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

Yet another dying print publication attacks the foundation of internet advertising with unfounded and sensationalistic claims about click fraud. Yawn…

I’m waiting for Jerry Springer to start producing shows about clickfraud. I think it’s a perfect fit, and in both cases, you could say America just doesn’t know any better.

Jerry: Meet Lucinda, she’s a 35 year old operator of backyardgoldfishponds.com, she says that Sergey here took $59 from her last week for fraudulent clicks.

Lucinda: Hi Jerry, that’s right, he’s the one right there. All the clicks came from Botswana. He’s a bad man.
Sergey: Let me guess Lucinda, you spent $35,000 last week on clicks, made a net profit of $17,000, and you found $59 of clickfraud, and Clicktracks told you all about this?

Lucinda: How did you know?

Sergey: I know everything.

If you are wondering why mainstream print media needs to publish articles like this, look no further.

What in the world is KwPI¢? I was reading a post by the world’s best recruiter about a candidate’s KPI, or Key Performance Indicator. Being that I’m a lowly google adwords certified professional and live in a PPC vacuum, I’d never really heard or paid much attention to this terminology. I immediately assumed it was Keyword Performance Indicator, and thought, wow, how in the world are they measuring that?

Well, turns out they aren’t. No one is. But I think we should, as search marketers, develop a standard way to measure the performance of a site against a key phrase. Don’t you? Doesn’t that make sense? I’m sure some people are doing it but I’ve never seen it discussed and formalized.
This measurement would have several useful benefits.

1. Search marketing agencies can list in their credentials a KwPI score for their client’s key phrases.

2. If I’m a job candidate, I can say something to the effect of, “Raised company KwPI to 7.2 on phrase “wide blue widgets”

3. It would be an effective way for a company to measure the performance of their own efforts, whether in house or outsourced.

As I’m thinking of what it could be used for, I think first you have to define what IT is.

Here’s a stab at it:

KwPI: Keyword Performance Indicator - A measurement of a website’s reach or visibility within the scope of the major search engines and advertising networks.

I think you would want to separate organic KwPI from PPC KwPI altogether. Measuring PPC reach is a manual process right now and the way I would do it could take 30 minutes for each keyword.

Let’s call the organic version Keyword Performance Indicator - Organic.

What key measurements could determine a company’s organic KwPI? This is a tough one, and will have to be refined over time. At least you’d have to start with the following:

1. Organic rank in Google (sliding scale points based on ranking)
2. Organic rank in Yahoo (sliding scale points based on ranking)
3. Organic rank in MSN (sliding scale points based on ranking)
4. Alexa Ranking (sliding scale numerical value based on ranking)

Of course there are hundreds of other small search engines out there, as well as a few medium sized ones, like ASK. But for now, I think if you take a score based on your rankings in these search engines you’re getting a fairly accurate representation of the visibilty of a site, organically speaking.

What this won’t take into account: roi on keywords, feeds, ppc, paid placement, email driven traffic, and countless other techniques.

This is just me brainstorming, and there are a lot of people who will pick this apart, so please, share your thoughts on how to refine this measurement. I’m already working on a tool to measure this and hope to release it soon.

Yes, if you currently manage PPC campaigns for any number of clients this question is no doubt the bane of your existence on a daily basis. Normally, the conversation goes like this:

“Jeff I can’t see my ads, what in the world is going on here?”

“Dear Client, your daily budget is 45 cents and your main keyword is ‘New York Injury Attorneys’, we may never see your ad, ever. Ever.”

OK, that’s not exactly how it goes, but you get the idea. Google has given us a nice tool in order to help advertisers see their ads with certain geographical restrictions in a ‘preview‘ environment. What is nice about this is that the ads will not accrue impressions or clicks, and the advertiser finally gets to see something tangible (while not live, yes, but it will still help people get over their skittishness.)

To me this has been one of the major challenges in PPC client management. Many of the advertisers who have adopted pay per click marketing were yellow page clients. They understand the importance of this medium, but they can’t get over the fact that they can’t see their ads all the time. No matter how many times you describe the adwords system, they still hang up the phone feeling like someone is taking their money in some sort of scam. Think about it.

Pay for Yellow Page ad, see thousands of copies of your ad everywhere.

Pay for newspaper classified ad, see thousands of copies of your ad everywhere.

Billboard, everywhere.

Magazine, everywhere. On and on and on.

The irony is, all of those offline ‘impressions’ are by and large completely, utterly, untargeted. However, you can touch and feel them, which goes a very very long way.

Anyhow, the point of my post, if you want to show someone exactly what their ad looks like, Google can do it for you.

From the Adwords blog:

“We’ve heard your feedback and now have a tool for you to use to preview your ads no matter where they’re targeted. Here’s how it works:

1. Visit www.google.com/adpreview
2. Enter your keyword(s) in the search box and click on the “Search” button
3. Preview your ads on the search results page that loads or the subsequent pages (click the next link to see more ads on the right-hand side)

For example, if you are trying to preview ads for “pay per click genius” in Chicago, IL, the URL you would use would look like:

http://www.google.com/search?adtest=on&hl=en&q=pay+per+click+genius&gr=US-IL&gcs=Chicago

A useful tool from the folks at the Adwords farm.

If you manage PPC campaign for clients, what’s the best explanation you’ve heard, or given, to a client when asked about the inability to see their ads all the time?