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

It seems like a simple concept, but you don’t see it discussed much on the SEO forums and blogs all that often. I venture to guess it’s because if people are given a choice - pay now or pay later, most people will choose the latter. Matt McGee at SEL wrote what seemed to be yet another Top 20 list, but while reading I saw 2 excellent points that caught my eye.

1 - Have analytics in place at the start:

It always surprises me how many clients I speak with who don’t have analytics installed or don’t utilize what they have. Look at it this way - the NBA draft is tonight, do you think that the team executives would show up at the draft without any stats about the prospective players? Something tells me they do just a little bit of statistical and game tape analysis before they decide who to draft.

2 - Open up a PPC account

Anyone who asks me about starting SEO, I tell them the same thing. Find out now what your site should be optimized for. Start a paid search campaign. Don’t spend weeks, months, and resources optimizing for something you have no idea whether it will convert. In fact, let’s kill 2 birds with one stone, Google Adwords offers Google Analytics to anyone with an account. They’re both ‘free’. Sign up and take advantage, please!

I absolutely 100% guarantee there is no one in the world who can tell you what your best converting keyword will be before you actually start getting search engine traffic. Be patient, spend a month running a small campaign in paid search, you will learn a lot about your site and your product/service in that time.

Google’s new Placement Performance reports are being heralded as a big step towards transparency, and for the most part I agree. What I can’t understand is why they are hiding all the data from the Adsense for Domains program. If you run a placement performance test, you will see in the “URL” column as well as the “DOMAIN” column, the label: Domain ads.

Google says,

“In general, we’ve found that ads on parked domain sites perform as well as or better than ads on content and search sites.”

AHEM..Excuse me while I get up and walk this off…

Actually, as I examine data across many of the campaigns I manage, I think I know why they’re hiding it. Because, in my case, it converts approximately 25% as well. Of course, this is only the campaigns I manage. I would love some feedback from the rest of you. Please run reports where you can and let us know what you find.

What is an MFA? It’s all the ‘bogus’ sites that are optimized by publishers who, let’s say, have an interest in high CTR.

MFA’s are also what all the white hat establishment get up in arms about, complaining about the quality of these sites and how they hurt our industry.

Well, I just started running the new placement performance reports available through adwords, and I’m finding what most serious PPC advertisers already knew.

MFA converts, big time.

Are MFA’s a good thing for the industry long term? Of course not.

Run some of these reports yourself, and you will see what blackhatters have known all along, and also why it’s taken so long for Google to offer up this information. MFA sites are simply too valuable to Google for them to give up on.

Still, blackhatters are quaking in their boots about this new information becoming available. I personally don’t think they have much to worry about. Why? Because your average advertiser has no idea, no time, and no inclination to go through the trouble of actually running this report.

With my biggest client right now, I just ran a placement report for the last 7 days. What did I find? Probably 40-50% MFA, or borderline MFA. Some of them converting at 60%.

60%? I’ll take it. Parked domain traffic? Now I’ve got a real problem with that…

Right now this program is in the Google Beta ‘mystery forest’. I signed up and was accepted some time ago, but have received virtually no impressions for my offer. Granted, it’s in the a web design niche, so I had low expectations. Others I’ve spoken with haven’t had much traction, though, so I’m not alone.

In any event, Google announced today that if you’ve recieved more than 500 conversions in the last 30 day period through Adwords conversion tracking, you will eventually be invited to join the program. One of my clients had 559 conversions last month, so I’m anticipating being able to test this tactic with a different offer soon.

Starting today, advertisers who use AdWords conversion tracking and receive more than 500 conversions from their cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) campaigns in the most recent 30-day period will be invited to join this beta test, on a rolling basis. Eligible advertisers will see an alert in their AdWords account informing them that they can now try the PPA beta.

The upcoming 90 days will tell us a lot about whether Google has the expertise in house to handle the CPA game. This is critical for them, in my book, on their path to world domination (not that I want to see this). My thought, if I were a manager at Google Adwords - snipe an engineer, a high end project manager and the best client services person from Performics (part of Doubleclick) and start putting the pieces in place for integration between the two units. I mean, isn’t that why you bought them?

Today Yahoo is starting a phased rollout of quality based pricing for BOTH the SEARCH and CONTENT network. It’s needed badly, in my opinion, on the content network, but I’m suprised to see it on both.

Key Features:

• We’ll evaluate the quality of traffic from our distribution partners’ sites.
• Your click charges can be discounted based on the value of that traffic.
• Discounts will automatically be applied to your account.

I definitely applaud this innovation from Yahoo, it’s the first time in years that I can remember Yahoo Search taking a step forward on their own, before Adwords. This is a needed feature, and I’m suprised they’ve gone ahead and implemented something like this. Bravo!

Quality Based Pricing, from the horses mouth