Paid Search Marketing Posts from the Internet Marketing Blog
PPC Ad Writing Tips from the Experts: An Interview with BoostCTR
BoostCTR is is a network of advertisers and expert pay-per-click ad writers. I asked BoostCTR's Jeff Sexton and Ryan Healy to share some of their knowledge about what goes into a great pay-per-click ad. Jeff is in charge of Optimization Management for Boost’s writer network, and Ryan is a lead writer and blogger for Boost.
First off, can you tell us a little bit about BoostCTR? Jeff Sexton: BoostCTR helps businesses improve their pay-per-click advertising ( PPC) by boosting the click-through rate (CTR) of their ads. We take clients’ best performing PPC ads, re-write them, and then split-test the original ad against our new challenger ad. And we repeat that process until we beat the client’s old ad by at least 5%, or we give them their money back. 5% is the guarantee, but ... > Read more
Fighting Cross-Campaign Ad Poaching with Negative Keyword Lists
A couple of weeks ago I told you that your first negative keyword lists should consist of your brand keywords. Doing so keeps your competitive (higher CPC), non-branded campaigns from poaching brand-related ad impressions. Typically we see negative keywords being used to stop ad impressions from completely irrelevant search queries (or search queries that bring no business value), but there is a case for using relevant keywords as negative keywords.
Using brand-related keywords in negative keyword lists is not the only example of using relevant keywords as negatives. Depending on your business, you may find, after analyzing your search query reports, that your campaigns are poaching ad impressions from each other. Because of this, I recommend that you create a negative keyword list for eac... > Read more
Acting on Good Advice: Using Symbols to Get an 89% Lift in Conversions
This is a guest post by Chad Summerhill, author of the blog PPC Prospector, provider of free PPC tools and PPC tutorials, and in-house AdWords Specialist at Moving Solutions, Inc. (UPack.com and MoveBuilder.com). How many PPC blog posts do you read in a week? How many do you actually take action on? I’m guilty of reading a lot and acting too little.
Much of the information published on optimizing your PPC campaigns is very interesting and insightful, but maybe not particularly actionable (or it can be difficult to take action easily). So when you see something that's actionable and easy to try, don’t just read and tweet! Actually try it! Slow down and ask yourself how you can leverage this new knowledge in your own campaigns. That’s what I did, just a few weeks ago when Tom Deme... > Read more
Optimization Means More than Just Refinement: Two Ways to Expand Your PPC Keyword List
In many cases, expanding your paid search marketing reach can have as great of an impact on results as refining your existing campaigns. As you look to expand your paid search campaigns, you want to focus on two core means of discovery: "Wider" - Going "wider" means identifying new keyword verticals that didn't previously exist within your campaigns.
This often comes in the form of new ad groups targeting wholly new keyword ideas that you hadn't previously introduced into your campaigns. "Deeper" - Going "deeper" in this context means mining your existing campaigns for new targeting opportunities. The best way to do this is by looking at the search query data generated by your existing campaigns. WordStream's latest product release offers some tool... > Read more
What's the Biggest Day of the Week for In-Text PPC?
Which day of the week do your contextual PPC ads get the most clicks? Infolinks recently released a study showing that in-text pay-per-click advertisements get more clicks on Tuesday than any other day of the week, followed by Wednesday and then Monday. Unsurprisingly, clicks were lowest on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, with a typical Sunday accounting for 45% fewer clicks than Tuesday.
This study was based on Infolinks' database of over 40,000 websites and analyzed data spanning all of 2010. According to the study: "Advertisers and publishers can utilize this click data for smarter investments and also higher payouts. By concentrating advertising efforts on Tuesday, Wednesday and even Monday, higher engagement can be accomplished and in turn higher revenue earned." ... > Read more
10 PPC New Year's Resolutions for 2011
1. I will use Broad Match Modifiers more This feature is something that we PPC’ers have been wanting/needing for a long time. It is a real step forward in giving us more control over how we spend our money on broad match. But with great power comes great responsibility. It’s up to us to use BMM to its fullest potential, which unfortunately means more disciplined work.
Some of you may remember the Broad Match Modifier tool I created earlier this year to help you get started. I wrote about how to use BMM here. 2. I will use geo-targeting more Geo-targeting has been around a long time, and like the new BMM it takes a disciplined approach to use it properly and effectively. Using geo-targeting gives us advertisers more control over how we spend our money, but it makes me tired just t... > Read more
PPC VLOOKUP: How to Use VLOOKUP for Paid-Per-Click Marketing
VLOOKUP is one of a number of handy Excel functions for PPC. For grizzled PPC campaign managers this function is likely very familiar, but as a former philosophy major who fulfilled his math requirement with a class in logic (taught by a philosophy professor) I think it's helpful for non-Excel ninjas who are new to PPC to understand: How the Excel VLOOKUP function works How it can be applied to pay-per-click management As a result in this article we’ll walk through some specific applications and resources offering more information on using the VLOOKUP function for PPC.
How to Do a VLOOKUP Before we dig into the applications of the VLOOKUP function for PPC I want to go over how to actually use the VLOOKUP function. Here are a couple of videos that should help you to learn th... > Read more
AdWords for Beginners - Explaining Pay-Per Click (PPC) to Clients & Novices
I have failed to effectively communicate "what PPC is" to people on numerous occasions. Some of that may be that I talk unnecessarily fast, but I think most of it was a result of my approach. My more recent efforts to explain to people what PPC is, how it works, and why it's important to their business have been more successful (from what I can tell and from what I've been told) and since this is an issue every PPC consultant is likely to face in some capacity or other, I thought it might be useful to talk about what has been (and hasn't been) effective for me in communicating to non-PPCers on the topic of paid search marketing.
Think About Your Objective I think that your objective should always be education. Whether you're selling PPC services, PPC software, or just tryin... > Read more
Advanced Search Query Mining Part 5: Acting on Your Insights
This is a guest post by Chad Summerhill, author of the blog PPC Prospector, provider of PPC tutorials, and in-house AdWords specialist at Moving Solutions, Inc. (UPack.com and MoveBuilder.com). This is the last post in my series on Advanced Search Query Mining. Here is a list of the previous posts in this series just in case you missed one.
Part 1: The Power of Search Queries Part 2: Getting the Right Data Part 3: Preparing Your Data for Analysis Part 4: Mining Your Data for Insights In my previous post on search query mining I showed you my technique for creating an ad-group-level negative candidates list and a keyword expansion list from your search queries. In this post I’m going to show you a method for acting on those insights. I will also include a link in... > Read more
Advanced Search Query Mining Part 4: Mining Your Data for Insights
This is a guest post by Chad Summerhill, author of the blog PPC Prospector, provider of PPC tutorials, and in-house AdWords specialist at Moving Solutions, Inc. (UPack.com and MoveBuilder.com). In the last post in this series, I showed you how to prepare your search query data for analysis. We had some specific questions that needed to be answered and that shaped how we transformed our data.
These questions included the following: What search queries have high impressions but no clicks? What search queries have resulted in a conversion? What search queries have a below-average CTR for the ad group? What search queries have an above-average cost/conversion? Do I have a problem with ad poaching and duplication? For the most part, these questions are focused aro... > Read more
