PPC Without Pity

Yahoo recently announced some new functionality in their PPC platform. One of the new features was improved ability to import Google AdWords campaigns into Yahoo Search Marketing format. Now, I like the ability to cross-post campaigns as much as the next PPC marketer, but announcements like this just make me feel like Yahoo is constantly admitting defeat in their PPC platform.

I should preface this by saying that you can also import AdWords campaigns into MSN AdCenter, although you do need to take a side trip into Microsoft Excel to get it done. At least you have to use another Microsoft product. Yahoo just seems to be rolling over and admitting that there are much better tools for creating PPC campaigns out there, and you should probably just use those instead of the Yahoo Search Marketing platform.

I assume that most of the people reading this blog have created a Yahoo PPC campaign before. And you would probably agree with me that making changes to a Yahoo account are pretty tedious and boring. Compared to the agility and ease of use of AdWords Editor (or for that matter, the AdCenter Desktop Beta), Yahoo is light years behind the competition in terms of useful tools for large-scale PPC accounts.

So instead of creating a tool of their own, Yahoo decided to take the easy route and just assume that you are using their competitors tools (which you probably are) and outsource their PPC tool creation to the other guys. I admit that Google has some pretty awesome tools for PPC, but I hardly think that’s an excuse for just rolling over and giving up, especially if you’re one of the web’s largest companies. I guess I can’t really blame Yahoo for phoning it in, though, since their PPC platform is probably on the outs, pending the upcoming Yahoo/Bing merger.

If you are still interested in importing AdWords accounts into Yahoo, you can find instructions here. In the future, I’d recommend having a Google AdWords export handy for all of your PPC campaigns, since it seems like it has become the gold standard for pay per click accounts. I doubt that any of the other providers will be taking away their AdWords import abilities any time soon.

This week, Google announced new mobile device targeting options for AdWords campaigns. Before, you could only target computing devices (laptops, desktops, etc.), mobile devices with full internet browsers, or both. Now, Google has opened it up for much more granular targeting. You can now choose to target specific mobile phone operating systems (iPhone/iPod, Android, or Palm webOS) and specific mobile carriers such as AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.

This is a huge step for mobile PPC. By allowing for this super-specific targeting, this opens up the ability for marketers to create highly effective mobile device PPC campaigns. If you sell iPhone cases, you can create a campaign that only reaches iPhone users. Maybe you run a PPC campaign for a mobile phone service provider. You can filter out users of your own mobile service, and target only people who use your competitors to convince them to switch over to your company. Also, since Google allows for specific targeting to US and Canadian mobile providers, you can ensure that your mobile campaigns only reach users from a specific country, filtering out business travelers who might have only hopped across the border for a meeting or conference. These targeting options open up a lot of possibility for creative marketing tactics, and increased return on investment for mobile PPC campaigns, since you can filter out unqualified traffic much more easily.

This is yet another indicator that Google is taking mobile PPC advertising very seriously. Both their purchase of AdMob last year, and continued improvements to mobile traffic tracking in Google Analytics were pretty clear indicators, but this is a huge step as well. Google clearly thinks that mobile advertising is about to take off in a big way. It might be time to think about your mobile PPC strategy, and start incorporating these new tools and options into your current PPC efforts.

If your company is large enough and popular enough, your company name and trademark may suddenly become valuable pay per click search terms not only for yourself, but for your competitors as well. In some cases, your competitors may find that by bidding on keywords related to your company they can reach out to customers who originally intended to purchase from you. Obviously, this is a situation most of us would like to avoid. Unfortunately, most PPC companies do not explicitly ban the use of trademarked terms in PPC keyword lists. And why should they? The more keywords they make available for bidding, the more money they make. If you are having an issue with competitor use of your branded terms, you will need to resolve the issue yourself.

If you see your competitors running pay per click ads with your branded terms, the first step you should take is to contact the advertiser directly. That way, you can ensure that your key terms are removed from all advertising campaigns instead of just one PPC account. Be firm, but polite. There is no need to threaten legal action, but you should be clear that if they do not comply to your request you will register a complaint with the PPC advertising services, and their account will be affected. If your request is acknowledged, you may be able to resolve the issue quickly and easily with no need for intervention by the search engines.

However, if the offending competitor chooses to not take down the ads that are in violation, you may need to lodge a trademark complaint with the search engines. While it is not against the rules to bid on a competitor’s trademarked keywords, there are some restrictions on using trademarked terms in text ads. Be aware of this before you lodge a complaint. You can’t stop a competitor from running ads when users search for your branded or trademarked terms, but you might be able to prevent those competitors from using the terms in their text ads.

If you see some text ads running with your branded terms (and reaching out to the advertiser directly doesn’t help), you may need to issue a trademark complaint. This is about as effective as lodging a complaint with any other major company (that is, it’s kind of a crapshoot), but it may be worth your time if you really think that it is negatively affecting your business.

To lodge a trademark complaint with Google, first read their trademark policy here. If you still think that the advertiser is violating Google’s terms, you can send them a complaint by filling out their Trademark Complaint Form. If your complaint is valid, then your brand terms will be added to Google’s blacklisted terms, and future ads containing the keywords will be rejected through Google’s automated editorial process.

For trademark complaints about Yahoo ads, read their editorial guidelines here. If you would like to report a violation, you can send an email to trademarkconcern-ysm@yahoo-inc.com. Be sure to include the following information in your email:

1. The search term(s) that caused the ad in question to appear.
2. The trademark on which your claim is based.
3. The registration number of the trademark you own (if it is registered at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office).
4. Evidence of consumer confusion arising from the offending ad.
5. A copy of any communication you have had with the offending advertiser about the matter.

If you have a complaint about an ad on Bing or another Microsoft network property, you can read their guidelines on intellectual property at this link. To lodge a complaint, you can fill out their trademark complaint form.

Keep in mind that all search engines explicitly state in their terms of service that they are not responsible for mediating trademark disputes. However, if you have a compelling case and the offending advertiser is clearly in the wrong, the search engines can be a great help in standing up for your intellectual property rights. Just be civil, communicate with the advertiser directly first, and use complaint forms as a last resort. As long as you remain respectful in your request, you’ll find that protecting your brand in the PPC marketplace is simple and effective.

Now that we’re firmly planted in 2010, I think it’s time for a few predictions for the coming year. And, since this blog is quite obviously concerned with pay per click marketing, I’m going to stick with what I know. Here are what I think the big three developments for PPC will be in 2010:

1. Yahoo and Bing will join forces, but still won’t match Google for PPC marketshare.

In July 2009, Yahoo and Microsoft announced a deal that would eliminate Yahoo search and replace it with Bing. Of course, as in all major business transactions, this deal has taken quite a while to materialize. Yahoo and Microsoft just finalized their deal in December 2009, and are anticipating a rollout of the new functionality in early 2010.

This is obviously big news for the PPC world. With Yahoo Search Marketing leaving the market space, that only leaves two major PPC providers – Google and Microsoft. With billion-dollar budgets at their disposal, this is sure to be a corporate slugfest for the ages.

However, I’m convinced that Google is still going to come out on top on this one. Let’s crunch some numbers. An August 2009 study by Search Engine Watch indicates that Google gets about 65% of total searches, Yahoo gets 15%, and MSN/Bing gets about 10%. Looking exclusively at PPC market share, a Rimm-Kaufmann group blog in March 2009 shows that Google dominates with 80% of PPC market share, while Yahoo gets about 15% and MSN/Bing lags with only about 5%. Even after Yahoo and Bing join forces, they will only get about 25% of web searches and 20% of the PPC money out there. I’m optimistic about Bing, since it has showed some great momentum since it’s launch, but I think we need to be realistic here. Google will dominate PPC spending for quite some time, since their company name is synonymous with web searching in a lot of web users’ minds. Microsoft is going to have to do a lot more than just take over Yahoo’s search market share if they want to put a dent in Google’s profits. This won’t happen any time soon, and certainly not in 2010.

2. Mobile PPC spending and use will continue to increase.

This is a pretty obvious one. More smartphones are being purchased with every passing year, and with that comes an increase in mobile internet use. Google made a big bet on the mobile ad market in late 2009 when they announced the acquisition of mobile ad provider AdMob. Google has also made significant improvements this year to mobile ad tracking in their Google Analytics platform. Yahoo offers a robust mobile advertising platform for display advertising, and Microsoft inked a deal to be the exclusive search and advertising provider for Verizon mobile phones. With the big three making such big pushes into the mobile advertising space, we’re sure to see some interesting developments in the coming year. The only question that remains is how will users of smartphones react to the encroachment of advertising on their mobile experience?

3. Social network PPC advertising rises, then falls flat.

Social networking has definitely been on everyone’s mind in 2009. With the explosive growth of Facebook and Twitter in the last year, advertisers have been wondering how to capitalize on the user bases of these extremely popular sites. To better monetize their products, both Facebook and MySpace have created advertising platforms to businesses who want to reach out to their users.

This is a really tempting proposition. Social networks have access to an unparalleled amount of demographic data that allows for hyper-specific targeting. On the surface, this seems like a great deal, and I think it’s going to attract a lot of advertising dollars in the coming year from businesses who don’t understand social media, and are looking for a shortcut to get presence on these sites. However, from my personal experience (and a few other folks I’ve talked to), social media ads tend to get really terrible results. You can already target MySpace, YouTube, and a few other social sites through Google’s content network, and let me tell you that the results aren’t pretty. You certainly get a lot of impressions due to the massive amounts of users, but you’ll also get a lot of errant clicks. What you probably won’t get, though, are conversions.

People go to social network sites to be social – they’re not there to buy things, fill out lead forms, or learn more about companies. This is the inherent flaw in any social network PPC campaign. Sure, you can pick up some good brand recognition through clever banner ads, but I wouldn’t expect anything good from text ads. The reach is good, the demographic targeting is good, but the user intent just isn’t there.

So here’s what I think will happen in 2010: businesses will get sucked in by the promises of awesome demographic targeting, and consultants telling them they need to get into “the social media thing.” Then, after a few months of mediocre results, they’ll realize that the ROI just isn’t there and they will pull the plug on their social network PPC campaigns. 2010 will be the year of boom and bust in the social media PPC space, unless Facebook and MySpace can figure out how to make ads more engaging to their user base, and more profitable for their advertisers.

There you have it – three PPC predictions for the coming year. We’ll see if I’m right this time next year. Got some predictions of your own? Let’s hear them in the comments.

All good search engine marketers know that pay per click advertising campaigns and search engine optimization efforts work well alone, but are really awesome when they’re integrated. PPC data can often be used for great keyword research, and analysis of SEO trends can help influence the structure of your PPC campaigns. Here’s a neat little trick I’ve found to streamline your linkbuilding research by using data from PPC content network campaigns.

First, you’ll need to run a simple content network campaign (if you haven’t already), and let it run for a little while to gather data. A couple of months should do. After you’ve driven a bit of traffic through content placements, run a content network placement report in Google, Yahoo, or MSN. You should get a big, long list of websites where your content ads showed up.

Your ads showed up on these sites because the search engines determined that they were relevant to your keywords and/or business objectives. Guess what? These are exactly the kind of sites you want backlinks from! You can sift through this list of sites and see which of them might be open to posting a link or doing a link exchange. Just let the search engines do the research for you – you’ve got enough to worry about with the tedious process of actually building the links.

One of the most vexing issues in pay per click marketing is the problem of user intent. Sure, you can pick a lot of great keywords, but what happens when someone types in an ambiguous search term, or one that has multiple meanings depending on the context? For example, someone who types “medical coding” into their search box could be looking for a medical coding job, a book on medical coding, or a medical coding training program. Under current search engine restrictions, it’s impossible for marketers to figure out exactly what each searcher is looking for without poring through volumes of analytical data.

This week, Google announced a new feature that just might have a shot at figuring out the user intent problem. It’s called AdWords Comparison Ads, and it’s currently only rolled out to a few select advertisers in the mortgage industry. Here’s how it works: someone types in a pretty generic term like “mortgage.” When AdWords ads are served up for the search query, Google shows some radio buttons next to the ads (in the example they provide, it’s a choice between “buy a home” and “refinance”). This allows users to clarify exactly what they want. If the user selects an option, they are taken to a new page that allows them to compare mortgage rates according to their selection.

It’s a pretty neat idea, and I’m interested to see how it turns out. I’m a bit wary of the fact that it relies on voluntary data, adding more work to a search query on the user side. I guess I’m just cynical enough to think that people will be too lazy to click an extra button on a Google search. If Google sees some success with this pilot program, they plan on rolling it out to other industries. Now that’s where it would really get interesting…

When managing a pay per click advertising account, it helps to have a lot of software tools to help you manage your account, discover new keywords, track success, and perform split-tests for you. There are a lot of people out there who would love to sell you an expensive software package to accomplish these tasks. But, in my experience, everything you need to do in a PPC account can be accomplished through free tools that are easily available online. Read on for my choices of the six best free PPC tools:

6. Google Insights For Search – This tool gives you access to the vast amount of data that Google has collected on keyword searches and internet traffic trends. Simply type in the search terms you want to learn more about, select the time frame and geographic area you want to analyze, and you can view trends and relative popularity of any search term that has enough search volume to matter. This is great for discovering how popular your PPC keywords could be, as well as getting a look at likely seasonal trends before they happen.

5. MSN AdCenter Desktop – MSN AdCenter usually has the lowest traffic of the big three PPC providers, but this will soon change once Yahoo’s web properties switch to Bing search. If you’re doing PPC on either Yahoo or Bing right now, you’d better learn MSN’s tools now before your traffic increases drastically. Fortunately, MSN has recently released a desktop editor for their MSN platform, although it is still in beta. If your account meets the right requirements, you could be eligible to download it – see the above link for the steps you need to take. This desktop editor can help you make mass changes to your MSN AdCenter account, like adding multiple keywords, creating text ads in bulk, or other mass campaign/ad group changes. It certainly makes managing an MSN account a lot faster, since you don’t have to wait for multiple pages to load and re-load like in the web interface.

4. SEO Book Keyword Tool – There are lots of good keyword tools out there on the web, most of which are provided by the search engines themselves. But who wants to go back and forth between multiple keyword tools to make a single keyword list? SEO Book has a really awesome aggregator that pulls keyword data from multiple keyword tools like Google, Yahoo, and WordTracker. It’s one-stop shopping for all your keyword research needs. This tool does require that you have an SEO Book account, but registration is free. You also get access to a lot of other SEO Book resources, so it’s a pretty good deal.

3. Google Website Optimizer – Have you heard about how awesome split-testing and multivariate testing are, but the thought of doing all those statistics makes your head spin? Well, you’re in luck. With Google’s Website Optimizer tool, all you need to do is create a few variant pages, cut and paste some javascript code snippets, and the tool does the rest. It even crunches the numbers at the end to tell you conclusively which of your variant pages performed the best. And, with it’s multivariate testing feature, you can choose a set of elements (buttons, images, blocks of text, etc.), and the tool will automatically mix them up in different combinations to see which is the most effective. Split testing your landing pages couldn’t be easier.

2. Google AdWords Editor – After managing accounts with AdWords Editor, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. In fact, I hardly ever use Google’s web interface to work with PPC accounts anymore. This desktop application lets you download your account info, make whatever changes you need, then upload the changes to the web interface. It’s easy to copy and paste any element, from campaigns down to keywords. You can even select multiple keywords and change bids by percentage or dollar amount. I could do a dozen posts about all the features that it has, so it’s probably better to just read Google’s own documentation about this product. And, of course, it’s 100% free. Probably one of the best bargains on this list, considering the wide range of functionality it has.

1. Google Analytics – If you’re going to run a PPC account effectively, you must have a reliable web analytics system in place. Period. You need to be able to keep track of your web traffic, monitor how your organic and paid site traffic is interacting, and look at what keywords people are using to find your site. Google Analytics does all of this for free, and is incredibly easy to implement – just cut and paste a javascript snippet on to every page of your site, and you’re done. What’s more, there are infinite filters and segmentation formulas to allow you to customize your data. You can even set up alerts to let you know when key metrics are rising or falling. With all of this functionality, you’d probably expect to pay a hefty monthly fee for the privilege. But, unlike a lot of similar web analytics packages, this one is 100% free.

Got any more great free PPC tools? Let’s hear about them in the comments.

There’s no question that pay-per-click advertising can do great things for local businesses. With smart, region-specific keywords and text ads and the ability to geotarget specific areas for ad distribution, local businesses can create a low-expense, high-result campaign by cherry-picking exactly the kinds of customers they want to target. Until recently, the only additional boost you got from putting in all of this hyper-local work was a simple extra line of ad text that displayed your city or state. But now Google has kicked it up a notch and added new functionality that allows local advertisers even more of an advantage. By linking your local business account to your AdWords account, you can activate location extensions in your ads. These extensions display your business address in your ads, giving you more ad real estate (for free) and showing your local customers exactly where to find you.

Before you take advantage of Google’s integration of local business listings into PPC accounts, you should create a local business listings account. Fortunately, this is pretty easy, and comes with the added benefit of giving you free listings on Google Maps. Every local business should do this, if only for the SEO benefit that it provides. It’s simple to start an account – just go to http://www.google.com/local/add/, click on “Add A New Business,” and follow the instructions. If you have multiple locations, you can even upload a data file to save you some repetitive data entry work.

Once you have a local business listing account, you’ll be ready to link it to your AdWords account and activate location extensions in your ads. Just follow these steps to get going:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. Go to the campaign you want to edit.
3. Click on the “Settings” tab.
4. Under “Audience > Locations” you’ll see an option to “Show relevant addresses with your ads.” Select this, and you’ll be prompted to enter your local business center account name and password or manually enter an address. Linking the campaign to your local business center account will save you a lot of work in the long run, but if you’re only going to use this for a few ads you can just manually enter the addresses.
5. Click save, and you’re done!

Google has even added functionality to their reporting so that you can view statistics on your location extensions. When you run an ad group report, look for these options under “Add or Remove Columns:”

Location Extensions Reporting Options

Now, you can not only provide location-specific information to your text ads, but you can also get statistics on how your users are interacting with this information. Neat!

So you’ve done your keyword research, and you think you have a pretty good, relevant set to run with. But you still have a few choices to make. For starters, what type of keyword match type should you use? Here’s a breakdown of all the PPC keyword match types, and the kinds of situations they are useful for:

• Broad Match: The default match type for the search engines, and for good reason: they generate a lot of clicks, which means a lot of money for the search engines. Having keywords set at broad match means that the search engines will make a rough approximation of what they think is relevant to your chosen keyword. And they will probably make a very liberal interpretation of what is relevant. I’ve pored through search query reports and seen broad match furniture keywords show ads under a search query for housewife porno. Do you really want your ads showing up for everything? Stay away from broad match if you’re on a tight budget and can’t afford any extra wasted clicks.
  
  Broad match does have it’s uses, though. If you’ve got a large enough budget and can afford to waste a little of it in the name of research, broad match can be a fantastic keyword research tool. Since it picks up everything, including those super-obscure long tail keywords that you probably wouldn’t think of targeting, you can run a set of broad match keywords for 30 days or so and then analyze your search query reports to see what you missed in your initial keyword set. Then, you can add those missed keywords in, change everything to a more specific match type, and run a more efficient campaign.




• Phrase Match: Phrase match is a good middle-of-the-road solution to the match type problem. Under phrase match, a user’s search query must match the keywords you specified (including word order), although your ads will also show if they add more keywords before or after the keyword(s) you specified. For example, if you were bidding on “pizza delivery,” your users would see your ads if they typed in “pizza delivery in austin,” but they wouldn’t see your ad if they typed in “delivery pizza” or “pizza fast delivery.”
  
  Phrase match is good because it filters out a lot of that weird, marginally-relevant traffic that broad match brings in, but it still allows you some leeway to overlook some terms that a user could type in. It’s a good idea to start out new campaigns with phrase match, and then switch later to either broad or exact match if you decide that you need more or less traffic to your site.




• Exact Match: If you’re having a lot of trouble with unqualified traffic, exact match is the way to go. Keywords set to exact match will show ads when the user types in a search query that matches your keyword, and nothing more. You’re going to block out a lot of traffic with this setup, but if you see a lot of junk traffic coming through in your search query reports, sometimes you need to take drastic measures to keep your cost down.




• Negative Matches If you see a few troublesome search queries in your reports, but don’t want to take a measure as drastic as setting everything to exact match, then some creative use of negative keywords may be in order. Negative keywords prevent ads from showing whenever a search query contains a keyword listed in your negatives. You can also set negative keyword match types for more precise targeting – negative match types have the same effect as the ones mentioned above.

Yahoo Search Marketing has some special match types, since they don’t use the broad/phrase/exact standard that Google and MSN adhere to. Here are the Yahoo match types:

• Standard: Standard match functions almost like the aforementioned exact match type, but allows for plurals. For example, if you were bidding on the keyword “lamp,” a user that typed in “lamps” would not see your ad under the exact match type, but would see it under the “standard” match type.




• Advanced: Advanced match type works like the broad match type. Your ads will show if a user misspells their search query or appends additional words before, after, or in between the keyword phrase you’re bidding on.

As with any pay per click marketing strategy, it’s important to test out different match types to see which one works best for each campaign. These instructions should give you a good starting point, but don’t forget to analyze those search query reports to make sure your keywords are driving the kind of quality traffic you need.

The Google Content Network is one of my favorite ways to eke out a few more conversions in a flagging PPC campaign. However, it takes a lot of hard work and careful pruning away of unqualified traffic to make it work. Before you venture in to the exciting world of content network campaign mangagement, you should read up on how to review a placement report of your Google Content Network campaign.

After a little analysis, you should be able to figure out where junk traffic is coming from in your individual campaigns. However, there are a few repeat offenders that always seem to offer poor performance whenever they are included in a content network campaign:

1. Gmail – Sure, we all love Gmail. But as a marketer, I’m extremely wary of its performance on the content network. It drives a ton of impressions, but offers few clicks and even fewer conversions. I’m also willing to bet that most of the clicks it drives are from accidental clicks anyway. Most people are probably going to be preoccupied with whatever issue is in their email, and won’t be likely to click away. It’s just too distracting. Think of it this way: when was the last time you clicked on an ad or bought a product while you were checking your Gmail?
2. MySpace – Oh, MySpace. How far you have fallen. All joking aside, MySpace is surely one of the top drivers of impressions on the Google content network thanks to their lucrative ad deal with Google. Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily translate into good results for marketers. Sure, MySpace has lots and lots of visitors, but they’re too preoccupied with being social or pimping their profile to really pay attention to ads. What’s worse is that MySpace’s demographics skew pretty young, around the late teens and early 20s. No offense to all you youngs out there, but teenagers sure love to click on ads and not spend any money. This means they’re spending your money (in the form of clicks) and not offering any return. Exclude this site on all content network campaigns, unless you happen to be marketing a product specifically for teens.
3. Error Pages/Parked Domains – This one covers a lot of ground, but fortunately Google makes it pretty easy to block them all in one fell swoop. On your campaign screen for your content network campaign, choose the “Networks” tab. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and expand the “Exclusions” option. Under the “Campaign level” section, click on “Add Exclusions” and select “Exclude category.” On the next menu, you’ll be able to select both Error Pages and Parked Domains for exclusion from ad distribution. The reason that you’ll want to exclude these pages is that people will be wanting to leave these pages as quickly as possible, since they have little content of value. Sometimes instead of hitting the back button, a user will click on a semi-relevant ad to get to a page they think might help them. This leads to few impressions of your ads (because the page sucks and no rational person would seek it out intentionally), but a high percentage of clicks (that usually don’t convert).

When starting your very own content network campaign, it’s a best practice to exclude at least these three sites. Once you gather more data and regularly exclude poor-performing sites, you can be on your way to content network cost-per-conversion bliss.