PPC Without Pity

This just in from the “I thought they had this already” department: Microsoft announces full HTML mobile device targeting for their AdCenter PPC marketing platform. Sure, Microsoft AdCenter has been in the mobile ad game for a while now, but did it really take them this long to work it out so that you can specifically target smartphone devices with full web browsers like the iPhone, Google’s Nexus One, or any number of other Palm and Android phones? Actually, they did have this capability previously, but you had to individually target each type of mobile device. At least now you can target to the general category of mobile devices, which should save you a lot of time.

Regardless of my snarky commentary, this is great news for any advertiser trying to make mobile-targeted PPC campaigns in 2010. Clearly, Google and MSN are betting big on mobile PPC marketing in 2010. Yahoo, not so much. I’m not aware of any ways to target mobile devices in Yahoo (feel free to prove me wrong in the comments!), but we’ve seen a lot of developments lately from Google and Microsoft. I’m still not totally convinced that users are going to be on board with mobile PPC just yet. I don’t think that people are ready to be advertised to on their mobile devices – it seems like a little too intimate of a medium to me. We’ll see if my cynicism is justified by the end of the year.

Either way, now would be a good time to make sure you have mobile-specific landing pages, and optimize a mobile version of your homepage for tiny smartphone screens. Whether you’re ready or not, people are going to start looking for information about your company on their mobile phones. It’s better to have a mobile version of your site ready to go and no one using it than having to scramble to make one once you see your mobile traffic take off in your web analytics program.

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.

In the world of pay per click marketing, we often focus on new customer acquisition. Much thought has been put into the buying cycle, and reaching customers who are in the research, comparison, and purchase phases. But there’s another type of customer that often gets overlooked in PPC campaigns – the returning customer.

Business research shows that acquiring a new customer can cost five to ten times more than retaining an existing one. This is especially true in pay per click, where we are constantly concerned with ROI and cost per conversion. Fortunately, return customer traffic can be really cheap if you know what you’re doing.

The best way to enable return customers is to run a “branding” campaign based on your company name and brand name keywords. There is some controversy in the PPC world regarding whether or not you should bid on your own brand name keywords. Some people think it’s a waste of money, since you’ll probably get organic results anyway. However, I think that it’s a good idea for a number of reasons. First, you may not be ranking well on your own brand search terms, especially if your company or web presence is relatively new. Adding company-related PPC keywords to your campaigns guarantees coverage. Second, having more results show up for your company on search engine results pages is never a bad thing. Even if you have multiple listings in both organic and paid search, you can dominate the SERP so that customers are certain that you’re the best option. Third, running a branding PPC campaign can help protect you if competitors are running a PPC campaign using those keywords. This is not explicitly banned by the search engines, but you can get them taken down if you register a complaint. However, running your own branding campaign offers insurance while you wait on the conflict to be resolved. And lastly, brand keywords tend to have really low bids due to the lack of competition. It’s the last niche to get ten, twenty, or thirty cent CPC keywords, so your actual traffic costs will probably be pretty minimal.

Having a strong PPC presence for your brand terms will help you bring back people who bought from you before, but might not remember your website. You’ve probably done this before – you don’t remember a URL, so you just search for a company name. Wouldn’t you want to make sure that those people are sure to find your website? Tailor your text ads with words like “official site” and other phrases that show searchers exactly where they need to go.

Finally, you can entice return customers with coupons and special offers. You can add in a coupon code to your text ads in your branding campaign, or bid on keywords like “{company name} coupons” or “{company name} promo code”. In this economic climate, everyone is looking for a deal. Plus, if customers have a special coupon code, they may feel obligated to use it. This could be especially effective if you add in a specific expiration deadline – it’s a great way to push sales in a flagging month.

Since CPC costs for brand name terms are so low, it couldn’t hurt to run a test campaign to see how it goes. I’m sure you’ll find that your cost per conversion is much lower than the rest of your campaigns and your conversion rates will be really good. And, most importantly, you’ll be showing your return customers that you know they are there, and that you value their business.

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.

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.

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”:

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

Earlier this month, Google released a beta version of new code snippet that enables asynchronous tracking in Google Analytics. So what exactly is this, you ask? Well, under the current setup of Google Analytics, code is read sequentially by the user’s browser. When a page loads, first the header is rendered, then the body, then all of the elements in the body, etc. Most people put their Google Analytics snippets just before the close body tag, so the analytics script is one of the last things executed by the browser. If a user is having issues with Javascript or slow load times, sometimes the code snippet won’t be executed and you won’t get accurate data. You could move the snippet higher in the code to solve the loss of tracking fidelity, but due to the sequential nature of browser rendering, there may be a page load delay as the browser tries to execute the Google Analytics Javascript before it executes the rest of the HTML code.

With this new asynchronous tracking snippet, the Javascript code is executed separately from the rest of your scripts and HTML content. This means that you can put your tracking snippet higher up in the page code and not experience a page load delay as the browser executes the code. Think of it this way: the old Google Analytics code was a one-lane road, where cars (or in this case, scripts) couldn’t pass each other. Asynchronous tracking opens up another lane, where your Google Analytics code can zip by the rest of your sluggish code without impacting site load times.

So what does this all mean for PPC? Well, the main benefit of this asynchronous tracking is an improvement in site load times. And site load time is a commonly overlooked factor in landing page optimization. Consider this paper by Ron Kohavi and Roger Longbotham. In a web experiment, they tested the effect of site load times on Amazon.com. They found that for every 100 millisecond increase in site load time, sales decreased by 1 percent. One hundred milliseconds! That’s only a tenth of a second. It’s barely perceptible, yet somehow has a drastic effect on the psychology of e-commerce. A poorly implemented analytics tracking snippet could probably hold up your site loading time by this amount.

Sure, the new asynchronous tracking snippet promises greater accuracy in Google Analytics (always a good thing), but I think it’s the improved site load time that’s going to make the real impact. Good PPC marketers should always pay attention to what their analytics programs are telling them. But maybe we should be paying attention to what our analytics snippets are doing to our pages, as well. Having a web page that loads slowly and awkwardly could be costing you sales and conversions, and you wouldn’t even know it.

Making effective PPC keyword bids is part art, and part science. It can be a daunting task deciding what your keyword bids should be, especially since there’s quite a bit of money on the line. If you bid too low, you risk your ads never showing on the first page results, and having only a mere trickle of traffic coming to your site. If you bid too high, you can get top keyword positions, but the expense could be so great that your return on ad spend can dip into the negatives.

In order to make an effective keyword bid, you need to start with a baseline figure of your target cost per acquisition (CPA). Figure out what the absolute maximum is that you can pay for a lead, sale, or conversion and still make a profit. Then, dip into historical data to know what kind of conversion rate you can expect to get on that particular keyword (for new keywords, you’ll just have to make your best guess). Finally, to determine the maximum amount you should bid, you need to multiply your target CPA times your expected conversion rate.

So here’s the formula:

Target CPA x Expected Conversion Rate = Max PPC bid

Here’s an example. Let’s say my target CPA for selling widgets is $50. Based on my historical PPC data, I can see that my conversion rate for widget keywords is around 5%. So I would multiply $50 times 5% to find that the maximum amount I should bid on widget keywords is $2.50.

Of course, just because you bid $2.50 on a PPC keyword doesn’t mean that you’re going to be paying exactly $2.50 for every click. That gives you a little wiggle room (and profit!) to work with.

In some cases, you may find that your max CPC bid isn’t enough to get you on the first page, either due to CPA restrictions, intensely competitive verticals, or poor quality scores. In this case, you should probably just let go of these keywords and pick some other ones that might be a little less competitive and a little more profitable for you. By using this handy PPC bid formula, you can make sure that your campaign expenses stay on track, and that you’re getting a good ROI for all of your active PPC keywords.