David Szetela has long been one of the PPC experts I most admire, not least of which for his informative presentations at SMX – typically on the Google Display Network (GDN), his specialty. He wrote a book for Wiley/Sybex’s online marketing An Hour A Day series, Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing An Hour A Day, along with his fellow Clix Marketing pro, Joseph Kerschbaum. I was fortunate enough to be given a review copy, and while I’m sadly quite late in writing this review, I figure better late than never!

First of all, since this blog is geared to an intermediate-to-advanced audience, I’ll answer the first question everybody asks themselves: yes, you’ll learn something new.

What are some examples of things that I didn’t know about before reading PPC An Hour A Day, having barely ever touched the GDN?

• How to write and design a banner ad
• Static vs animated banners
• Ad types and sizes – what are the most popular, for instance, and will get you the widest coverage on the GDN
• Demographic Bidding

One thing that I found surprising with PPC SEM An Hour A Day, since originally I recall this being contrary to AdWords guidelines, was being encouraged to use title case in copywriting. That Means Capitalizing Every Word In Your Ad, Like It’s An Article Title.

Since Szetela and Kerschbaum’s book is meant to be a comprehensive overview, there is a lot that won’t be new to anyone who’s run an AdWords campaign before, and naturally the more experienced one is, the more “know that, next” moments there’ll be. But I think that even intermediates and advanced people will find interesting material in the book.

For example, there’s a generous section covering various advanced reports within AdWords. Since optimizing is an essential step on the way to profitable campaigns, this can’t be overlooked. This includes insights into methodology that Clix Marketing obviously uses, such as various Excel functions that enable PPC managers to manipulate data and understand it more easily. Reviewing this sidebar I notice the words “Huge Tutorial” that I wrote in pencil when I read the book.

With regards to copywriting, people who’ve attended SMX conferences will likely have heard some of the David’s tips, but despite being a past attendee of his panels, I was surprised to discover that AdWords will allow you to use ALL CAPS, and with dynamic insertion yet. News to me!

People who use critical thinking ideas described in my advanced SEO book will find that some ideas described re: the GDN can also carry over to Facebook ads (or Plenty of Fish, for the affiliates reading this). For example, keeping banner sizes small – for the sake of load times – and therefore using only one or two movements.

In sum:

1) Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing An Hour A Day (try using Dynamic Insertion with that title…) is a comprehensive book, addressing everything from campaign set-up, to writing, bidding, landing page testing and design (a good section, but mostly stuff I knew), to advanced optimization and reporting.

2) The newer you are to the field, the more value you’ll get out of the book.

3) The material on interruption based advertising will probably be new to most people, since the majority of us are into search engine marketing, after all… because of search!

4) Kerschbaum and Szetela have ensured that they also cover modern developments in AdWords, such as demographic bidding, ad sitelinks and so forth.

5) Ignore the fact there’s an appendix about Facebook ads, because it’s useless.

You can buy it on Amazon.

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http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q1_google_earnings.html

“Google Network Revenues – Google’s partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.43 billion, or 28% of total revenues, in the first quarter of 2011. This represents a 19% increase from first quarter 2010 network revenues of $2.04 billion. ”


What’s interesting to note is that roughly 70% of that goes to AdSense Publishers. That’s based on Google’s statement regarding Traffic Acquisition Costs (TAC):

“The majority of TAC is related to amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners, which totaled $1.70 billion in the first quarter of 2011. TAC also includes amounts ultimately paid to certain distribution partners and others who direct traffic to our website, which totaled $337 million in the first quarter of 2011. ”

In a similar vein, average CPCs are up 8% year-over-year from Q1 2010 to Q1 2011. Yet another reason big PPC investors get fed up and eventually seek SEO services…

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
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• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Ever try creating lots of Facebook ads that you wanted to track using Google Analytics? If so, you probably know Google’s URL Builder, which generates URLs with tracking tags. (See post-script for an explanation if you’re not familiar.) It does this for a spectacular amount of URLs at a time! Exactly one URL at a time, to be precise.

Frustrated by Google’s URL Builder tool? Here’s how to build URLs with tracking tags in bulk.

Use SEO Book’s “Keyword Concatenator” tool, and instead of inputting lists of keywords, input your URL and variables.

If you’ve never used SEO Book’s concatenator tool before, let me explain how it works. You input 2+ or more lists of words. You then press generate. The tool takes each word in list 1 and combines it with each word in list 2, to generate list #3.

For example, suppose I have these two lists.

List 1: car, cars, auto, autos
List 2: used, new

The tool will generate list #3: car used, car new, cars used, cars new, auto used, auto new, autos used, autos new.

Obviously, it’s important to get the order of the lists right.

The trick is to just use some creative thinking – exactly the kind of lateral thinking I teach in my book on advanced organic search marketing – and replace the keyword lists with so-called “name-value” pairs. That is, your tracking variables.

(A name-value pair is just the technical name for variables listed in a name-of-the-variable=value-of-the-variable format. You’ve all seen this before in math class. Y=X+1 And you’ve seen it in meta description tags and image tags. < Meta name=”Description” content=”This is where you put your meta description to try and generate a high CTR.” > < img src=”url of your image.jpg” alt=”description of the image for blind users and Googlebot” / > )

Step 1: In word list #1, you input your URL(s) and the first tracking variable:

Ex.: http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=

(You can’t see it because of the underline on the link, but there’s an underscore between “utm” and “source.”)

Step 2: In word list #2, you input the values for the first variable. Note: Only use commas, not spaces, or the tool will add spaces into your results:

email,bing,blogs

Step 3: In word list #3, you input the second variable:

&utm_medium=

Note: You must include both the ampersand (“and” sign) and the equal sign. The ampersand connects what follows to the rest of the URL. The equal sign tells Google Analytics that the text before the equal sign was the variable name and what follows is the variable’s value.

In word list #4, you input the values for the second variable:

cpa,cpc

In word list #5, input the third variable:

&utm_campaign=

At this point, you run out of lists in the tool, but that’s no problem. Step 6 is to generate results and turn those results into a single list so you can iterate in the tool.

- Click “Generate.”

- Copy-paste the results into a text editor (Word, Notepad etc are fine).

- Use find and replace to add a comma after the third variable, on each of the URLs you generated. In my example, I’d find “&utm_campaign=” and replace it with “&utm_campaign=,”. This makes the URLs fit to be used as words in the keyword list generator again.

- Copy-paste the resulting URLs back into SEO Book’s concatenator, in the text-input field for word list #1.

In word list #2, input values for the third variable… you get the idea.

Finally, generate your new list and import to Word. Use “Find and Replace” to eliminate the spaces inserted by the tool between keywords. Recall that the tool was built for concatenating keyword lists, not URLs. So you’ll usually get results with spaces. Ex.: seoroi.com/blog/?&utm_source= facebook &utm_medium= cpc

Bonus tip: Though Google Analytics requires input for the source, medium and campaign variables, you don’t need to use separate lists for each. That’s only the case if you’re using multiple sources, each with multiple mediums, each with multiple campaigns.

More commonly, you’ll just be tagging URLs for one source (ex.: AdWords), and it’s all CPC or email. So you can just concatenate that using one list, saving time. Ex.: In list #2, write: ?utm_source=AdWords&utm_medium=cpc .

It sounds a lot more complicated than it is. In about 2-3 minutes, I bulk built 126 tagged URLs using this technique. Here’s just a handful for show:

http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=linkbait
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=google
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=bing
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=cpc
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=cpm
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=adwords
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=commercial intent
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=linkbait
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=google
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=bing
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=cpc
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=cpm
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=adwords
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=commercial intent

Post-Script: Google Analytics will track any marketing campaign you’d like. You just need to add tracking tags as above, and Google Analytics will use those tags to organize the collected data for you. For example, tagging a URL with “utm_term=keyword-goes-here” will allow you to see a report on the visitors who came on URLs tagged with that term – how many visitors you got, your bounce rate, conversion rate etc.

P.P.S. Some of you may recall I shared a similar idea for local keyword list generation.

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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The Problem With Facebook Ads

People buying Facebook ads have been getting progressively more sophisticated and large-scale. The problem with scaling is that the web interface is clunky and that the Bulk Uploader is only available for high rollers spending $1000/day + on Facebook ads.

A few years ago, the solution for automated ad creation was the “FB Ad Manager” . It wasn’t based on the Facebook Ads API but was rather a Firefox extension like SafeWallet (password manager for iphone, BB etc). FB Ad Manager was a great product for the time savings, and well worth the $200 it cost. But recently Facebook served the owner with a cease-and-desist letter , and now it has stopped working and I went off in search of a replacement.

After numerous fruitless searches on Google, I finally got to the Facebook Ads API (Facebook’s officially approved way of mass-creating ads) and found out that they have a list of approved developers.

Facebook Ad Creation and Campaign Management Software – for Small Business

The large majority are enterprise-only, tell-us-what-you-spend-and-we’ll-quote-you-a-license type companies. But thankfully, there are two companies in the group that have a price point accessible to SMBs.

• One is Dryleaf Social, which offers a free plan for creating up to 50 ads a day, and a Premium option ($99/mo) for creating up to 500 ads a day.

Dryleaf is like FB Ad Manager in that it provides mass ad creation functionality. I’m trying it out now.

You can create your own account by simply logging in with your Facebook account and authorizing the Facebook app.

• The other is Brighter Option’s Social Ad Manager, aka SAM. It’s free for a 7 day trial and then charges 3% of spend, with no setup fees or minimum spend. So the only cost is really just the percentage of spend.

SAM is a more full featured tool in that it also handles conversion tracking, reporting and optimization functionality. To be honest, the description looked pretty enticing and I’m looking forward to trying it out.

I’ve asked for an account as I couldn’t make an account myself via the site.

If you know any other such software, or have experience with either one, please leave a comment!

p.s. For those of you who are curious what my link is to Facebook ads, I’ve been doing local lead generation. It’s been rewarding so far. For instance, in two days we generated 9 leads for a $500 dental service. The first lead was from their agency’s landing page, and the remaining 8 leads were from the landing page edited per my conversion rate guidance.
(I’m happy I outperformed the baseline that much, but annoyed I had to edit their template rather than making my own landing page from scratch, which limited what I could do). Both landers saw a couple hundred visitors.

If you’re interested in Facebook lead gen or in CRO consulting, contact me or buy a consultation.

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Earlier in 2010 I had the good fortune to be offered a free review membership at PPCBlog.com in exchange for a review. With the necessary disclosure given, here’s my take on PPC Blog.

For those who don’t know, PPCBlog.com is a ppc coaching forum run by the good folks from SEOBook.com, namely Aaron Wall and his wife Giovanna.

They’re working with longtime PPC pro Geordie Carswell, who is the main admin and answers people’s questions . Geordie has a long history in PPC and it shows.

For instance, Geordie’s shared several different case studies of his own campaigning, including both the successful and unsuccesful. It’s fascinating seeing what works and how it’s done, since you can apply those lessons yourself to your own niche. And conversely, you learn what to avoid. I particularly enjoyed reading about the spectacularly profitable mobile PPC campaign Geordie ran for an affiliate offer.

Regarding questions, I’m happy to say that I had answers within a prompt delay from Geordie and/or others, usually within 1-2 days.

The other community members are also pretty respectful and savvy, which is another benefit. You don’t need to rely just on Geordie for learning, because you’re in a peer group of smart PPC marketers. Partly this is thanks to Aaron and Giovanna’s marketing, focusing on SMBs and ecommerce, rather than the affiliate market typical of other PPC-oriented forums.

For instance, I had the benefit of the community’s feedback on my initial site design for my advanced SEO book, which meant that I knew what content I needed to develop and what to do before launching. In my case, I was too anxious to start and they thankfully held me back by pointing out that at my price point, more info was needed.

Similarly, I got feedback that helped make my dad’s landing pages more credible for the PPC campaign I ran for his dental travel seminar site.

Regarding the learning modules and tools, I have to admit that I was personally less interested in those and hardly spent any time there. The reason is that I’m pretty well read on PPC even though I don’t do it much. So I didn’t want to have to wade through a bunch of stuff I knew to eventually find the premium nuggets. (Hence my preference for the case studies.)

Regarding tools, they’ve got a sweet local keyword list concatenator/generator that comes preloaded with US states and city names, which then expanded to Canada and elsewhere. I believe they also have a massive campaign builder if memory serves.

Some things I’d improve if I were PPC Blog:

- Organize the modules by degree of knowledge. Newb-Intermediate-Advanced. It wasn’t clear what was what initially.
- Offer a way to export select threads and/or the whole forum. Just like buying a book gives me a fixed amount of knowledge, being a member once should give me a permanent copy of the site’s content up until the last time I paid dues.

I asked Aaron about this and his view was that doing this would just facilitate the task of those content thieves who would take his material, publish it elsewhere and wrap the stolen content in ads (and then have a chargeback so it was free). If people want access to the forums again, “they can re-subscribe when they feel they need access again?,” in Aaron’s words. I see where he’s coming from, but I think you should get some record of the content even if it’s metered.

Magazine subscriptions leave you with the magazine after all…

- More guides and case studies around Facebook ads, and other social ads (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn) (Anyone else notice FB ads proliferating for FB ad guides, lately?)

Ongoing payment should be for ongoing learning, not for leasing access to a fixed block of knowledge. Personally, I was tempted to scrape the forum (true of other pay-to-play communities I’ve been a part of, too, like SEOmoz) to compensate but then didn’t for lack of time/patience.

For me, I’ll admit that I didn’t buy a membership when my free gift ended, but not because the quality lacks. I didn’t buy a copy because I hardly manage PPC on Google or Bing, so it’s got limited applicability.

For people who are running PPC campaigns on a regular ongoing basis, PPCBlog.com is definitely worth the money. You get coaching that would cost you an arm and a leg if it was one-on-one (instead of one-to-many as in a forum) and the case studies are fascinating. As time goes on, I’m sure the social advertising content will beef up, and the original tools will continue to grow and develop, as has been the case with SEO Book.

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I was browsing the analytics of one of the top financial sites around. Just about everyone in the financial blogosphere knows this site.

The online advertising rate card for this site lists impressive numbers. But when you look at the analytics, you might be surprised at what some of the traffic is coming to the site for.

Here are some keywords sending them traffic:

top interview questions
quick chicken leg quarter recipes
sugar sandwiches
how to answer questions at an interview
giving away items on craigslist

Of course, they do have other valuable keywords sending them traffic, such as people interested in mortgage topics.

The catch is that if you just buy based on their traffic numbers in aggregate, you’re buying mortgage traffic along with hungry chefs and job seekers. Probably not what you were looking for in a finance site ad buy.

I have some ideas on solutions, like requesting/paying for access to their analytics, or just buying ads within 1 category of their content, but I’m not sure how likely people are to give anyone that access. How would you guys go about solving this? (AdSense obviously is a solution, but it has other problems, and sites don’t always use Webmaster Welfare to monetize…)

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

What’s The Future of Adsense?

In the past month, I’ve noticed retargeting campaigns on a few quite random websites. Retargeting means targeting ads to people who already visited your site.

The remarkable implications for AdSense may forever change the AdSense publishing industry!

PPC company Webrageous has been following me all around the web because I read something they wrote about the content network.
A/B split testing company Unbounce has similarly shown me their ads as I watched streaming illegal video, err, porn, I mean, How I Met Your Mother.

What really made me notice how significant this could be was IfByPhone’s retargeting while I was on a camera review site.

If you’re in the digital camera adsense biz, or read about Darren’s Digital Photography School, you know that AdSense can be a good earner in that niche.

Speaking of which, I just saw this…

Digital Photography School with a retargeting campaign

When I was getting into internet marketing, I recall that people used to publish lists of AdSense niches with high CPCs.

(Ex.: “Mesothelioma,” a form of cancer that features tort lawyers advertising for class-action lawsuits.)

Now suppose retargeting via the Google content network (now renamed Google Display Network) becomes mainstream, or even default.

The results are wide-ranging.

For AdSense publishers, niche selection becomes virtually pointless.

If call-tracking ads show up when I’m looking for camcorders, and PPC management / split-testing when I watch How I Met Your Mother (instead of the more logical DVD sales/rental option) – what use is it to publish about camcorders?

Why not publish about something that requires less expertise and capital?

Political blogging may become profitable.

For AdSense advertisers, optimizing becomes more difficult.

- For ordinary content network campaigns, you can just look at an AdSense block and see who else shows up.

With retargeting, you can’t see who else is bidding for that ad space unless you happened to have visited their site before.

- Site exclusion tools may be less effective, because you’re targeting users and not sites/contexts.

- Category exclusion tools may be less effective for the same reason.

What results do you guys anticipate from this change? Will it last long term? Or will this be a temporary trend whose ROI won’t be shown to warrant wide adoption? Perhaps it will be adapted with impression caps?

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I recently took my own endorsement advice and bought access to Spyfu for a PPC campaign I’m managing, which is having CTR trouble on some keywords.

Besides my use for my own campaign, the Spyfu membership – especially Domain Ad History tool – was useful in critically appraising this post from Epiphany, which discusses how Lego are apparently not buying keywords they’re targeting for SEO, an apparently obvious mistake. (Dofollow link because theirs was an honest mistake; I don’t think they deliberately made a silly mistake to linkbait.)

As I explained in a comment on that post, the problem with their criticism is that it’s based on their own searches for these terms. That ignores:

• Ads being run at different times of day, aka dayparting, because some times convert better than others
• Ads being run seasonally, for the same reason
• Geographic targeting that may have excluded their area

And those are just the PPC factors at play. Inventory levels, competing marketing priorities for budget and other business issues can also limit what people do with their PPC, in a way us consultants can never know.

Fortunately, at least the PPC factors can be clarified if you’re a member of Spyfu. While Spyfu’s main audience is people who need to find competitors’ keywords, they’re also useful for appraising PPC sales leads etc.

In the Lego case, I looked up Lego.com in Spyfu’s Domain Ad History tool. That shows you all the keywords and ads used by a particular website.

Here’s what it looks like for Lego.com, after I filtered by keyword phrases that include the word ‘educational. Click to enlarge, click back to return here.

Quick explanations of Spyfu charts:

1) When you click a keyword in the left-hand column, it brings up the window towards the bottom that shows you the ads run on that keyword.

2) Clicking any of the coloured boxes in the chart will also bring up that window.

3) The default sorting option is best keywords. Anyone with a brand will have these brand terms show up first; retailers who distribute merchants’ products can use these for inspiration. You can also sort by keyword, but then you get alphabetically-sorted data, as above.

4) Note the different options to export the data

5) The longer they bid on a keyword (e.g. the longer and more unbroken the row of coloured boxes), the more likely that keyword is profitable. Here are some broken and unbroken lines to compare what great keywords (brand terms, in this case) look like vs non-brand terms.

The problem is that there’s a cutoff after 50 keywords, and it looks like you can’t see more! What can do you?

Spyfu’s tech support pointed me in the right direction, with three options:

[...]

You: Oh, i have to keep clicking next?

Steve: Yes

Steve: We don’t have a good way to export the history yet

Steve: So you can export everything from spreadsheet view

Steve: Or click through the ad history … if there is a specific keyword you are wondering about … you can search for that in term ad history

Steve: And then scroll down to this domain again

[...]

Steve: The issue is that the gantt chart is a flash control … and we couldn’t have it keep going further and further down the page. It would cut off in the flash. So we had to make pages

Steve: Once you click “next” once …

Steve: Then you can see in the url num=50 or something like that

Steve: You can change that manually to jump down a few pages

Steve: For example num=500 … but that is more of a hack then a support way of using the UI

You: Ooooh neat – that’s valuable

You: it’s pleasant dealing with support staff who are knowledgeable !

Steve: sure thing, thanks for using SpyFu

Steve: have a good day, let us know if you have more questions

Notice the little text link that reads “Next,” above the upper-right corner of the chart, now? That’s how you see more.

So voila – take my advice and check out Spyfu for some valuable insights into competitors’ keywords, ad copy etc.

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Because beating Yahoo and Bing into a necessary merger was just too easy, and because they’re sitting on [Dr Evil moment] MILLIONS (ok….. BILLIONS) of dollars, Google’s AdWords team decided to rest on their laurels and take a few years vacation.

Seen in a Google AdWords account I manage:

Gotta love bloopers .

This is part of my Friday photos and fun categories. Like it? Get my latest posts sent to your email or RSS reader.

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Guides

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/designing-for-mobile-web
http://mashable.com/2009/11/26/mobile-web-design/
http://abduzeedo.com/mobile-web-design
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20946338/Great-Mobile-Landing-Pages – A useful presentation for beginners. The authors created Movitas, which has the most affordable WYSIWYG mobile page creator I found. (Besides the free, uber-basic Movylo.)

Mobile Web Design Galleries
http://www.mobileawesomeness.com/mobile-web-resources/ – A blog and design gallery with useful resources linked
http://www.mobisitegalore.com/index.html – Another gallery

WYSIWYGs

https://movitas.com/Movitas/pricingComparison.aspx
http://www.tekora.com/en/ – Another mobile WYSIWYG
Very basic: http://www.movylo.com/
Really pricey: http://mobify.me/features/

Slice Shops Turn PSD and AI Graphics Into XHTML, WML etc

http://www.mobilizetoday.com/xhtml-conversion – Seemed to have pretty affordable pricing for slicing up graphics into mobile landers, but it wasn’t clear if they’d do WML either…
https://w3-markup.com/ – A site that will slice your graphics into a working lander, but they don’t do WML. Use them if your target is newer devices that can support 320px wide graphics etc.
http://www.zestadz.com/help/help_landing_page_tool – Unclear if you need to use Zestadz to get their tool, however.

If you liked this post on mobile tools and resources, add my rss feed to your reader!

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

It’s a fairly well know tip amongst AdSense users that you want to integrate your ads appearance as closely as possible with the content. You want to give users visual cues to help visitors skim over the advertising disclosure.

Additionally, if you place pictures next to the ads as if they are related – e.g. like the pictures are bullets in a list – you boost your CTR.

It looks like Facebook is testing both of those strategies with its recent addition of thumbnails-and-content above the right-hand side advertising.

If you liked this post on PPC ads and Facebook, add my rss feed to your reader for more! You might also like these 16 Tips and Guides For the Google Content Network.

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A: When you rank for coupon terms plus your brand. A guest post by yours truly at my friend Dean Chew’s site, Chewie.co.uk .

Some other recent guest posts of mine:

-Wordstream: ppc-workflow – My PPC workflow and mistakes I’ve made

-Wolf Howl: youre-all-wrong-paid-links-from-offtopic-sites-do-count/ So long as the page is relevant, you’re good!

If these posts are interesting to you, add my RSS feed to your reader already! Enough with the refresh button . Also, have a look at my advanced SEO book, featuring neat principles and tactics.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I’ve been reading up on the Content Network before launching a first campaign there in years. The following’s a list of posts I’ve found useful and the key takeaways. They may repeat and overlap in some ways. That repetition is summarized below. The links are accompanied by notes on what’s unique in that guide.

Google AdSense unit image courtesy of Frank O’Dwyer.

All these guides broadly suggest:

1) Don’t just copy search network campaigns to the content network

2) Your content network adgroups should be formed with modifers added to you base keyword/phrase. E.g. Air Jordan Basketball shoes | Nike basketball shoes | Nike high-top Basketball shoes

3) The ads have to shout, not speak politely. This is because people are in info-gathering mode, not search mode. You need to INTERRUPT!

4) Content quality score = CTR

5) Individual keywords don’t trigger ads, it’s the adgroup theme that determines where ads are syndicated.

6) The corrolary to #5 is that tracking happens at the adgroup level. If your campaign is small in keyword #s, you can have 1 keyword per group to see what keywords perform best.

7) Run placement reports regularly to see where ads showed up. Cut the low CTR and low conversion rate sites.

Use negatives liberally, but be careful not to misapply them in the wrong context. Should the negative be at an adgroup or campaign level?

http://www.pointit.com/blog/10-ways-with-google-content-network/ – Several unique keyword research tips there, as well bidding advice. “Don’t be a wimp!” [regarding bids].

http://www.adhustler.com/google-content-network-strategy/ – His last point on pruning and reviewing sites from the placement report is juicy.

http://www.ppce.net/ppc-management-google-content-network.html – Clever point on bid management for content towards the end, regarding placement targeting (aka site match).

http://www.webrageous.com/ppc/contentnetwork – Section on multimedia ads and what niches they work for makes sense.

http://tommiepowers.com/the-importance-of-placement-targeting-research-for-your-adwords-content-network-campaigns/ – Couple of tool links, including a free one, w0000t!

http://sites.google.com/site/gcreativebrief/google-content-network/gcn-case-studies – Case studies I found around

This wouldn’t be a valuable bit on content network ads without linking to Dave Szetela’s articles, free book etc.

I also found this SEW article useful for having some nice tool links at the end, though I haven’t tested or compared vs the free one listed by Tommie.

Lastly, I’m currently trying out PPC Blog’s private community and getting some great, fast responses.

If you liked this post on PPC, add my rss feed to your reader for more!

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

(We’re continuing our SphinnCon deadblogging, this time with coverage of the web analytics panel. Previously we’d been discussing analytics with a internal search case study from Adi Reguev, and PPC with material from Naomi Sela on the content network, ad writing and split testing with Ophir Cohen and Dan Perach, and mixed link building / ppc notes from my panel/ Dan Sumeruck.)

Michal Neufeld – Google Analytics – Tying Adwords Into Analytics

Some pros of tying the two together:
- Understand the whole funnel, from search to site exit
- Instant and granular view of ROI on AdWords
o This enables optimizing to profitability
- Uniform goal language between the two systems.
[Seems like a feature to me and not a benefit, and I can’t remember why she brought this up. Honestly, I had trouble following because she went through her preso incredibly fast.]

Funnel:

Visitors, clicks, impressions, CTR, cost and ad position are all visible in one report.
Likewise for PPC (did she say CPC?) ROI and margin – they’re all available by integrating AdWords and GAnalytics, which enables optimization.
[Again, I don’t know what this has to do with a funnel. Sorry!]

Tip: Watch % of new visits from a given keyword.

This helps with decisions on when not to kill keywords with a longer latency or that are higher in the funnel. [This also helps Google draw more money out from you while you’re waiting for enough data to decide. ].

Another You can also use this information to adapt the call-to-action (CTA) to something that would evoke more response earlier in the buying process. E.g. ‘Download a free guide’ instead of ‘buy now.’

I wanted to ask, but didn’t get to in the end:
1) “What patterns or types of keywords they see showing these greater latencies?”
2) “What CTAs work early in the process?”

I imagine that head terms (eg ‘glasses,’ ‘cars,’ ‘movie’) show more latency, but I’d have really liked to hear about other patterns in the data as to what keywords show greater latency and what CTAs work better early. I get that you can call for action besides ‘buy now,’ but there’s a range of soft possibilities out there from free, unrestricted dowloads to trying out an online app to email squeeze pages etc.

Another tip Michal gave was that you can position your ads better when you integrate GA to AdWords, by seeing metrics like time on site, bounce rate and so forth by position. This data is available from the Position Performance Report.

I apologize to Michal for giving a half-assed account of what was a much more detailed, intelligent presentation. It was just very difficult following her at the pace she was going, especially with my pen and paper!

Daniel Waisberg – Easynet SEM – Behavioral Targeting & SEM

Tip 1: Use dynamic banners that will match the numerous keywords sending traffic to your homepage.

[I think he meant dynamic hero graphics/flash-animated featured-content areas, which are frequently dead center at the top of the active window.] Excellent tip imho, given the wide range of keywords typically sending traffic to a homepage.

Daniel next gave a few lists of tools, but he, like Michal, went too quickly for me to write it all down. Some paid tools he listed: Amadesa, SiteBrand, Test & Target (Omniture). Some free tools: BT Buckets and Google Analytics.

BT & GA can work together to create/adapt buckets. It hacks GA & gives you additional special reports.

What’s in it for me?

1) My notes ambiguously read: “Hard to find brain power + many pieces of code.” I’m not sure if that’s a reference to trying to build your own or a con that people should be aware of regarding installation.
2) Cross selling opportunity is offered by behavioral targeting, where you’d offer a firewall to an antivirus purchaser, for example.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Continuing my SphinnCon PPC coverage…

Naomi Sela – Compucall

She blitzed through the early part of her preso on the differences between CPC and CPM bids. One point I caught was that CPC was for ROI driven campaigns and CPM was for brand driven campaigns. [I find it sad that we still talk about advertising as an expense where we don't care if it makes sales - even brand campaigns should be generating an ROI, even if it's only an early stage lead.]

Optimization tips:

- Build and use predefined lists of sites per vertical. If you run an automotive campaign, keep the list of sites that were profitable for the next automotive campaign. Verticals are broadly defined here. EG Economics for adults and sports for kids or social.

- Exclude both sites and categories.

- Exclude demographics (eg credit card required, exclude 18- )

- Bid more for specific ages/genders

- Optimize banners – within the same sizes, use different creatives, rotate them. (True also of Facebook creatives – there’s a diminishing return as people get accustomed to a particular creative and ignore it more and more.)

- Target placements and keywords together to get very targeted and/or reach demographics.

- She targets English/Arabic/Russian (I love the chutzpah)

- Use the new option to exclude below the fold impressions, especially for CPM targeting. (Me: Probably also for CPC since these unseen impressions will lower your CTR.)

- Retargeting – soon to come to G’s content network

- 80% of web is reached by G’s content network, so this should be effective at retargeting.

- My idea: Retarget those who got to the cart but quit; and do the retargeting after optimizing the cart for conversion/usability

- Another similar idea: Fix message match between ads and landing pages and then retarget. So many campaigns are launched anxiously with basic mistakes like this one – get this fixed, then retarget!

If you liked this post on PPC, add my rss feed to your reader for more!

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• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This is the continuation of yesterday’s post featuring my deadblogging coverage of SphinnCon, the recent SMX-affiliated 1 day conference here in Jerusalem, Israel (where I’m currently living).

Ophir Cohen – Compucall Web Marketing

Ophir Cohen of Compucall and Gab Goldenberg hanging out after SphinnCon 2010.

Shares Perry Marshall’s formula for PPC ad copy:

Dynamic Keyword Insertion (aka DKI) for the title

2nd line: Benefit

3rd line: Feature [I wonder where/if there's a call to action somewhere?]

Display: Brand or subdomain or folder.

Ophir: DKI bypasses Tm filters.

- To give greater % of impressions to one ad (eg a new split test to try and improve on a previous winner, without losing 50% of impressions to the expected loser), just make multiple copies of one ad.

- Use capitalization in the URL as a best practice.

- Price, numbers and signs boost CTR… and conversion rate!

- Free shipping / good offers boost CTR.

Dan Perach – PPC Proz PPC Management

Dan Perach, Gab Goldenberg and Olivier Amar sharing a drink after SphinnCon.

 Learned from Ophir at Compucall. Kudos! [Classy start!]

 A/B testing is something to do consciously. Not just because it’s a best practice. Dan spends 1 hour optimizing ads in just 2-3 ad groups

 “It’s not enough to come up with a new ad [at random] and start running it, because 50% of your impressions are then running a loser.” In other words, don’t just test a new ad/lander for the sake of varying – come up with a hypothesis as to what ad/landing page combination will outperform your current winner. [This goes back to what Ophir was saying about writing ad copy highlighting benefits, features, prices, offers etc.]

 For a new split test, Dan will pause the current winning ad.

 He clones the existing winner twice, and edits 1 of the new duplicates. This is to avoid the existing winner’s quality score and history affecting the test (presumably getting better position/cheaper).

 Later in the preso, Dan also pointed out that for a true split test, you need both ads to have been running for the same amount of time. [And presumably during the same time period to adjust for day-parting, weekday vs weekend, and seasonal differences.]

 A setting Dan likes to use in contrast to many others is to set AdWords to optimize to find CTR winners.

 To the same effect, Dan user a tool called WinnerAlert.com, which syncs to AdWords and then sends you an email when there’s a statistically valid winner between your ads. [I think winners in this context still means winning on CTR, not conversion rate.]

 Ad approval takes 2-3 days [I think he means 2-3 ordinary days, not business days as defined by Western schedules – Monday to Friday.] In B2B segments, start on a Thursday or Friday so you only lose 1 business day. [I think the Thursday  reference is perhaps to Israeli B2B companies since the Israeli business week is Sunday – Thursday.]

 For local analysis of different ads, Dan uses Google Global Local (I think that’s Dave Davis’ Firefox extension he’s referring to, or else I just didn’t write that down properly).

 Another tool he uses for competitor analysis is Keyword Spy, which shows ads displaying most. Dan then analyzes the features and benefits most prevalent and aggregates the data. This is better than spot-checking (eg manual checking ‘on the spot’), according to Dan, because spot-checking is [more] limited by day parting and other methods of ad targeting.

 For composing new ads, Dan follows a simple formula.

Figure out a unique feature or benefit, and add that to a call to action. He creates a variety of these in excel, uses excel’s tools to mix-and-match, then copies to AdWords Editor to upload. He doesn’t find space for both a benefit and a feature.

If you enjoyed this post, come back tomorrow for coverage of SphinnCon’s content network advertising tips (those Ads by Google you see on so many sites) and more . Or more easily, just add my rss feed to your reader for more of this good stuff (that link also lets you subscribe by email).

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I didn’t live blog the sessions at SphinnCon, but I did take a good amount of notes. Here’s what I’ve got from my own link building session and from the first PPC session.

Link Building

[In the context of my presentation on guest blogging for links...]

To encourage bloggers, make their tasks easy. Whether that’s writing, editing, reporting etc.

To motivate bloggers, let them know you’re going to promote the article they’re writing for you, and likewise to get guest post opportunities, let people know you’ll be promoting their site.

To make life easy for editors, send full previews.

(I was joined on this panel by Ari Ozick from Wired Rhino, a B2B / ecommerce SEO shop, and Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO backlink intelligence.)

PPC

Ariel Sumeruck – Clicks 2 Customers

Some interesting arguments for businesses to get into PPC:

• On-demand scalability – This feature gives you the benefit of adjusting to your inventory management needs in close to real time. For example, if you need to sell off your remaining stock from a previous season to make space for the next season’s inventory, you can increase the PPC spend to buy more traffic. [Or you could buy conversion optimization with the same money and get a permanent ongoing benefit.]
• Easy to measure and attribute. The downside, says Ariel, is that most people set up their tracking incorrectly so the measurement isn’t accurate. Also, rules changes between systems. For example, Google Analytics attributes [conversions?] to the time of the click, while Omniture [SiteCatalyst?] attributes to the time of the event.

Tips on PPC:

• When starting out – Think of each keyword as its own marketing channel. To keep things manageable, you want to start out small.
• [I'll second this based on my personal experience trying to launch a huge affiliate campaign. I never got the campaign started because I discouraged myself due to the immense amount of landing pages I needed to maintain message match and I couldn't set up the headline to auto-match my keywords. ]
• Once you hit the point of diminishing marginal returns (where each additional dollar invested brings you decreasing dollars in profit) on expanding a campaign within a particular engine, look at  moving the campaign to other search engines.
• Change the campaign slowly. This will enable you to understand differences in performance that result and attribute them to particular changes.
• [I just realized that this is why people recommend split-testing before multi-variate testing. With a split, you're trying to learn exactly why/what works for application of the principle(s) elsewhere. But at some point there's only so much you can learn, yet there's more room to optimize, so throw loads of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.]

Come back tomorrow for Ophir Cohen and Dan Perach’s early-afternoon presentations on PPC at SphinnCon.

If you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader for more tips on improving your search marketing.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.