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

I don’t know why this topic gets me so fired up, but it does. This morning I was reading a new article over at SEL that argued against focusing on PPC ads for brand searches, by a PPC analyst of all people.

The general position of the author was that brand searches don’t drive incremental sales, and therefore shouldn’t be the focus of your PPC team.

Sales from brand phrases are non-incremental, and don’t reflect the effort of the search team.

To me, this is a totally irrelevant argument. It’s akin to Best Buy telling their newpaper reps that they only want their Sunday inserts to show up in markets where no one has ever heard of Best Buy. Sure, that’s a very useful ad, but I still want my inserts to show up where people have heard of me, and perhaps they even look forward to the Sunday inserts so they can browse the new plasma flatscreens or mp3 players (I know I do).

Let me put it this way. I know for a fact that I will be buying a flat screen sometime in the next month or two. The day I plan on purchasing this TV, I will probably pick up the Best Buy insert, as well as the ABT ad, and the Circuit City insert, and I will compare prices among those 3 retailers. If Best Buy doesn’t place an insert that day, they are out of luck (pretending there’s no internet for a moment).

Paid search is a similar playing field. When a user searches for brands, it’s because they want to see what the vendor has to offer, and it indicates a predisposition to a purchase. To me, this is a prime prospect, and I definitely will craft a finely targeted campaign for this person. Now this is where clients always object:

“I already rank for my own brand/name, why would I pay ‘extra’ for that click?”. Brand searches are an opportunity to:

1. Reinforce your brand
2. Inform users of new sales, products, or special offers
3. Deliver a more customized message that can’t be controlled through serp descriptions as well
4. Ward off competition who may be bidding on your brand
5. Control the dialogue

Now, this is not to say that there should be no special consideration for a brand search. Far from it, in fact. Every campaign I build has separate brand adgroups as well as a name adgroup, as a matter of default strategy. I will value a brand sale very differently, and the CPA will likely be significantly different than a non-brand sale. The messaging is different, the call to action is different, and landing page may be different as well. A brand searcher is just a segment of your audience, and they should be treated as such, not ignored becuase you have a decent organic ranking.

For small to medium sized businesses brand searches are even more important. Your site may be new, or have low visibility in general, but there are still a handful of people searching your name or brand, and you want to be in front of them, even if it means paying a few cents extra for a click. Last month I had a small regional client spend $5.16, at $.07 per click, on branding terms, most of them generated by searches for the company name. They do rank for their name, but other companies bid on this as well, and would show up on top of their organic listing if not for our PPC ad. That $5.16 drove over $2,000 in sales. Would those sales have come organically? Maybe, or maybe not. Maybe someone would have been diverted by another PPC ad. But now we know for sure, we drove the sale, the ROI was astounding, and the client is happy.

What’s the overall point? Brand searches are an opportunity. Whether sales from brand searches are incremental or not is irrelevant. They are sales, and should be measured in a separate adgroup as other segmented queries are.

Don’t miss the boat!

If you’re at all interested in growing your internet portfolio you’ve probably investigated domaining, an increasingly popular market phenomenon. In it’s base form, it is remarkably similar to the real estate industry, but much faster moving, less established, and with much more ‘gray’ area. You have valuation, speculation, and ‘location’ (traffic) all playing a part in the buying and selling of domains and sites.

What makes this business so attractive is that it’s really one of the easiest ways to build passive income for yourself. With the advent of the sandbox and increasing competitive saturation levels in various internet marketing niches, in many cases it’s simply more cost effective to buy someone else’s site rather than start from scratch.

The Aviva Directory just gave me a heads up on their new article, a comprehensive and useful look at this industry. You should pop over and take a gander (give yourself 15 minutes of reading time)

I don’t call myself a ‘domainer’, but I have dabbled in the buying and selling of existing web properties over the last couple years. For me personally, it’s just a way to leverage capital that would sit around in a bank savings account earning 2%. Other choices for that money? Um. The stock market, which I have no interest in relying on someone else’s skills or the flaky nature of stock market psychology. Or, real estate, which at the moment is not the lock it was for the past 10 years.

In my experience, depending on the niche, many existing sites sell for 7-10x monthly revenue. Of course, there is great fluctuation depending on the nature and stability of the site. The less valuable sites are gaming, proxy, and MFA’s, which you will find plenty of but beware of the underlying hosting costs and the possibility of getting your adsense account shut down. Sites that are more solid, such as ecommerce, need to show an established period of earnings, and there’s much more work involved in terms of validating suppliers, margins, shipping issues, etc. (I bought an ecommerce site late last year, and sold it 30 days later, for a $1000 profit luckily, after I discovered the horrors of actually running one of these things. Too much like real work to qualify as passive income!)

In my opinion the best sites are those that deal in information, the virtual kind. Selling ebooks or memberships can be totally automated and require virtually no maintenance. Your only job is marketing, which is the way it should be.

How do you finance one of these endeavors? It all depends on your financial situation and tolerance for risk. Personally I don’t mind some risk because I’m confident in my ability to speculate and monetize. The Aviva article talks about using the cheapest capital available, or in my case I often choose what Aviva calls balance transfer arbitrage. Credit card companies are always offering 0% introductory periods, so I chose to take advantage. Don’t go out and do this recklessly though. You have to be sharp and stay on top of your finances. Certainly don’t overextend yourself and put yourself at risk. I could easily have paid cash for a recent site purchase, but I didn’t want to use it, I’d rather use someone else’s money for free. The main point being, stay well within your means and don’t get carried away.

How does it work? Well, I found a site that made $800/mo., steadily for 6 months+. After my due diligence I paid 9 months revenue for the site and charged the majority of the purchase on a 0% card with an introductory offer of 12 months. I’m currently about 4 months in, the site is making between 800-1500/mo, and I pay my $600 payment every month. Most of the money I make goes back into the site, buying links, reviews, content, etc. The site will be paid off by the 12 month mark, and after that it’s purely profit.

Of course, there is always risk associated with this, like anything, and I don’t mean to make it sound so simple. This is just how I do it, you have to find what works for you. Whatever you choose, it pays to educate yourself first. Do your research and stay diligent in doing the little things right.

Happy Domaining!

There’s some debate to it’s relevancy of late, but seriously, how can you question the value of quality localized search listings? The question is, when will it get over the hump? We’ve been talking about it for years! C’mon, Al Gore invented the internet in half the time it took us to even come up with yahoo.local and google.local. Hell, he’s even gone and solved global warming before we can come up with one single site that provides real quality local content (spare me yelp please).

What is taking so long?

I have no idea. That’s a question for people smarter than me. I’m more worried about Illinois basketball and their low seed in the tourney. And why can’t Bruce Weber recruit…

About 2 years ago Yahoo had Google smoked in local search features and usability (remind you of another product they had a lead with?)…now, Yahoo lets people game it just for fun by exploiting the most ridiculous hole in a search algo ever:

Search engine marketing chicago << this hole has been plugged

Google pulls data that has more integrity, and it's beefing search results with local bells and whistles, which is nice but it's far from perfect. If you have a business with a local address, you best pay attention to the improvements they're making at the local G.

Yes, taking care of these details will help the small business in the long run, but in terms of real traffic? Hard to say. It depends on your vertical. The effort of ranking locally outweighs the benefits in many cases. Why? Basically, too much fragmentation in the media. As Greg Sterling said recently, “complexity of local “on the ground” far exceeds that of national online advertising or general paid search”.

He’s absolutely right. Imagine it this way…you live in Chicago…you sit down in front of your TV tonight to catch the news on your favorite local college basketball team. Say it’s DePaul. You want to know if they’re getting into the NIT tournament. You enter into your remote “channel 37″, which you know is a local Comcast sports affiliate, the best place to get local sports news. Instead of landing on channel 37, you find a list of channels to choose from.

109,000,000 OF THEM!!!!

Is that useful? Unless Google starts to produce local content, we’re going to get a lot more of this unless some kind of shift takes place.

Anyone? Buhler?

Well, not something to really celebrate per se, but rather, something to reflect on. Threadwatch has a post this weekend about the technology bubble bursting this weekend 7 years ago. March 2000. Hard to believe that it’s been 7 years already, it seems like just yesterday.

What was I doing at the time? Glad you asked…because I was one of the lucky ones who got thrown through the hurricane called the dot com bubble. Why lucky? Because I learned lessons during that time I’ll never ever forget. Valuable business lessons about speculation, smoke and mirrors, and hype. As our immortal george in chief would say:

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

You just can’t write comedy like that….

Flashback:

In 1997 I was working for AOL Digital Cities as a producer. Pulling together design and editorials for local Minneapolis content. It was a dream job, other than having to code in Rainman, the crappy AOL proprietary code. I was 25, all the people I worked with who had started before me were planning investments and retirement with their recently cashed in pre-IPO priced options. My options were still locked up, but if I waited just a little bit longer I would surely be next, right?

Wrong. 6 months later the company that ran our division decided to ‘change focus’ and fired 85% of our office. Ouch. Dream job gone and options kaput. I went across the street and had a beer, and began to plot my next move.

That move included going to Chicago, where my friends were and the economy was much more robust. I got a job with a small web design shop that lasted until they were late with 2 of my paychecks, which I have very little tolerance for. I picked up the phone and called a recruiter who had been hounding me about a job in the suburbs, a company called MyPoints. I accepted their package offer, which included of course a nice chunk of pre ipo options.

To make a long story short, when I walked in the door in March we had around 200,000 members. Just a few months later we had a couple million and were going public with our IPO. Most senior management were instant millionaires. Our stock price went from around $11 at open to $90 around December, if memory serves. The market cap reached, believe it or not, $2 billion at some point. LOL. We had maybe $10mm in sales?? What the hell, I thought. I was still very young. This career stuff is pretty fun!

I ended up selling some stock at the first open period, but passed on selling the rest in March 2000. I just know the stock will rebound! We’re doing so well…By the time were were ‘unlocked’ again the stock had dropped to $55, but the full bubble hadn’t yet burst. We were all drinking the cool aid at this point and were bullish on the company. We were approaching 15 million members and sales were booming. Our top sales guy was 24 years old living in NYC, he pulled down $1m in 2000. More than one co-worker started buying stock with the ‘equity’ in their options (I wasn’t that nuts).

Hindsight, they say…

Anyhow, the market crashed basically the very next day and suddenly we weren’t as smart as we thought. Our stock dropped below the IPO price faster than you could say ‘Titanic’. A couple years later United Airlines bought us for $56 million, because they liked our code. They probably put it on someone’s AMEX. Some of us stayed, some left, but at the end of the day it was a lesson in humility and business fundamentals. One that I won’t ever forget.

When I start to see things like Google’s $500 share price, I go back and read articles like this one...

While not the ideal situation, many PPC analysts have been in the position where they have to take over a PPC campaign that was originally opened by the client themselves. What often happens is the client started with Adwords as a way to gain new customers, being the entreprenuers they are, they take it on themselves, and one of 2 things happens:

1. They get slaughtered (70% of the time).
2. They overachieve, and actually have a marginally ok campaign (30%).

I can think of many examples of both situations. The 30% are the easiest to work with, because they actually have an idea of how to do it the right way, but they realize the number of hours required to actually do a comprehensive job managing the campaign correctly, and by the time they come to me they are more than happy to hand over the reins.

The 70% are the most difficult to work with. These are the people who jumped in the water without thinking, and didn’t set the campaign up remotely correctly for whatever reason, and have high expectations. What they’ve done is actually worse than never trying, because now their account has a poor history, which can be difficult to overcome.

In either case, the analyst ends up working on an account in which the client can log in and access the campaign. Now, we’re spending their money, so that’s perfectly ok, I would do the same thing. However, what has to be avoided at all costs is the client actually making any changes whatsoever to the account while it’s under the analysts control. I know it sounds crazy, but it has happened to me personally (only once, thankfully). Not a fun conversation to have with someone, but at that point you have to let your client have it, full on.

So, the question is, how do you keep an eye on your client? Well, that’s simple, and as soon as this feature came out (seems like eons ago) I was all over it. It’s the My Change History tool. To get to this page, go to the:

Campaign Management Tab
The click Tools
Under “Analyze Your Ad Performance”, see My Change History

Here you can track everything that has happened within the account for the last 3 months. Specifically, it will tell you:

* Daily budget adjustments
* Keyword edits or additions
* Changes in distribution preferences
* Changes made via the AdWords API

So, if you are in the situation with a client that you suspect there are changes being made (it’s usually very obvious), you can confirm this fact by checking here.

How do you know if the change was made by the client specifically? Well, the first column in the history tab will tell you the user login. Since you should be using your MCC to manage the account, the client will always login under their own username.

How else can this be used? Well, in two primary ways.

1. Managing multiple campaigns at the same time can get tricky, and sometimes you need to go back at your own changes and try to correlate cause and effect. For example, all of a sudden you see a huge drop in CPA for an adgroup, and also a drop in overall impression volume. What happened? Well, you can go back and see that 5 days ago you lowered the content network bids to $.10 for an adgroup that wasn’t converting well for content targeting. Ah, now I remember! Sounds silly but it you’re managing 20+ accounts, you can relate.

2. Keeping an eye on your junior analysts or sub contractors. If you are in the process of training newer analysts, or you are responsible for the performance of a campaign you aren’t managing directly, the account history tab is absolutely invaluable.

So, as you see, if you haven’t yet taken advantage of this feature, you should defintely get on the ball. It’s extremely useful in a number of different scenarios.