PPC Without Pity

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.

I’m blogging live from SXSW Interactive today. It’s been a crazy ride so far, and we’ve still got two days to go. The buzzword of the conference seems to be social media. I almost feel like the lone voice of paid search here. While I agree that social media advertising is a significant force, I think it has a long way to go to be viable. For example, there doesn’t seem to be any way to reliably measure cost per conversion. Until they figure that out, I don’t think social media will be replacing PPC any time soon.

I did get some insight from Steven Johnson’s talk on the future of news. Johnson seems to think that laid-off newspaper journalists will be able to pay their bills by starting hyperlocal blogs and earning money from online ad revenue. He theorizes that advertising dollars from now-defunct newspapers will migrate to the web. While I agree with him on this point, I have my doubts that ad revenue from a blog with such a limited audience could generate enough AdSense revenue to pay the bills. It might be a good idea to brush up on content network strategy just in case, though.

That’s it for now. More updates later if something piques my interest.

Welcome to yet another blog about search engine marketing. My name is Shawn Livengood, and I am a search engine marketing professional here in Austin, Texas. My specialty is in pay per click marketing, but I have been known to dabble in search engine optimization, banner ad campaigns, and the like. I am also a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, pursuing my master’s degree in information studies with a concentration in information architecture.

I started this blog to offer a fresh, expert perspective on pay per click marketing. While there is certainly no lack of good blogs on search engine marketing out there on the internet, I find that most of the focus is on search engine optimization. There’s certainly a lack of good information on PPC marketing (with the notable exception of blogs like PPC Hero), and I wanted to throw my hat in the ring and offer some useful information to folks just starting out with PPC, or people like me who have a lot of experience and want to tackle some of the more difficult issues in the field.

PPC is hard, people. I just want to get that point across right now. Unless you’re willing to put in some serious research time to go over your data (you are tracking your traffic data, right?), then it’s really easy to make some big mistakes that are going to cost you in the long run. Hopefully, I can offer some good advice to help keep you on track.

Stay tuned for updates every week!