Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category

What I’m about to tell you will totally revolutionize your PPC campaigns and make you A LOT more money.  It’s simple, but not well known and not widely practiced.  Most of your competition isn’t doing it.  This is why you should be.  Really, I should not be telling you this.  I should really keep it to myself.  Maybe I’ll just write about organizing your campaigns or how you shouldn’t run search and content ads in the same campaign.  Been there, done that.  Shoot.  Then again, it should be ok.  Most of you will follow the principle anyway, so I should have nothing to worry about.

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.”

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Google Instant Preview: A Game-Changer for Landing Pages

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.

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Marketing on the web is demand-driven.  Searchers are looking for answers.  The best way to dominate the game is to become the best answer to their questions. This is why it’s important to do dynamic keyword research instead of static keyword research. (Read that post before the rest of this one)

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.

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The +1 Button & AdWords

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.

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Google has this tool called Insights for Search.  At first glance, it looks like a pretty simple, fairly unsophisticated tool that just tells you if search volume is going up or down for a particular keyword or group of keywords.  Not many insights there, right?  I mean, all you really have to do for search engine marketing is keyword research with one of the many tools available to you out there and you can easily line up the keywords that you want to go after by search intent and volume, right?

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.

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The latest news to keep you ahead of the competition in managing your paid search advertising…

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

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Chad Summerhill wrote a nice post recently about something you should be doing if you manage your own PPC account and something you should be showing your clients if you manage accounts for others – visual statistically significant ad test results by time period.  Check out the “how-to” in that post.

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…

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Recent news and notes that every PPC advertiser should be aware of…

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

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Check out some of the latest news and notes in the world of the PPC advertiser…

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.

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Last week, we talked about PPC trick #1 to building your online business for the long-term – using keywords correctly.  This week, let’s talk about another “trick of the trade” that will also help on the way to this goal.

Trick #2 – Using Campaigns Correctly

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