PPC Without Pity

Well, folks, I’m on vacation this week, so no new post. I can tell you’re all disappointed. In the meantime, you can while away the summer hours by catching up on PPC Without Pity’s greatest hits of 2010 (so far):

1. So You’re Thinking About AdWords Certification…
2. Three PPC Predictions For 2010
3. A Critical Review of Trada PPC Services
4. PPC Text Ads – Rotate Or Optimize?
5. Advertising Pharmacy Products In AdWords

This week, WordStream released a new set of keyword tools for SEO. This toolset is great for SEO marketers, but it’s handy to have for us PPC folks as well. I spoke with Larry Kim, founder and VP of Product Development for WordStream, about the new tools.

1. The new set of keyword tools looks great for SEO, but what can it do for PPC managers?

You can definitely use these tools for pay-per-click marketing if you’re on a budget. Effective PPC campaigns are built on strong keyword research and organization, and the advanced keyword discovery, keyword research, grouping, and analysis features in WordStream for SEO cover a lot of the groundwork you’ll need to do before you create your campaigns.

In addition, the new WordStream SEO for Firefox plug-in, a content creation tool, is great for landing page creation. Sometimes, writers do keyword research with the best of intentions but abandon that research when they’re actually writing copy. The plugin helps marketers follow through on their research to ensure that landing pages are targeted and keyword optimized. Ideally you want to ensure that the page you send your traffic to matches up closely with the user’s original search query – and by doing this you can significantly improve Quality Score and conversion rates.

That said, serious PPC marketers will probably want to check out the additional functionality that’s available in our PPC solution.

2. I see a mention of keyword analytics in your press release. Could you go into more detail on how that works?

We believe that the traffic volume estimates in traditional keyword tools should be treated as directionally indicative of search volume but not necessarily accurate or precise. The only way to know for sure if a keyword is valuable for you is to test it out on your site and in your search campaigns. The keyword analytics in WordStream for SEO are predicated on this idea that your search marketing efforts should be based on both estimated and real data. This is accomplished in one of two ways: You can either use the WordStream JavaScript tracker to capture ongoing keyword and traffic data for your site, or sync your account up with Google Analytics. Either way, your numbers are always up-to-date and accurate.

3. Where do you get your keyword data for in this new tool?

Relative frequency is our estimate of how often a particular keyword is searched on. A higher relative frequency means that the keyword is searched on more frequently, relative to other keywords in your list. We derive this data (both the keywords and the frequency estimates) by applying various statistical models on keyword data obtained through industry partnerships (described here).

Of course some of the best keyword data comes from your own Web analytics. And that’s why WordStream SEO for Firefox can be configured to work using your own saved, historical keyword research – so that the data is customized to your own website.

4. What are the advantages to using this new tool over some of the free keyword tool options out there (Google’s keyword tool, Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, etc.)?

This tool does everything that standard keyword research tools do (like traditional keyword discovery and competitive keyword research) but on top of that, we layer on the personalized keyword research, plus analytics, plus content authoring tools. Instead of only covering the first step of SEO (keyword research), we cover the whole process, from finding those keyword opportunities to acting on them to analyzing the results, and we make it easy to repeat the process continually. But it’s still a very affordable platform for budget-minded businesses ($49 a month is the entry price).

5. Thanks for your time! Anything else you’d like to add about the new WordStream offering?

I’ll add that it’s easy to get started. You can download and install the Firefox plugin here. This quick video shows how to use it.

Full disclosure: I’m not receiving compensation or free product from WordStream – I’ve just used their tools in the past and have been pretty impressed by them. They have plenty of free keyword tools on their site for budget-conscious PPC managers, and more robust paid options for those of us that need a more high-powered tool.

Like many of you, I’m an avid user of LinkedIn. This week, I got an email in my inbox promoting LinkedIn’s newest innovation – PPC ads targeted to users within their network. They even threw in a free $100 ad credit!

I probably won’t get around to using that credit, since I’m not managing any PPC accounts right now that would benefit from advertising on the LinkedIn PPC network. But, I think that this is a great opportunity for a lot of other PPC marketers out there. Pay per click advertising on the LinkedIn network has two major benefits.

The first advantage is that you are able to get super specific with your demographic targeting. Like all other social networks, LinkedIn has users that voluntarily submit detailed, accurate demographic information about themselves. They even have a significant incentive to do so. After all, if you don’t accurately portray which industry and experience level you’re at in your career, you may miss out on some potentially lucrative job offers or business opportunities.

Advantage number two is that LinkedIn is a very business-focused user group. Other social networks like Facebook and MySpace are full of users that are just there for fun and games. There’s not much purchase intent behind someone checking up on their friend’s birthday party photos from last week. LinkedIn is just the opposite. It’s users are all about the cold, hard cash. This means that if you have a relevant product, and you are able to get your demographic targeting right, chances are much better that you will get that PPC conversion from a LinkedIn ad than if you were to show the same ad on a less business-inclined social network.

I see LinkedIn’s offering as part of a larger trend of social networks getting in on the PPC game. And good for them. Social networks need to monetize their traffic somehow, and pay per click advertisers are always looking for more granular and more accurate demographic targeting – things that social networks are better at than anyone else. Even users get the benefit of only viewing ads that are relevant to their age group, professional aspirations, and interests. Everybody wins at this game.

Have any of you taken LinkedIn up on their offer of free ads? Seen any good results yet? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Howdy from Austin, Texas! No post this week, since I’ll be out at the South By Southwest Interactive conference all weekend. If you want to meet up and talk PPC, information architecture, or web marketing, send me a direct message on Twitter. My handle is @slivengood.

Well folks, it’s been one whole year since I embarked on this little PPC blog endeavor. I want to extend a special thank you to everyone in the search engine marketing community who has helped this blog grow throughout the past year. In case you’re just tuning in, here are the top PPC Without Pity posts for 2009, based on traffic numbers from Google Analytics:

1. Some Changes For Yahoo This Week

I must admit I’m a little surprised that my recap of Yahoo PPC changes got the most visits of any single blog post this year. I guess it goes to show that there’s still some love for Yahoo’s PPC offering, despite my snarky comments about it.

2. Free Automated PPC Bid Management (Thanks, Google!)

There was definitely some interest in this hot tip about creating automated bid management formulas using AdWords spreadsheet editing. I love it when geeks like us hack a new functionality to do something beyond what was intended.

3. How Do I Increase PPC Conversions?

Ah, the burning question that haunts all of us PPC marketers. A good read for PPC beginners, or seasoned pros that could use a refresher.

4. Viewing Visits From Mobile Devices In Google Analytics

2009 seemed like the year in which everyone started surfing the web from their smartphones. 2010 is poised to be an even bigger year for smartphone web use. To get ready, check out this post to see how you can segment your traffic tracking in Google Analytics to monitor the behavior of users who are visiting your site from smartphones and other mobile devices.

5. Using Negative Keywords Effectively

If you’re having trouble reining in your cost per conversion in your PPC campaigns, you should read this post to learn more about negative keywords. Negative keywords can help filter your PPC traffic, and eliminate visits from people who are unlikely to convert. Filtering out this traffic can reduce the amount of unqualified clicks on your ads, and save you a lot of money in the long run.

Well, that’s it for this year, folks. I’ll be back in 2010 with more PPC blog goodness. Happy new year, and here’s to a profitable and productive 2010 for all of you PPC marketers out there.

Instead of a post this week, I thought that I would share a presentation I gave at the University of Texas at Austin last week. It covers some PPC basics, and also goes over how the principles of information architecture may be used to improve online marketing performance.

You can download a PDF copy at this link: Information Architecture and Web Advertising.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license. You may freely distrubute the work, but please give credit to me as the author, and do not modify the document or use it for commercial use.

Friend of PPC Without Pity (and a damn good PPC blog in its own right) PPC Hero is giving away a ton of cool SEM prizes including search engine marketing books, subscriptions to some cool pay per click and SEO resources, and even a ultimate grand prize of a full SEO or PPC review from the Hanapin marketing team (the parent company that runs PPC Hero and their sister site SEO Boy).

Check out their contest page at http://www.contest.hanapinmarketing.com/. Good luck!

Hey folks. I’m out on vacation this week, so I’m giving PPC a rest for once. I’ll be picking up where I left off next Sunday.

I know I’m a little late to the game on Bing commentary, but it’s been an exciting last couple of weeks in the world of search engine marketing. Microsoft seems to be aiming pretty high with their hopes for Bing, and rightly so. With Google holding a near-monopoly on the PPC market and Yahoo failing to innovate quickly enough to present any serious competition against Google, Microsoft has a real opportunity to take market share away from its competitors in the PPC sphere and shoot for the #2 spot in search engine usage.

The only problem is with the users. Microsoft has a huge hill to climb in an era where the word “Google” is synonymous with searching the internet. So far, Microsoft has been wise in trying to differentiate Bing from other search engines, labeling it as a “decision” engine and offering better ways to sift through the volumes of information contained online. Initial reviews of the service have been good, and Bing even surpassed Yahoo temporarily as the #2 search engine of choice. The upcoming marketing and PR blitz Microsoft has planned for Bing will likely increase users as well. Fortunately, Microsoft has deep enough pockets to spend a fortune on advertising their new service – a tactic that Google and Yahoo have never really needed to do.

But what does this mean for PPC? Despite the sweeping change in the actual search engine, MSN’s ad platform hasn’t changed much aside from a few minor updates a few weeks ago. MSN has a decent system for advertisers (and it will get better once they take their desktop client out of beta!), and experienced advertisers can usually coax a good ROI out of an MSN AdCenter account. The problem is one of volume – the user’s just aren’t there. With Microsoft’s search offerings being used by only about 10% of total online searchers, you’re never going to get the results you will see out of Google. Bing could change that if it brings more users into the Microsoft fold. While I highly doubt that Bing is going to displace Google as the #1 search engine, it’s beginning to look like it has a shot at taking Yahoo out of #2. More users will result in more conversions for advertisers, which will result in more advertising and revenue for Microsoft. Time will tell if Microsoft’s Bing gamble will pay off, and I’m certainly interested to see if internet search patterns will change over the next few weeks.

This week, I’m putting PPC on hold to promote a little something I’ve been working on. This semester, I put together a social media and blogging guide for a local Austin nonprofit. Now that my project is over, I’m releasing it for free on the internet so that other nonprofits can benefit from the guidance.

This 36-page document outlines basic setup of social media and blogging accounts for non-profit organizations. I also detail best practices, and ways that you can involve your community in your online marketing efforts. To download the guide, follow this link:

Free Online Media Guide For Non-Profits

The document is licensed under Creative Commons, so feel free to share and use the guide freely. All I ask is that you give me author credit when it’s due. That’s it. No email-sign ups, no free offers. Just take it, use it, and enjoy it.