Joe Whyte - Digital Marketer » Pay Per Click http://www.joe-whyte.com Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:21:54 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 en hourly 1 18 PPC secrets to help you improve your efforts and maximize your ROI http://www.joe-whyte.com/2007/03/05/18-ppc-secrets-to-help-you-improve-your-efforts-and-maximize-your-roi/ http://www.joe-whyte.com/2007/03/05/18-ppc-secrets-to-help-you-improve-your-efforts-and-maximize-your-roi/#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:23:18 +0000 joe.whyte http://www.joe-whyte.com/2007/03/05/18-ppc-secrets-to-help-you-improve-your-efforts-and-maximize-your-roi/ I cannot tell you how many companies and individual’s I have seen over-paying for keyword terms, getting no conversions, low ctr and bidding their way into ad depletion. When I find companies or individuals in this situation I am honestly not shocked. It’s not easy to know how to create a succesfful PPC campaign so that is why it is important to either do your research before jumping into a PPC campaign or hire someone with experience.

PPC can seem easy to the”do it yourselfer”, I mean all you have to do is just bid on words that you think are the most trafficed, right? WRONG!! This is where a lot of people get into trouble. If they have a bussiness about “home appliances” a common mistake is to go after search terms that are to broad like “home appliances”, “kitchen appliances” or “ovens”. Yes these terms get a lot of traffic BUT how good is the CTR, how much are you spending per click and what is your cost per sale if you even get sales off of this ad?

I am going to give you some secrets that many industry professionals already know but the majority of PPC campaigns do NOT use. Hopefully this advice will help start-up businesses, people who are new to PPC and maybe even more experienced PPC vets.

Are you ready for the secrets?

1) Focus on long tail keywords (they are less expensive, less trafficed but MUCH more targeted)
2) Build landing pages for these terms
3) Develop your ads with creativity – see what your competition is doing and capitalize on their weeknesses, be interesting and eye catching.
4) Vary your ad placement – Range from being #1 to #6 on given ads sometimes it might be worth it to show up sometimes for a keyword like “home appliances” but you do not need to spend an arm and a leg on it. Bid the lowest amount.
5) Do not get into bidding wars
6) Use negative words so your ad does not show up for unwanted phrases or words
7) Test, Test, Test and Test some more varying your keywords and bid prices. Usually a day is sufficient for testing. 8) Use tools like Keyword Compete – This program is one of the best services online for competitor analysis and implementation
9) Expand PAST Google Adwords – Google can comprise of over 50% of search traffic – What about the other 50? Do MSN ad center (low cost per click) and Yahoo!s new Search Marketing.
10) Go after commonly misspelled words and phrases using this ontology tool
11) If your business is specific to an area then GEO Target your search terms with geographical specifications
12) Advertise on Foriegn search engines like Google.es and Google.co.uk etc (make sure your ads read like a native tongue)
13) Manually research sites you can place your adwords on. Digg and slashdot are popular and highly traffic for the computer and internet industry. Find popular sites in YOUR industry as well.
14) Put PPC ads up for your competitors search terms and for their branding. (this is worth a shot and I have been able to do this and I have seen this being done…. Some engines do not allow this and from my experience it depends strongly on the company who is seeing ads placed for their own brand name who speak up. The sqeeky wheel gets the oil as they say)
15) evaluate your market and see what people are searching for using MSN Ad labs
16) Maximize your ROI by disecting your highest margin and optimizing your PPC around your highest margin of profit.
17) Track Google Trend, demographics and competitor keywords
18) Think outside of the box as much as possible – If you can find search terms that are highly traffic in a keyword or industry roughly related to yours you can pay little to nothing for a very high conversion.

I have been very successful using and implementing these secrets. If you are new to a company, new to PPC, or recently responsible for evaulating and improving a companies pay per click ad campaign then you are facing a big task. Without the right HOW TO guide you are most likely going to fail unless your company is selling “eternal salvation” you are going to need this guide.

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]]> http://www.joe-whyte.com/2007/03/05/18-ppc-secrets-to-help-you-improve-your-efforts-and-maximize-your-roi/feed/ 5 Google sneaking images next to ads part II http://www.joe-whyte.com/2006/12/24/google-sneaking-images-next-to-ads-part-ii/ http://www.joe-whyte.com/2006/12/24/google-sneaking-images-next-to-ads-part-ii/#comments Sun, 24 Dec 2006 09:40:47 +0000 joe.whyte http://www.joe-whyte.com/2006/12/24/google-sneaking-images-next-to-ads-part-ii/ I found a forum post from Josh (SitePoint Forum Leader). It was a very GOOD post in my opinion. He took great measures to digg deeper on Googles postion regarding placing its OWN images next to ads. See original Forum post here:

Josh’s  email to Google said and I quote -

Regarding your blog post “clarifying” the image placement next to ads here: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/12/…nt-policy.html

While it was certainly clearer, it wasn’t clear.

Statements like this are very ambiguous and confusing to publishers:

“You can definitely place Google ads on pages containing images — just make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors. For example, if you run a stock photography site with a catalog of thumbnail images, don’t line the ads up with the thumbnails in a way that could be misleading. Consider using a full border around your ads or changing your ad colors, for example.”

So wait, does that mean if you use ads with a full border or different background color you can have thumbnails? If you offset the thumbnails so they don’t line up exactly with the ads is that okay? Your examples certainly don’t answer those questions, either (one implies it’s a no-no to put images related to the products sold in the ads, the other implies that it is bad to make your ads look like content links–but what if your adsense blocks are the only things with thumbnails on your site, is it then permitted?)

Do you have any better answers? This policy clarification still seems to leave things VERY subjective and ambiguous.

Also, given the number of people who are doing this, and how effective it apparently is, why don’t you guys just offer thumbnail ads to ADVERTISERS. Then they pick the thumbnail on their ads and everyone is happy. I’m sure you’ve gotten that suggestion numerous times.

I mean, it looks like you guys already break your own rules: http://www.joe-whyte.com/2006/12/18/…xt-to-its-ads/

-Josh

I love his email. Way to go JOSH!! Here is what GOOGLE HAD TO SAY!!!

Hi Josh,

Thank you for your email.

I understand that you have questions about the example we’ve provided. We’re trying to convey that users who naturally have smaller images on their sites (for instance, the stock photography site we used as an example) should still feel free to place ads on their sites, as long as they don’t try to associate the images and ads in any way. The provided suggestions were general suggestions that referred to our example, and do not apply to other sites.

Regarding your second question – if a site does not have thumbnail sized images for some other reason, then there’s really no circumstances under which images should be added and placed near Google ads.

We appreciate your suggestion for allowing advertisers to offer thumbnail images. While this feature isn’t currently available, I’m happy to pass along your comments to our engineering and product teams. Please also feel free to submit any future suggestions through our online form at http://google.com/adsense_features_email .

Sincerely,

Stephanie
The Google AdSense Team

I suggest my readers check out this forum post as there are going to be a lot of opinions going on over at sitepoint ;-) . IMO I think Google is taking the easy way out. Yes they do explain themselves and I GUESSSSS because its christmas they have a REASON to put these images next their ads but seriously how close are they pushing the line on this?????

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