Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category

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Last week Yahoo posted a blog about how using the negative keywords helps increase relevance. Where they did provide a list of steps, I thought I’d take that a bit further and outline the steps for each of the three major PPC providers.

Google AdWords
Quite often you will want to create a negative keyword list that applies to your entire campaign, rather than creating individual lists for each ad group. Google makes this easy by following these steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. Click the campaign you wish to edit.
3. The number of existing campaign negative keywords will appear beneath the campaign name and daily budget.
4. If no campaign negative keywords exist for your campaign, click Add. Otherwise, click edit.
5. You may select and enter negative keywords for your campaign in one of two ways:

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In the never ending effort to improve the success of the current campaigns, I recently spent some time going back through our AdWords history to see which ad creatives had been successful, as well as to see what keywords had converted strongly. I went back a year, prior to my employment with Pole Position Marketing. Sometimes I feel like my creativity has been tapped out, so I was hoping for some inspiration.

Looking at the campaign level, I found some paused and deleted campaigns with healthy Conversion Rates, leading me to wonder why that campaign had ever been paused, much less deleted. A quick glancing at the CTR and my questions were answered. Sometimes it is best to just dump what isn’t working and begin again. Ad group quality score certainly reflect that.

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Planning and organizing are often overlooked aspects of PPC accounts. A retailer knows their product inventory and wants to sell it online. Let’s say they sell sporting goods, everything from bowling shoes to tennis balls. They create a pay-per-click account and get a huge list of keywords that anyone might use to find the products they sell. The problem is that they do this without planning ahead.

They compile a gigantic list of keywords because they sell hundreds of products. They create one campaign with one ad group to sell everything in their inventory. Their ad lists the company name and points everyone to the home page. Thousands of impressions, hundreds of clicks and dollars later, few conversions are the result.

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Last week I talked about my awesome Click-Through-Rates, so this week I pulled together some impressive conversion rates… These screen shots are month to date as of 10:00am, Tuesday, January 29, 2008.

Campaign Summary:

AdGroup Level:

Ad Variations: (Dappi Diaper Pants):

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Whether starting out fresh with a new Pay-Per-Click account, or improving an existing account, keywords are the root of every campaign. Knowing what words people are actively searching can help you capture the traffic you’re after. The following tools can be useful in generating new keyword ideas.

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool – can be used externally without an AdWords account – allows you to enter single keywords or find keywords from a web page.
• Google Search Query Performance – must be used with an active AdWords account – generates a list of what key words actually triggered your ad to display.
• Google Suggest – allows you to try different keywords to improve your search results.
• Google Trends – reflects what keywords people are searching for.

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Thursday’s Celebrity Apprentice was a pretty lackluster episode. I was excited to see Marilu Henner and Vincent Pastore square off. I like both of them, but Marilu seems to be a much stronger leader than Vincent. I wasn’t sure who I was rooting for. I mean, I love it when Omarosa’s team loses, but I don’t want to see Marilu go.

The women have severe cohesiveness issues, thanks largely due to Omorosa. On the other hand, the guys, who work very well together, had some pre-task fireworks themselves. Which brings me to…

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I read “What’s Your Highest Click Through Rate (CTR)?” last week. Comments on the blog brought up good points. CTR can rock at every level. Ideally, we’d love to see our best CTR at the Account level, but we also track campaign level, ad group level, ad creative level and keyword level. If there’s going to be a poll in the future, I’d suggest it state/ask specifics. Also, for the record, I would point out that CTR isn’t as important as conversion rate. I’ve posted previously about an account with zero conversions. CTR doesn’t mean beans if you don’t get any conversions out of it!

With all that said, I’ve grabbed screen shots of one of my more successful results. The following screen shots were taken Month to Date, 01.22.08. I drilled down into my highest conversion ad group for the details:

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The true title should be “I Love My Job” … not so much because it is Pay-Per-Click, but more so because I am provided with the tools to do my job efficiently. In this ever changing world of the internet, things change so quickly that keeping up with the changes can be rough.

Not so with my job though cause ‘education time’ is built into the work day. One hour, every day, we’re to dedicate our time to research, study or just plain reading about our profession. I read so many posts a week – I wonder how those people actually get any work done outside their posting. I’ve mentioned in a previous post about reviewing and updating my PPC binder and I’ve been at it again. I have my binder organized into eight different categories thus far, including:

Forget about the details of setting up an AdWords, Search Marketing or adCenter campaign. — You aren’t going to find those instructions here. At least not today anyway. If you’re looking for that kind of information, each vendor has a pretty extensive step-by-step process they’ll walk you through. (Although tips on those instructions are always good – that is another post.)

What you will find here is a basic question that you need to ask yourself. Before even considering how to compose your ad text or create the keyword list, what is the FIRST question that needs asked? Is it about the budget? No. How about the CPC bids? No, that’s not the first either.

So if ad text isn’t first, keywords aren’t first, budget isn’t and CPC certainly isn’t, then what is the question needing answered? If you’re job is like mine, and you manage other people’s PPC accounts, you’ve got to understand what your client sells, and how their site is organized. So you the first question you have to ask is:

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I am looking forward to 2008 – looking forward to increasing the number of PPC clients we manage.

I started with Pole Position Marketing in May 2007 with 5 clients. I’ve added 4 clients since and while we still don’t have a huge client list, the services and products they promote are quite varied.

To name the interesting clients, I currently manage campaigns selling baby products, bathroom fixtures, online testing services, pet caskets and plastic card manufacturing. That’s quite a diverse assortment. Each of them has very specific needs, different budgets and different constraints.

I’m ready for more … Bring it on 2008!