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Archive for the ‘Advanced PPC Strategies’ Category

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.