This morning I arrived at my desk to find a very welcome message from my friend and colleague Eric Lander. Apparently Google made a colossal boo-boo and exposed the quality score and max bids for some advertisements. As far as I know this is a first. Check out Eric's article at Search Engine Journal.
Below is one of the screenshots of the leak from Eric's article
This is the second in a series of articles intended to convey my personal impressions of managing PPC through Google Adwords, Yahoo Panama and MSN Adcenter.
If you missed part one, you can view it here. Today I will be covering Yahoo’s Panama. Of the three, this is my least favoured, so I’m wearing my Yahoo Search Marketing ball cap today, to remind myself not to allow too much vitriol to slip into the article.
Interface
Logging into a Yahoo account brings you to the Dashboard. This is an overview page containing basic account information, along with any alerts. Also on this page is a drop down menu allowing you to shift to different accounts under your master account. If you are advertising in multiple countries this is useful for easier access without requiring multiple logins, though these accounts can only be linked by Yahoo support personnel.
The dashboard also contains a table which allows you to view either top performing campaigns, ad groups or keywords at a glance. The nifty thing with this table is it allows you to view at a glance items you have set up on the watch list. This is useful for quickly viewing items of concern and allows you to select from a drop down menu, watched campaigns, ad groups and keywords.
One of the things I like about Panama is the use of colour to highlight various features. Particularly when I’m creating new campaigns or ads, these buttons stand out very well. Also, the capability of different colour fonts and sectional backgrounds eases the look of pages that would otherwise appear cluttered with all sorts of information.
The dashboard is the first of 4 tabs, the others being Campaigns, Reports and Administration.
Campaign
The Campaign tab contains 5 links to navigate back and forth:
Campaign: A table showing all the account campaigns and basic performance information for each.
Ad Groups: Shows basic performance data for all ad groups, listing also which campaign each ad group belongs to.
Keywords: A table showing all the keywords in the account with basic data and lists which campaign and which ad group each belongs to (very handy feature this).
Editorial Status: contains status listing of pending, declined and removed ads and keywords.
Search: Allows search for campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads. I am not sure why this page exists as essentially the same function is available on each of the other pages.
One thing to note, with exception of the search page, all of the above can be viewed for specific date ranges using a fairly robust date range selection system.
Reports
Reports can be saved in several different formats. Performance reports can be saved in CSV for Excel, CSV, TSV and XML, while financial reports can be saved as either PDF or TXT. Reports can be set up for either the campaign, ad group or keyword level to view overall performance data. There are also optional views for geographic location, daily spending and URL performance. There is an option to use saved templates, but it is limited to 5 saved configurations.
Administration
Under the administration page, you can find the account details and edit billing and budgetary options, set up alerts, change tactics, set up different account users and assign permissions. You can also choose up to 250 domains to block placing content ads on.
The Tactics selection includes the ability to turn on or off either Sponsored Search or Content Match, set match type to advanced or standard and add keyword exclusions. This is kind of an odd spot to put these; one would normally expect to see this in campaign level settings, but it seems Panama is only capable of this at the account level. A definite minus for flexibility.
There is also a link for analytics (where you can set up conversion tracking) and one for tracking URL’s. The first time setting up conversion tracking, I found the interface to be quite confusing, but it was just the choice of labeling that threw me off. You must ensure “Conversion Only Analytics” and “Analytics are enabled” are both activated in order to have the conversion tracking function.
Campaign Setup
Setting up is an 8 step process.
First thing is naming the campaign and setting up geo-targeting. You can select Entire Market or specify by region or specific city/area. There are some pitfalls to watch out for here. If you haven’t read my previous article on this you can find it here.
The second step is creating an initial ad group and defining tactics.
Now it is time to input your keywords. You can get suggested keywords at this point, have this tool scan a URL for suggestions or input your own list. Excluded (negative) keywords may also be input here.
Next step is to set the ad group default maximum bids for sponsored search and/or content match. One thing I really like about this stage is a side graph that shows estimates for average position, number of impressions and clicks, average CPC (cost per click) and the percentage share of available clicks. This graph updates to changes in the set bid, so is useful for gauging where to set your max.
The next step is writing the ad itself. Two things to watch out for here; one is the long descriptions and the other, the display URL. Yahoo does not allow long descriptions and has not for quite some time, beyond me why they have not taken it out of the set up process. The display URL input box is hidden and you need to click the little bullet arrow to view. It really does not save much space doing that, so I have no idea why it is designed like that.
After this stage is review, which takes you back to the second step and you can edit any errors along the way, or you can just choose to move to stage 7…
Which is the budgeting of the campaign and setting up a display schedule if necessary. There is a display estimates feature that allows you to view monthly clicks and impressions for varying schedules.
The last step is reviewing and activating your campaign.
Learning Resources and Certification
A while back I studied for and passed my certification examination to become a YSM Ambassador for StepForth Web Marketing. Having gone through this process prior to this with Google AdWords, I was somewhat dismayed at the learning resources available for using this interface. Whereas AdWords has a comprehensive learning center with video and text modules complete with relevant quizzes for each, Yahoo only offers a very brief, scant slideshow with no quizzes. Most of my learning had to be done the hard way, meandering through their help sections.
The overall difference in quality and difficulty between AdWords and Panama exams was pretty obvious. But at least Yahoo allows professional accreditation, unlike MSN, whose recently implemented program is only available for US residents.
Annoyances and Oddities
These are some of the gripes I have with Panama I have not covered in previous articles. I will try not to foam at the mouth too much.
As with MSN Adcenter, the timeout seems much too short. While writing this article I was using an existing account to view different sections of the interface. I had to re-log into the account dozens of times. I would write a few sentences, go back to look at something and more often than not I would find myself logged out.
Some of the labels and wording are not ideally descriptive. One example I mentioned earlier has to do with conversion tracking. Another instance regards ad display rate. In AdWords, you can adjust ads so better performing ads get more exposure. There did not seem to be a feature in Panama, until I clicked on the “optimize ads” button. I thought this was some sort of tool to suggest ad changes but after reading the lengthy description I realized it is for displaying the “best” ad.
The campaign “Tune up” tool is of questionable value. I ran a test on this and the recommendations given were pretty doubtful. Basically, the tool recommended I up the daily budget by 350%, jack up the keyword max bids (in some cases quite dramatically) and change some match types. The estimated rewards for providing Yahoo with this additional spend were a 2% percent improvement in CTR (click through rate), a 20% increase in clicks and no estimation on conversion changes. All this with only a 4% increase in monthly cost. Regardless of any of the other estimations, I cannot equate a 350% increase in daily spend equaling a 4% increase in estimated spend.
Setting up campaigns, especially ones with lots of ad copy, is laborious and time consuming. There is no option for uploading work or any tools to make this a smoother process. It is either do it from scratch or a lengthy cut and paste session from a spreadsheet. To give an example, I recently set up account in all 3 engines. It took roughly a half hour to get everything set up with the AdWords Editor tool and uploaded. Then having saved the campaign information in CSV format from the AdWords Editor, I uploaded the file into MSN Adcenter, set up the bidding and activated the campaign. This took all of about 10 minutes. Finally, setting up the same campaign in Yahoo, took over 3 tedious hours of copying and pasting.
I mentioned the “hidden” display URL box when writing ads which is annoying when first setting up. If you are creating new ads however, even in an entirely new campaign in an existing account, by default the original display URL is set in there for every new ad in the account. So if you are using a different domain, you have to ensure you open up the hidden entry box and change it for each ad. There is a way around this, but it is obscurely set in Administration under the account set up page.
Also, if you are modifying ads, your modifications will not show until the changes have been approved, which can take several days. By this I mean you cannot even see the changes you have made until the ads have been approved. (This caused me quite a bit of grief recently, as I was required to do a massive overhaul when a client renamed all the URL’s on their site - it was very annoying to be unable to double check my changes upon completion.)
My last and biggest beef with Yahoo is the quality of their support. I have worked with first tier support in the past and I know the drill. The incidence of skimming the first line or so of a support request and firing back a template response which generally has nothing to do with the context of the support request seems to be higher than most here.
My perception of the quality of first tier staff training diminishes with each successive phone call. When trying to figure out the problem which led to the discovery of certain geo-targeting issues, we went through quite a few emails and phone calls before finding someone with an adequate grasp of their system to understand what was wrong.
In another case, a support saga of epic proportions, I received 5 successively different, nonsensical explanations, none of which addressed my actual question. Sensing the circular pattern of this, I struggled to get direct contact up-tier. Incredibly, one rep actually told me editors aren’t allowed phones, to keep them impartial. When I finally got put through to an editor, I was initially told more of the same, but upon realizing I wasn’t buying it, he simply went ahead and fixed the problem. Quite an ordeal and a completely unnecessary waste of time.
While it is obvious some of the complaints I have about the design of this system are fairly trivial, these little problems can add up to a serious, unnecessary increase in the amount of time required to work with this interface, particularly in large campaigns. It is my hope that Yahoo can expend a little more effort to improve Panama’s usability.
Summary
Over the course of writing this article, I realized there are quite a few things I do like about this interface. If they made it a little easier to work with and especially if they improve their customer support, I would have no qualms about using this interface.
This is the first in a series of articles intended to convey my personal impressions of managing PPC through Google Adwords, Yahoo Panama and MSN Adcenter.
Each engine has its pluses and minuses and I thought I would write a short blurb describing my experiences using the interface for each of these. The first engine I will be looking at is the lesser utilized of the three, MSN Adcenter.
Interface
One of the things I like about working within Adcenter is the clean look. Although from time to time I wonder if the uncluttered interface is more a product of its relative youth, there’s no denying it’s easier on the eyes than either of its competitors. In part, this appears to be due to the lack of clutter that plagues both Panama and AdWords. Perhaps Microsoft hasn’t had time to fill every gap on each page as seems to be the case with the others. Part of the reason however, is the use of bullet links. More often than not, clicking on these causes the additional information to appear in place, without having to navigate to another page. This is a refreshing change, as most of my time using these seems to be spent hitting my back button and waiting for complete pages to load.
The layout of subsections is based on 4 tabs; Campaigns, Accounts & Billing, Research and Reports. Clicking on these takes you to exactly what you would expect, no more no less. Everything is laid out in a logical format and it’s pretty quick and easy to find what you’re looking for. After struggling to navigate through Panama in particular, I find this refreshingly simple.
Campaign Setup
Setting up is a 5 step process.
First off, you lay out your basic campaign structure by naming the campaign and initial ad group. One of the nifty features at this stage is a checkbox allowing you to copy an existing ad group. I have found this can be a useful time saving feature. Network targeting, campaign scheduling, language and regional targeting can all be set up on this same page. Also, conversion tracking can either be set up here or later in the campaign interface with a single click.
The next step is writing ad copy. The biggest advantage I have found in this stage is that the interface allows you to paste the entire ad description in one line rather than having to fuss with the character limitations for 2 lines of ad text, such as in both Google and Yahoo.
Now you can add your keywords. This is a very straightforward process, You have the option to add your own pre-made list of keywords and/or using a keyword tool that scans a site, or the ad destination URLs. This tool can generate a list of synonyms based on a suggested term, including the number of searches conducted in the previous month.
The last main step is to determine pricing settings. This includes setting a budget (see annoyances and oddities section), bidding and setting bidding options, such as incremental bidding. Here also you can set bids specifically targeting for location, day, time, age, or gender.
The final step is simply a review of all the information entered to this point and the option to change settings. I find this a bit annoying, as opting to change anything takes you back to that stage and after making your adjustment you have to cycle back through the entire process to the review page once again.
Keywords
The only tool this interface has at the moment is the keyword research tool. This can be accessed under the research tab or when editing keyword settings. I have found this far less awkward and time consuming to use than either of the other 2 engines. One thing to note about adjusting keyword settings is how robust the options are generally. When adjusting existing keywords it is simple to add negative keywords to individual keywords, as well as adjust the match types and specific destination URLs by keyword. Another interesting feature is the trend charts, viewable by keyword. With this handy feature you can view individual keyword trends by age and gender, geographical location, social class and affluence.
One major difference with keywords between MSN and the others is the level of editorial control exerted. Recently I was managing a campaign with a particular ad group that had quite a few different ads. Some keywords were reported by MSN as being declined for certain ads, but approved for others. This is certainly a departure from my experiences with either AdWords or Panama, where if a keyword is declined for any reason, that’s that.
Reports
The reporting feature is also quite robust. One can run single use reports or create saved templates for performance, accounting or targeting. It allows for quite a number of specific report types from account overview down to specific ad or keyword performance. A report can be set to display information from hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. Additionally, filters can be set to customize reports to only display information you wish to view. Automated report scheduling is also an option if you wish to receive emails periodically, without having to fetch them personally. The format for these reports are limited. Currently downloading one gets you a zipped csv file. Hopefully they’ll expand that to allow options for other file formats.
Annoyances and Oddities
These are some of the gripes I have with Adcenter.
For some reason, they’ve incorporated the option to select campaign settings for either daily budgeting or monthly. While this isn’t really a bad thing, if you select daily budgeting, it requires you to set a monthly budget as well. In my experience, doing this seems to have little effect on the amount spent on a given day. For example, I had set a daily budget of $10.00 while selecting a monthly cap of $310.00 to reflect 31 days in a month. Day by day this particular campaign was spending regularly up to and in excess of $20.00 daily. No amount of fiddling seemed to change that behavior, so consequently the monthly budget was used up in half the time.
Normally, when optimizing ads and keywords, I like to pause poorly performing ads. Pausing them, rather than deleting them, allows me to retain the statistics for later viewing. This is handy because sometimes I do not wish to drop an ad or a keyword entirely, but just want to turn it off for a time, for whatever reason. Unfortunately, there is no option to pause either an ad or a specific keyword. There is no way short of deletion to stop displaying a specific ad and the only way to “pause” a keyword without deleting it, is to drop the max CPC to the absolute minimum.
There is a limitation on viewing data at campaign, ad group or even ad or keyword level. One can only view yesterday, this month, last month, this year, last year or entire time. I find it very strange that unlike anywhere else in this interface, you cannot specify a custom date range. To get around this, you have to go to reports and create and run a report specifying what start and end date you wish to view data for. This can be time consuming and is an obvious flaw that will hopefully be worked out soon.
The timeout is quite short. Many times while working in Adcenter, I’ve tabbed back after only several minutes, only to find the system has logged me out and I have to re-login and navigate back to what I’d been working on.
Summary
Overall, I’d have to say that MSN Adcenter is quite easy to use. Although MSN gets the least amount of traffic of the 3 engines, this isn’t entirely disadvantageous. One result of this disparity is that spend for a given campaign is generally significantly less than in either Adwords or Panama. Given that, when a conversion is achieved the difference in ROI is notable. This engine is certainly worth advertising on and with some improvements will be a fine choice.
Recession, recession, recession… I don’t know about you but I have had my fill of this doomsday word! It seems to me the panic caused by this word simply increases the chances of a recession occurring. Recessions, however, have a silver lining because they provide business owners with the opportunity to look long and hard at their expenses and this can provide valuable insight in strengthening the business long after a recession recedes. Some cut backs may become obvious such as eliminating frivolous office expenses and are a wise move but should business owners cut back on their web marketing? Lets look at the circumstances within web marketing where cutbacks may or may not make sense. When You Should or Should Not Cut Back on Pay Per Click or Search Engine Optimization Campaigns So what is unnecessary marketing? Logic dictates that any marketing that is not profitable is not worth keeping. That said, how certain are you that a particular form of marketing is not profitable? Perhaps the following questions and notes will help you decide:
Have you been tracking key performance indicator(s) (KPI) since the inception of the campaign? Let me explain; say you launched an SEO campaign to drive more traffic to the “Norco Bikes For Sale” page on your website. In this case a very simple key performance indicator (KPI) would be how many visits the page has received from people that stayed longer than, say 6 or 7 seconds (this time qualifier would all-but-eliminate low quality clickthroughs). If you tracked this all the way from the inception of the campaign and you saw that this KPI had increased perhaps more research is in order before cancelling this campaign. If you saw no measureable improvement in your KPI then the campaign should be canned, or at the very least, paused.
If you haven’t adequately monitored the success of a campaign from the start is there a way to determine it now? Usually there is a method to determine the success of a campaign using historical data but the method depends on a multitude of circumstances. Here are a couple of the most common methods:
Dig into your web statistics: any hosting company worth its salt (like LunarPages or WeDoHosting) will have web statistics compiled for your website. These stats can provide revealing historical information on the ups and downs of traffic on your website.
Note: I recommend setting up Google Analytics on your website (free) for an alternative view of your stats. I find it best to have Google Analytics installed if even just for piece of mind that you have a backup of your stats (if you move hosting providers for example). If you do this, however, please read this handy article by Matt McGee on protecting your privacy while using Google Analytics.
If web site statistics are not an option then you may have to review your income history and see how much of your income you can tie into the specific marketing campaign. This process is not likely to be painless and may very well be impossible if you have a large number of campaigns going on at the same time; however, it could prove worthwhile if it keeps you from wrongly shutting down a profitable campaign.
What do your frontlines say? Are you getting more sales from the web? Every sales person in your office should be asking how prospects found you and they should be keeping meticulous notes on this information. If they are then ask them if they have seen a marked increase in web-related phone calls and whether they found you through a (specific) search engine. This kind of info is invaluable to determining the success of any marketing campaign.
Is the campaign nearly profitable but not quite? If you can see the campaign is close to being profitable then I strongly recommend sticking to your guns (if you can afford to) and conduct testing to increase the viability of the campaign before giving up on it.
Multivariate testing is often a great technique for improving a campaign. Multivariate testing is a term used to describe the tweaking of a landing page in manner that (hopefully) influences a desired reaction from the visitor. Tweaks could be as simple as removing an image of a Norco Bike at the top of the landing page which in-turn moves the marketing text higher up the page. A multivariate test would examine how this seemingly minor change positively or negatively affects the page. Usually a positive reaction would be an increase in clickthroughs to a goal page (such as a purchase page or an inquiry form).
Did you check to see if your pay-per-click campaign was profitable before turning it off? When you are looking at cost cutting your attention will most likely be focused on major expenditures like pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and rightfully so; a poorly performing campaign can be a major drain. That said, you must do your homework before shutting down a PPC campaign because it could be delivering the profit you desperately need. In a perfect world this question would be a waste of space but I am sure a vast number of PPC campaigns are run without proper monitoring so I feel this reminder to verify profitability is warranted. If your campaign has not been properly monitored then I suggest thinking carefully about your next step. You can either turn it off for the time being and see what effect it has on your sales OR immediately install the appropriate mechanisms to track a pay-per-click campaign and monitor it long enough to determine if it is in fact successful; the time required depends on the breadth of the campaign but 2 weeks should do the trick.
Evaluating the Success of Social Media Marketing Campaigns It can be difficult to associate profit with Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaigns since they tend to have a more indirect affect on sales. As a result, determining the success of a SMM campaign could seem nearly impossible. Fortunately that isn’t the case because like any marketing campaign you likely (or should have) started the campaign with some goal in mind. Here are a few questions based on common SMM goals that should help you determine the success of your campaign:
Has there been a regular and distinct increase in subscribers to your blog RSS feed or newsletter subscriptions? If you are using Feedburner or another RSS management tool look at your average sign-ups on a weekly basis (take more than one sample) before you start your SMM campaign(s) and then compare that to a sampling of a few weeks over the past month or two. Do the same examination for your newsletter subscriptions (using whatever management tool you use to monitor signups). Do you see a substantial increase in signups on a weekly basis? If not then have an in-depth discussion with your SMM team or vendor and determine where the disconnect is. After all, these assets have to be doing something for their money – perhaps they see another metric increasing.
Are you seeing more traffic from social media websites? If so, are they of a high enough quality? Open your web site statistics, go to your referral stats and look for increased traffic from social media websites your SMM team is concentrating on. If you don’t find any additional traffic stop at this point and have a serious discussion with your SMM team.
If you do find an increase of traffic from social sites then further segment this data and determine the quality of this traffic. For example, using ClickTracks Professional it is easy to create a filter that shows only visitors from StumbleUpon (or another group of social sites) that stays on your website longer than 5 seconds; this will eliminate zero second (aka “useless”) traffic and leave you with the worthwhile data. Now take this traffic and compare it to the expense of acquiring it through your current SMM campaign. If the numbers appear favourable and you feel the benefit outweighs the costs then you have your answer – keep the program. If the numbers are unfavourable either sit down with your SMM team to adjust/tweak/modifiy your campaign (by finding more appropriate social sites to become active on) or shut the campaign down until the winds are again favourable to refocus and try again.
Are you or your company getting talked about more often? Is it positive or negative talk? No matter what type of campaign you have running it is important to keep tabs on your online reputation. While running a SMM campaign it is easy to step on toes and cause ill-will; especially if your marketers are not taking care to understand the unique etiquette of each social property they participate in. If you are not sure of your current reputation then try searching Google for specific iterations of your business name and your key employee names. Document anything that appears positive or negative. Also make certain to setup a Google News Alert for specific key phrases so that you can be alerted whenever relevant fresh content is made available in Google’s vast database. If you find negative press then handle it immediately by responding to it (decide how this best be done) and quickly inform your SMM team of the issue so they can learn from it and avoid a reoccurrence. If you find a lot of negative press then you need to decide if your SMM campaign is worthwhile continuing since you have to spend so much time pursuing damage control.
Conclusion In an ideal world where a marketing department is running a tight ship a recession would have little or no impact on a marketing budget because smart companies realize they need to maintain the flow of business. That said many small businesses and indeed large companies lose track of the effectiveness of their campaigns so a potential recession provides a great opportunity to increase marketing efficiency. If you fall into the latter category then I hope this article has/or will help you cut costs without cutting profits. Just keep in mind that these evaluations should be conducted on a regular basis (regardless of a recession) so keep this article within reach as a reminder and (hopefully) a helpful reference.
PPC (Pay-per-click advertising) has been around for a while now and many site owners have either experimented with, or have at least heard of the marketing platform but surprisingly, there are still a large number of potential advertisers who have had no exposure to the world of PPC.
After fielding questions from new clients as well as our newest sales representative, I have decided to write an article to explain a few of the basics of what PPC is, some pro's and cons and provide some insight into how it works.
PPC advertising is a means to let businesses advertise their products or services online, within search results or on other websites participating in an advertising network. The advertiser pays only when a potential customer clicks their ad and follows it to their site. The advertiser competes on ad display and positioning by bidding on relevant search terms.
Pro’s
Matches consumer specified search terms for something they are already interested in researching/purchasing, with the advertiser providing what they are looking for.
A well managed campaign allows consumer behavior to be monitored to assist in adjusting the effectiveness of the campaign while it’s running.
In some cases, particularly ecommerce sites, ROI can be tracked very accurately.
Advertiser pays only when potential customers interact with their ad.
Cons
Ad copy is very limited in size which makes it difficult to “shoehorn” in a lot of information to attract customers.
Cost per click is dynamic not fixed; rates can depend on a number of different factors. Potential overspend is offset easily by setting a budgetary cap.
PPC can be susceptible to abuse, such as click fraud. However, there are methods employed by search engines to detect much of this. Additionally, aftermarket analytics solutions such as ClickTracks, can also be of significant help in narrowing down possible click fraud and generate a report for advertisers to send to the appropriate search engine.
PPC differs from more traditional forms of advertising in that it displays ads to those who are actively looking, rather than merely “display and pray” to a demographic. Also, the ability to gather information and adjust an advertising campaign at any given time makes it a more flexible alternative to broadcast or printed media.
How PPC Works
At its simplest level, PPC works as an auction style "bid for position" system. This system has evolved over the years to take keywords, ad copy and even destination page content into consideration when determining the order of the paid listings.
It is pretty easy to get an ad live in front of searchers with 4 easy steps. 1. Choose your destination page 2. Pick your keywords 3. Write your ads 4. Set your bids. While this will allow you to get your ads live, in order to be successful (unless you are incredibly lucky) more research is required here, but these are the basics.
While there are many important aspects to setting up and maintaining a successful PPC campaign, three very important things to focus on are keywords, ad copy and bidding strategy. Here are a few of the major points to remember on each of these categories.
Keywords
As a rule, using keywords most relevant to the content on your site’s landing page(s) will net the most qualified traffic and result in better positioning within a search engine for reduced cost.
Keywords that are very general will usually result in greatly increased cost by displaying ads to searchers that are unlikely to follow through to purchase.
One technique often overlooked is the use of negative keywords to filter out unwanted traffic. For example, using the word “free” as a negative keyword would block out any searches that include the word “free”. If you are not offering free products or services you would definitely not want ads displayed to searchers using that term. This can also be a very effective optimization technique to enable the use of keywords that are too general otherwise.
Using “long tail” keywords. Keywords that are highly relevant but not often searched for can be a very inexpensive means of boosting niche traffic.
Ad Copy
Ads should first and foremost be designed to get the searchers attention through relevance and a little creative writing.
Testing different ads against each other is the best way to optimize the effectiveness of an ad group.
Whenever possible, employing keywords in the ad text is best practice. It can be difficult to do this while keeping the ads appealing to searchers, but it will increase the quality of the ad to the search provider and will generally result in better positioning at reduced costs.
The ad destination must be a working link to a landing page relevant to the user’s search. Consequences of not following this guideline range from greatly increased cost per click to having ad service declined outright by the search engines.
Bidding Strategy
Rather than arbitrarily setting out bids based on estimations, best practice is to start low and spend a bit of time daily adjusting upwards until reaching optimal bids.
In some cases, particularly when bidding on very competitive keywords, it’s not always the best approach to vie for the number 1 position. Avoid getting locked into a bidding war over the top positions.
PPC is a very direct method of advertising which, when implemented properly, can generate a stream of targeted traffic to your website almost immediately. While PPC may not be cost effective for all target phrases in all industries, proper keyword selection and campaign management can help attract qualified visitors and generate conversions at a reasonable price.
Written by Andrew Clough and published at 11:03 AM
Yahoo Search is aiming to show more useful information on its results page. Yahoo state's it will eventually "enable 3rd parties to build and present the next generation of search results". This includes bringing data found within a website like ratings and other useful information into it's Yahoo search results page. Instead of just a website's URL and abstract on its results page Yahoo will include "ratings, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data". Although this is still in the works the plan is to let websites "regain some control over how their content is presented without allowing them to actually muck with search result ordering."
Great Q & A from people working with social media (Lee Odden, Shana Albert, Neil Patel, Jane Copland). Topics include good sites to promote content, attracting links, social media as a marketing strategy, and an insiders guide to Social Media.
Google Maps is now including a "refine by user rating and neighborhood system" to its search results of local services (hotels, restaurants). So whether you are downtown or uptown you can find more specific and user rated search results.
Yahoo is changing its minimum bid for PPC. Depending on what keywords you are targeting your minimum bid can now be under the previous .10 cent minimum. Although this will not affect any competitive keywords it will likely help to lower costs of targeting smaller niche markets.
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 3:01 PM
The policy at Google may not be changing regarding how they treat Display URL's within AdWords accounts, but they are cracking down on those abusing the system. Effective April 1st of this year the display URL policy will be strictly enforced.
While the policy is relatively simple, some advertisers have found ways to abuse the system and in the light of some advertiser complaints, Google has decided to put its foot down in the act of fairness.
Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land has written on this in more detail and has given a few examples of acceptable and unacceptable Display URL's, but in short, if your Display URL's coincide with your landing page, you should have nothing to worry about.
As an accredited Yahoo Ambassador, I am accustomed to working with the Yahoo Search Marketing PPC system (YSM). Although YSM can be an effective means of paid advertising, its Panama system still has a ways to go and I want to share with you several of the challenges in setting up a geo-targeted campaign.
Opening an account with an address in the US or Canada, restricts you to advertising only in those markets. If you'd like to geo-target other areas of the globe, you have to use this site: Yahoo International Accounts
Once there, a separate account for each and every additional country you wish to advertise in will need to be created. That's an awful lot of work for someone wanting to geo-target globally. When calling YSM support to find out how to get around this, their answer was that it is impossible to integrate campaigns to be served globally. I found this to be odd, as I'd just completed a globally targeted campaign in Google Adwords for the same client.
Another hitch in geo-targeting in Panama is trying to include Canada as a target region. If you select Canada as the market to be served to, you will only get ad service if the ads are written in French. This is unusual, as roughly 23% of Canada's population is French; in order to get ad service to English speaking Canada, one needs to set up the account in the US and Canada market . Apparently, however, this odd set up can cause problems in US advertising as well, as evidenced in this RKG blog.
Given that targeting Canada allows for only ad service in French, it seems odd that Yahoo would use exactly the same map as the English service US and Canada market as there aren’t a great many French Canadians in the US. By comparison, upon checking Switzerland, which also has more than one official language, no similar restrictions seem to apply. The target area was even restricted to just Switzerland and not the bordering countries, many of which have the same languages.
Overall, Yahoo seems to be very inflexible as to where they will serve ads. It would be nice if they displayed this kind of information more prominently when setting up accounts with them. I imagine a lot of people have wasted a fair amount of time trying to work through this system. I've mentioned these issues when speaking to Yahoo support staff, suggesting that changes of this nature would make the system more useful for advertisers. Both Google AdWords and Microsoft Adcenter allow flexible geo-targeting options, with MSN going as far as to allow an assortment of criteria to be changed at the ad group level.
Yahoo has thanked me for my input, but I question whether they are really listening. Dating back more than a year, similar complaints litter the YSM Blog and to date no known attempts have been made to improve the system.
While Yahoo has a number of good aspects behind its Panama Platform there is still much room for improvement. Here is a summary of my recommendations to Yahoo:
A revamping of YSM's system should be devised for more user friendly and efficient account creation and management. Yahoo's current system has the effect of putting all the setup and management workload on the advertisers.
Country restrictions should be made clear to the advertiser at the account creation stage.
Any ad copy language restrictions in place for specific geographic areas should be clearly noted by Yahoo. In cases where ads are disallowed due to language, there should be an indication the ads will not be served. In the case we recently experienced, there were no editorial alerts or any other obvious indication the Canada – English campaign was not functioning.
Do you have any tips or suggestions for Yahoo? Email me and I will be thrilled to add it to 'the list' and send it to Yahoo Search Marketing staff.
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 2:57 PM
Ad-Butterfly, an online ad services, allows more control over ad placement, providing marketers with the ability to choose which blogs to post there ads to, and allowing bloggers to choose which ads get posted to their site, according to a BusinessWeek article published Wednesday morning.
The world of online advertising continues to grow at phenomenal rates, but certainly, in the big scheme of things, it is still in its infant stages. The control given to AdWords advertisers and AdSense publishers has grown over the years, but Ad-Butterfly offers almost total control.
Ad-Butterfly works similar to the first tier PPC platforms of Google and Yahoo, using algorithms to automatically pair up ads and websites, but it offers a more advanced means of controlling which ads are displayed, for those who want total control.
Bloggers are given total control on which ads they will display on their site and also offers the ability for comments to be placed along side of the ads. Registered bloggers will also soon have the ability to request ads from other site.
The service is available in Japan and so far only 2,000 bloggers have signed up, but this form of paid ad placement is certain to grow over the very near future. Perhaps Google will even by them out it its quest for total control over online advertising. If you are fluent in Japanese feel free to visit the Ad-Butterfly website.
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 2:52 PM
According to Business Week, AOL has acquired pay per click search engine Quigo for a reported $300 million. The acquisition includes the AdSonar and Feedpoint platforms.
Quigo has been serving up ads for a number of Time.com properties, and with the success they have been having, saw the potential and went forward with the purchase.
The deal which is expected to close later this year, will allow for expansion of their contextual advertising on AOL as well as their partner sites. For the time being, Google will continue to provide AdWords ads alongside AOL search results.
StepForth is happy to announce that we have all been afforded an extension until November 30th on the great 15% discount for annual subscriptions to WordTracker. If you have not already signed up then follow the directions below:
Visit this link and enter the discount coupon codeus-annual-15to get 15% off
What is WordTracker? WordTracker is a phenomenal keyword research tool that allows subscribers to find out which keywords drive the most interest online. With this information in tow subscribers can change their SEO and pay-per-click keyword targets to make more money.
Blink
Del.icio.us
Digg
Furl
Google
Simpy
Spurl
Y! MyWeb
These are some of the gripes I have with Panama I have not covered in previous articles. I will try not to foam at the mouth too much.
Recession, recession, recession… I don’t know about you but I have had my fill of this doomsday word! It seems to me the panic caused by this word simply increases the chances of a recession occurring. Recessions, however, have a silver lining because they provide business owners with the opportunity to look long and hard at their expenses and this can provide valuable insight in strengthening the business long after a recession recedes. Some cut backs may become obvious such as eliminating frivolous office expenses and are a wise move but should business owners cut back on their web marketing? Lets look at the circumstances within web marketing where cutbacks may or may not make sense.
There are a number factors involved in having a successful PPC campaign. These include everything from keyword selection, bid manag