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Archive for the ‘Advanced PPC Strategies’ Category

By Frederick Felman, CMO, MarkMonitor

According to The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), search advertising has grown 286% in the last five years and will increase from $14.6 billion to $16.6 billion in 2010. The future for search engine advertising is bright. However, it’s the very vibrancy of search that leads to abuses and scams by counterfeiters, fraudsters and unscrupulous competitors. In fact, based on analysis of data from Direct Magazine, 14% of branded searches never arrive at the brand’s site. While some of those clicks land on legitimate ecommerce sites reselling those branded goods, significant percentages are lured away from ‘clean well-lighted’ sites to disreputable destinations (read more in this pay-per-click advertising scams white paper). For luxury products, these statistics get much worse. A traffic audit for five luxury brands found that traffic to sites selling suspected counterfeit goods amounted to more than 45% of the search traffic generated by the official brand sites.

How does this happen? Online scammers are every bit as savvy in online ‘best practices’ as legitimate interactive marketers. They are smart and motivated and employ a wide array of online tactics to intercept traffic meant for legitimate brand and ecommerce sites.

The first tactic of choice is cybersquatting, the practice of registering a domain name which includes a trademark to which the scammer has no claim. An unknowing potential customer may assume that this domain represents an official website of the brand and will mistakenly patronize this misleading website rather than the legitimate website for that brand. Cybersquatting can intercept significant traffic and, in the long term, dilute brand value when searchers are directed to sites with possibly counterfeit, poor quality or competitive goods.

Cybersquatting is often used in combination with other black-hat SEO tactics which scammers use to increase organic search rankings, often at the expense of legitimate brands. In addition to cybersquatting, black-hat SEO practices can include placing a trademarked brand name in a web page title tag or headline, or building a large volume of links that use trademarked terms in a variety of ways. For example, one site selling knockoff Louis Vuitton products created more than 13,000 inbound links, propelling the site to first place in searches for the term ‘louis vuitton on sale’ and earning the knockoff site more than 3.3 million visits annually.

Analyzing these links further, we found that almost 25% of the links to this site resulted from internal website links with a brand term embedded in the link text. In addition, many external links to the site referenced a variation on the Louis Vuitton brand in anchor text. Still other links originated from a site where the relevant content was controlled by the knockoff company. Black-hat SEO techniques are constantly evolving in an effort to stay ahead of the practices that search algorithms detect and discount.

Online scammers invest in paid search, too, just as legitimate marketers do. The most prevalent and obvious examples of paid search scams occur when a brand name is used in an illegitimate fashion in a paid search text ad or keyword buy. The intention is to generate traffic at the expense of a legitimate brand and, as a result, paid search scams affect brands in two ways: They intercept traffic that is searching for the legitimate brand and drive up the cost of a pay-per-click advertising campaign. Often, a branded term will be present in the ad copy itself and can lead consumers to counterfeit goods or to pages associating a legitimate brand with undesirable or offensive content.

As a side note, counterfeiters will also use common generic terms that a brand advertiser would purchase, too, driving up campaign costs and exposing consumers to knockoffs and sub-standard goods. In a study that we conducted during the busy holiday shopping season last year, we examined search results for the popular term “designer handbags.” A startling 32% of paid search ads that appeared on a search for this term led to sites that appeared to sell counterfeit handbags.

How and when can a brand take action? First of all, in the case of counterfeit or pirated goods, brands should always take action. None of the ‘big three’ search engines allow pay-per-click ads that lead to sites offering counterfeit or pirated goods. Each of those search engines has information on how to report these types of offenses posted within their advertising guidelines or ‘terms and conditions’ sections. It is important to remember, however, that the search engines do not police this type of activity and it is up to the legitimate brand to identify and report the offenders.

An advertiser can use a trademarked term in ad copy if the advertiser’s site either resells or provides information about the trademarked product, or if it sells or promotes component, replacement or compatible parts. Advertisers are prohibited from using a trademark in ad copy if the advertiser’s site is deceptive. A good example is that of a classic ‘bait and switch’ scenario in which a paid search ad promotes one type of branded product, but the corresponding landing page does not sell that branded product or sells only a competitive brand.

Online scammers are aggressive and savvy in promoting their wares online, but brand marketers can outwit them with a solid online brand protection strategy that seeks and destroys the scammers. To paraphrase the old adage ‘you don’t need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the brand next to you.’

There are plenty of places on the web to help you familiarize yourself with the specifics of the pay-per-click scam threat including ecommerce associations, publications, blogs, and LinkedIn groups dedicated to the topic of brand protection.

MarkMonitor is a global provider of online brand protection solutions. The company offers a free white paper that can be accessed here about: Minimizing Paid Search Scams

Frederick Felman is the CMO at MarkMonitor®, a leader in enterprise brand protection, where he is responsible for promoting the company’s brand protection products. He and his team created the Brandjacking Index®, an often cited measure of the trends in online abuse targeting the world’s largest brands.

© 2010 MarkMonitor Inc. All rights reserved. MarkMonitor® and Brandjacking Index® are registered trademark s of MarkMonitor Inc. All other trademarks included herein are the property of their respective owners.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Would you like some extra cash? Do you have a website or blog, or at least an idea for one? Do you have time to commit to updating that site with content?

If you answered “yes” to all of these questions, then you may want to consider becoming an affiliate advertiser.

Affiliate advertisers host ads for other companies’ products or services on their site. They are paid each time a particular action is taken relevant to one of the ads. For example, they may be paid each time someone sees the ad, each time someone clicks on the ad, or each time someone clicks on the ad and completes a conversion.

Revenues for affiliate advertising can range from a couple of cents per action to a couple hundred dollars per action. It depends on the value of the product or service for sale, as well as the particular affiliate program the company has in place.

Affiliate advertisers don’t need to be companies themselves. They can be regular people with simple and inexpensive websites.

If you’ve decided you’d like to try out affiliate advertising, here are some steps for getting started:

1. If you don’t already have a website or blog, start one. This is a necessary step for becoming an affiliate advertiser. Some affiliate programs, including Google’s AdSense program, require publishers in certain locations to have owned their sites for at least six months before becoming an affiliate. You may want to base the theme of your new site on a particular product or service you’d like to advertise, though a better idea is probably writing about a topic you’re passionate about. This way you’re more likely to update your content regularly, get more traffic, and have people click your ads.

1. Look for products and/or services to advertise. If you are new to affiliate advertising, you may want to start out with just one advertisement on your site. This way you can see if the revenue produced by the ad is worth the time you’ve invested in designing and updating your site for that ad’s success. You can search for products or services to advertise by joining an established affiliate network like Commission Junction, Amazon, eBay, ClickBank, or Google. Look for items that are highly relevant to your site, don’t have a lot of competition, and have a commission structure that fits your liking.

1. Once you’ve found the product or service you’d like to advertise, review your site. Make sure that it is relevant enough to what you’d like to promote. If it’s not, users will be less interested in the ad. If they are visiting your site to read about innovative children’s toys, for example, they likely won’t click on an ad for an office cleaning business. If your site’s theme is very different from the product or service you’d like to promote, find a new product or service. If it’s just a little different, modify your site to make it more relevant. That may include adding particular keywords, rewriting your headlines, and renaming your images. Once you’ve made these improvements, you’re more likely to be approved to advertise the particular product or service.

1. Next, apply for the affiliate program you’re interested in. Also, if required apply for the particular advertising program you’re interested in. Before applying, check out the affiliate program’s website to see if you fit the eligibility requirements. You will see that to be an affiliate advertiser for Amazon products, for example, you can’t be a resident of Colorado, North Carolina, or Rhode Island. Also, make sure that you have your bank account or PayPal information on hand, as many of the networks require this information in your application.

1. Once you’re accepted into an affiliate/advertising program, create your ad. Affiliate networks generally provide tools that let you easily design your ad. Usually you can choose between a simple text ad or a banner image ad. Some affiliate networks, like Google’s, allow for video, flash and mobile ads. You must make sure that the ad conforms to the affiliate and/or advertiser’s standards. eBay, for example, has special wording guidelines. Once your ad is complete, you will be provided with a code you must copy and paste onto your site. This code will make the ad appear, as well as track all traffic that is delivered from your site to a company’s landing page.

1. Monitor your ad and site analytics once the ad is up and running. See how much traffic your site or blog is generating, and how much of that traffic is clicking on your ad. Also, monitor the percentage of clicks that are resulting in conversions. Conversions can either be lead-related actions, like white paper registrations or newsletter signups, or actual sales. If your traffic numbers are pretty low, then improving those figures should be your number one priority. Perhaps you could update your blog more often, or start promoting your articles on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

1. If your traffic is high but your clicks are low, improve your ad. This could mean changing the ad type (banners instead of buttons, text instead of images), moving the ad to another location on your page, or simplifying the ad’s copy. Google offers a number of tips for improving your ad’s performance. Try to make just one change, and then see how that impacts your ad campaign. If it doesn’t make a positive difference, make a different change. Once you find the change or changes that work best, keep those in place. If none of your efforts improve your ad’s performance, you should consider picking a new product or service to advertise.

1. Once you’re ready, put more ads on your site. Once you’ve gotten a feel for whether affiliate advertising is worth your time, consider branching out. Find more products or services to promote within your affiliate program, or join additional affiliate programs to potentially maximize your revenue. Make sure, though, your new ads conform to your site’s theme. As you experience more success with your affiliate advertising efforts, buzz may generate about your site. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself being contacted by companies wanting to advertise on your site.

About the Author

Christine Laubenstein is a Marketing Associate at WordStream, a provider of an advanced pay-per-click tool suite, designed to improve the performance of pay-per-click keywords in your AdWords campaign.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Every day, about 200 million people log onto Facebook, spending an average of 14 minutes on the site—adding up to about seven hours per month!

This high number of engaged users represents a huge potential advertising audience for your business. If you choose to tap into this audience, consider following these 10 tips for advertising on Facebook:

1. Familiarize yourself with Facebook’s advertising guidelines. Facebook has very strict requirements for the types of ads you can place on its site. For example, ads can’t contain audio that plays automatically; they can’t contain excessive repetition; and they can’t promote “get rich quick” opportunities. Make sure you adhere to these rules or your ad will be rejected.
2. Make sure your ad text isn’t annoying. Facebook has a feature that neither Google nor Bing has: You can close ads you don’t like. Just click on the gray box at the top right corner of the ad. Facebook will ask you why didn’t like the ad, and you can offer your feedback. If enough people close the ad it won’t be shown anymore. So if you actually want your ad to last beyond a few days or even a few hours, make sure it’s not too pushy.
3. Find a relevant and attractive image for your ad. While ads on the major search engines can’t contain images, Facebook ads allow for one image. When I signed into my Facebook account today, for example, I came across an ad for Caribbean real estate containing a beautiful image of an island surrounded by clear, turquoise water. Be sure to pick an enticing image that highly relates to your product or service. Then you’ll get more qualified clicks.
4. Familiarize yourself with the different ways you can target users. With Facebook, you can target people based on many different factors. You can show your ads to people of a certain age, people in a certain city or country, or people who had a certain college major. You can target single people, Republicans, or employees of a specific company. You can also target people based upon their interests, whether it be snake charming, fly fishing, or cross stitching. Determine your target audience, and then advertise to these people alone.
5. Determine the main purpose of your advertising campaign. Decide whether your main aim is to have users become familiar with your brand, or to generate leads or sales. If it’s the former, then cost per impression advertising is probably the better option. If it’s the latter, then cost per click advertising is likely your better option.
6. If you don’t have a lot of money, don’t spend a lot. You can be a thrifty advertiser with Facebook. According to Facebook’s Help Center, the minimum required daily budget is $1 for both cost per click and cost per impression advertising. The minimum cost per click is 1 cent and the minimum cost per impression is 2 cents. Just keep in mind that if you have a lower budget your ad will be shown less frequently.
7. Use Facebook’s bid estimator to help you set your bid. If you really have no idea what bid amount will get your ad a good amount of exposure, take advantage of this tool. While creating your ad, enter your targeting criteria, and then go through to step 4. The bid estimator will show you the range of bids that are winning auctions among ads like yours.
8. Make the most of the advertising space you’re allotted. Facebook allows 25 characters for the ad’s title, and 135 characters for the ad’s body. While Google also allows 25 characters for its ads’ titles, it only allows 105 characters for the ad’s body (70 for the ad’s text and 35 for the display URL). So take advantage of Facebook’s extra space by including all the information you think will prompt qualified clicks.
9. Monitor your ads’ performance with Facebook’s Ads Manager and Facebook reports. These resources will tell you how many people saw your ads, how many people clicked on them, and your click-through rates. They will also tell you how much you’ve spent, the types of users who have seen your ads, and the types of users who have clicked on your ads. This information shows you which of your ads are successful, and which need improvement. Modify your ad campaign based on this information.
10. Check out this Facebook advertising blog for more tips on good Facebook advertising techniques. It contains common Facebook advertising mistakes, information about new Facebook advertising features, and detailed tutorials for advertising on Facebook. This video, for example, takes you through the steps for building a Facebook ad.

About the Author

Christine Laubenstein is a Marketing Associate at WordStream, a provider of an advanced pay-per-click tool suite, designed to improve the performance of pay-per-click keywords in your AdWords campaign.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

There are a lot of settings to choose from in your Google AdWords account, but how do you know which ones are best? Depending on your objectives, goals and approach you might find one combination works better than another but the key is to test, test, test. What works for one account or campaign, may not work well for another. If you haven’t spent time exploring the settings options, you are likely using the defaults and a few quick changes could bring in additional clicks or conversions. Below is a brief description of many of the settings as well as some recommendations.

Locations & Languages

If you haven’t taken a look at the geo-targeting options, it is worth becoming familiar with the many choices. I once had a client where we targeted the states in the Midwest. We noticed in analytics that a lot of clicks were coming from one metro area, but those visitors rarely converted. In order to help manage spend, we kept the states we were targeting but excluded traffic from a 15 mile radius around the metro area. This way we were no longer getting irrelevant clicks and had more money to spend on those who were more likely to convert. The location options allow you to narrow down your focus by country, state, city, metro area or even zip code. Want to reach everyone in who lives in Houston but not those that live downtown? You can choose to target the city of Houston but then exclude the zip codes in the downtown region.

Another option if you are trying to target a region but don’t want to list out every city in the area, is to use settings on the ”Custom” tab. You have the option to target a specified radius around a city or zip code or you can also create a “custom shape”. For custom shape, you can decide if it is a triangle, square or rectangle and include (or exclude) exactly what you want.

Networks and Devices

Under this section you can choose if you want to run on Google Search, Search Partners and/or Google Content Network. I won’t go into these differences today but you may want to brush up on the Content Network best practices before you make your selection.

If you haven’t taken a look at the Device options, you might want to. Is your landing page smart phone friendly? How about your conversion form – is it really long with a lot of items to fill in? You may be getting clicks from smart phones and your landing page is less than optimal for these devices. If that is the case, change your settings so you don’t spend money on clicks that won’t convert. Google gives you the options to target all devices, desktop and laptop computers only, or just iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers. If you do have a landing page that is mobile friendly, click on “Advanced devices and carrier options” to choose which mobile devices to target (Android, iPhone, Palm and iPad) as well as the mobile carrier. Running ads for a Custom iPhone app? Since the apps won’t work on Android phones, target only iPhone users to help rule out irrelevant clicks and spend.Bidding and Budget

Google provides two options for managing your bids – either use Manual Bidding or Automatic. I prefer to manage bids myself and use manual bidding in order to maintain control of budgets and spend but some only use automatic bidding and it works well. Try both and see which one gets you the results you need. Another option in this section is to use Conversion Optimizer. This option is only available for campaigns that have at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days. If you qualify, you are given the option to set your conversion goal and then Google will manage your campaign to help generate additional conversions. For better results, make sure your account has quite a bit of history before activating. Also, keep conversion optimizer on for several weeks before you determine if it does or does not work for you. Often the cost per conversion goes up at first and then brings itself back down to an acceptable average over the course of several weeks or months depending on your traffic.

Position Preference, Delivery Method

Position preference can be enabled if you want Google to control bids and show your ads in a preferred position or range. For instance, if you get the most qualified clicks in positions 3-4, you can set it to optimize to these positions. Google can’t guarantee you will show in your preferred position all the time, but they will try to automatically adjust your bid to place. You can choose to show:

• Higher than a given position
• Lower than a given position
• Within a range of positions
• In a single exact position

One important note before selecting this – you may loose impressions and clicks by setting position preference. If you are not able to show up in position 3-4 as specified, Google won’t show your ad at all. Make sure you weigh the options before deciding.

In Delivery Method, you have two choices – Standard or Accelerated. In Standard method your ad will show evenly throughout the day. The benefit is that Google helps balance your clicks to your budget so you are less likely to run out of budget by mid morning. Make sure your budgets are set high enough, if your budgets are too low, you will eventually run out of money not matter what. The Accelerated setting doesn’t take into account your budget and the amount of time left in the day. It shows your ads as frequently as possible, which means if budgets are low, you may run out by lunch.

Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling

In this section you have the option to set a start and end date for your campaign. Running a campaign for the 4^th of July? Make sure it starts and stops on time by setting a start and end date so you don’t loose track and time and forget to pause the campaign after the holiday. Ad scheduling or day parting allows you to run your ads only during certain time periods in the day. There are many options with this and we have put together a separate post with tips on how to get the most out of ad scheduling.

Ad Delivery: Ad rotation, Frequency Capping

Ad rotation allows you to choose how your ads are served. Do you want Google to determine the best performing one? If so, choose Optimize. If you are testing not only ads but also landing pages or simply want more control, select Rotate which shows your ads more evenly. A general best practice is to use Rotate, especially if you have a campaign focused on conversions. With Optimize, Google will run the ad that has the highest click through rate but it may actually have a lower conversion rate – since you want conversions, Google isn’t optimizing to your advantage.

While several of these categories can be explored much further, this gives you the general summary of the Google AdWords settings tab. Make sure you try different settings to see what produces the best result and anytime you add a new campaign don’t forget to go in and update your settings!

Bonus shortcut tip – an easy way to change the settings on multiple campaigns quickly. Click on the Settings tab (without clicking on a campaign first). Once all campaigns are listed, click the check box on the left for all the ones you want to edit. Once all are highlighted in yellow, select “Edit Settings” and you will be allowed to change settings right there rather than going into each campaign separately. Want to change Ad Rotation and it isn’t showing up? First click “Column” at the top and use the check boxes to select other categories. Make sure you hit “Save” at the bottom to save your changes.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

The exciting thing about search marketing is that people’s search behaviors are always changing; this can depend on the time of year, trends or new developments in the industry. But how do you stay ahead of these changes and more importantly, what do you do to counteract any negative effects in your accounts? In this post, I’ll focus on understanding traffic trends in your PPC accounts and in my follow-up post I will talk about how to effectively leverage your findings to benefit your account.

Digging-in To Your Account

There are many tools out there to help you understand traffic patterns for your campaigns. However, the first place you need to look is in your PPC account. Start out by running a campaign report for the last few years. Under settings choose “monthly” as your unit of time. Alternatively, set your time range and look at a graph for impressions and clicks in the interface. Either of these tools should give you insights into when traffic drops or spikes occurred. Are there any patterns in your data? Now start thinking about what events (good or bad) happened during those time periods:

• Did you make any significant changes in your account during those times? The “View Change History” tool can be very insightful.
• Did something big happen in the industry?
• Is seasonality a factor for your product or service?

Drill down even further by pulling keyword placement performance reports. Some keywords might be affected by seasonality as well. Certain keywords may have been star performers for a few years, but have dropped off in performance even if their average position hasn’t changed much over time. Pull out these keywords and use Google Trends to further trouble shoot. Searchers might be using different search terms than they did a year ago. Along with Google Trends, your Google Analytics can also help you identify search patterns based on geography.

What Are Your Competitors Doing?

Keep an eye on your competitors – know what they’re doing, not only in the PPC space, but other marketing efforts as well. It is easy to get sucked in to the PPC world, but take those blinders off. Your competitors maybe running compelling awareness-building offline campaigns that are driving searchers to click on their PPC ads as well. Your traffic might be directly impacted by what your competitors are doing.

What Is Going On In The Industry?

You may want to set up Google alerts for your most important keywords and try to catch-up on some industry news on a weekly basis. Traffic may spike if there is a huge surge in your industry or tank if there is some bad publicity, so keep on top of what’s going on and think through what that might mean for you PPC account.

I’ve recapped several ways in which you can start identifying changes in your PPC traffic. In my next post, I will discuss how to utilize the knowledge that you have about search patterns to maximize your account performance.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I hate to admit it, but I probably spend more time surfing YouTube than I probably should. You know how it goes: A friend sends you a link to some funny or random video on YouTube, then you find another video to watch and then you’re hooked.

As someone who manages PPC accounts for a living, I wondered, why am I not on YouTube trying to grab a share of this captive audience?

YouTube introduced Promoted Videos late last year and I thought it would be beneficial to reintroduce this valuable tool and outline some tips and tricks on how to integrate these videos into your PPC campaigns.

What are Promoted Videos?

YouTube Promoted Videos appear on the right hand side of the YouTube search results page. Videos are triggered based on the match between your keywords and users’ queries. The position of your video is determined by the bid system and you pay each time a user actually views your video. If you have multiple videos on YouTube, you can opt to take users to the Channel page to watch your video as well as let them browse all your other videos.

Although you can set up a Promoted Videos campaign directly through YouTube, you can only get access to click-through and conversion data by setting up the campaign through Google Adwords.

Why Should You Care?

YouTube attracts millions of users per day. As I mentioned before, you can grab the attention of an engaged audience while they’re searching for related content.

The video format gives you more flexibility in highlighting the features and benefits of your product than a text ad. In essence, you can be as creative as you want.

Finally, videos have the potential to go viral…fast. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars or hired professional actors, if you make your content engaging you can get a lot of attention.

How To Set It Up?

1. Set up a YouTube account (it’s free) and upload the video(s) you want to use.
2. Sign into your Google Adwords account.
3. Choose keywords for your campaign and set your daily budgets and bids. You can use one video across multiple ad groups.
4. Select the “Create new ad” button under the Ads tab.
5. Choose the “Display Ad Builder” and select “YouTube Promoted Videos Template” and follow the steps. You will be able to enter in a headline and description lines (total of 70 characters) that will appear right next to your video on the search results page.
6. In your campaign settings, specify whether you want the ad to only come up on search or on both search and content networks. Remember, that you might have higher cost per leads on the content network.
7. Go back into your YouTube account and select a call-to-action banner (you can only do this through YouTube). This banner will appear as an overlay to your video. If a user clicks on the banner they are taken to a landing page that you specify.
8. Follow the PPC mantra…continually monitor and test!

Best Practices:

• Create a separate campaign for these video ads so you can better monitor and track results.
• Use few tightly themed keywords in each ad group, similar to your content network campaigns.
• You should include more generic and broad terms since that’s how users search for videos on YouTube.
• People want to know what they can expect to get when they click on your video. Use your headline and description to peak their interest. Sell the video!
• Include a strong call-to-action. Obviously, you want them to watch your video, but what else do you want them to do? Do you want comments on your video, do you want them to go to your site and fill out a form or join a contest?
• As I mentioned before, you don’t need to break the bank, but be creative and keep your audience engaged throughout the video. You don’t want them to click on it and then bail.

Having explained all this, you and I both can justify our YouTube surfing as market research. When your supervisor asks why you’re watching a music video at work, you can now respond with “Just doing some market research”! Good luck implementing!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I hate to admit it, but I probably spend more time surfing YouTube than I probably should. You know how it goes: A friend sends you a link to some funny or random video on YouTube, then you find another video to watch and then you’re hooked.

As someone who manages PPC accounts for a living, I wondered, why am I not on YouTube trying to grab a share of this captive audience?

YouTube introduced Promoted Videos late last year and I thought it would be beneficial to reintroduce this valuable tool and outline some tips and tricks on how to integrate these videos into your PPC campaigns.

What are Promoted Videos?

YouTube Promoted Videos appear on the right hand side of the YouTube search results page. Videos are triggered based on the match between your keywords and users’ queries. The position of your video is determined by the bid system and you pay each time a user actually views your video. If you have multiple videos on YouTube, you can opt to take users to the Channel page to watch your video as well as let them browse all your other videos.

Although you can set up a Promoted Videos campaign directly through YouTube, you can only get access to click-through and conversion data by setting up the campaign through Google Adwords.

Why Should You Care?

YouTube attracts millions of users per day. As I mentioned before, you can grab the attention of an engaged audience while they’re searching for related content.

The video format gives you more flexibility in highlighting the features and benefits of your product than a text ad. In essence, you can be as creative as you want.

Finally, videos have the potential to go viral…fast. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars or hired professional actors, if you make your content engaging you can get a lot of attention.

How To Set It Up?

1. Set up a YouTube account (it’s free) and upload the video(s) you want to use.
2. Sign into your Google Adwords account.
3. Choose keywords for your campaign and set your daily budgets and bids. You can use one video across multiple ad groups.
4. Select the “Create new ad” button under the Ads tab.
5. Choose the “Display Ad Builder” and select “YouTube Promoted Videos Template” and follow the steps. You will be able to enter in a headline and description lines (total of 70 characters) that will appear right next to your video on the search results page.
6. In your campaign settings, specify whether you want the ad to only come up on search or on both search and content networks. Remember, that you might have higher cost per leads on the content network.
7. Go back into your YouTube account and select a call-to-action banner (you can only do this through YouTube). This banner will appear as an overlay to your video. If a user clicks on the banner they are taken to a landing page that you specify.
8. Follow the PPC mantra…continually monitor and test!

Best Practices:

• Create a separate campaign for these video ads so you can better monitor and track results.
• Use few tightly themed keywords in each ad group, similar to your content network campaigns.
• You should include more generic and broad terms since that’s how users search for videos on YouTube.
• People want to know what they can expect to get when they click on your video. Use your headline and description to peak their interest. Sell the video!
• Include a strong call-to-action. Obviously, you want them to watch your video, but what else do you want them to do? Do you want comments on your video, do you want them to go to your site and fill out a form or join a contest?
• As I mentioned before, you don’t need to break the bank, but be creative and keep your audience engaged throughout the video. You don’t want them to click on it and then bail.

Having explained all this, you and I both can justify our YouTube surfing as market research. When your supervisor asks why you’re watching a music video at work, you can now respond with “Just doing some market research”! Good luck implementing!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Managing paid search campaigns requires a mixture of science and art. The scale probably tips more toward the scientific elements when it comes to optimizing your performance. However, in order to create a successful, well-balanced campaign, you can’t completely disregard either end of the spectrum.

Here are some skills/traits that you need to manage your PPC campaign effectively:

Statistics

Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data (according Wikipedia). This is the main driver behind PPC analysis and optimization. Having a thorough knowledge on how to collect and interpret data within your account is mission critical.

You also need to understand how to present this information as well. This presentation of data could be within your team or, even more importantly, to clients. Your clients (or upper management) are not in the accounts every day and they don’t have as clear of a picture as you do in regards to the direction of your campaign. Providing the right statistics in the easiest way possible is a must.

Information architecture

I know what the standard definition of information architecture is but I like this phrase so I’m going to re-appropriate it for my own usage. This skill/trait refers to the logical categorization of similar search terms into themed groups. Or other in terms, creating awesome PPC account structures.

You have to be able to find themes, patterns, and parallel user intent within disparate phrases in order to create an account structure that is likely to generate excellent results as well as enhance your AdWords Quality Score.

Psychology (Human information behavior)

The psychological element is the middle ground between science and art. As paid search marketers, we need to understand the thought patterns and intentions of our search engine audience. What are they thinking? What are they looking for? How can they be convinced that I have what they’re looking for? When conducting keyword research, creating account structures, writing ad copy, and optimizing landing pages, these are the questions we’re trying to answer.

You need statistics to give you some great insight to answering these questions. This is why ad text testing and landing optimization are so important. However, from trying to understand the online buying cycle to determining why a certain ad has a higher click-through rate involves understanding the mindset of your audience as well as hard-fast stats.

Copywriting

Now we’re getting to the artistic end of the spectrum. Writing great PPC ad texts requires a certain finesse that goes above and beyond ordinary copywriting skills. This is because you only have 70 characters to tell someone who you are, what you have to have offer, why they can trust you, and why they should disregard everything else on the SERP and click on your ad.

This requires tapping into your creative side. You need make bold, convincing statements within a very, very small amount of space. When every character counts (literally!), you need to have a strong command of the English language (or whatever language in which you write PPC ads) in order to truncate a great deal of information into a few brief phrases.

Graphic design

This where your landing page optimization comes in (and this is an artsy skill). Yes, you need data in order to tell you how your landing pages are performing. And performance data can tell you what is appealing best to your audience. However, you need analytical and artistic skills in order interpret this information and turn it into images, copy, and an overall design that engage your visitors.

As you can see, successful paid search management requires a blend of scientific and artistic skills. This is what makes our industry so interesting! And there are many more skills that are helpful to generate great PPC results, but hopefully this list will get you thinking about your strengths and weakness. Where can you improve?

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

In Google Analytics, there is an order to everything. I learned this the hard way. In the past the PPC Hero team has shared with our readers some bad things that can happen when you combine destination URLs, tracking parameters and 301 redirects. Today I am going to shed more light on this subject and hopefully prevent someone from making the same mistake in the future.

I recently began working with a client that uses fairly complex tracking systems to monitor the profitability of their pay-per-click business. A part of this tracking system required me to setup tracking URLs at the keyword level to monitor both online and pay-per-click call performance. Thanks to autotagging in Google using the gclid parameter, I only had to append the call tracking URL (i.e. ?param=a&param2=b) in AdWords. For Yahoo and MSN, I was required to combine the call tracking URL with the &utm=source parameter. Thus the source of my pay-per-click tracking issue.

As the month continued, our cost-per-sale continued to rise, and we were not seeing pay-per-click sales attributed to Yahoo and MSN. Sales from the pay-per-click campaign were attributed to organic and/or direct, which was really hurting our bottom line. So I needed to resolve this issue, fast!

Resolving URL tagging is relatively simple if you know what to look for. If you have problems with tracking search engine performance with 3^rd party campaigns, it is most likely one of three things (from my experience):

Problem 1: 301 Redirects
Believe it or not, but 301 redirects can often strip your URL tracking, and categorize per-per-click traffic into organic or direct. This includes the gclid tracking code for AdWords and the &utm=source tracking parameter for other search engines. It is easy to find if this is your issue. To test the gclid, enter the destination URL into your browser with the following appended at the end: www.yoursitehere.com/?gclid=test. The gclid should remain at the end of the URL when the page loads. If it disappears, then you are losing your tracking info.

Solution: Update the destination URLs in your pay-per-click accounts so they point directly to the final destination. If you are pointing your pay-per-click ads to a redirected URL, then your tracking may be stripped in the redirect.

Solution: Ask your website developer to configure your server to pass the gclid and all other tracking parameters.

Problem 2: Tracking Parameter Order
Check the order of your tracking parameters. Your &utm URL tagging needs to come before any additional tracking parameters. If they are in the wrong order, then you are not going to properly track performance. In the case of my client, I initially setup the Yahoo and MSN URLs with the call tracking parameter first, and the URL tagging second. Here is an example:

www.mysitehere.com/?param=a&param2=b&utm=source&utm=cpc&utm=content&parameter

Under this structure, the call tracking parameters were effectively stripping the &utm=source in Google Analytics. So similar to the case of 301 redirects, my pay-per-click traffic was counted as organic and direct.

Solution: Reorder your tracking URLs so the &utm=source tracking code comes before any additional tracking parameters. Your URL should follow this structure:

www.mysitehere.com/?utm=source&utm=cpc&utm=content&parameter&param=a&param2=b

Problem 3: URL Structure

If you are still having problems tracking 3^rd party campaigns in Google Analytics, then your issue may lie with the &utm=soruce tracking parameter setup using the Google URL Builder. If you do not properly format this tag, then Google Analytics will not record traffic properly.

Solution: Take a closer look at your &utm=source parameters to confirm everything is correct. Check out How to Troubleshoot When Tracking 3rd Party PPC through Google Analytics for a more detailed review of the problem.

3^rd party URL tagging is a great resource for tracking pay-per-click campaign performance, but you have to do it right to reap the benefits. These are all very common problems with URL tagging and thankfully the solutions are simple to implement. Please learn from my mistake and make sure you setup your URLs correctly. But if you are experiencing tracking problems, use this as a resource to quickly find and resolve the problem.

Have you experienced other issues with URL tagging? Please share your problems and solutions with us!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Several of our clients have compliance teams that must approve each and every word the company uses to promote its services and/or products. According to Wikipedia, compliance is defined as: “the goal that corporations or public agencies aspire to in their efforts to ensure that personnel are aware of and take steps to comply with relevant laws and regulations.”

It’s quite a tedious process to submit each and every PPC ad text to a team that will pick and poke at each word you use. But what is more important than anything is representing the company in the best, safest way possible.

In this post I’ll give you five tips that we use that has made this approval process a little smoother:

1. Be sure to ask your client before hand for words you shouldn’t or can’t say. I would steer away from asking your clients about what you should say – then you’re really limited to testing capabilities. But if you ask what you shouldn’t say in an ad text then hopefully you’ll only have a few restrictions that you’ll know to stay away from. By requesting words you can’t say before hand this will save you time having to go back and make changes to your PPC ads and having to re-submit them again to your client for approval.
2. Start working proactively. Typically I would say most companies work within 24 to 48 hours in getting back with you on an ad text approval. Some companies even work in a week timeframe which is a really long time to get an approval for an ad text. So start working in advance. Plan out your month ahead of time and know when you need to submit new ad text to the compliance team in order to make them live on time.
3. Another tip that has worked for us in the past is to take notes on feedback your client gives you when writing your ad text. If you take notes and keep those notes out when writing your next batch of ads you’ll be more likely to get approval the first round. This again will make your approvals go faster and you will sustain much less frustration sending your ads back and forth to be approved.
4. A general practice for most companies is to NOT promote any guarantees or claims. For medical companies you typically cannot say ‘cure’, as this states there is a cure for a disease when their may not be. Also guaranteeing any kind of specific results or making any promises in an ad text can get you in trouble as well. For example, a search engine marketing company should never say, ‘Page 1 Rankings Guaranteed’, or a weight loss dietary supplement company should never guarantee that you will lose weight using their product since everyone can react differently.
5. And finally, we have found it’s much easier to make ad text changes in an excel spreadsheet over making them in AdWords editor. It’s much quicker to make changes via the spreadsheet rather than having to go back into editor and make the changes there.

I think the biggest tip I can give you on having to work with a compliance team is to just have patience. Don’t write you ads too quickly and think about them thoroughly before sending them off to be reviewed and approved. Even if you’re not currently working with a compliance team for one of your clients, if any new client comes on board they’ll be happy to know that you are aware of how to manage a PPC account with a compliance team just from reading this post!

If anyone else has any tips on working with a compliance team feel free to let us all know!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.