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Top 10 Insider PPC (Pay-per-click) Tools, Tactics & Strategies

By Andrew Goodman

My good friend Larry Chase has asked me to update you with some of the latest best practices in paid search advertising. Which gives me a thought: the "latest" isn't always the best, or the most important to you. (Remember New Coke? Taste tests showed it was "better," but the public still didn't buy it.) So in the ten tips that follow, some are "classics" and some are based on more recent evolutions in the field.

1. [Classic Tip] Your objectives – not a vendor – should drive your strategy.
The quirks of marketing platforms like the Yahoo Direct Traffic Center may cause you to put your campaign together in certain ways. For example, if it's difficult to edit ads or test ad effectiveness, you might give up on doing so. Or perhaps a third-party vendor tells you that frequent bid changes are a must. (That might be true in fast-moving retail, but less so in other businesses.) Don't focus on what a platform forces you to do, or shift your priorities to try to be perfect in one area based on a vendor's advice. You're the marketer. Get your message out to your target audience at the price you want to pay – period – even if that means researching a bit on how get around technological limitations.

2. [Classic Tip] If you can't measure results, don't turn on your campaign.
If your customers frequently call you on the phone, or frequently just browse your site without performing a significant action, that doesn't mean you're off the hook for measuring campaign effectiveness and coming up with metrics such as cost per acquisition, broken down by groups of keywords. You have options. You can track phone calls seamlessly back to parts of your campaigns (even individual keywords) if you use multiple 800 numbers or a service that routes extensions based on your campaign, for example. Or you can take a site that has only "browsing" potential and tweak it so people are at least occasionally reaching out to you - downloading a sample, reaching a certain significant internal page (even if it's only driving directions), etc. It's all about what the user does on your site, and what kind of tracking regimem you put in place. Install tracking code, and customize it correctly. You can and should come up with creative ways to measure cost per action in cases where this appears impossible on the surface. Beware of magic bullets – some of the measurement process is bound to involve legwork and collating different sets of data.

3. [New Tip] Google AdWords ranks your keywords based on Max CPC X QS.
What the heck does that mean? It used to be that ads with a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) got higher positioning on the page, although of course increasing your bid (Max CPC) would have a similar effect, as the two factors were multiplied together. Now, CTR has given way to "Quality Score", which includes CTR. Quality Score is a bit of a black box, but the essentials include the relevancy of your ad text and the track record of not only any given keyword, but likely your whole AdWords account. Taking steps to consistently improve performance will help your campaign perform better over time. The "power of incumbency" is at work here. If you've had a smooth running campaign for a long time, spending big bucks and generating high CTR's, you will find it easier going. So what can you do if you're trying to establish that history? Test and refine your ads, send users to appropriate landing pages, and don't choke the system with irrelevant keywords "just to see what sticks". If you really need to get high on the page, of course you can always bid higher, too.

4. [New Tip] Check out some new AdWords features.
Here are a couple of interesting ones... "Position Preferences" - located in the advanced options area under edit campaign settings – allows you to keep your ads turned off unless they match your position criteria. Let's say you never want your ad to rise as high as position 1, but never want it shown if it's going to be lower than 7. You can specify "only show my ads in positions 2 through 6". If you know your performance tends to be better in those positions, give it a whirl. A second new feature is "Content Bidding" - if you turn "content targeting" on (ads that show up on websites related to your keywords, not search results), you can bid less by enabling "content bidding" and entering lower bids for content inventory. Previously, this required a painful workaround.

5. [New Tip] MSN adCenter is worth a look.
MSN adCenter is finally getting out to the wider advertising community. Although you won't get as much traffic from MSN as from Google, the new features are worth the price of admission (free, ha!). Not only can you "boost" your bids on certain demographic categories (let's say, for women of a certain age if that's whom you're targeting), but you can "day-part" seamlessly. Best of all, you can research demographic breakdowns when doing keyword research. Want to know who is searching on the phrase "BMW coupe"? adCenter can give you a breakdown by age, sex, geography, etc. – within reason, given search frequency. The answers may surprise you! And not just because "Andrew Goodman" searched on that phrase eight times this morning when he was supposed to be writing this article and/or taking his old Acura to the dealership.

6. [Classic Tip] Appeal decisions that are obviously wrong, and do so politely.
Google and Yahoo both have a heavy human component when it comes to assessing ad copy. Sometimes, they goof. Google has some technology that checks out your ad right at the beginning for potential policy violations, spelling errors, etc. Sometimes, it goofs. So appeal politely where appropriate, either by entering info into the box provided, or by emailing your service rep, or calling customer service. The phone numbers aren't a secret.

7. [New Tip, Sort Of] Stay on top of how matching options work.
By keeping my ear to the ground, I hear Google staff sometimes release small bits of information at trade shows and such that differ significantly from official documentation or that simply offer additional information that isn't formally disclosed anywhere. One such recommendation is not to use all three phrase matching options in a single ad group. Many of us used to do that "just to see what happens". It appears that some Googlers are quietly saying: "Um, don’t do that". I think Google is implying that using all three will lead to confusing performance. Sometimes, I also believe they don't have the greatest faith that their ad serving technology works anywhere close to the way it's billed. In essence, ad serving can be confusing, and they're hinting strongly that the cleanest possible account structure will help you get more insight into which keywords are working.

I tend to use exact matches only in rare instances where there is a clear reason to do so. Keep in mind, also, that broad matching (using keywords with no quotation marks or brackets) continues to enable something called "expanded broad matching". If you sell very specific products, you may find that expansion into "related phrases" gives you a lot of unwanted clicks. To be safe, you can rely on phrase match instead. Another reason to keep simple ad groups with not too many keywords is related to Google guessing at the "meaning" of the ad group for the purposes of showing your ad on content targeting (if you have this enabled). 10-15 keywords is a nice amount for Google to discern a "meaning" based on their proprietary linguistic map that helps compare your ad group against content pages – determining how close one is to the other. Too few or too many keywords will make this mapping less effective, supposedly.

8. [New Tip] Second-guess your tracking.
There are significant discrepancies in the reporting of ROI tracking and Web analytics services, particularly between those offered for free by Google and third-party services. If you're not confident in what you're seeing, uninstall one and try another for awhile. Or try using two at once. In general, the methodologies for capturing the details of "user sessions" on your site vary widely, and so do the criteria for what counts as a clickthrough. Comparing data from two analytics tools might give you too much food for thought, but then again, it might help you gain a better understanding of the shortcomings of some tools and the imperfect nature of all the data you're gathering.

The last two tips actually come to me by way of Mona Elesseily, my colleague, Yahoo Search Marketing expert and author of the new Yahoo! Search Marketing Handbook.

9. [Classic Tip] Patience! For a number of reasons, Yahoo campaigns can be very disappointing at first.
Concrete reasons may include delays in getting your ad approved through the system to show on partner sites, and who knows, possibly some introductory "click fraud hazing" inflicted on new advertisers by their competitors. Even more concretely, Yahoo campaigns really must be refined carefully for appropriate bid levels and ad copy that converts. Keyword expansion efforts are a must (even more important than on Google AdWords) for several reasons outlined in Mona's handbook. Without taking all the right steps, you'll be tempted to just shut the campaign down. Stay the course.

10. [Classic Tip] Rewrite that ad copy.
It's tempting to let your Yahoo campaign be governed by a few generic ads. But the user seems particularly responsive to well-written, specific ad copy. Where you have hundreds of individual products in a retail environment, your only way to compete against the big buck advertisers may be to do what they are unwilling to do: write hundreds of enticing and clear descriptions that speak directly to your target audience, and of course, send them to targeted landing pages. It helps if you've already got a good idea of which style of landing page converts best (possibly having done tests using Google AdWords, which makes it easier to split-test ads and thus landing pages). Don't forget seasonal offers and specials! Have you tested which call to action, benefit or free shipping offer is the most effective? Do the extra work and reap the performance reward. This may take a couple of days. ;)

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