Revisiting Fundamentals for Effective PPC

Last Thursday we hosted an event at our office where I gave a presentation about the basics of PPC. I explained all of the moving parts that are involved and showed how constantly optimizing and tweaking all of those parts can improve the effectiveness of your PPC account.

As I was talking about the campaign level of a PPC account I realized I hadn’t been practicing what I preached. With so many moving parts, its easy to forget about a few of them.  So the next day, I dove into my accounts and evaluated two of the things that I hadn’t changed in a long time (or hadn’t changed at all in some cases): location targeting and ad scheduling.

Location targeting: Where you run your ads is almost as important as your keywords.

Whether or not you’re allowed to make changes to your location targeting, you might as well evaluate it. Open up Analytics and select the Paid Search advanced segment. Then check out the location section. Where are your clicks coming from? Do locations with high click density match up with the places that have high conversion density? If not, you might want to recommend cutting out the locations that aren’t converting the high number of clicks they get. Do you pause keywords that get a lot of clicks but no conversions? Might as well treat physical locations the same way.

Ad Scheduling: Don’t stay open late if there are no customers.

I recommend taking a two-part approach to determining when your ads should be running. First, look at analytics. Find out what time of day converts best, what days of the week convert best. Then, do some actual test searches for a handful of your keywords at different times of day. Who else is running ads at the same time? Are they advertisers you want to be competing with? Are they a direct competitor you didn’t know about? Use this information to rework the hours and days you’re running ads.

After you’ve made some changes to these two campaign settings, remember to keep track of the effects. Make an annotation in analytics so you know when you did everything and then check frequently to see if things are improved, steady or getting worse. Either way, keep evaluating and keep optimizing and your campaigns will only get better.

Make December Easier with Workflowy

I work for an interactive agency and one of the perks is getting the entire week between Christmas and New Year’s off. This is undoubtedly awesome but it makes for an interesting little window of time at the end of year. The weeks between the Thanksgiving break and the Christmas/New Year’s break are usually extremely busy. We’re trying to wrap up projects and create new work for the upcoming year at the same time. With all of this responsibility, its easy to just want to fast-forward through the month and wake up in the next year.

There’s an easy way to keep your head together though, and one thing I rely on not only in this time of the year but always, is Workflowy. Essentially, its nothing more than an outline. But its the most powerful outline you’ve ever used. Every bullet point can be focused on, allowing you to think both high level and low level in the same environment.

So on this busy Monday, I open up Workflowy and make a new bullet point for everything I can think of that needs to get done, whether it by the end of the day, the end of the month, the end of the year or 5 years from now. From there, I just keep adding bullets under each task for what has to be done to accomplish it. As time goes on, I can simply mark bullets as complete or delete them if they become irrelevant.

Here's a look at how I'm using Workflowy to plan an upcoming presentation. Simple, right?

If you need to get focused, you can zoom in on any bullet and make it look like a top-level item. This is great for when your list is getting long and overwhelming. If you get confused about where you are, Workflowy gives you breadcrumbs at the top to find your way back to where you started. The way to use it is up you, so dive in and give it a shot.

Workflowy is free and browser-based, so it works on your laptop, desktop, tablet or smartphone. Just go to Workflowy.com to get started.

Three Legendary PPC Questions

I love meeting with a potential client. There’s always this tension where we both kinda think the other is an idiot and we’re both trying to prove the other wrong. They usually have some questions prepared solely for the purpose of derailing me and exposing me as a fraud. Luckily my cover hasn’t been blown, yet. Here are a few that I get most often. Got any of your own favorites? Share them in the comments!

Nobody clicks on those ads, how effective can it be?

When I hear this the first thing I want to do is throw back some childish response question like, “Nobody listens to Nickelback either but somehow they sell millions of records.” And then I bite my tongue to give them a more useful answer. Google is worth an estimated $190 billion and almost everything that sports the Google logo is free. Their core product, Google Search, serves 3 billion search queries every day. Couple that will all the sites in their display network, all the youtube videos with ads, all the mobile advertising and you get some staggering numbers (this is not a math blog). Bottom line is, these ads get clicked. A LOT.

Furthermore, those of you who aren’t clicking should really give it a shot. Are you still afraid that an ad for soccer cleats is gonna send you to a site with 600 pop-ups and Britney Spears pictures? Again, Google is built on their advertising. They work every day to make sure the ads they run are what their users need. Next time, click an ad. You might be surprised at the results.

How many keywords should we be running?

If I knew the exact keywords that are going to bring you high qualified leads from every click, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing blog posts, that’s for sure. The number of keywords is completely irrelevant and always changing. There’s no magic number, there’s no magic range of numbers. In a given week I’ll add new keywords, pause old keywords, add negative keywords, change the match types of keywords and reorganize keywords into different ad groups and campaigns. Nothing is set in stone because it doesn’t have to be. Don’t worry about the quantity, focus on the quality.

Can’t we just buy more clicks if we increase the budget?

Short answer: yes. Long answer: Sometimes but its not always going to deliver the results you want. In my previous job, my boss was a very wealthy man who for some reason wanted to learn about Magic: The Gathering. One day we head down to the comic shop and he starts chatting up the guy behind the counter about what the best cards are, how expensive the best ones are, if he could dominate tournaments if he just bought the best cards, etc. The clerk explained to him that in theory, he could be the best Magic player ever if he could always have the best cards but its not necessarily going to work. If you don’t understand the game, someone who is better can beat him even though they may have less. This broke his giant heart, which is strange because he was a pro football player and I’m sure there were hundreds players on the field that beat him on plays even though they weren’t as big, strong or fast as he was.

With PPC its no different. The advertiser with the highest budget might be able to shoot to the top quickly but an advertiser who understands the system and creates campaigns that provide what the audience wants can be more successful in the end. It’s not always the size of the budget but the quality of your account that matters.

How Google’s Secure Search is Ruining Your Search Experience

In mid-October, Google began rolling out secure search to logged in users. This means every search performed while you’re logged in to your Google account is behind a secure connection. On the surface, this seems like a good idea. There’s nothing wrong with trying to convince your users that you care about their safety and privacy. However, this also means that data about the keywords used to find your site through organic search will no longer be provided. Instead of seeing a long list of diverse keywords in your Analytics tool, you’re now seeing all those terms lumped together and labeled as “(not provided).”

Matt Cutts went on record saying that it would only affect a “single digit percentage” of search traffic but the findings have so far been much higher than that. And with Google’s ultimate goal of getting everyone on the internet on Google+, that number is sure to increase. I’m of the belief that Google’s plan is about to backfire in a big way. What they’re not understanding is that they are merely a clear path to what their users really want. People don’t give a shit about Google. They care about the sites they visit from Google. Here are my three predictions about the future of Google search.

Content creators will not be able to effectively create appropriate content for their visitors

How does a blogger build an audience? By writing posts that are of interest to a group of people, right? Simply put, yes that’s correct. However, what’s a blogger to do when they don’t have an idea for a post but want to consistently provide content to their audience? One popular method is to consult the organic search terms that lead visitors to your blog. With this information, you can see which keywords bring the most visitors, which keywords keep the most visitors engaged, which keywords don’t have very many posts related to them and so on. If you know what your audience wants, you know what to write. By cutting out the keyword data from logged in users, you lose a large chunk of that information.

The long tail will cease to exist

Long-tail searches are the majority of searches that occur. An estimated 54.5% of searches are greater than three words. Additionally, about 20% of all searches have never been completed before. The most difficult thing about SEO is trying to straddle the line between focusing on specific keywords and appealing to the ever-present long tail. Without data from all of these logged in users, the variety of search queries we have to review becomes smaller and smaller. It would be similar to trying to advertise for a ski resort to people in Texas without any information about where the most skiers live in the state. Sure you’re going to get some skiers to book a vacation but you’re probably going to waste a lot of money in advertising in the process.

SERPs will suffer

The biggest issue here is that those running ads on Adwords will still get the full keyword data they are used to for searches that lead to clicks on their ads. With access to this information, it will be more effective to run ads than it is to take a shot in the dark with organic rankings. The quality of paid ads will increase while that of organic search will decrease. It has been estimated that 65-70% of clicks on Google SERPs go to organic listings. If the quality of these starts to suffer and the clicks on paid ads don’t increase, users are going to start moving away from Google. And where the users go, so do the dollars.

These predictions are very dramatic, and perhaps a little anger-fueled but I think its something Google needs to understand. They’ve worked with us over the years to improve their product while at the same time increasing our sales and now it seems that they’re making moves that aren’t in the best interest of Google, SEOs or the businesses that thrive online.

Well, this is it…

This blog has been something I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time now. And truth be told, it took a lot for me to finally show some interest in it. Those of you that know me probably know that I’ve gone to more funerals in 2011 than any year before. When you sit quietly in a setting like that, listening to people talk about the person they lost or looking at pictures of someone you’ll never see again, its common to think about your own funeral. Not just how its going to be or who you think will be there but most importantly, when its going to be. That’s a dark thought to kick off this blog but its the thought that helped me understand that even as cliche as it is, we never know how much time we have left. I try to keep that in mind whenever I think about any of those things I’ve been “meaning to do.”