Righteous Marketing

You heard me correctly. Despite the fanboy love and media hype I intend to show you how humble PPC is better than the iPad.

The Evidence

iPad – Runs for 10 hours
PPC – Runs 24 hrs/day, 7 days/week, 365 days/year (or any combination of hours, days & weeks you choose)

iPad – Plug in through the proprietary Apple docking port
PPC – Plug into your Analytics for better metrics, connect it with your SEO and email marketing to improve copy or plug in through an API

iPad – Have a problem? Only Apple can fix it (that includes changing the battery)
PPC – Have a problem? Fix it yourself or have any company you want fix it

iPad – Name could be confused for a feminine hygiene product
PPC – Name can be misheard as “Paper Clip” instead of “Pay-Per-Click”

iPad – Maybe a few million users by this time next year
PPC – Millions of PPC ads are seen EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

There you have it folks. What would you add?

This morning I read an interesting piece on SmallBizTrends.com titled “Will 2010 be the year of Start-Up America?” Melinda Emerson discusses how Obama should make start-ups the focus of his economic recovery plan in 2010, citing that small businesses have been responsible for 60-80% of annual job creation since the 1990s. She details 8 specific ways the government could assist in this effort, from wage subsidies to tax credits to plain old increased funding.

Small Businesses As Economic Saviors

While statistics can tell a lot of stories, I agree with Melinda’s point that small businesses are where most new jobs will come from as we come out of the recession and try to chip away at the 10% unemployment rate. Large corporations are under pressure to maintain profits and a lot of their gains are coming from cost-reduction efforts (aka layoffs, stretching employees, delaying new hiring). So how should we be going about it?

Government Intervention is NOT the Answer

The ideas that Melinda gives are great ideas and I believe they would be successful in helping a lot of start-ups. However, I couldn’t ignore the feeling that all of them centered on one key idea; the government’s increased interference in small businesses. Some of the ideas were intended to temporarily reduce government interference (payroll tax exemption, tax credits, etc.) while the others increased government involvement (whenever the government give you money they have to monitor how it’s used, so more regulation and red tape.)

Perhaps Melinda’s suggestions are more feasible, but I believe that small business creation will continue to lag in this country until the government reduces it’s role in the process. What do you think?

With the new year have come some fine new improvements from Yahoo Search Marketing. On January 12th Yahoo announced increased control of the content network as well as the ability to import AdWords campaigns directly into Yahoo (this should have been there years ago). They also just upped the number of negative keywords allowed from 250 to 500. These are great improvements and I’ll definitely be using them. However, this got me thinking.

Too Little Too Late?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but part of the Bing/Yahoo deal was that Bing would be taking over the PPC business and Yahoo would be doing display. Therefore, if Yahoo is just a few months from being rolled into Bing, why are they putting out so many improvements? Likely this is just the wrap-up of projects that were in process. Tying up loose ends. Also, this could be somewhat of a beta test of features that were planned for the merged “Binghoo” entity. Unlikely as it seems, it may also be Yahoo covering themselves in case the Bing takeover doesn’t go as smoothly or quickly as it’s supposed to go.

What do you think? Why is Yahoo even bothering?

Yesterday on the Official AdWords Blog, Google announced a few new features targeted directly to the fast-growing mobile search arena. I’ll give you my 2 cents and then you can go and read full post.

Target by Device & Target by Carrier

You want granular, you got it! Targeting by device will allow PPC advertisers to customize copy, landing pages and offers specifically to the device. If you’re running serious mobile campaigns this is going to be a boon. And can’t you just hear the mobile execs pulling their hair out because of carrier-specific targeting? Yep, now Verizon can run ads that only target AT&T users and vice versa. There is already a price war brewing and Google just handed both parties a bazooka.

Direct App Downloads

Have an app to sell? This will make your life so much easier. If you’re advertising for iPhone or Android apps just use the URL for the app store and Google will automatically put a “Download App” link. No more worrying about losing people on a landing page. Just 1 step and they’ve got your app in their hot little hands.

To fully paint the picture, imagine this scenario:

Your company develops iPhone apps and you just developed and app that increases your gas mileage (everyone is gonna want this). For the US you can set your device targeting to iPhone/iPod Touch to prevent bogus impressions and clicks from lowly Android and Palm OS users. You then target AT&T and Boom! Each click is going straight to the App Store so you’ll get insane conversion rates.

How else could this be used? I’d especially encourage any international ramifications if you’re out of the US.

You may have seen a couple of these commercials on TV, but this is the most complete compilation of Dos Equis commercials for their “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign. I think they’re hilarious, so if you need a quick 7-minute break today, here you go!

Yesterday on Search Engine Land, George Michie wrote an excellent piece describing why the long tail of PPC is most definitely worth managing. I agree wholeheartedly and just wanted to chip in my $0.02.

Message Match & Intent

The first point that George debunks is the idea that you don’t need to worry about all those tail terms because your broad-matched head terms are picking them up anyway. While this may be true, the more accurate messaging (both in the ad and the landing page) will produce a more qualified lead or more sales. Face-to-face salespeople are always customizing the message based on what the customer lets them know. You know what the person searched, so do something with that information!

Tools

For the inexperienced PPC manager, the time requirement for maintaining a good tail strategy is often the biggest hurdle. While experience will help, properly leveraging certain tools is vital to your success. Here are a couple to start out with:

• Search Query Reports – The new AdWords interface made this super easy. Go to the Keywords tab and then select the drop-down box labeled “See search terms…” Click the “All” option and Voila! You have a keyword report of the actual terms triggering your ads. Find top-performers that you don’t already have in your keyword lists and then give them a little extra TLC.
• Excel – This is the benchmark by which all PPC tools are mentioned. You don’t have to be a wizard, but the basic functionality of Excel will allow you to digest a lot of information much more easily.
• Keyword Tools – Google has a couple flavors (the search-based keyword tool and the old keyword tool), Wordtracker has one and there are plenty more. Use these to help you find new keywords that you might have missed otherwise.

What tools do you use and how do you use them?

For today’s post I’m going to borrow from Charles Dickens a bit. You will be visited by 3 PPC tips; the PPC past, PPC present and PPC future.

• PPC Past – Our ghost of PPC past is Kate Morris who wrote this exceptional post about dayparting using Google Analytics. This is a step-by-step guide that will reveal important data to help you know what time of day justifies additional (or any) spend.
• PPC Present – Our ghost of PPC present is the Official AdWords blog, posting about the recent change to the display URL policy on subdomains. However, Brad Geddes thinks they still didn’t get it quite right.
• PPC Future – Our ghost of PPC future is Mike Churchill of SEM Clubhouse writing about the new Yahoo PPC Network distribution option. Proving that it’s better late than never, Yahoo finally gives advertisers more control over content network impressions and bids (though I wish they would have also bumped the number of Domain Blocks up since 500 isn’t enough sometimes).

Google is famous for their slogan “Do No Evil.” However, when Google created Google.cn to serve the huge (and growing) Chinese market they made a very significant compromise with the Communist government of China; they agreed to censor their search results. Many people, myself included, were disappointed that Google “sold out” their beliefs. However, Google announced yesterday on their Official Google Blog that they will not censor results any longer and are willing to close Google.cn and their Chinese offices if necessary. I’m a forgiving person and I believe Google will do the right thing. Google, I salute you!

PS A brief apology: last week (my first week of the new year) I broke my resolution to blog 3 time/week. I’m not throwing in the towel though, so keep holding me to my resolutions.

Say you’ve been working hard with your AdWords account and you feel good about your results. CTR on ads and keywords is good. Conversion rate is okay, though not stellar. Where can you look for further improvement you think? Look in your analytics.

PPC Bounce Rate

To find your PPC bounce rate, log in to your analytics account. For most of you that will be Google Analytics (which I’ll be basing this post upon) but any analytics package worth its salt will have this data. In GA you’ll want to go to click on Traffic Sources in the left nav and then select Search Engines. For this example I then select Google in the main content section and then filter it to only paid traffic by clicking “paid”:


Now you’ll see just the performance of your AdWords keywords and we want to focus on bounce rate.

What It Tells You

As you can see, this keyword has a bounce rate near 90%. But what does that mean? It can mean a couple things:

• Wrong Stage – The purchase process involves numerous stages from interest to research to actual purchase. If the keyword is often used by prospects in the research phase and you’re putting them on a purchase page, you’ll likely see a high bounce rate.
• Broken Promises – The most likely explanation is the simplest; your ad piqued their interest, but the landing page didn’t deliver. They expected one thing and got something else.
• Multiple Meanings – Many words have different meanings. Toto can be a fancy Japanese toilet, Dorothy’s dog from the Wizard of Oz, or a famous rock band. Look at your keyword reports and put some negative keywords to work.

What else does PPC bounce rate tell you?

With the success of Digg it isn’t hard to see that the best judges of content are the actual readers. As part of the new year I took a look at my Google Analytics data and here are the posts that you, the readers of Righteous Marketing, thought were the best:

• Case Study: A High Cost Competitive Keyword and Landing Page
• 100th Post Giveaway
• Direct Mail Fail

There you have it. An awesome guest post from Akin Tosyali of Clix Marketing, my 100th post, and a post with a little humor. In 2010 I’ll try to provide more great content and just keep voting with your readership. Thanks.