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

Adwords raises the bar yet again. A newer feature from the folks at Das Google, we can now see our campaign changes mapped against performance metrics. This is quite simply a brilliant feature.

Performance slowed down?

Check the graph.

Need to check your campaign analyst performance?

Check the graph.

Wondering which of the 42 changes you made this month increased your sales?

Check the graph.

It’s a visual cause and effect, basically. Very, very useful. Love it!

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!

Per the Adwords blog, landing page load time is now visible from the keyword detail page:

This is especially useful when a client needs a little encouragement towards optimizing their site performance. A picture is worth a thousand (key)words.

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.

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.