Today I began to think about the phrase “a/b testing”.  I know that split testing is most commonly used by PPC managers as a selling point for their services.  But in reality you could be a/b testing landing pages, ads, and even duplicate keywords amongst several campaigns.  I wonder how often a client hears that from their managers. Read more »

I found myself at a loss of something to talk about this week but then inspiration came as a client called in to talk about his account.  He wanted to talk to us about re-working his campaigns to include areas in North Carolina.  His small business is expanding to that area and he wanted to use pay per click as one engine to drive customers to his site.

It seems to me that over the past several months a majority of our sales leads and new clients hail from one of the following areas: Virginia/DC/Baltimore, North Carolina & South Carolina, Florida, and California.  Although being Californians focusing on this region a bit more may skew the results a bit. Read more »

As Adwords managers we like to detail our value to clients as we tinker around in their accounts.  Often, we throw out the term “optimization” as a catch all to describe our at-the-moment efforts.  That’s probably the most honest description of what we are trying to do, but it is also very broad.  One of the more recent efforts that I have been undertaking that I describe as “optimization” to clients really just re-enforces best practices:

Adgroup “Silo-ing”:  Adwords Optimization By Way of Organization Read more »

The headline suggests that I have no idea what I am talking about.  Apple App ads and Twitter feed advertising have nothing to do with SEM. Right?

But where SEM companies have strived and where they have created a market for themselves, the internet has seemingly become more and more accommodating and willing to carve out an even larger niche.  Twitter found a way to monetize their cool concept it open the doors for SEM-like performance based consultation and management.  Apple allowing ads to support Apps will allow SEM companies to apply their knowledge of demographic targeting .

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Coming Soon

Having been recently laughed at by a fellow PPC manager when he found out the budgets we work with I decided I’d write down some of the things that the little voice in my head is telling me.

Small Budget Pay Per Click Management and Google

We have had to diligently “bug” Google to give us some of the support features it reserves for advertisers who spend $200 per day. As a company, Marty and I have fell into the ppc management for small business arena…by choice and by virtue of our model. We love dealing with the owners and getting to know their businesses as well as we can. This is something a bit more personal than a larger company that can do great keyword statistical research but may not have the ability to spend time on the phone with customers. But we have to remind Google that we still end up spending several tens of thousands of dollars each month with Adwords. If that was rolled into one or two clients we’d have the red carpet treatment, but since it’s parsed out amongst many clients, we’re considered small time.

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Algorithms. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft. They all have their own which are mostly hidden from the general public. Additionally, they are updated consistently to try and ward off those who would use them for spam, etc.

So what makes for successful Adwords Management? What would the client prefer? Is it someone who knows enough about html, programming, and network security to use tricks to gain an advantage? That’d work for some, but it could have repercussions on your overall account, and a legitimate business owner may become blacklisted by the search engines.

I’d submit that successful Adwords Management comes from someone that understands business and marketing in general. It is only because the internet can be so confusing that internet marketing is sometimes pursued by those that are more technically savvy with it than others that have an eye for business and markets. A business should last forever, and so should the marketing strategy. Read more »

In my experiences the pay per click model of advertising is effective, but you would not think so from the small sample of peers and acquaintances I have educated about adWords and other pay per click mechanisms.

The typical first thing from their mouths is, “I hardly ever click on those, I never know what those ads are for.”

There are a few crucial items of information that I gather from those statements:

1)They DO click those ads periodically

2)It proves that ad copy can influence a potential customer’s decision to click on a particular ad.

3)The various search engines have to a better job of educating their users about the difference between search results and sponsored links.

I’ll tackle each of those concepts individually in the hopes of shaping what PPC Management is ideally accomplishing.  Every effort should have an impact on the overall quality of the industry you work within.  For example, zoning codes are written in an effort to better shape a city’s fabric and overall quality of life.  So for those in the PPC industry, it’s important to treat the components of our efforts in the same way; to make the end user’s experience better and increase the quality of the overall concept of sponsored links and shopping online.

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Google Adwords just added a status in the Keywords tab called “Low share of voice”. This is in the same place where you would be told if your keyword was “below the minimum first page bid” or “low search volume”.   What exactly does this mean?

Currently, you can run a report in Adwords to find out some pretty valuable information.  Share of Impression a.k.a. Share of voice. What does that mean?  Let’s look at this example:

• Campaign is set to California only
• Keywords include dark red widget, red widget, and burgundy widget
• Today, there were 5,000 searches for any of those keywords or broad variations of those keywords.
• Your campaign had 1,000 impressions and 50 clicks.

Calculations:

• Click-through-rate = 50 clicks / 1,000 impressions = 5%
• Share of Impressions (Share of voice) = 1,000 impressions / 5,000 searches = 20%

OK…. why do we really want to know the share of voice?  Well, it’s the possible searches that you did not qualify for.  You may have been restricted by your budget, quality score (rank), or by exact match.  By this calculation we know that there were 4,000 possible customers that didn’t see our ad.

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I don’t want you guys to think I’m picking on GoDaddy.com, they do provide some great services. But if any of you has thought of a great business idea and gone to GoDaddy.com to buy your new URL, you’ve probably found yourself there about 5 hours later banging your head on your computer wondering how Blue14dogbowls.com is taken too!

There is a really cool tool that most of us should start our search at. It’s a little complicated but if you watch the tutorials, then you’ll quickly find that it’s not that complicated at all! The sites name is BustAName.com and I have no affiliation to the site other than I show many of my entrepreneur clients the site in order to ease their frustrating searches.

OK….. so here’s a quick over view: I have a buddy that is starting a permit expediting service so I’ll use that as an example. Here are the steps:

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