectations for what your year-over-year return should be.

Researching the PPC market should include research of your keywords, your competition, your available budget and the estimated search volume and click-through rates for your keywords. But you also need to know your conversion rates, profit margins and a whole lot more. With this information you can then set realistic expectations for what your month-over-month return should be.

Both can easily be self-managed

It’s as easy to set up an account with Google AdWords as it is to set up an account with TD Ameritrade and Options Express. All three make measuring performance easy, but don’t mistake the ease of use as a barometer for success.

Google and Bing have made managing your ad campaigns as easy as possible. You get reports, historical data and real-time performance results. But again, easy to use does not translate into profits.

Most business owners don’t know enough about PPC to manage their campaigns profitably. Effective management of your PPC campaign requires a great deal of knowledge about each system. There are a lot of cool tricks you can do but only if you know about them. Even those who do nothing more than PPC all day still have a hard time keeping up!

Both have their ups and downs

Anybody who has watched a stock for more than 30 seconds knows that the value of the stock goes up and down constantly. With each investment we hope to see our stocks rise in value, and most long-term stock investments do see gains in their investments. But even if you look at a one-year history of consistent stock growth, you’re never going to see 100% upward movement.

Any PPC campaign will see  similar results when looking at overall cost per conversion. Some days you’ll have a really high CPC and other days it’ll be much lower. There will even be spans of time when your cost per conversion is unprofitable. This, again, is normal.

The difference here between stocks and PPC is that with stocks, you rely on the market to decide the value. With PPC, you rely on your own management skills to keep your cost per conversions where they need to be to make a profit. But, just as with stocks, there are also outside factors that weigh in on profitability.

Both can bring long-term gains

A well-managed, knowledge-based stock investment can lead to solid long-term financial growth. Unless you are extraordinarily lucky, you won’t get rich overnight, but you can develop a stock portfolio that provides a respectable retirement income.

The goal of stock investment is for long-term financial security. PPC can help deliver that, too, when smart management principles are applied. Looking for short-term gains with PPC often goes against your long-term business growth strategy.

Building a smart PPC “portfolio” can be a key component to your business growth. Many people look at PPC as a supplement to SEO until you get natural rankings. Instead, look at PPC as just one of your investment options. Think diversification. But smart diversification is what you need, and smart management of your PPC campaigns can ensure that this avenue of investment not only brings sales, but profits as well.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Should I start marketing my website with search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC)?

The response from our three in-house experts was unanimous! You need both. Here’s why…

Stoney (@StoneyD): While both SEO and PPC results are displayed on the same search results page, they operate very differently (and independently) from each other. PPC can be set up much quicker and get results sooner than SEO can. But don’t let that make you think you’ll “instantly” get ROI out of it. PPC takes optimization before profits are secure. SEO, on the other hand takes along longer to work. My suggestion is, if you can afford it, get started on PPC right away to start bringing in profits sooner. While the PPC campaign improves, be working on the optimization of your website, targeting keywords, building links, growing your social base and improving conversions.

Craig (@craiggeis): SEO takes time to gain ground, so starting asap is important. SEO also improves site usability because it takes visitors into account. You need PPC because it helps fill the traffic void while SEO is ramping up. Together they generate a synergy effect on visibility and conversions.

Mike (@mflem25): There are going to be keywords up front that you know you want to rank for.  Begin both PPC and SEO for those keywords immediately.  Your long term goal is to dominate search results pages for keywords that work at growing your business.  The best way to do that is to have listings through both PPC and SEO.  Each reinforces the other, resulting in overall lift of visitors and conversions.  In fact, with the rise of universal search (including product listings, local listings, product extensions and the like), you can have more than two options for the searcher on a page, all with different messages.

After you’ve ranked well for keywords you know you should be hitting homeruns with, use PPC experiment data as intelligence for where to go next and how to proceed.  Since SEO typically takes 6-12 months to begin seeing significant results (if done right), here are some advantages that PPC offers that make it a channel you don’t ever want to leave behind.

Immediacy

1. Results – You don’t have to wait to see if a keyword, landing page, message or promotion will work.  You know what is going on as soon as you get statistically significant data.
2. Feedback – You’re target customers immediately tell you what keywords they are using to find what you offer, allowing you to customize the conversion process for their needs.

Control

1. Performance – Improvements in performance can be made instantaneously.
2. Keywords – You decide exactly what keywords you show up for.  With SEO, pages can show for many unqualified keywords.  Also, how about the keywords you aren’t ranking organically for yet, but that are important to your business?  You can have a presence there at a profitable ROI.
3. Landing Pages – You decide exactly what landing pages prospects using specific keywords land on.  With SEO, visitors on those same keywords may land on a variety of site pages.
4. Location – You are able to geo-target your ads to customers to make them more relevant.  With SEO, there is no geo-targeting function.
5. Position – You can decide to pay for any position on the page.  Although it’s not necessarily desired, you CAN test to find out what an optimal position is for you and stay there.
6. Spend – You can immediately raise and lower your bids or budget depending on results and other outside factors of your business.
7. Ad Messages – You can immediately test ad messages to see what resonates with your prospects better.
8. Promotions – If you want to run a promotion, you can immediately gather targeted customers to that promotion.
9. Special Situations – If something happens where you need to get a message out on specific keywords right away, PPC gives you this option.

Testing

1. Keywords – Which keywords work and which don’t?  You want to know before you optimize your site organically for them.  PPC gives the added ROI of market intelligence.
2. Landing Pages – Which landing pages work to convert which keyword markets?  PPC gives this too.
3. Ad Messages – Testing ads is immediate and easy to do, giving you results based on data, not opinion.

Let me repeat that: Cost is not important.

What is important is ROI (Return on Investment).

When spending any money on a marketing campaign, you should consider the following:

1. How much money you can you afford to spend?
2. How soon will you see the return from that money?
3. How much will that return be?

If you can spend the money (1), not go broke while you’re waiting for the return (2) and the result will be enough of a profit to make it worthwhile (3) then the cost of the campaign is not important.

If I could turn trade $1 for $5 in the space of a few years, I might not be interested. But if I could take a $100,000 investment and turn it into $500,000 worth of business growth in the space of a few years, I’d find a way to come up with the $100,000 to invest. The problem is, as with any investment, the results are unknown. We have no crystal balls in which to predict the future.

With SEO, and a good business model, a seemingly sizable cost will often multiply itself into a considerable profit in just a few years, if not sooner.

Don’t look at the costs involved; look at the return your investment will bring.

Explore and Test Marketing Campaigns

When considering avenues for marketing your business, the list is endless. You can invest money in a number of off-line places such as radio ads, TV spots, billboards, magazine ads, newspaper ads, trade publications, community event sponsorship, public transportation ads, strategic partnerships, giveaways, etc.

Online marketing opens up a number of new opportunities for getting your product, service or message in front of your audience: website development, email advertising, banner ads, pay-per-click ads, strategic link partnerships, search engine optimization, social networking, directory submissions, and the list goes on.

So where should you spend your money? The obvious answer is to spend it where you get the most return. The harder part of that is to determine what will bring the best return for you.

Research is crucial. In most any industry you can get averages of how much return a particular investment will bring. But these can vary from industry to industry. For some, a direct mail campaign might produce a better return than PPC, while others will get more mileage out of SEO than magazine ads.

The key component here is testing. Analyze and test various forms of advertising and marketing and see what works and what doesn’t.

Tracking online is easier and far more comprehensive than offline. But whichever route you go, be sure you have tracking mechanisms in place so you can know what each produces. Track the money spent and the immediate to long-term results of each campaign. Start with what you know produces the best return in the shortest amount of time, then use the profits from that to test other avenues.

Investing in the Return

Sometimes you have to consider the cost-to-time ratio. Search engine optimization requires a long-term commitment to bring success, while pay-per-click advertising can bring more immediate results.

Which is better?

They both have their place. The ROI on PPC is usually lower than SEO, and it can cost a lot more. But with a more immediate return and better tracking, it is a lucrative place to invest. However, once your SEO starts returning profits, it generally returns big. Five thousand per month doesn’t seem like so much if it’s producing $15,000 in profits on top of it. But it just takes time to get there!

If you have a solid business and a successful business plan, investing in online marketing makes sense. If you don’t, the result is unknown. On more than one occasion I’ve told potential clients that they are not ready for SEO because they were unsure if their business would succeed. My suggestion to them was invest in some quick-return marketing strategies such as PPC. If those work and business grows, then go all out and invest in the longer-term strategies.

If the short-term strategies don’t work, you need to analyze in order to understand why. Was it the marketing avenue or the business model? If multiple avenues fail, it might be the business model, which means it’s time for a new idea or a new approach.

It’s been said that most business fail due to lack of monetary investment. If you have a good idea, a workable idea, be prepared to invest before seeing a return. If it’s a model that will work, don’t let a lack of funds stand between you and success. Do what you have to do to invest where you need to invest.

If you invest in SEO, invest wisely. If you know you have an ROI business, SEO will only improve that. How much ROI can it bring? Just depends on how much you want to spend.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

This principle states that an information seeking client will tend to use the most convenient search method in the least exacting mode available. Information-seeking behavior stops as soon as minimally acceptable results are found.

So, how does this knowledge affect how you should run your PPC campaigns?

Ad Writing

The first way this knowledge should affect your PPC campaigns is in your ad writing.  Instead of writing ads to persuade, you want to write ads that serve. This means your ad copy won’t be chalk full of great things about your company or your product.  It will contain content directly related to the monologue of thoughts occurring inside the heads of those who are searching.  This means using the words they use, addressing the questions in their head and presenting benefits that will help them avoid the pain they’re trying to avoid. Yes, I know you only have a few characters to do it in, but that’s why we experiment.  Oh, and even better than that, that’s why we talk to the customer. Haven’t done that in a while?  Well, it’s time to start because this is the ammunition you need to dominate your industry’s online audience.

Ad Groups

Another major way in which the knowledge of the Principle of Least Effort should influence how you manage your PPC campaigns is ad group organization.  This should be the guiding principle that determines which keywords are matched to which ads within ad groups.  After you have written your ads correctly, the keywords that should be matched to those ads are the ones where the searcher is communicating what you’re addressing in the ad. For example, if you’ve written the following ad about the latest “wing ding” you came out with…

Now, this is an extremely simple example to make the point, but you don’t want searchers who type the search queries “red wing dings,” “best wing dings,” or even just “wing dings” seeing this ad.  That’s bad customer service. Remember, after all, that’s the industry that search engines are in.  No, it’s not advertising.  It’s customer service.

You’re not making it easy for the searcher on the query “red wing dings” to find what they’re looking for.  Sure, you’re suggesting you might have red wing dings.  After all, you have blue ones, so why not red, right?  But, you’re basically ignoring the customer.  Imagine if a customer walked into a store and asked for a red wing ding and the CSR brought them a blue one?!?!  We’ve all had that happen.  The store doesn’t have what you’re looking for, but the person helping you wants to make a sale, so they just show you something else.  How does that make you feel?

So, you’ll most likely lose the sale to a competitor who is better at customer service in this case.  Make sure the right ads are showing to the right searchers. Group keywords by the ads you want them to appear with and block them from other ads you don’t want them to appear with.  This alone will save you a ton of money.

Google has created a new tool to help you correlate search trends with any other data you might want to throw in.  It takes a look at your trending pattern and shows matching patterns.  You enter a data series and get back a list of queries whose data series follows a similar pattern.  You must remember that correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation, but can likely find some great insights here into search strategy.

Communication Ad Extensions for Google AdWords

New ad extensions for AdWords that enable searchers to request a call or an email from the advertiser without even clicking.  Google has set it up so that privacy is kept for the searcher until they are ready to share it.  This could be the beginning of an alternative form of revenue based on cost-per-action for certain industries.

Google to Begin Charging for Direction Location Extensions

Google will now be charging for clicks on directions links in AdWords ads.

Google AdWords Embedded Sitelinks

Now sitelinks are going to be embedded in ads.  If you create a sitelink that matches words in your ad copy exactly, you may get a link in your ad copy to the page designated by that sitelink URL if you don’t already have sitelinks showing.  This will appear in top results only.

Google “Offer Ads”

It looks like Google is going to be allowing advertisers to present clickable offers that searchers can store in a “My Offers” profile; allowing them to later go back and redeem offers.  It’s like the Groupon concept, but it’s not one per day, it’s across all search terms that advertisers would like to offer something.

First, you’ve been duped into believing that when you place your ads on search engine results pages for your targeted keywords, you are taking part in the activity of advertising. After all, we call it “ppc advertising,” the links on the pages are called “ads” and we call the people running the campaigns “advertisers.”

But Google and other search engines are not in the business of advertising. Search engines don’t go out and interrupt web users going about their business by trying to garner interest in the message they’re screaming at them.  That’s advertising.  They wait for the searcher’s to come to them and then they serve them results based upon an input.  That’s customer service.  That’s right, search engines are in the business of customer service, not advertising.

Of course, this totally changes the way you should think about what you’re delivering to the searcher.  In advertising, you try and get the attention of a non-engaged person while communicating how being interested in your product or service might change their life. In customer service, you give the person your attention and deliver what you hear them asking for.  Lots of “advertisers” get this backwards.  They write ads that try and sell the searcher on the product or service.  Instead, they should be listening to the searcher and then serving them with the information they’re looking for.

Now that you understand that, there is something you need to know about your target audience.  They’re lazy.  We’re all lazy. Most shoppers/searchers follow what is called “The Principle of Least Effort.”  Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia…

This principle states that an information seeking client will tend to use the most convenient search method, in the least exacting mode available. Information seeking behavior stops as soon as minimally acceptable results are found.

That’s right, people searching for something don’t naturally conduct thorough research to find the best solution to their specific problem.  They naturally look for the easiest way to get satisfactory results.  That’s why people rarely go beyond page 1 on search results.  That extra click is too much effort if they find a satisfactory result on page 1!  They do just enough to get a decent result.

This knowledge should have a dramatic effect on how you conduct your PPC campaigns.  But, it likely won’t because YOU are very likely to follow this principle in the way you run your campaigns.  Stayed tuned for how this principle SHOULD affect the way you run campaigns (even though it won’t).

Until now, the only information a user had on a search results page to decide where to click was the 135 characters in the ads.  This led to many advertisers getting away with bad post-click marketing as long as they wrote great ads.  Not any more.  Advertisers can no longer hide behind the click. Now, users can hover over an ad and see a preview of the landing page with snippets of real text to see how closely it relates to what they’re looking for.

You see that call-out box inside the preview frame?  That’s text from your page that acts like a second ad.  This changes the game because now searches can not only compare ads, but landing pages as well BEFORE they decide where to click.  This makes design and message even more important on landing pages. It also affects CTR, and therefore quality score and cost.

US Lawmakers plan “Do Not Track” bills

This legislation would allow Internet users to block companies from gathering information about their online activities. It was inspired by controversy over tracking technology present in iPhones and Androids, as well as some recent data-theft incidents.

Google AdWords Can Now Target Tablets Separately

Tablets were considered “mobile devices” until now.  Now AdWords considers them as separate devices from both computers and cell phones.  So, you should organize your campaigns accordingly.

Google Call Metrics Pricing: What PPC Advertisers Need to Know

Google now charges if someone places a phone call from your ad.  Google’s phone tracking is essentially a cost-per-action model that assumes all calls are leads. Therefore, you should pay attention to the types of calls you get from PPC campaigns by isolating them and noting the types of calls you’re getting.  If there are lots of calls for non-lead reasons, it’s likely eating up your PPC budget that could be used on more qualified audiences.  If your target audience is more likely to pick up the phone than complete a conversion online, consider using a call tracking vendor.

Showing Domain URL in Headlines

On the heels of showing the first description lines in the headlines of top placement ads, now Google is going to show your display URL if you get placed in top positions on search results pages.  This will feature your brand more prominently and help users identify the site to which they’ll be taken more easily.

It’s also why you don’t copy and paste the same ads into all of your ad groups talking about yourself and what makes you great.

You’re only great if you’re great at answering the searcher’s question.  If your paid search campaigns are not organized around this foundational principle, you need to go back and make this happen.  The above example happens all the time.  The searcher is looking for a specific type of business card.  They have questions about it that they are looking to get answered.  The search is matched with an ad that doesn’t attempt to answer them.  It attempts to persuade the searcher that they are the best.  The searcher doesn’t care about your opinion of yourself.  They care about getting their questions answered.  If you’re looking at your metrics and crunching the numbers every month without first getting this right, go back and do this first.

Demands change.  So questions change.  What are searchers asking right now compared to what they were asking last year?  Has anything changed?  Is it the same? This is how you become the best answer to your searcher’s questions right now, not just when you initially did keyword research at the start of your account.  Then, when you find out what’s going on in your market, you can organize your ads to be the right answer to the questions searchers are asking in their search queries.

Why is this so important?  If you don’t answer the questions your prospects are asking right now, the performance downward spiral begins…

• Searches get matched to ads that don’t answer the searcher’s questions
• CTRs drop
• Impressions drop because search engines don’t want to show irrelevant ads to users
• Quality score suffers
• Money is wasted

In order to keep this downward spiral from happening, it’s important that paid search managers prioritize time in their accounts to include dynamic keyword research, the creation of ads that answer new and rising searches, and the organization of those ads to show to the right search queries.  Without getting this right first, all other optimizations are done on sinking sand.

In an effort to improve relevance on the web, Google is utilizing searcher’s relationships.  A new button in search results enables signed-in searchers to get recommendations on search results pages and websites from the people they are connected to through their Google profiles.  Google is saying it won’t affect how quality score is calculated.  But, it does affect quality score because if the recommendations improve CTR, then your quality score improves.

+1 and Tracking Parameters

Apparently, every distinct URL gets its own +1 score, so if your ad destination URLs include tracking parameters, you probably won’t get much benefit from Google +1 because each visit to a single landing page will have a different URL and therefore a different score.  This makes it impossible for a landing page to build a +1 score.  If you use AdWords auto-tagging on the other hand, then you are not affected by this.  But, there are a couple of ways around this…

Google AdWords Call Metrics Charging For Calls

If you display your phone number within your search ads, you will now be charged $1 for every call (reportedly as of mid-May).  On mobile devices, the click-to-call will still only count as a click.  This isn’t a bad thing.  Phone numbers in ads has been shown to increase CTR and phone calls are factored into your ad rank.  These two combined can lower your cost per click while increasing your ad’s positioning.

Smartphone User Study Shows Mobile Movement Under Way

Are you advertising on mobile yet?  People would give up “high heels, cable TV, and even chocolate!” for a smartphone and they are becoming really important to an increasing number of people’s shopping habits.  You would be surprised at just how integral they are to purchasing decisions.

New Contextual Targeting Option on the Google Display Network

To date, you’ve been able to specify keywords that work to show your ads on relevant webpages.  Now, you can choose from over 1,750 topics and sub-topics to do the same thing.  The AdWords system determines the topic of a page instead of looking for particular keywords.  This targeting option fits well with reaching a large audience quickly and easily and can allow you more flexibility with matching specific ads with specific types of sites.

But, here’s the problem with your keyword research.  It’s static. You get a number and you compare it to other numbers at a single point in time.  That’s great for that day, that month, or even that year.  But as you know, your industry changes.  There’s new advances, new challenges, new demands, etc.;  and part of winning is staying ahead of your competition.

Well, how are you going to do that if you’re not understanding the ecosystem of your industry online RIGHT NOW and what’s forecasted for the future?  Those keywords you optimized for last year might still be great, but what’s old news?, what’s new?, where is there opportunity to get ahead of the competition?  Can you create content about a pressing question that searchers have that will help drive brand awareness?  The only way to see that is by looking at keyword search interest in trends and not static numbers.  It’s DYNAMIC keyword research. The trends give another dimension to the numbers that help tell a different story of what’s going on.

Are there popular keyword searches for our industry RIGHT NOW that aren’t currently on our keyword list?  If they are on our keyword list, are we currently ranking for them?  How does their search interest compare to phrases that we have targeted in the past and/or we do rank for? Has this changed since we last did keyword research? Why has it changed? Has it changed worldwide or just in specific countries? If search interest has gone up, have the visits to our website kept pace? Why or why not?

Not only can you look at trend volumes, but you can look at them by geography as well.  How does this lead to insights?  For example, you may look at your #1 targeted keyword and find that it’s very popular in the United States, but Canada is a close 2nd.  But, when you compare your brand name to your top 5 competitors in Canada, you’re nowhere to be found and your analytics data confirms it because you’re getting very little brand keyword visits to your site from Canada.  So, your product or service is very popular, but you aren’t.  Why?  How have you failed and how can you fix it?

If you’re Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft; you may notice how video games exploded in popularity around 2009 in India…

but wonder why your brand did not…

Now, I have no idea if there’s any legs to it, there may be a great reason why.  But, if there isn’t a great reason, then this would be good to know right?  Absolutely.

So, it’s simple tool but also a digging tool.  The more questions you ask of the data, questions your competitors aren’t asking; the more insights will pop out at you with market intelligence that can put you a step ahead.  You will know why the word “insights” is in the name (although I think a better name might have been “Insights from Search” because these insights aren’t just FOR search, they’re for every marketing channel).

Good marketing is a continuous endeavor of adjusting to the ebbs and flows of your industry’s ecosystem and looking for areas where you can get out in front of the competition by giving your prospects what they are telling you they’re looking for.  Get to know how to use this tool really well and you can do just that.  Stay tuned for more on this…

Is it Time to Rethink Bidding on Trademarks?

You can now bid on competitor’s trademarks on Yahoo and Bing; meaning you can get an instant boost in traffic and conversions.  But, this doesn’t mean you should.  One PPC marketer recently lost in court to the tune of $292K plus legal fees for doing this. Protect yourself from lawsuits.

adCenter Quality Score Coming Soon

Similarly to Google AdWords, each keyword will have a quality score on a 1-10 scale with sub-scores for keyword relevance, landing page relevance, and landing page user experience to aid in optimizing performance.

Top Slots on AdWords: Even Longer Headlines

Remember how Google now moves the Description Line 1 of your ad to the headline if it appears in the top 3 results and ends in punctuation?  Now, all description lines that Google is confident are complete phrases will be moved to the headline when appearing in the top 3 spots.  Improve your CTR and ROI.

More Advanced Controls for Location Targeting

The control over when your ads are shown by location is now more granular.  You can specify not only by location, but also by search intent.  Make your advertising more targeted.

Google to Change Tablet Targeting Options

Current targeting lumps in the iPad with mobile phones, but they will allow the segmentation of these devices “in the coming weeks.”  Segmentation gives better insight, which leads to smarter decisions.

AdWords Campaign Experiments Now Available in Reports

Now more cutting and pasting experiment results.  You can now download them to spreadsheet.  Just segment by experiment and get statistical significance to make optimizations decisions.  Save time analyzing your experiments.

I did this exercise and can see how important it is to look at your ad test segmented out by time period (day or week, whatever is most appropriate).  The main reason for this is that if you simply report the final results of your test, you won’t tell the whole story.  Most of the time, we look at the results of tests like this…

Why is this imperfect?  Well, we know cumulatively that the challenger performed better, but does that mean we should delete the champion?  Maybe, maybe not.  You don’t really know until you look at the data in time.  There could be a scenario where the champion really struggled out of the gate in this test, but has actually been beating the challenger in the last week.  If so, how would you know?  Again, by taking a look at the results in time to view the trend.  With this particular ad test, here’s how it turned out…

This way, you can trend out how the winner actually became the winner.  In this test, we can see that the challenger was consistently better over time, which now gives us supreme confidence when we hit the delete button for the champion.

One other thing.  See those trend lines in the graph?  Not only does it show you which ad was better (by the gap between the two lines), but it also shows you the overall trend, meaning you can see if this metric is getting better or worse for you.  In this example, the ad group is performing better over time regardless of what ad is running.  This shows that whatever optimization efforts have been performed are working.

Mobile ShopAlerts

Wow, mobile is evolving fast.  AT&T introduced location-based “ShopAlerts” in NY, SF, Chicago and LA.  People can opt-in to receive offers and promotions via SMS or MMS when they physically enter a designated area defined by the advertiser (e.g. a mile from their store).  This can help drive in-store traffic and reach mobile users in very specific markets.  This is even more targeted than web-based and app-based advertising, but it is opt-in.

New Ad Setting: Optimize for Conversions

Last Wednesday, Google announced a new ad targeting setting that optimizes ad serving by conversion rate.  Google will monitor the ads in your ad group and over time will favor serving the ad with the highest conversion rate.  The ad with the best click-through rate doesn’t always generate the most ROI or profit; especially when advertising on broad keywords where search intent can vary greatly.  Just make sure you don’t turn it on when data is skewed.  For example, if you already have an ad that has accrued a history of performance and then add a new one to your ad group, Google will automatically favor the ad with the conversion history over the new ad that has a 0% conversion rate because it hasn’t run yet.  So, let the new ad run on rotate until you feel there’s enough information for Google to make a decision.  This is probably only a good feature for those advertisers that pay little attention to optimizing their accounts because if you have to wait until you have enough data to turn on the setting, you could just make the decision yourself based upon the data that’s accrued.

Content Farms and PPC

Google just changed part of their search algorithm and it will affect approximately 12% of U.S. search results.  This change is aimed at punishing sites that contain numerous pages with low-quality content; what many call “content farms.”  This change will not only affect SEO, but also PPC because if you are running ads on the Google Display Network, it is likely your ads are showing on content farms.  If you get a lot of traffic and conversions from these types of sites, you could see a drop.  If not, you may see an improvement in performance from display campaigns.

The Future of Display Advertising

There’s huge opportunity in display advertising, especially when uniting it with mobile devices.  The technology has caught up with the promises that were talked about for so long.  Here’s Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a short video talking about this future…

Eric Schmidt on the Future of Display Advertising

Twitter’s New Ad Platform

Although in beta and only open to VIP advertisers that are invited, Twitter has finally released their ad platform called Promoted Tweets.  The general format is that you can use tweets you’ve created or that have been retweeted by someone else as “ads” that are promoted in certain environments.  The way the ads are served are analogous to both search and contextual advertising in AdWords, where you pick keywords that are searched on to have your tweet shown or it is matched to a stream of tweets given the contextual nature that you choose in your account.  You pay on a cost per engagement which include clicks, favoriting, retweets and replies.  There is also Promoted Account where you can essentially buy followers and Promoted Trends where you are shown on hashtags.

Google’s Display Conversion Optimizer

This is in beta and may not be available on all accounts.  Google has updated their Conversion Optimizer to include a more specific Display Network version of the tool.  Remember, the Conversion Optimizer bidding option in AdWords improves results by using historical conversion data to adjust bidding on specific keywords to optimize for conversions.  This upgrade of the tool allegedly improves Display Network results by more efficiently and intelligently changing placements based on historical data to hit your target CPA.  Soon, there will be an option to choose “Automatic Campaign Optimization (Display Network Only).”

Facebook Account Quality

Facebook doesn’t have a quality score formula like Google AdWords to determine the quality of your advertising, but they do have sort of an “account trust” system going on that’s based on user feedback.  They actually allow users to “x-out” ads that don’t appeal to them or may be offensive.  If they notify you that something is not acceptable, make sure you never do it again.  Raising this “metric” can really help with the effectiveness and efficiency of running campaigns here.

AdWords Automated Rules

This new feature lets you schedule automatic changes to your account based on criteria that you specify.  This could save you time from having to frequently go into your account and make manual changes.  You can be really creative here too, depending on your business.  You can switch ads that are shown at certain times of day, raise budgets if conversions are high on a particular day, etc. etc.

Trick #2 – Using Campaigns Correctly

As the number of targeting options for PPC increases, so do the creative ways in which you can organize your campaigns to get the maximum effectiveness out of them.  As I mentioned last week, for example, you can create a “fishing” campaign and a “bucket” campaign in order to separately control budgeting, bidding and other targeting options to focus your efforts on dominating the locations (search queries) that really put food on the table.

The first thing we have to think about when deciding how to use each campaign is what the goals of each of them are.  As you move into being an advanced PPC manager, you will start to be able to use campaigns not just for the macro-goal of making sales and money, but for more micro-goals within each campaign that will contribute to making the lasting impact of the macro-goal bigger, better and more stable.  So, instead of just one goal (making leads, sales or whatever), your account may look like this…

Campaign #1 – Find search queries that work for my business

Campaign #2 – Maximize search queries that have worked for my business

Campaign #3 – Make search queries that aren’t working for my business, but should be, work for my business.

Why would you do this?  Again, it’s to make obtaining the different micro-goals that contribute to your macro-goal (making money) more efficient.  How do they become more efficient?  By utilizing the different features available for ad serving that are built for the different purposes.  Here’s a couple examples of what I mean…

Keyword Match Types

For example, the different keyword match types serve different purposes.  Broad match is a net that goes out and catches fish (search queries) to advertise on.  Then, you can see if these fish are worth keeping.  Phrase match is more like a fishing pole with specific bait on it to catch more specific kinds of fish.  But, still a fishing tool.  Exact match is the fish.  It’s the exact fish in the Search Engine Sea.

Bidding

For fishing campaigns, the point is to go out and catch search queries to decide if they’re keepers or not.  So, you want to maximize the amount of search queries and clicks that you get on those search queries.  Remember, this campaign is not directly about ROI or profit.  Thankfully, AdWords has a bidding option called “Automatic Bidding” that serves just this purpose.  When you set your campaign on this bidding option, the AdWords system will maximize the amount of clicks it can get for your set budget.  By doing this, you are most efficiently accomplishing your goal for the campaign, which is finding search queries that will work for your business.

Then, once you find the search queries that work for you, you want to then bid differently because the purpose now changes.  It’s now about maximizing ROI or profit.  Different purposes, different bidding options; so different campaign.  In our “bucket” campaign, we’ll use Maximum CPC bidding or Conversion Optimizer (designed for those purposes) to test what bid levels will accomplish this while increasing performance through optimization.

So, here’s a very simple general layout of how campaigns could be organized differently because of their differing purposes…

There are many more features that make creating campaigns with different purposes possible.  It’s up to you to learn them and then get creative as to how they will help your account.  But hopefully, above and beyond the specifics, the couple of examples I’ve given here will enlighten you to the ways in which you can be creative with targeting/organizing your account to more efficiently accomplish long-term growth.

Trick #1 – Use Keywords Correctly

A great misnomer among PPC advertisers is the belief that the foundation to success for an account is found in picking the right keywords.  While picking good keywords is important, it’s not the foundation.  The foundation is knowing how to use keywords to find search queries that you can use to attract customers to your website.  That’s right, keywords are different than search queries.  Search queries are the phrases that real users actually type into the search engines.  Remember, keywords are like nets that you throw into Search Engine Sea to find the fish (search queries) that you will then use to prepare dinner.

How do you build your account around search queries?  Well, an easy way is to make sure to separate your winning search query catches from your nets.  Once you catch a fish, you don’t leave it in the net, right?  That will just get in the way of catching other fish when you throw the net back in.  Therefore, we’ve got to use the organizational features that the paid search interfaces give us to put the fish in a bucket so that we can skin and fillet (optimize) it.

This is easily accomplished by separating your nets and your fish into separate campaigns.  Your “net” campaign will contain keywords that use match types effectively (we’ll get to this soon) to go out and catch the fish.  Your “bucket” campaign will contain the search queries you have found to be winners.  You will set these search queries on “exact match” so that they will only be matched to the exact query that you found works for your business.  Yes, I know that once you add the query to your account that it (technically-speaking) becomes a “keyword,” but since it will only be matched to the exact query, we can view it as such.

The bucket campaigns is where you will build your account from what you caught in the net campaign.  This separation allows you to separately control budgeting, bidding and other targeting options to focus your efforts on dominating the locations that really put food on the table.

For example, if we create a “fishing” campaign that uses the keyword “red shoes” on broad match, it will be matched to thousands of real search queries like “red nike tennis shoes” or even “purple slippers” (broad match can be very broad).  Yes, you may find that the exact query “red shoes” works for you and meets your advertising goals.  But, long-term business growth against your competition requires that you go fishing for as many queries as you can make work for your business.

So, let’s say your main keyword theme is “red shoes.”  Through keyword research, you add many relevant keyword phrases to your “net” campaign.  As ads run on these keywords, they will be collected and you are able to view them in your account. Here’s an illustration of what it’s like.  The keywords you add to your campaigns are in the middle.  The actual search queries that users are performing are in the small bubbles…

Now, what do you do with these?  You take a look at their relevance and statistics to decide whether to continue advertising on those terms or not, and whether or not they’ve performed well enough to be implemented into your net campaign for different treatment.  There will be a lot of terms to add as negatives, some to throw into the bucket, some will need more time, and some may need special attention to figure out why they are not performing as well as you might think.

Next time, we’ll take a look at how you may treat these groups differently.

Google Changes Display of Top Position Ads

Apparently, Google is going to start putting Description Line 1 of a typical PPC ad in the headline of the Top 3 ads positions as long as the line ends with a punctuation mark.  If they roll this out, it’s likely that competition for top position ads will grow and it will also affect ad copy strategies.  It is not recommended that you merge the headline and description line as there will be a dash placed between the two in the first line of the ad.

Remember, while it may get more expensive to be in the Top 3 positions if this happens, we still only bid for position if it is advantageous to our overall marketing goals.  As for ad copy, we may be more readily willing to be creative with our headlines since you could now put them in your description text and still have them show up big and blue on the page.

Facebook Debuts User-Generated Ad Option

Facebook has a new ad type called “Sponsored Stories” ads.  Basically, when the conditions are right, Facebook will serve a user comment in place of the ad an advertiser has created.  The conditions of showing the ad are dependent on each user’s privacy settings.  If a user leaves a comment about your company, but their settings only have their wall posts showing to friends, then only friends can see their comment in place of the ad in their profile.  What is happening is you are able to pay to have things that users say about your product or service to other people that would be eligible to see it in their Newsfeed anyway.

Using Negative Keyword Lists

Allows you to not have to manage keywords for each of your campaigns individually.  You can compile themed lists of negative keywords that you create and apply them to specific campaigns; saving you the time of having to weed through negatives to copy and paste them to new campaigns.  This allows you to better organize negatives into groups so that you have more control of how you use them.  Also, it helps if things change in your business or on your site and certain keywords that were negatives become positives.

Google Testing Display Ads in Gmail

Gmail is a part of the “Google Display Network” which allows advertisers who use AdWords to show text, image, rich media or video ads on targeted content sites across the web where your target audience hangs out.  Google put a lot of effort into improving the effectiveness of this network in 2010 and it looks like the trend will continue.  Remember, SERPs (search results pages) only account for 5% of Internet pageviews, so learning how the GDN works and making it work for your business is a very wise investment.

Amazon Product Ads

Amazon has entered the PPC marketplace with what they are branding “Product Ads.”  It’s sort of like a combination of PPC and comparison shopping, since people are looking to purchase anyway.  The categories are initially limited.  Right now there is only Baby, Computers, Consumer Electronics, Health and Personal Care, Home and Garden, Office, Sports and Outdoors, Tools, Home Improvement and Toys.  Your product ads are discovered in a variety of ways including search, browse and on product detail pages.  Products that only you sell will be viewable by using search and browse.  Products that are similar or the same as an existing product will be targeted to customers looking for products like yours.

One of the great things about PPC advertising is its immediacy.  You can start running ads right now and see almost instantaneous results; whether good, bad or just ok.  But, the trap that we don’t want to fall into when running our accounts is limiting our thinking just to what can be gained right now.  The fact is, PPC is a great way to help build all areas of your online business long-term.  And with the continuous expansion of features and avenues being offered in this channel today, the possibilities continue to grow.

But for this series of posts, I want to focus on keyword advertising.  I want to take you through a theoretical progression of how solid PPC search campaigns are started, developed and used to build a foundation for the long-term growth of your brand and website.

Build Your Net

When first starting your keyword advertising, you probably have some sort of idea about what your main keyword themes will be.  For our fishing metaphor, these themes are like the areas that you choose to go fishing.  They are what you believe to be the hot spots.  Once you identify them, you then choose the type of tool that you will use to fish.  Nowadays of course, this would typically be a pole, line, hook and bait.  But, because it fits the metaphor better and we want to catch lots of fish at once, we’re going to use a net .

The keywords you choose during your keyword research act as little nets that are thrown out into the Search Engine Sea to catch all of the billions of fish (search queries) swimming around out there.  You rake all of the fish in and then sort them out to decide which ones are keepers and exactly where you want or don’t want to toss your nets into Search Engine Sea in the future.

Time To Go Fishing

You put some gas in your boat (your monthly budget), you fire it up and go out to cast into Search Engine Sea.  You’ve scoped out your location (keyword themes) and loaded your boat (campaign) with your nets (keywords).  You arrive at your location and cast your nets into the sea.  The problem with many fishermen (advertisers) is that they are not using all of the “tricks of the trade” (AdWords features) that are available to them these days (bait, gps, etc.) in the correct ways to make them as good at fishing as they could be.

Having and knowing how to use the right tools really helps!

This is exactly why I can’t stand fishing.  I simply don’t know how to do it or how to use all of the right tools available to get better at it.  If I entered a fishing competition right now, I wouldn’t know what to do and would be wasting my time, energy and money.  Yeah, I know how to bait a hook, cast and reel.  But, I really don’t KNOW how to fish.  I don’t do it enough and don’t care enough to make it work for me.  The last 3 times I’ve gone, I haven’t caught anything.  Guess what?  Not wanting to fish anymore.  Good thing for me, Chipotle is right around the corner .

And therein lies the rub.  Advertisers go out on the “Search Engine Sea” alone to catch their “fish”, but they don’t know what they’re doing or how to compete.  Yeah, they know how to “bait, hook and reel,” but they really don’t KNOW how to “fish.” Then, when things aren’t going the way they want, they quit, aren’t motivated, decide its overrated or that it’s not worth their time, money and energy.  So, they go to Chipotle.

The problem is that they heard some talk about people catching fish or someone even gave them a fish, or they caught a TV show that made it look easy and enjoyable; and they got excited.  But, since they really don’t know what they’re doing, they “eat for a day” (if even that) and fail to lay a stronger foundation to “eat for a lifetime.”

Good PPC involves becoming an expert. It’s about knowing how to use it to find out what works and what doesn’t online so that you can keep getting bigger and better.

In my next post, we’ll start looking at some tricks of the trade that you may not have known about for long-term growth so that you can become a better fisherman.

We recently had a “small” business come to us for a proposal. We talked at length about their needs, concerns, and budget for SEO, PPC, and Social Media campaigns. We found out that they were spending over $1.5M a year on phone book advertising. For a lot of small businesses, this is an incredible sum of money.

As we developed their proposal, this company became concerned about the PPC budget we had recommended, which was well under 10% of their phone book ad spend. When they asked, “How do small businesses afford SEM?” I initially dodged the question. Every small business is different, but if you can spend $1M on phone book advertising that is completely un-tracked, you can certainly siphon money out of that to invest in SEO and PPC which is trackable. Especially PPC, which can be tracked down to the nth degree.

Understandably, this client doesn’t want to pull all of their phone book ads. I get that. Even if you don’t know whether it is working or not, you know you’ve been successful. The last thing you want to do is yank marketing that could be responsible for your success. (Just the fact that this is an unknown, yet so much is invested in it boggles my mind!)

I understand the slow migration philosophy… cut it, but don’t eliminate it. Take money out of that and invest in something new. That “something new” must prove to be successful, both on it’s own and as part of the bigger picture.

For instance, the PPC may bring them a positive ROI, but they may find that they lost money overall by taking it away from the phone book ads. I know, I chuckled too when I wrote that, but lets just consider it a “possibility”. If that were to happen, then we know that money needs to be re-invested back into the phone book. But, that also means new money needs to be invested in PPC.

Why? Because the PPC is profitable. Any marketing that is profitable is smart marketing. If you gave me a dollar and you knew, through proven historical metrics and tracking, that it would return $5, would you walk away because you didn’t have a dollar? Not me. I’d go diving under the sofa cushions to get whatever change I could find. As soon as I rummaged up a dollar, I’d invest it, take the $5 I earned, return the $1 back to the couch (thanks, Mr. Sofa!), and re-invest the remaining $4, eagerly awaiting my $20.

That’s the beauty of any marketing that is trackable. Once you know that every dollar you spend returns a profit, you’re a bit foolish not to continue to invest money in that marketing avenue. Eventually there is a tipping point, but again, good tracking has your back on that.

Some businesses understand the value of SEO. They have invested their entire marketing budget on SEO/SEM because they know that’s where the money is. I have clients that came to us years ago when they were still publishing catalogs or traveling in RVs to peddle their wares. The economics of those old school marketing efforts worked, but clearly not as profitable as the online marketing efforts.

But, unless those efforts are proven money losers, I say keep doing them. Profit is profit, no matter where it comes from. Of course, this is only valuable once you’ve hit your profit tipping points in the other areas. As long as there is room to invest more in your highest ROI marketing avenues, keep investing!

Unfortunately, for the REALLY small businesses that are just starting out and don’t have a significant budget to work with, SEO can be an expensive foray. This is the case of finding a way to invest the little you have and turn it into a little more, and then turn that into a lot more.

I don’t envy the small business in that position, but that doesn’t make SEO/SEM any less important. You may not be able to invest thousands of dollars a month in SEO or PPC or Social Media. Heck, you may not even find a qualified SEO provider that will take on your account for the budget you offer.

But, you still cannot afford NOT to SEO!

Fortunately, there are plenty of self-help SEO tutorials out there, as well as consultants that can answer your questions on an hour by hour basis. Your options may be limited, but you still have them. It’s just a matter of finding out how best to invest what you have, so you can get some return and grow your pot of SEO gold.

In this episode of PPC Rockstars, David and Howie explained the coined “Checkmate Method” to their listeners that focuses in on a more intense way to write and test your ads against your competition.  Here are some of the highlights…

The most important thing when we make decisions is the context in which we make them.  The decision to purchase is not made upon every possible decision available in the universe.  It’s based on what’s available in the prospect’s environment.  If the prospect is standing in front of a store shelf looking at three options of the same product, they are going to choose the one that they perceive to be the best value for them.  So, a good technique is to present a good value or image for your ad in comparison to those around yours.

A search results page is the ultimate context for people making decisions about where to go.  When people are searching, they are looking for the best match to solve their problem quickly; not every option available in the universe.  This is why people rarely move on to deeper pages of the search results without clicking at least one link.  People don’t spend a bunch of time rationally thinking about all the options on the page and which is the absolute best way to go.  In fact, they spend less time deciding where to go than they would choosing which product to buy in a store because the cost of making a bad decision about where to go is pretty much zero. You can just hit the back button and try again.  Therefore, people typically find and click within a few seconds.

So, what happens in those one or two seconds inside of a searcher’s brain that makes them choose one link over another?  The best research tells us that the brain is quickly scanning for relevance looking for the best deal.  Searchers compare everything on the page and decide on what the best ad is to get them to the information they’re looking for.

The thing is…advertisers tend to talk about their products/offers while ignoring the context of all of the other options available.  It’s a much better idea to write out your ads while looking at a search results page in order to gain the context of the environment your ad is going into.

Even better, it helps if you not only look at the environment your ad is going into, but really analyze it.  This is where the checkmate matrix comes in.  If you fill in this worksheet, you’ll have a great organized snapshot of exactly the environment your new ad will be going into.  Also, you’ll be able to better identify the holes that exist on the page when you combine it with what your ideal customer is looking for and then you can test ways to match those you see are missing.

For example, on this SERP, there are really no emotional benefits and no long-term benefits to what will be gained.  That may be a great place to start on your journey to dominating that keyword market…and then, of course, the world.