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

I’m sure there will be more of these to come:

Ppc
We manage them so you
don’t have to Save time,
money. Free Trial!
www.adisem.com

The problem is that within this particular adsense layout, the description portion of the adcopy is compressed horizontally into 3 lines. This causes the lines to break where you don’t necessarily want them to.

Lesson: Use periods at the end of your sentences whenever possible.

All queries are really nothing more than someone asking a question. At least, that’s how I approach pay per click advertising. What I find often is that advertisers are so concerned with giving consumers the hard sell on their business that they forget that they are there to help the consumer. At least, that’s what you should be doing if you ever want to get anywhere with your business.

Case in point…

I have been wearing contacts for 20 years. They are expceptionally fussy when I sit in front of the monitor 14 hours a day. They get dry, sticky. In short, it’s a pain in the **. My wife is always encouraging me to get Lasik surgery. She thinks I’m a wuss for being afraid to cut my eye with a laser, that it’s a routine procedure with virtually no risk. I disagree. So, I go out today on the World Wide Interweb to get some stats, and make myself a little more comfortable about getting the procedure.

My first query at the Google web: lasik problems

Obviously, I’m afraid of lasik. My query tells you that. If you are a smart advertiser, wouldn’t you take advantage of this? Speak to my question. My question is: Is Lasik safe? Are there potential problems with Lasik? Etc Etc.

What do I find for paid search ads?

Free LASIK Program -Mich
Wavefront and Bladeless intra-Lasik upgrade.
Hurry reserve your spot.
www.yaldoeyecenter.com

Um, I don’t live in Michigan and cost is not my concern, thanks though.

Top 10 Lasik Surgery
Lasik Centers Ranked for you. Leading Lasik Centers.
www.aLasik.org

Doesn’t address my concern

Marina Del Rey Lasik
0% Financing, Free Consultation!
As low as $99 per month.
www.marinaeyecenter.com

Hmm. Chicago must be closer than I thought to Marina Del Rey.

Lasik Problems
Affordable Laser Eye Surgery By The
Top Surgeons. Optimax, Lasik, Lasek
www.bertybuzzard.com

Bad use of Dynamic Insertion

Lasik Problems
All About Lasik Problems
Get Informed Before You Decide.
LaserEyeSurgeryReviews.info

Even though it’s a double dynamic insertion trick, the copy comes out reasonably well. Too bad it’s an MFA arbitrage site. Bummer.

Lasik Problems
Lasik Problems. Learn
about costs, risks, and procedures.
www.TheVisionGuide.com

Again, good ad copy, obviously dynamic insertion. Another MFA. They do seem to write the best ads though.

Avoid LASIK Complications
A guide to risks and complications,
and steps to take to avoid them.
AllAboutVision.com

This is a good ad, well crafted, it addresses my query directly without generic dynamic insertion, and the site is actually a good resource for information. Well done!

So, what have we learned? Copywriters need to take the time in the campaign creation stage to carefully craft detailed ad copy that will speak clearly to the query being performed. Don’t rely on dynamic insertion so heavily. It does save time, but in the end, it can produce boilerplate ads that don’t really engage the user.

Take the time at the beginning and it will pay off down the road!

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?

Salesforce is now becoming an agency of sorts for Adwords.

This is interesting to me because a client, once upon a time, was integrating their tracking with Salesforce. As I’m always pushing my clients to implement end to end tracking solutions, which are defined differently by every business, I’ve come across Salesforce/PPC tracking a few times.

In this particular case, the client had users register for a whitepaper, once the registration hit the database, the user info was passed into their database and to Salesforce. Now, to date, there wasn’t really an efficient way flag that user as an Adwords prospect. Once that lead hit the Salesforce system they entered one of those epic software sales cycles that lasted 12-16 months. Good luck managing the campaign for ROI based on only landing page conversions. That doesn’t tell me if the keywords I used pulled in a valuable prospect or not, it just told me that someone, anyone, wanted the whitepaper. Not good enough for an ROI freakazoid like me;)

Tracking all the way though the Salesforce CRM lifecycle was a pain. I used a tag in the URL that showed up in some obscure Salesforce field jumbled with other url data. This resulted in a manual parsing of referring information, which required intervention on the clients part, wasting their valuable resources. What would have been ideal would be to have Salesforce look for a variable that I defined, like, ADWORDS>KEYWORD, then, we could sort in Salesforce by PPC lead, keywords, and other useful methods.

So, my question is, will this new Salesforce development come with better integration for PPC/Adwords campaigns with regards to tracking? I would think so, but hey, I’ve been wrong before.

Technically this is a post about affiliate-based arbitrage, not pure arbitrage. In my opinion, here is the difference:

Pure arbitrage (using ppc): The technique in which a publisher buys mass amounts of traffic from various PPC platforms. The traffic is directed to a site that then serves the user a page that contains outbound links that are monetized on a CPC basis. The publisher tracks both the cost of the inbound traffic versus the income from the outbound traffic, and attempts to monetize the ’spread’ as much as possible. For example, if I bid $.09 for the keyword ’sears washer dryer model RX21223′, someone clicks on my ad, lands on my page, and sees a link for ‘Buy Sears Washer Dryer - Free Delivery’, which is a link I got through a feed at Yahoo, and that click pays $.25, I just netted $.16. If I can do that on a mass scale, I am running a nice little business.

This technique is different than using PPC to do affiliate arbitrage.

Affiliate arbitrage (using ppc): The technique in which a publisher buys very targeted PPC traffic focused around a theme or product. The traffic can be sent directly to an affiliate landing page or to a publisher hosted page that contains one, or several, affiliate offers.

In my particular case, I was trying to figure out how to track conversions back to keywords on an affiliate I was promoting through Commission Junction. It’s a little hard to figure out due to poor documentation on CJ, but I’ll help you get right to the goods.

Basically, CJ uses SID’s, or site ID’s I believe they call them. Normally, people apply these to a site, so you can tell which site is converting for a particular advertiser they are promoting. In this case, we are going to use SID’s to track a PPC campaign at the keyword level.

Let’s say our campaign is for payday loans, and we’ll use 2 keywords as a starting example. My keywords are:

pay check advance
“pay advance”

Notice the second one is phrase match. CJ will give you a long url under “keyword links” that look something like this:

http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx

Obviously, the x’s are placeholders. Your affiliate id will be in there. Now, as is, you can’t tell which keyword generates a sale or conversion. Adwords conversion tracking won’t tell you either. We need to use SID’s to track the sales. You can build out a nice Excel formula to do this on a mass scale if you have a lot of keywords, but I’ll show you how to do it first with just a couple.

Take your base url:

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx

add a question mark

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?

add sid=

http://www.dpbolvsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?sid=

then add the keyword, replacing any spaces with +

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?sid=pay+check+advance

for phrase match keywords, you can do this:

http://www.dpbolsd.net/click-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx?sid=pay+advance+phrase

That’s it. Just plug those urls into the keyword creative and you’re in business. Now, in your CJ account reporting, you will be able to see which keywords converted by looking at the report details. Viola. You’re a millionaire!

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

Well, until today, I had no clients under my management that were adversely effected by the quality score changes. My previous thought was that only arbitrage and straight affiliate sites were being targeted. That no longer appears to be the case. No, I’m not going to over dramatize this as most bloggers have in the industry. I’m just going to show you what happened to my client.

The one reason I want to highlight this is that it is a real business with a storefront and real human operators. It’s a service oriented company. It’s not arbitrage or affiliate related. They spend more than a couple thousand a month with an IP targeted campaign and conversion tracking. Once the quality score algo changed last week, I noticed a massive drop in traffic. Here’s why. Some of their best keywords had been disabled. In fact, 75% of their keywords were disabled. This is not a junk campaign with one adgroup and 2000 keywords. Each adgroup is carefully crafted with about 20-25 keywords. 7 adgroups. 5 ad copies per. Here’s an example of the performance I was getting and you tell me why it’s shut down. Notice, the CTR is ok, and the conversion rate is good (relative to the call to action)…

Here’s another example…

This isn’t an example from a huge client, and that’s why I chose it. This demonstrates the potential effect to your everyday advertiser who runs a legitimate business, with legitimate ads, who’s trying to use this platform to generate business.

I think, as with so many Google innovations in the last 2 years, that the intention is good, but the execution is extremely poor. The intention here is to devalue sites that don’t offer value to the searching public. They are after arbitrage sites, thin affiliate sites, and MFA’s. What it appears they are catching is some of the baby with the bathwater. The small, medium, and large sized advertisers who are doing things the right way.

This isn’t a disaster by any means. I know exactly what can be done to get this campaign back on track. I believe Google will get better at discerning the MFA’s from the ‘real’ websites, and at the same time, we as marketers have to get better at telling Google what our site is about.

Again, at the end of the day, I see more and more that Pay Per Click and SEO optimzation are becoming one in the same. In order to have a successful Adwords campaign you now have to optimize your site just as you would for SEO.

Much to my liking Google appears to have ‘opened up’ the Google Analytics registrations for Adwords users. Because I didn’t jump on the bandwagon early, I was shut out of the first wave of free accounts. Now I’ve been able to actually dive in and play around with this really nice analytics package. Say what you will, but this is hands down the best free solution out there, and definitely rivals most of the paid solutions. (beware clicktracks investors;)

In addition to implementing this on my sites, I also have a client who needed an analytics solution badly. I got them set up with a Google Analytics account, had them implement conversion tracking from the adwords account, viola, we’re all set.

This client had recently heeded my advice to create 4 different PPC landing pages themed around their major ad groups. In addition to our compulsary conversion tracking, Google analytics gives you the ability to set up ‘goal tracking’, which is essentially conversion tracking, but with the additional capability, through the analytics program, of tracking organic traffic, or email traffic, or any other source as it relates to the goals you set up.
So, in digging around the somewhat complex google analytics navigation, I got frustrated and google’d for a tutorial, or just some sort of clue how to set this up. Here’s what I found:

To implement goal tracking, follow these steps:

To set up your goals, Enter Goal Information:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account and click Analytics Settings.
2. Find the profile for which you will be creating goals, and click Edit.
3. Select one of the 4 goal slots available for that profile and click Edit.
4. Enter the Goal URL. Reaching this page marks a successful conversion. For example, a registration confirmation page, a checkout complete page, or a thank you page.
5. Enter the Goal name as it should appear in your Google Analytics account.
6. Turn the goal On or Off. This selection decides whether Google Analytics should track this conversion goal at this time. Generally, you will want to set the Active Goal selection to On.

For further details on setting up funnel tracking, I suggest you go straight to the source and visit the google analytics support site.

If you get through that and you’re feeling really chirpy, you can take things to the next level and start your A/B split testing. These guys lay things out about as well as you’ll find.

Yesterday I had the good fortune to be in on a call in which the Yahoo Search Marketing team walked us through the upcoming and badly needed Yahoo Search upgrades that are coming down the pipe. eWhisper covered this in the paid WMW forum, probably more thoroughly than I, but I’ll give you a few bulletpoints nonetheless. I’m basically giving you my notes from the meeting, but I think you’ll get the basic idea.

Fast Editorial: This, to me, is the most promising feature. I am so tired of the snail-mail speeds at which my ads get approved or rejected. Yahoo promises automatic approval and eventual editorial reviews, a la Adwords (you’ll see more of this phrase)

Categories will become campaigns, and adgroups will be an option on new campaigns.

Multiple Ads! WooHoo! I believe they will allow up to 20 ad copies per ad group.

Geo Targeting - Yes it will be part of the new system. Don’t quote me but I swear she said they will offer this at the ad group level.

Separate URLs AND ad copy for content match

Quality Score/Index - Yup, kinda like someone else but definitely needed. You will still be bidding on a position, but that doesn’t mean you’ll end up there. They will take into account CTR, relevance, historical perfomance, etc.

No dayparting in the initial release, maybe next year

Integrated Forecasting tools

Those are my highlights. All in all it looks like someone finally lit a fire under the search group and they decided they are going to play ball with Adwords afterall.

Good news for everyone I believe, especially in the PPC analyst world.

If you’re a Pay Per Click Analyst, like myself, this is good news. Just like with the introduction of the quality score, Google has added another layer of complexity to the equation. Is dayparting rocket science? No, of course not. But is it something else to pay attention to? Yes, of course. So in effect, the more complicated the better for the analyst. A sort of built in job security. Dayparting just adds to the amount of work that goes into managing a professionally built PPC campaign. In the words of Larry and Sergey,”Ad scheduling allows advertisers to run their ads and modify their bids based on time of day as well as intra-day and intra-week cycles in campaign performance.”

Businesses that need to use dayparting -

Anyone with a storefront or daytime hours in which no one is available to answer the phone after hours. Duh. Especially with the who knows how long it will last ability to put your phone number in an adwords ad text, this is a key consideration for the small business owner or anyone else who relies on a phone conversation to close the deal. Top of mind companies that should use this:

Mortgage companies
Insurance companies
Big ticket retail
High touch retail and service industries

Being able to synch your ads to the time that you actually have live help available is going to save you a bundle in blown opportunities. For example, last night I am surfing high and low for a merchant account provider. I must have clicked on 15 ads that matched exactly what I was looking for. However, it was 11:30 PM. Maybe half of them had the live help banner on their site, but guess what, none of them was actually staffed by anyone at 11:30. I wanted to talk to someone because I had specific questions. No dice, and a lot of wasted clicks for those advertisers. If not turning your ads off in this scenario, you could at least lower your bids to $.10 or something less impactful.

All in all, more options are a good thing for advertisers. Better control of your spending is never a bad thing, it just means you have to pay more attention. As Kevin Lee of Did-It said recently, “Doing dayparting badly is as bad or worse than not doing it at all.”