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

***Edited because one of my 2008 resolutions was to be nicer to Adcenter

For useful demos and instructions on how to use this new tool from Adcenter visit:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/addin-demos

disclaimer: To be fair, this does look promising, but I really don’t have an extra hour or 2 to play around with it…in my efforts so far, the server it pulls data from is really slow

Seobook has more information and links to feature reviews if you’re interested in learning more.

If you run campaigns overseas, or use labor in this part of the world, this news may impact you:

Internet failure hits two continents

I give this knucklehead credit for making me laugh this morning.

Um. I guess I’m not looking at your PPC ad, it’s some sort of illusion?

Reading the fine print on the website, I was positively stunned to find out:

“the system it involves neither has anything to do with any “AdWords™ and/or AdSense™ credits or vouchers,” nor the direct provision by Google to the customer any direct free advertising at anytime…nor any free pay-per-click or otherwise paid-for advertising directly”

I’m so bummed. I thought I was going to get rich this morning.

Oh well, back to work…

Yes, we know this all along, and I hate to see the ApolloSEM guys get discouraged, because they were posting great content.

Long story short -

I implemented this on 2 of my sites and it was working well until about 10 days ago. I was wondering what happened. Apparently google doesn’t want you to know what people are REALLY searching.

Now, not to be a hypocrite, I’ve roasted people to chards on this blog for whining about Google and the ‘big machine’. Like ApolloSEM, I will not whine about this issue, I will just bear down harder until they tap out.

I was down for the count last week and missed a lot of great activity on my normal blog ’rounds’. ApolloSEM is changing their format somewhat, Joe at PPCHero walks us through a purchase in a customer’s shoes (not enough advertisers do this), and Clixmarketing dissects the Adwords content network post. Good stuff.

As I was reading semfire’s post on local australia google serps, I did a search of my own and I was struck by the percentage of screen landscape on page one that is open to traditional seo. 2 listings, out of 22 total. That’s 9 percent according to my accountant. Since I spent some time with folks in the travel industry last week, I searched for ‘chicago hotel’.

10 of these listings are pure local results. Obviously, these results are more relevant for the user, so this is a trend that isn’t going anywhere.

Beyond that, what do you notice about the paid results?

I don’t see one of these advertisers using “chicago” targeting for their paid search ads. Not a 1. We all know what that can do for your CTR when you are up against national advertisers. Shame Shame Shame. That’s an opening for one of these folks. How to take advantage?

For the beginners

Go get ‘em!

Well it’s been a really busy week and I’ve been sick like a dog. Check out the weather here, it’s been like this for 2 weeks. Oy!

‘

At least it’s sunny. We’re going back to the caribbean next winter. Guaranteed. (more on that later)

In addition to being sick I had a presentation yesterday at the Explore Minnesota Tourism Conference. Exploreminnesota.com is a sweet domain and they have some nice user generated content modules that are being implemented this year. I enjoyed meeting all the people there.

My presentation covered identifying revenue goals, setting up google analytics, and mapping out content to drive traffic. I think it went well. I didn’t get booed off the stage and no one threw anything at me, a ‘la the blues brothers. If you were at the conference and need to download my presentation please send me a message via the contact page.

I’ll be back on my posting schedule tomorrow after I get caught up.

Hasta.

The YSM blog recently had published a guest post from Mike Moran, author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc.. His main points:

2: The Traffic Report Error… For paid search, in fact, having more lookers with few buyers is the worst possible situation to be in, because you pay for every searcher who clicks, but you’re getting next-to-no sales to show for your investment.

True enough I suppose, but isn’t every buyer a former ‘looker’? Knowing what stage of the buying process your searcher is in can very useful. Many ppc advertisers prefer to segment their campaigns accordingly. I don’t think I would ever completely avoid lookers.

3: The 24/7 Sales Pitch Error… it’s natural for you to emphasize information about your products, such as advanced features, special deals…. However, that information targets people who already know they need to buy something—folks who know that your product (or your competitor’s) solves their problem. What about the people who know they have a problem, but have no idea what to do about it? Do you have the kind of problem-solving content that those customers are looking for?

I like this point especially. Search marketers of all kinds tend to focus SO much of their effort on keywords. This keyword converted, this one didn’t, this one is too expensive, this one wears a green hat, etc etc. How about examining why the keywords did or didn’t convert. The reason often lies in the message you present on the site. Are you solving their problem? Are you feeling their pain? I think we can all stand a bit more work on our landing pages and user experience.

Good advice from the Yahoo blog.

WWJBD - aka - What Would Jack Bauer Do?

As I turned off Comanche Moon last night, after only 4 minutes of horrid dialogue and even worse acting, I realize how much I miss Jack Bauer. The writers strike is clearly having an effect on my Sunday evenings.

With no professional writers on this blog (obviously), I will attempt to channel Jack Bauer in order to improve your client relationships.

Jack Bauer (PPC expert): I trusted you, Nina…
Nina Myers: I was just doing my job.
Jack Bauer: Your job?

Yes Jack, she was just doing her job. This is Jack’s obvious reference to the dialogue between PPC manager and client. When the client, Nina, decides, mid-campaign, that it would be a cool idea to add a popup window to the homepage, or even better, one of those ridiculous talking heads.

Result: Ads are suspended, in violation of the ‘no popup rule’
Solution: Jack shoots the talking head, immobilizing it

Jack Bauer: If you don’t tell me what I want to know, then it’ll just be a question of how much you want it to hurt.

Here we have Jack Bauer interrogating his client on their internal sales data. Oftentimes it’s necessary to torture clients into sharing inhouse reporting. Ironically, this is usually the data that helps manage the campaign more effectively, and oftentimes this data shows that despite the cries to the contrary, the campaign has produced a massively positive ROI.

Symptom: Client evasively suggests that the reports are ‘on another computer’.
Solution: Overt threats, suggesting painful torture

In our last Jack Bauer intervention, we go back to the beginning, when Jack first lays eyes upon his client’s existing Adwords campaign:

Jack Bauer: I’m gonna need a hacksaw.

Symptom: Large campaign, one adgroup, 4 keywords, targeted to planet earth
Solution: New account, new campaign

This is fairly self explanatory. Jack knows a bad campaign when he sees it.

More episodes to come, as long as the writers strike is on, I’ll need something to do…

If a tree fell in the Adcenter forest, would anyone hear it?

Dave Szetela notes the addition of a new keyword research add in for Excel. Sounds interesting! Obviously this is in response to Adwords offering to ‘export to Googledoc’. Interested to hear if anyone has tried this yet?

**Note - In 2008 you’ll probably hear less criticism of Adcenter from this blog, I’ve been having surprisingly good results for the last couple months with a few key campaigns in Adcenter.

There was a hotshot seo at a company I used to work for. He was always trying to be the smartest guy in the room, and he was always babbling on and on about LSI theory. Long story short, he got fired, real fast.

Some people like to talk algorithms until they’re blue in the face. Most of the time they don’t actually do any work or make any money. Analysis paralysis.

Anyhow, I’ve found very few articles that do a good job of explaining this concept and even fewer with real world examples. This one is an exception to that rule.

What does this have to do with PPC?

I’m finding, in the last 90 days or so, that on page optimization is weighted more and more heavily after the initial 7-10 days of honeymoon once you launch a campaign. In short, Google gives almost everyone a fair shot for the first 48 hours. (it’s not always the case, but it is a lot of the time) In my tests I can get great/ok QS for any niche. Period. You name the keyword. All with domain/url customization, 100% borrowed content and simpleton pages, including affiliate links. However, after 5 days to a week unless I do something with those pages the great/ok QS will start to slide, slowly at first and then rapidly.

There are so many variables to this, and for every person who agrees with me on this, I’ll find 5 that have different experiences. The concept, however, is that you need to build out and test your personal ‘matrix’ of content organization. Find what works, build your little map, and stash it away. PPC and SEO are almost completely blurred to me now. They are one entity, and you need to work both at the same time. The good news is that if you’re building value for one, it’s working for the other as well.

Read that article, and understand it, it will apply to PPC just as it does SEO.