the PPC Book|PPC Blog | Querying for Dollars

Just a reminder that if you missed the 1st episode of PPC Rockstars with Dave Szetela you can download the show at webmasterradio.fm.

The first episode covers dynamic keyword insertion with Matt Van Wagner:

Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Matt Van Wagner of FindMeFaster discusses dynamic keyword insertion , including if DKI can improve marketing score, click through rate and ad relevancy.

All this and more on the premiere episode of PPC Rockstars. The visual presentation can be found here www.clixmarketing.com/blog/ppc-rockstars-stuff/

I know a lot about about paid search. I know nothing about home renovation related activities. Put me in front of a paid search campaign and I’ll slice and dice and segment like the Iron chef. I’ll bring out the beef, cut with conviction and tell you bad jokes while I prepare your meal. I’ll flip knives high in the air while I laugh at your campaign quality score. I’ll break your campaign benchmarks over the vegetable tray and still remember to ask you if you want white rice or stir fried.

Now…Put me in front of a patio door that needs to be installed and I stutter, stumble, and twiddle my thumbs like a 3rd grader waiting for the school bus at a busy intersection. After 12 hours on Saturday, and my family scurrying to the warm shelter of their rooms, with a huge 9 foot hole in our room facing the balcony, I finally understood, I am not, and never will be Bob Villa.

It’s just not my thing. I’m not awful, that would be an insult to someone who is awful with at least a remote understanding of what is going on. Granted, that doesn’t keep me from trying. I hack around and cobble together bits and pieces, but it generally looks awful and causes mild danger for people nearby. When it was over I wasn’t defeated or discouraged. Just at peace with my awfulness.

What else am I terrible with?

Web design. Not quite as bad as patio installation, mind you. I can chop around and tweak and existing template. Who can’t? The thing is, I have the vision of what needs to be done. That’s quite a bit of the battle right there. Point is, I am resigning myself to my strengths. You may have noticed a new design today for theppcbook.com. It’s just a template I found to be a placeholder while I arrange for a professional and unique design all my own. With the impending Pay per Click Book release I need a new look for my little blog home. I’m putting a call out to anyone who is or can recommend a good blog designer. I know the usual suspects, but am looking for something new.

If you have any recommendations they would be greatly appreciated!

I’m a guy, and a husband, which means among other things, I can’t remember important dates….at all. So today I go to search ‘mothers day’ because, don’t laugh, I couldn’t remember what the exact date was. I know it’s soon, so I get points for that right?

Anyway, I expected a barrage of flower and gift PPC ads at Das Google, but there was hardly a whisper. Maybe 8 ads?

Flower people, what are you doing? Or am I the only guy who can’t remember what day Mother’s Day is?

According to marketingcharts.com consumers will spend $2.0 billion on flowers, and we only have 8 PPC ads for the term ‘mothers day’???

Yes, it’s short tail, but come on people. Are there any paid search people out there running mothers day offers that can enlighten me as to the conversion rate on ‘mothers day’ exact match, google-only, not the search network? It can’t be THAT bad, can it?

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.

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.

I’m watching with some bemusement this morning at all the financial news surrounding Google’s ‘deceleration’. This absolutely kills me. Here are some snippets:

Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley: Meeker writes that she still thinks Google’s fundamental business trends are intact. But she also calculates that if ComScore’s data are accurate, and assuming international paid clicks are growing at a 35% rate, the company would have a blended click rate growth of 19%, or 4% sequentially. That, she says, would imply net revenue of $3.52 billion for Q1, or about $120 million short of the $3.64 billion consensus. Meeker, though, is sticking with her above-consensus estimate of $3.72 billion.

Youssef Squali, Jefferies: “While Google’s actual numbers are likely to be materially better than what’s being reported, ComScore’s less than flattering growth trajectory for GOOG does point to continued decelerating growth, and is likely to keep the stock under pressure short term.”

God forbid - DECELERATING GROWTH - AGHAST…

Did anyone catch the revenue number?

$3.52 billion for Q1

I wish I could decelerate like that.

These analysts treat Google like a manufacturing or retail company. They don’t understand online advertising in the slightest. Apparently everyone is up in arms over the fact that -

“The click-through rate grew 3 percent in February compared with a year earlier, and January saw no increase compared with January 2007. Several months earlier, the rate was growing 25 percent to 40 percent compared with a year earlier. The new data is in line with click-through declines Google reported last quarter.”

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.

One of the things that makes Chicago unique is the importance of corruption influence. Chicago is the city of clout (defined by the icon Mike Royko).

Anyway, I don’t really have any clout because I’m not in realestate or city sanitation, and I don’t even live in Chicago anymore. BUT, I do know some people who are hiring. So I’m playing Chicago Alderman today. I know a guy who knows a guy.

If you live in Chicago or the surrounding burbs and you are an experienced PPC analyst, I know of a couple attractive opportunities. If you are interested send me a note and contact info through my contact page, or send your resume to jeff at theppcbook dot com.

No post from me today - but 2 others I can point you to:

LocalMN - Net Neutrality - Will it Influence Your Vote?

Most of you are probably aware of net neutrality. If not, it’s critical to all of us, so do some research.

Obama: In favor of net neutrality and promises to make it a priority in his first year of office to reinstate net neutrality

McCain: Sen. McCain says we should let the market and technology solve the Net-neutrality issue: “When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.”

TopRank: The Fallacy of SEO Celebrity

Good post by Lee about the odd phenomenon of seo celebrity.