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

There’s an old adage in the sporting world that goes something to the effect of: “Take what the defense gives you”. For example, in basketball, the opposing defense might double team your center down low, and therefore leave you with someone open on the perimeter. Now you have 2 choices, you can: a. take the open outside shot, or b. ignore the double team and try to still get the ball down low. Which one is easier? The open jump shot, of course. Why not take it?

In the pay per click business, Adwords is the defense. Your campaign is the offense. Your adgroups are the squad, the keywords are your players, and your website is your playbook. Google, to our frequent dismay, owns the basketball court, the basketball, the stadium, the league, and they may even own your team bus. When you’re building a campaign for the Adwords platform, you best keep this in mind. Do you really want to pick a fight with the league? I don’t. I like the game and want to keep playing.

The good news is that the league office will tell you what squads and players are going to work best based with your website. How do they do this? Through the Adwords external keyword tool.

Let’s pretend that I wanted to build a campaign selling my pay per click management services through this website. My first stop, but never the last, is the Adwords keyword tool because I like to check in with the big dog to get a general sense of what the landscape is. I have a general idea that my most relevant root keywords will be related to:

pay per click management
ppc management

Some modifiers that would possibly go along with those keywords:

services
company
agency
consultant
etc etc…

I plug in some variations of these keywords and see what Adwords will come up with:

I end up with a nice long list of keyword ideas, as well as some negative keywords. This list is not segmented well, however, and will require some granularity before I can build the campaign efficiently.

I file these keywords away and move on to the next step, which is critical. I need to see what Adwords thinks about my site as it relates to these keywords. I do this through the same tool, but select: Website Content, and enter my url.

Google is now kind enough to hand me keywords and their themes, as they see them. I can see immediately that I have a problem. Pay per click management and my other core keywords are nowhere to be found.

More often than not, Google is right. If you look at my sitemap you’ll see I have nothing related to ‘pay per click management’, ‘ppc management’, etc. This tells me a few things.

1. I need to be more deliberate in my page architecture and content tagging
2. I need to build content around my intended campaign themes.

If I tried to run this campaign now, without those elements, I would most likely suffer a mediocre quality score and would not be achieving maximum ROI efficiency.

So there we have it. Before the game has even started I’ve gained the most important bit of strategic knowledge I can possibly get.

I know that if I take these players out on the floor with this playbook they will get slaughtered.

Best to go back to the practice field and work on some new plays.

I can start immediately with a few strategies:

Better to invest a few hours now and save myself a lot of money in the long run.

This issue hasn’t had much ink in this election season, but we in this industry should be voicing our opinions, loud and clear. Today is your chance - head on over to the freepress blog and leave a comment.

Google Beats Estimates, Stock Flies

Am I allowed to say I told you so?

Not so long ago I criticized analysts for not understanding Google.

This is a situation where Google is not listening to the street at all when making decisions about how they tweak their platform, and it will benefit them in the long run.

Thank goodness we have Henry Blodgett to tell us that Google has a good business after all. For you youngsters out there who weren’t hemorrhaging stock options through the dot com bust, Henry Blodgett was the pied piper of internet stocks in the big pre 2000 run up. He was later caught in a securities fraud investigation and is now banned for life. But that doesn’t preclude you from getting a great job on TV, of course.

Funny: He was caught by a randy fellow New Yorker - Elliot “Wire Transfers are Stupid” Spitzer

Call Tracking has become a very important part of PPC campaign strategy with many of my clients over the last year or two. This is especially true among the most chronically underserved business segment in the SEM industry - the successful small to mid sized regional business. This business often relies on the phone as the main booking mechanism for revenue/appointments, etc. Yet they are too small to pay high end SEM management fees, but large enough to spend a fair amount on paid search.

To date I have employed Voicestar with the majority of these clients. The ability to report phone calls, numbers, and length of call are critical to demonstrating the value of this advertising medium to companies that otherwise don’t have the resources to implement an effective website, robust analytics, and some of the other luxuries afforded to larger or more web-based businesses.

Voicestar does the trick and I’ve been pleased with the service. The interface is somewhat underwhelming, but it gets the job done. I have yet to try the Adwords solution, but have noticed this teaser from Google lately. It mysteriously pops in and out of my client accounts and I can never find it to go back and reference it. Either way, for those who haven’t seen it here’s what it looks like.

I’m interested to hear from those of you have have given it a run. Let me know what you’re finding. I’m also interested in what this means to the Voicestar folks. Yet another web analytics niche that Google is trying to offer for free?

Rule 1:

The campaign you think is the greatest thing to ever hit adwords will also be the client who is least impressed. “I don’t care if you show 482 leads in the last 2 weeks, I was getting that before you started working with us (even though I don’t have stats to prove it, I just know it).

Rule 2:

The campaign you aren’t able to do much tracking on and you think is doing terribly, that’s the one that the client is most pleased with. “We’re getting tons of calls and new business!”

Rule 3:

(affiliate campaigns) The day you finally decide to throw in the towel on that chronic underperformer and shut down the ppc campaign, you’ll show a couple sales out of nowhere tomorrow in your CJ stats, then you’ll turn it back on, and it will underperform for a few more weeks until you shut it down again.