Paid Search looks at search advertising programs and how to most effectively use them. Columnists cover topics such as bid management, managing multiple campaigns, search ad copy tips and landing page quality issues and other subjects.

How To Manage & Measure Local PPC Accounts

Aug 6, 2012 at 11:24am ET by Brad Geddes

In my last column, I looked at some of the differences between small and large accounts as the best practices vary for each. In this column, we’re going to specifically focus on one of the most common small accounts: local accounts; and examine some of the best practices for this type of small account. A local account is where there is a limited geographic area being served. When you combine a limited geographic reach with a small budget, you often run into problems trying to balance spending the budget on highly relevant keywords while getting a high enough return for the budget so th [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEM | How To | How To: PPC | Paid Search

3 Tips To Manage Complex Paid Search Programs

Jul 30, 2012 at 12:31pm ET by Karima Hamamsy

When you are managing hundreds of ad groups, it’s easy to neglect certain details; however, the diamonds in the rough can often only be found through account deep-dives. Thus, I’m always looking for the next tip or tool that could speed up and make more efficient my management of large, complex AdWords accounts. Below I provide 3 proven tricks that make managing large, complex programs much easier: Bulk changes to local business listings AdWords labels Automated rules Examples and step-by-step implementation steps are given as well. Bulk Changes To Local Business Listings D [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: SEM | How To | How To: PPC | Paid Search

Head vs. Tail – How To Shift Your Priorities For Each Type Of Account

Jul 23, 2012 at 9:12am ET by Mike Nelson

"There aren’t enough hours in a day" is an old – but true – refrain about the nature of an SEM’s job. The list of things we could be doing in any given day to optimize accounts is a daunting one. Agreed? Fantastic. As long as we’re on the same page, and already slinging the clichés, this post will help you "work smarter, not harder" by helping you identify where your accounts lie on the head-tail spectrum – and how to use that knowledge to prioritize tasks like ad testing, keyword optimization, negative keywords, and more. First: Identify If Your Accounts Skew Towards ‘Head� [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | How To | How To: PPC | Intermediate | Paid Search

How Best Practices Differ In Small & Large Accounts

Jul 16, 2012 at 11:18am ET by Brad Geddes

There are a lot of great articles written about paid search and best practices. However, almost all these articles ignore one important aspect of paid search: account size. For instance, it is a best practice to bid at the keyword level, and every large account should be doing that on most of their keywords. However, that is an unrealistic expectation for a small account that does not generate enough keyword level data to set keyword bids. Small accounts must bid at the ad group level based upon combined stats of all the keywords within an ad group. In this article, we’re going to e [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

5 Tips To Fine Tune PPC Ad Copy

Jul 9, 2012 at 12:03pm ET by Mona Elesseily

Of all the communicating we humans do, it’s estimated that only 7% of our message is transmitted by the words we choose, while the rest of our meaning and intention comes from the tone, body language and other non-verbal cues we use. So what does this means for PPC advertisers, who communicate exclusively in short text-based messages? Simply put, the words we use in our advertisements must be as powerful as possible. If your messages lack appeal, you may find it difficult to get your ad to stand out amongst your competitors to drive high CTR's while maintaining good conversion rates. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

5 Ways To Fail Fast Using Paid Search

Jul 2, 2012 at 12:59pm ET by David Roth

Let’s face it. Nobody ever learned a valuable lesson from success. Sure, succeeding feels great, and we can often look back at success and credit a number of meaningful contributing factors. I love it, we all do. In fact, our society and culture celebrate success to such a ridiculously high degree that we forget that the real knowledge and wisdom come from failing, not from succeeding. The key to making failure work for you is to fail fast – as quickly as you can, in fact. I was reading an article recently that talked about the HP TouchPad. The what? Exactly. HP built and released th [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

The Current State Of PPC Keyword Match Types

Jun 25, 2012 at 4:15pm ET by Matt Van Wagner

I'll start with a big thank you! It’s been a busy few months with advertisers and Google forcefully exchanging opinions back and forth on topics such as ad rotation, features needed/wanted in AdWords, and changes to keyword match types. In my column on the Google ad rotation change last month, I expressed my strong concerns about the latest changes to ad rotation (as did many other paid search advertisers and bloggers) and was very pleased that Google’s VP of Product Management, Nick Fox, announced that Google had reconsidered their actions on ad rotation behavior. First, they ex [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | Microsoft: Bing Ads | Paid Search

3 Common Landing Page Flops To Avoid

Jun 18, 2012 at 11:31am ET by Mona Elesseily

In a previous article, I covered 3 Common PPC Ad Copy Flops. In this article, I’ll cover common landing page flops and discuss ways in which pages can be tweaked to improve conversions, overall marketing messages and various other factors. Some of my examples relate to common webpages but logic can obviously be applied to PPC landing pages. Landing Page Example #1 – Unclear Call To Action This is a very good example of a page with no clear focus. Because there are too many words on this page, it does not have a main focal point or direct you to take a particular action. Left to guess, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

Ad Testing: Are You Using The Wrong Success Metrics?

Jun 11, 2012 at 11:50am ET by Brad Geddes

Everyone knows you should test ads – that’s not debatable anymore. However, what is debatable is which of the ads you are testing is actually the best ad. I recently polled a large group of marketers and asked them of these ads, which one performed the best: Take a moment to decide which you think is the winner. Here were the responses: Just 7.3% thought there wasn’t enough data to determine a winner. Those are the ones who are correct. The Current Metrics Are Flawed When you consider all the stats needed to determine a winner; you need to work from these numbers: [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

comScore’s Search Planner: The Benefits Of Rich Panel Data

Jun 5, 2012 at 9:05am ET by Josh Dreller

Five years ago, I shifted my career from a pure search agency to a full-service, digital media firm in order to expand my knowledge from just SEM to the other disciplines of this industry. I was pleased to discover that many of the ingrained, good habits I developed while honing my search marketing skills translated very well to the execution and optimization of email marketing, display marketing, etc. For example…granularity. For most paid search marketers, it’s all about granularity. Evaluating performance solely at the campaign or ad group level is a big no-no in the paid search w [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

To: Google Founders, From: Advertisers, RE: AdWords Rotation & Other Flaws Need Fixing

May 29, 2012 at 1:21pm ET by Matt Van Wagner

Last week, my colleague and fellow columnist, Brad Geddes outlined 8 Features Advertisers Really Need from Google AdWords and I couldn’t agree more with the points he brought up. Back in December, I ran a wish list of my own, 7 Things On My Google AdWords Wishlist For Santa and many advertisers jumped in with their own wishlists. Actually, many of the items on my list weren’t so much features as they were requests for re-engineering of incompletely or illogically-implemented features, some so old and ingrained that many advertisers had forgotten about them until Microsoft implemented t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

8 Features Advertisers Really Need From Google AdWords

May 21, 2012 at 11:23am ET by Brad Geddes

Google AdWords has seen a flurry of releases recently. Some have been good (Display Campaign Optimizer) and others bad (rotate changes) for advertisers. Many of these features are items Google wants to see as they help increase their bottom line or make it very easy to advertise. However, these new features are not necessarily what advertisers really need to pull additional revenue from their campaigns. In today’s column, I’m going to talk about my wish list and why Google should be implementing these features instead of adding yet another ad extension. Cross Campaign ACE AdWords C [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

4 Alternatives You Need To Consider Beyond AdWords

May 14, 2012 at 10:13am ET by Mona Elesseily

While there’s no arguing with the fact that Google’s Adwords program is the dominant player in the PPC industry, it’s by no means the only option when it comes to paying for website traffic. In fact, the size of the Google Adwords program creates a number of challenges for "small-time" webmasters. The service’s immense popularity has resulted in extreme competition, driving up keyword bid prices and lowering ad placements for sites running on smaller budgets. If you’ve been struggling to gain traction on this highly competitive network, take a look at the following PPC alternat [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

3 Lessons Paid Search Can Learn From SEO

May 7, 2012 at 11:37am ET by Kelly Gillease

There’s no denying the synergy between SEO and paid search marketing, and paid search marketers would do well to take away a lesson or two from the world of organic search engine optimization to improve their campaigns. 1. Keywords! Keywords! Sherlock Holmes exclaimed, "Data! Data! …I can't make bricks without clay." And likewise, keywords are the backbone, heart and soul of all search engine marketing, paid or organic. There’s a whole mess of keywords work and reports done for organic search optimization that paid search marketers can and should utilize. On the most basic level, [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEM | How To | How To: SEM | Paid Search

How Device Specific SEM Can Lead To More Valuable Traffic

May 1, 2012 at 11:32am ET by George Michie

Segmentation is the key to success in most marketing activities. Simply recognizing that how traffic gets to the site tells us a great deal about its value should prompt analysts to dive into data. Doing so often reveals big opportunities in device segmentation. Golden Tablets I'm not talking about Joseph Smith's discovery, I'm talking about Apple's. The traffic from iPads is more valuable than traffic from desktops for many in the eCommerce sector. Our data suggests the traffic from tablets as a class to be worth ~15% more than traffic from desktops. Traffic from the Kindle Fire seems to [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

The Who, When & Why Of PPC Account Audits

Apr 23, 2012 at 11:38am ET by Brad Geddes

Auditing your PPC accounts on a regular basis is something every company should be doing. Performing an audit lets you step outside of your normal day-to-day activities within an account to reevaluate the big picture and see where large opportunities may lie. Normally, when you hear about a company doing a PPC audit, it’s a consultant or an agency auditing an advertiser or occasionally a consultant auditing an agency. However, even if you are in-house managing your account internally, an audit can give you insight that’s easy to miss because one of the points of an audit is to step a [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

5 Highly Effective Landing Page Tips

Apr 16, 2012 at 11:05am ET by Mona Elesseily

For many years, I’ve been on panels where I comment on PPC landing pages volunteered by the audience. Given the wild popularity of these sessions, it’s safe to say that marketers are still way behind in their landing page improvement efforts. Often, they just need a push to get started down the right path. Here, I’ll focus on several effective landing pages elements and provide examples. 1. Credibility Indicators On landing pages, try including credibility indicators such as testimonials, reviews, awards, social media information (i.e. Facebook likes, number of tweets, etc.) and s [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

Consider The Ends To Justify The Means In PPC

Apr 9, 2012 at 12:27pm ET by Ted Ives

"En toute chose il faut considérer la fin." (In everything one must consider the end) - Jean de La Fontaine, 1668 It seems that every initial conversation with a prospect, or a new client, seems to start out as follows: Me: "What are your business goals?" Client: "I want more {clicks, actions, conversions} at a lower cost". Well, of course, this barely even needs articulation, everyone wants those things. Actually, those "goals" are really a means to an end, not the end itself – marketing goals if you will, not business goals. These goals are universally focused on of course; t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

Simple Tips To Make Miracles Happen In Your PPC Campaigns

Apr 2, 2012 at 1:31pm ET by Matt Van Wagner

Last week, millions of Americans flocked to buy a Mega Millions lottery ticket or ten, each hoping for their own personal miracle. This strategy worked for all of three people. Yesterday, in their annual homage to the April 1st prankster’s holiday, Google announced the miracle of a new ad technology, the AdWords Click-to-Teleport Ad Extensions which enables searchers to transport themselves across time and space and "shortens the online-offline conversion funnel." They pretended this was an April Fool’s joke, but I know what Google is capable of, and so I’ve put a call into my rep [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

4 Pieces Of PPC Conventional Wisdom You Should Possibly Ignore

Mar 26, 2012 at 10:47am ET by Brad Geddes

Best practices are called such because in most cases they work. In the PPC world, they are a set of processes or layouts for which conventional wisdom has concluded they are the best method for creating or managing accounts and landing pages. Conventional wisdom is an idea that is widely accepted because it is usually true. Just because it is usually true does not mean its correct for you. You should question conventional wisdom to see if it holds true for your situation. In today’s article, I will examine some cases where conventional wisdom was inaccurate so you can start to j [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search

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