PPC Without Pity

If you’re reading this blog, then chances are you are a serious pay per click marketing professional, or you would like to be one someday. And that’s great! There are a lot of job opportunities out there for online marketing professionals, and it’s an exciting new field. However, the field is so new that there are not many opportunities in higher education to specialize in PPC marketing. You can’t exactly get a college degree in PPC…yet.

So how do you prove your PPC chops to potential employers? Right now, the gold standard is Google’s AdWords certification. Just about everyone who is running a PPC campaign is running it in Google, so if you’re going to learn how to do PPC, you had better know how to run a Google AdWords campaign effectively. The Google AdWords certification tests your knowledge of the platform, and best practices to ensure that your campaigns are profitable.

Preparation for the test is totally free, so there’s no reason not to study for it. You can access all of the lessons online at the Google AdWords Learning Center. Lessons are available in text or video format, and they cover just about everything you need to know about what’s going to be on the certification exam.

The exam itself is about 100 questions, and has a two-hour time limit. It is open-book (which means you should probably leave a tab open to the AdWords help center as you take the test), but you’re going to need some serious time management skills in order to finish before the clock runs out. In order to pass, you’ll need to score 85% or better. There is a $50 fee to take the test, but keep in mind you have to pay that every time you retake that if you fail. Use that as a motivator to get it right the first time around.

Passing the AdWords certification exam isn’t all you need to get certified – it’s only the beginning. In order to be registered as a qualified professional, you also need to manage $1000 or more in AdWords spend over a 90-day period. You can either do this with your own account, or link to an existing account through your own client center account. The trickiest part of getting certified is getting someone to trust you with their AdWords spend. If you pass the test beforehand and show that you know your stuff, you’re going to have a better chance of landing a client who will help you finish your certification requirements.

Here’s some advice from someone who has taken and passed the exam. First, keep in mind that the correct answer on the Google test may not necessarily be the best real-world answer. I know this may sound counterintuitive, but think of it this way: Google has a vested interest in training people to spend as much money as possible on AdWords. So, a lot of Google test answers go like this: “Q: How do I improve performance in my Google account? A: Spend more money on Google!” So, be extra careful on the strategy questions. Second, two hours is definitely not long enough to finish all of the questions. Study and memorize as much as you can before you start, because looking up the answers burns up precious time. Skip too many questions, and you won’t make it to 85%.

Once you pass the test and meet the ad spend management requirements, you’ll get a nifty icon to put on your website that tells the world that you passed the certification. As an added bonus, you’ll also get some AdWords promotional credits to give to your clients. But, most importantly, you will be recognized as an expert in the field. This will help you get work if you’re a freelancer, or help you land a job if you’re looking for a 9 to 5 gig. Good luck!

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.

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.