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Home > Best of Larry Chase's Top 10 Internet Marketing Tips
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, dont 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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