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Archive for the ‘PPC News Round Up’ Category

I’m always looking for new ways to enhance my AdWords accounts, so I was excited when Inside AdWords let me know that Google has added a new course to the AdWords Online Classroom. This course is designed for those of us who may not be familiar with all the Opportunities tab has to offer. After viewing the video you will have a better understanding of how to improve your campaign with keywords, keyword bids, and budget ideas. Implementing these changes will let you extend advertising reach and increase your return on investment for your accounts.

Google is releasing a new version of AdWords Editor that you’ll want to keep an eye out for. Jason Shafton at the Inside AdWords Crew breaks down some of the new functionality and shares a number of resources to look into it further. AdWords Editor 8.0.1 is going to help us manage our local ads, has collapsible and expandable panels to help us organize the interface, adds progress bars, additional error messages to help narrow down mistakes, and some other helpful additions. At the time of this post, the latest version was still 7.6.1 but keep an eye out here for the new one.

I’m beating this topic to death because of its importance and I’ll probably continue to do so, at least through September, but we have another Search Alliance article this week. This one is from Tina Kelleher at the adCenter Blog and highlights some resources the Microsoft Transition Center offers.

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.

PPCBlog has an informative article on the integration of Search Query Reports into the Search campaigns Keywords tab. The changes will simplify the process of adding negative keywords and site placements to your campaigns. It may take some getting used to, but you will now be able to improve campaign targeting faster than ever before!

If you are looking to find a good way to start your advertising on the content network, a good way to do so is to find out the top ranking blog and news sites on Google. According to Kevin Burns, the top five sites for contextual advertising are Weather.com, CNN.com, NYTImes.com, HuffingtonPost.com, and FoxNews.com. All five of these sites generate a massive amount of traffic, and depending on your target market, these sites offer both sides of any demographic spectrum. So give contextual advertising a try—the upside is enormous.

In continuing the recent PPC Roundups trend, we’ve got another great article about the Yahoo/Microsoft transition. George Michie points out some possibilities for traffic value and how this change will affect them. The article provides a good outline for developing your bid strategy for the merge.

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.

If you’ve ever needed help targeting websites for your Display Network campaigns the Google DoubeClick Ad Planner can help target your key demographics. A new feature of this tool is the ability to export your findings directly to AdWords; making creating your newly focused campaigns easier than ever. The Google Agency Ad Solutions Blog provides a great video tutorial on how to do so.

PPCBlog has a really great article on how traditional high-level marketing skills apply to PPC. Lets face it, so many of us web marketers don’t have a traditional marketing background and/or no traditional marketing training. The PPC market is competitive. Use these skills to your advantage.

Wpromoter’s Jamie Lane blogged about a great case study, in which Lumaneers diversified their traffic and boosted conversions. They did this through a combination of SEO and PPC strategies. Their original problem areas are something I think is pretty common and their solution is something we can all apply to our strategy. See what you can takeaway from this great article.

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.

Have you been using the updated keyword tool in AdWords? I haven’t, but that’s about to change. Truthfully, I enjoy the simplicity of the previous version and always found myself clicking the “previous interface” link rather than giving the new tool a legitimate shot at winning me over. This week Google announced the new keyword tool is exiting Beta and they shed some light on the functions that are coming with it.

The Display Network is your friend and Mike Fleming is here to prove it. Today he released his third installment with how to advance your business with the Display Network. I advise going back and reading the first two as well but today he gives some great advice on how to create effective ads.

As we draw nearer to the yahoo/msn merge, I’ve been scouring the web for any little tricks that will soften the transition. Elizabeth Marsten at Portent Interactive answered the call with a few tricks that are outside of the box. Read her article on MSN AdCenter Secrets to tighten up your Microsoft chops.

What do you think about internal search on your custom PPC landing pages? I think we often stay clear of this option in an attempt to funnel our users towards a conversion. But what happens if your user doesn’t find what they’re looking for? More often then not, they leave. Our customers want a usable site. Peter D at PPCBlog offers some insight about how to coordinate internal search and PPC.

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.

When it comes to promoting an event, the Internet can be of great help. Whether you need to generate buzz or post local announcements, PPC should be a primary weapon in your arsenal. Kevin Burns over at WPromote has an excellent article on starting event buzzes using PPC campaigns. PPC has the power to reach your target market and spread the word, so get your party hat on and start leading powerful campaigns that will increase your traffic!

In the context of a website, conversion is usually the percentage of visitors that make a purchase. Many websites concentrate solely on increasing their number of closed deals when they often have other conversion opportunities within their site. Some of these secondary conversions may have a huge effect on your ability to measure success. Derek Edmond over at KoMarketing Associates lists additional SEM conversions beyond direct sales leads.

This week Erin posted a follow-up article on PPC Hero that digs into the AdWords Campaign Experiments tool. The good news is that this week we also saw an announcement from Google on the Inside AdWords blog about the ACE tool rolling out to all U.S. advertisers. This really is a handy tool and there is no reason not to use it. It’s time to get your experiment on.

We all love tools that make our lives easier and our decisions more informed right? I thought so. If you haven’t been using Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, Tina Kelleher at the adCenter Blog has a bunch of reason’s why you should.

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 is an update coming to the AdWords legal terms and agreements that you should be aware of. If you manage a different companies account or if you have hired someone to manage your account (most of you fall into these categories), this update applies to you. Moving forward, Google is telling us we have to share basic account information with our clients. You’ll be required to share cost, impressions, and clicks with your client. I’m sure most of us already do this but if you aren’t, start preparing some basic reports that contain this information. You’ll be required to share them in about six months.

If you’ve let your focus on Quality Score drift a little bit lately, you need to snap out of it. Although you don’t have a say in what your quality score is, you can do a lot to help improve it. With that said, there are a lot of things people are doing that simply aren’t having an effect. Andrew Goodman over at Traffick shows us some Quality Score myths and gives us some advice about how to effectively increase your scores.

Creating a budget may not sound like the most exciting thing in the world but it is vital in keeping your PPC in order. Before you begin to create your budget it is important to realize that in order to be successful you have to understand AdWords budget settings and their impact on conversions. Jeremy Mayes from PPC Discussions has an excellent article on budget settings. Ultimately, the end result will be able to show where your money is coming from, how much is there, and where it is all going.

Leonardo Dicaprio’s latest blockbuster opened to the tune of $62 million partly because of a great advertising strategy. As Kevin Burns of WPromote reports, they slowly began releasing stills and intriguing clips of footage to build viewer interest. Now you might be asking yourself “ok, viral marketing, what does this have to do with PPC?” Simple, you have to put an idea in someone’s head when you are doing PPC marketing. When you are writing your PPC ads try and think about how to create ad text that doesn’t read quite like an Ad. If searchers are thinking “Wow I think this is really cool” instead of “Ok that’s an interesting ad” they are more likely to pursue an ad further.

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.

PPC is highly competitive and the inflated keyword costs make it that much more difficult to compete. As a small business owner, if you are certain to be outranked in the search engines for popular phrases relating to your services, it’s first important to acknowledge that you may get trampled unless you start looking in other places on the web to attract traffic. Erik Whaley at Search Engine Journal points out some effective PPC tips for small business owners. You don’t have to abandon your PPC efforts, just re-think your strategy.

Having a landing page that isn’t relevant to your PPC campaign not only confuses users, it also confuses Google. In addition to matching your landing page message to your PPC campaign, you should also optimize your landing page for relevant keywords that you are buying. Giovanna over at PPC Blog has some tips on making sure your page is structured in the most efficient manner to maximize free traffic and to keep the visitors from making a quick exit.

Sometimes Internet searchers can be a little impatient. We know what we want and we want to find it now. Adding sitelinks to your PPC ads can help improve your CTR and ROI. By adding additional text to your Ads the benefit is two folds. 1. You are able to give searchers more information about your site and possibly your product and 2. Your ad will take up more space, increasing odds that a searcher will see it. Sinead from Redfly put together a great tutorial for adding sitelinks

Mobile web access is here to stay, and while many of us use smart phones to access information on the web, many marketers are not taking advantage of the opportunities available. David Ward at Clickz.com tells us, only about a quarter of marketers surveyed are using social or mobile advertising. The real take away here is that there is a huge opportunity to get to the mobile party first. By ramping up or simply starting your mobile PPC campaigns now you can already be ahead of three quarters of the competition. If you need more proof check out Micheal Martin’s piece. You don’t want to be late to mobile search marketing.

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.

If you’ve been burned by poorly managed broad match keywords in the past, Google just released the Broad Match Modifier in the U.S. According to George Michie from RKG blog. With BMM you can use a + sign in front of words within Broad Match to trigger close variations of that word: misspellings, singular/plural, stemming, and acronyms/abbreviations. In short, BMM lets you create keywords, which have greater reach than phrase match and increased control on broad match. Thanks Google, you’ve done it again.

Darwin wrote about survival of the fittest. With the release of new apps and add-ons to our browsers, consumers are fighting back against an overload of ads. Most notable, Apple released Safari 5 witch has a new “reader” feature that take out text and content ads in an effort to make its browser more user friendly. Check out Michael Gray’s post about fighting back against these new features.

Giving your ads a local feel can help you increase a consumer’s comfort level. You might be asking, how do I separate myself from being the Walmart of widgets and still reach a large audience? Joseph Vivolo offers some tips to give your ads that mom and pop shop feel while still marketing to the whole country.

Are you starting to get nervous about the impending merge of Microsoft and Yahoo AdCenters? We all are. It can be tough to weed through all the information that is (and isn’t) available. For those of us utilizing these search engines for advertising, we want as much info as possible to make the shift seamless. The Folks at PPC Blog have found a rose in the weeds in their article about Yahoo’s Trademark Policies winning through.

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.

Back in the day when people had something to sell, they traveled door to door with their products. Before they sold anything, they first had to find an audience. Nowadays, users generate ad content based on their search words. As a copywriter, the challenge is not creating the opportunity to sell, but crafting a winning ad in a competitive environment. Giovanna over at PPC Blog describes some copywriting tips that will help you get started down the road to conversions.

Seasons come and go and so do peoples interest. You’re probably not going to get a lot of searches for wool sweaters in July and if you’re like me, you can never get enough data about your ads. Pinpointing the most relevant search terms can be valuable. Here are some great keyword tracking tools from Google that the folks at PPC Blog point out.

Kim Farmer at Microsoft introduces us to the SEM Advanced Series with an article on Budget Optimization. Should you be using the “spend budget until depleted” option with Microsoft adCenter? It wouldn’t hurt to consider it. Kim shows us what to keep an eye on, what reports to run, and how to set up your campaign for ideal results using this option.

By now you’ve heard that Lebron James is making his way to Miami. The quest for Lebron has taught a valuable PPC lesson. As Christopher Heine reports, the New York Knicks now know to double check their landing pages. But wait, the Lebronathon has more to offer! As a bonus article, check out the folks at This Week in Relevance’s article on relevancy and accuracy of your ads and make sure you aren’t peddling outdated products or discounts that might drive you CPC or CPL up.

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.

Getting the consumer to your site is only half the battle. Check out these 5 Tips To Improve Conversion On B2B Landing Pages, and start reaping the benefits. *Side note: don’t be deterred by the title, the tips can be applied to your B2C clients as well!

Mike Fleming dropped his third installment on using ad testing to reach your marketing goals. This final article helps us know when to conclude our tests so we can analyze our results. These tips will help you get the most out of your tests and will make sure the time spent setting them up is well worth it.

Head over to the PPCBlog for an interesting read on the importance of headlines in PPC advertising. To an expert, this little fact might be nothing new, but this post is a must read as it goes into depth about the role of headlines, not only in PPC campaigns and traditional advertising, but also in our overall media culture. Brevity, relevancy, and simplicity are the keys to success for higher CTR and conversion rates.

Josh Dreller over at Search Engine Land has come up with a list of 11 Inventory Sources for Keyword Marketers. From Twitter and Facebook to the Internet Yellow Pages and Shopping Engines, this list includes some of the top ad inventory for search marketers.

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.