PPC Tools

Using Google’s Wonder Wheel For PPC Keyword Research

Posted in Keywords, PPC Tools, Search Engines on May 30th, 2010 by Shawn Livengood – 1 Comment

In the highly competitive world of PPC, sometimes it’s necessary to think outside of the box to keep ahead of other advertisers in your vertical. In this post, I’d like to introduce you to a secret weapon in the world of keyword research: the Google Wonder Wheel.

There’s no lack of good (and free) keyword tools out there. To get a basic list of keywords, you can try the Google External Keyword Tool, WordStream’s keyword tool, or Microsoft Advertising Intelligence. But, as reliable as these tools are, they do have an upper limit on the keyword suggestions you can get. Eventually, you’ll reach the point of diminishing returns and will only find keywords that you’re already bidding on, or ones that just are not relevant to your business.

This is when you’ll have to bring out the big guns. Here’s what you need to do:

First, go to www.google.com. Enter one of your most profitable or popular keywords into the search box and execute a Google search. In this example, we’ll use “web design training.”

On the left side navigation of the search results page, click on the “Wonder Wheel” link:

Wonder Wheel Link In Google Navigation

On the next page, you’ll find the infamous “Wonder Wheel”:

Google Wonder Wheel

Now, the fun begins. You’ll probably get some pretty good suggestions for relevant keywords off of the first wonder wheel, but you can dig even deeper by clicking on any individual keyword. This will spawn a brand new wonder wheel, with even more suggestions related to the keyword you clicked on. Even better, you have a dynamic list of top search results to the right of the wonder wheel to help you determine the user intent behind the query, and whether or not the suggested keyword is a good fit for your advertising campaigns.

This is a great method to both expand your current campaigns and ad groups, or come up with new ideas for areas you haven’t covered. There’s really no limit to how many new keywords you can discover with this – each new keyword you add creates potential for new suggestions. If you see some success after a few test runs, you should definitely add this method to your regular keyword research.

Manage AdWords From Your Mobile Phone!

Posted in Google AdWords, Mobile PPC, PPC Tools on May 2nd, 2010 by Shawn Livengood – Be the first to comment

Good news, everybody! This Friday, Google released their new mobile phone interface for AdWords to all users. Now, you can check up on your account, and make tedious account edits on a three-inch screen!

Okay, maybe I should dial back the sarcasm a little bit. Sure, this is a great tool if you really need to check up on your account on-the-go. But, I can’t imagine doing any serious PPC work on my iPhone. I’m spoiled as it is using two LCD monitors for even the most mundane of pay-per-click marketing tasks. Not to mention the fact that I’m usually flipping back and forth between multiple browser and Excel spreadsheet windows…

That being said, this should be a great feature for anyone who really needs to keep tabs on their account at all times. By allowing you to check up on your account quickly and easily, Google is making sure its advertisers don’t make any potentially dangerous snafus that end up costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Admit it – we’ve all had at least one of these in our PPC careers. It might be nice to have that little safeguard to assuage the paranoia.

I do find the interface a little unwieldy to make changes. But that is to be expected with the kind of spatial limitations Google is working with by creating a mobile site. Smartphones were never designed to do something as data-intensive as PPC. It’s nice to be able to change a bid or two on the fly, but I think I’d rather wait to get to a computer if I’m going to have to change text ads or multiple campaign settings.

The trick is to log in to your AdWords account on your computer beforehand and set up appropriate filters to cut down on the information overload. You probably don’t need to be checking in on all of your account on your phone, but maybe you have a new ad group or two that needs extra special attention. If you set up filters containing only these special groups ahead of time, you can select the filter on your smartphone to go straight to them. Scrolling through hundreds of keywords and ad groups looks like a total pain in this interface, so I’d recommend that you get on top of your filters right away if you think you’re going to be using the mobile site in the future.

I’d go into some more how-to’s on this site, but Google has already produced a pretty slick video that goes over the basics. Check it out:

A Critical Review of Trada PPC Services

Posted in PPC Tools on March 28th, 2010 by Shawn Livengood – 3 Comments

Earlier this month, a new startup called Trada launched a new kind of PPC management service. Essentially, they’re crowdsourcing PPC management, connecting advertisers with SEM management needs with PPC experts who are willing to work on the account for the agreed price. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not totally convinced that it’s workable. After doing some research on their service, here are a few issues I found:

1) PPC Experts Get Paid Only When They Meet Advertiser’s Expectations. Trada has a weird way of paying out their PPC experts. An advertiser either sets a specific click cost they want to target, or chooses a conversion cost they need to stay under. If you get clicks or conversions below this target, you get to keep the difference (minus Trada’s 25% cut, of course). There are a few problems with this. First off, clients don’t always have enough expertise in the PPC space to set a reasonable expectation of performance. Back when I worked at an agency, I remember rolling my eyes as a client told me they wanted 100 conversions a month at a dollar per conversion. All this on an account where the average CPC was upwards of $10. As a PPC manager, you need to set up a reasonable expectation for cost per click (based on average bids in a certain keyword niche) and cost per conversion (based on average CPC and expected conversion rate). Trada takes these factors out of the experts hands, and places the goal squarely in the hands of those who may not know what they’re doing. Secondly, letting the client set the price ignores the environmental and competitive factors that go into how much your click and conversion costs are. I’d be happy with a $5.00 CPC if it converted at 10% and had a good ROI, but maybe Joe Client will only accept an average CPC of $0.50, effectively crippling his account. Maybe you get lucky and get a client with PPC experience, but I’m wary that this kind of system may only be appealing to novice PPC users. And lastly, it doesn’t seem like PPC contractors would be able to break even on this model. Sure, you start getting paid after you get click costs a few cents under the client’s (probably low) expectation, but after Trada takes their 25%, you had better be getting thousands of clicks to justify the hours you spent fixing that click cost.

2) Trada Doesn’t Let PPC Contractors Alter Landing Pages. Seriously? Let me be clear on this: you cannot improve PPC account conversion rates without changing landing pages. Landing pages are critical to whether or not users convert – everything else is just driving traffic. Sure, you may be able to eliminate some bad traffic to lower overall CPA, or find new keyword niches to explore to add more total conversions, but you’re never going to see improvement in existing conversion rates unless you rigorously split-test landing pages. Keeping your PPC contractor off of your landing pages is just setting both the client and the contractor up for failure.

3) More Than One PPC Expert Can Work On A Single Account. I’m all for teamwork in PPC strategy, but I think this is a recipe for disaster. On Trada’s homepage, they boast that accounts have an average of 24 PPC experts working on them. Twenty-four! That’s like having twenty-four chefs in one kitchen to bake one muffin. It seems to me like this could set you up for a lot of miscommunication – experts of different skill levels undoing each other’s changes, making changes too often, not doing enough analysis for good results. Not to mention the fact that if you get five PPC experts to look at a single account, they’ll give you ten overall strategies to improve it. This isn’t like stuffing envelopes at home. You can’t do PPC in assembly-line fashion. I’d much rather have one really good PPC contractor working slowly through an account than 24 cheap freelancers making changes at all hours of the day.

Now, I should end this by saying that I don’t think Trada is all bad. They do a few things that I applaud, like requiring all registered PPC experts to have some sort of certification, whether it’s through AdWords, SEMPO, or through their own in-house certification process. And, I recognize that there’s a real need for qualified people to do a lot of the tedious grunt work that comes along with PPC campaigns. This can be very time consuming and expensive for businesses that don’t have a lot of time to devote to SEM, and Trada seems like a good way for these companies to get things done at a discount price. But, as in all things, you get what you pay for. Good PPC service is not cheap. There are no shortcuts, and no substitutes for experience and analytical ability. You can’t just throw a dozen people at a PPC problem and expect it to be resolved.

Would I use Trada for outsourcing my PPC management? Probably not. Instead, I would find a quality freelancer with a solid background in PPC through LinkedIn, eLance, or personal contacts. But, I should end this with a caveat that I have never used Trada’s service and don’t know anyone who has – I’m merely basing my conclusions on their own explanation of the service. I’d love to hear if anyone out there has any experience (good or bad) with Trada’s PPC management service – let’s hear about it in the comments.

New PPC Keyword Tools From WordStream

Posted in Keywords, PPC Tools on December 20th, 2009 by Shawn Livengood – Be the first to comment

To be an effective PPC marketer, it helps to have a lot of tools in your arsenal. Choosing good keywords takes a lot of background research, and it’s always great to have plenty of options for keyword tools. This week, WordStream released two new keyword tools to help PPC managers find new keywords and organize them into effective groupings.

The first tool is the WordStream Keyword Niche Finder. This tool allows you to generate a list of suggested keywords and niches to target after you enter a root keyword. Here’s an example using the root keyword “ppc marketing”:

Wordstream Keyword Niche Finder

The Keyword Niche finder not only shows you the relative popularity of related keywords (indicated by the blue bar graph), it sorts the keywords generated into related groups. In this case, we get some groups like “ppc marketing >> internet,” “ppc marketing >> search engine web,” and “ppc marketing >> online.” You can then use these niche groupings to build out campaigns and ad groups. This saves a lot of time in the campaign generation process. Using this tool, you automatically get like terms grouped together, and you can determine which keywords are going to be high traffic generators and which ones are more likely to be long-tail keywords.

The second tool WordStream released this week is the Keyword Grouper. With this tool, you can take an existing list of PPC keywords and automatically segment them into relevant groups. This is really handy if you just generated a huge list of keywords from another tool like WordTracker or the Google Keyword Tool. Just export a text file of the keywords you want, cut and paste them into the WordStream Keyword Grouper, and everything gets grouped instantly! This is a great organizational tool, and a must-have for anyone who deals with large amounts of keywords on a daily basis.

These two new tools join the ranks of the excellent Free Keyword Tool by WordStream. This older tool can get you some really helpful suggestions if you’re just starting out a new campaign and need some new keyword ideas. It works great in tandem with other keyword tools in your arsenal. For best results, use multiple keyword tools in your research to get the maximum amount of useful keywords for your efforts.

WordStream also offers a host of paid PPC and SEO management solutions if you’re looking for more robust management and research programs. Check them out at http://www.WordStream.com