the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

…there was a young Jeffrey (yes I’m going to do the 3rd person bit). He was not particularly studious but had a lot of energy and a wild imagination. He would do half his homework and then rush outside to play. Dad was concerned. One day Dad sat young Jeffrey down for a lecture.

“Jeffrey, the world works like this…You’re in second grade now. You have responsibilities, like your homework assignments. When you complete the assignments you get a grade. When you go to class for a whole semester, you add up your grades on your assignments and you get a grade in the class. People will judge whether you are smart by this grade. If you get a bad grade, you build a bad foundation. A bad foundation is like putting a bad brick in the wall of the house. If you get bad grades in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade, you get a bunch of bad bricks. Eventually, with enough bad bricks, you have a bad wall, and the house will fall down.”

The story went on and on like this (or so I remember). Dad had to repeat this story every year until I left the house. Poor Dad.

What does this have to do with PPC? Well, I’ll tell you what. It’s about taking shortcuts and what it does to you in the long run. Why do I bring it up? Because I recently took on my biggest client. The client came to me wanting to spend more money than any client I’ve ever managed. I was happy, because it meant a lot of money for me (with a new baby this is important). What’s the catch, you ask? Of course, the client wanted to be LIVE IN 3 DAYS.

Who does this? Why would you spend money and demand unreasonable set up time. You have to know you won’t get as good a campaign built in 3 days as you would 14. PPC is ALL ABOUT THE BUILD people. All about thorough research, painstakingly duplicitous and methodical, plodding building. Yes, it’s very much like building a house. Do your measurements, make sure you have everything covered, and then hammer away until it’s done. The blueprints are what matter. You have to design correctly. You have to know what will come before it even becomes an issue.

Yes, this is all well and good, but give me examples jeff…

OK…

First, research your verticals and determine the ROOT words, like house, condo, ranch, etc…get ‘em all people, because if you miss them here, you won’t go back and catch it later.

Then, how do people modify that phrase for your vertical?…do they want to buy, purchase, rent, build, tear down, construct, paint, or remodel? Pick out what is relevant to your business, and then permutate or concatenate your way to a complete campaign.

Last bit of advice for this lesson, when you’re compiling this list, break your keyword groupings down into as many columns as you can and write 5-7 ad copies for each column. Get granular folks, and you’ll have a good, solid foundation…

And best of all, you won’t have to repeat 2^nd grade!

So what happened with the client? Well, instead of building a complete campaign half assed, I built a great campaign, but only a 1/4 of what they wanted. Why? Because quality is all that matters, you can always add more quality components later, which I’m doing now. How is the original 1/4 campaign doing? Well, I’ve cut their old acquisition cost in half, and inquiries have gone from 500 to 700 per week. And I’m hardly even in the bid management stage, I’m still building. In short, it kicks ass, and is good foundation upon which to build.