Righteous Marketing

More MCC Cosmetic Changes

Robert — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:30:35 +0000

Last week Google moved the MCC link and drop-down box up to the top of the screen and now I’m seeing these cute little icons in their own column of the MCC dashboard.

The red one is for critical alerts in your individual client accounts. In this case, a failed payment method.

The yellow guy is for the ~~annoying~~ less important alerts, such as a campaign that has ended (even though it was set to end and ended right on time).

Looks like the all-seeing eye of Google has decided to focus its gaze on the MCC interface yet again.

PPC Aggregators Are Screwed

Robert — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:13:28 +0000

As usual, Google continues to change and modify their AdWords platform and policies. The newest change (announced via the AdWords blog) was the topic of a Brad Geddes post on Search Engine Land that very clearly laid out the good and bad of the policy change. However, here is my take:

What Changed?

A lot of PPC providers out there take your money and give you back the leads/phone calls that result from the spend. If the results justify the cost they keep paying. However, these aggregators don’t usually report how much was spent on clicks and how much they pocket for themselves. Hence the policy change.

Google is just requiring that the end client know how many impressions they got, how many clicks and the total spend. This way the advertiser will know if an agency is pocketing a large chunk or not.

Why I Think It’s A Good Thing

In a word: Transparency! Agencies that are afraid to disclose their cut should be culled from the herd. If you’re good then your clients should be willing to pay the fee because you produce results. Pretty simple if you ask me.

Gmail PPC #Fail

Robert — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:01:25 +0000

The other day a buddy of mine sent over the following screenshot:

While the occasional PPC fail is humorous, this garners special consideration because the offending firm, eFrontier, actually provides PPC services. From their own site we read:

“Competition for market share is fierce. And campaigns are more complicated than ever with millions of keywords, geo-targeting, content options, and copy testing. For close to a decade, Efficient Frontier’s technology has helped some of the largest and most complex advertisers in the world lead successful SEM campaigns.”

I guess that their own PPC campaign was just too simple to justify using their awesome tool. #FAIL

MCC Link Moved

Robert — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:49:11 +0000

Dear Google,

I’m a creature of habit and consider myself a very organized person. One of my greater joys in life is knowing exactly where things are and being able to find them with ease. So, as you might have guessed, moving the MCC link and drop-down has been a bit traumatic for me (see image below).

While I’m sure that you have a good reason for moving the link, please at least warn me of such changes. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Robert

PS This post written entirely in jest. I really can handle a small change.

Guest Post – How to Increase Your AdSense Revenue With Your Content

Robert — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:03:15 +0000

AdSense is a revenue sharing program run by Google that can be a great way to generate profit with a website of any size. Google sends you advertisements to post on your website based on the content that is there. Every time a visitor to your website clicks an advertisement, you receive a share of the profits. The advertisements Google supplies will be matched with your content to help ensure that anything you advertise is in some way related to the topic of your website. Although it may seem that once you sign up for AdSense there is nothing more to be done, there are certain things you can do to make more money. One of these things involves focusing on your website’s content. Knowing how to increase your AdSense revenue with content can make the difference between a website that succeeds and one that fails.

Provide More Content

Featuring more content on your website is good for several reasons. More content means that your website is larger. Google only allows three AdSense advertisements on any page, so simply having more content on multiple pages provides you with more opportunity to generate profit. As long as you have a respectable amount of traffic, more content means more chances for your readers to click on advertisements in which they are interested. Similarly, having a wide variety of content helps make sure that all visitors will find content that they find interesting. The more people your content appeals to, the more clicks you should get.

Another reason to feature more content is that AdSense selects relevant advertisements based on your content. The more content you have, the more relevant the advertisements will be. If your advertisement has nothing to do with your content, it is much less likely that a visitor will be interested. Because of this, simply writing more makes sure that AdSense chooses advertisements that make sense for your website.

Provide High Quality Content

Of course, it will not matter how much content you provide if it is not of high quality. Visitors will likely be turned off by shoddy writing, and will be much more unlikely to click on any advertisement on your website. Well written content will interest your visitors in the advertisements, and they may even trust your website more if they feel that the writing was of a very high quality. Also, if your content is full of grammatical or spelling errors, AdSense will be unable to properly analyze it, making irrelevant advertisements much more likely.

One way to ensure that everything your visitors read is of the highest quality possible is to employ a content writing service. This means that you will have professional content writers crafting your content specifically to suit you and your website’s needs. When you hire a content writing service, you can be sure that your writing will be accurate, clear and most importantly, interesting. These writers have been trained to write for specific audiences and can therefore craft your content with your visitors in mind. If you are trying to discover how to increase your AdSense revenue with content, hiring a content writing service is one of the best options available.

Optimized Ad Serving? I Don’t Think So

Robert — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:58:42 +0000

Below is a screenshot from a display network campaign that was running for about 16 hours. All the default setting were in place, meaning that ads were set to optimize instead of rotate.

So unless Google is omniscient (and the algorithm may be approaching that level) I’m pretty sure they should have showed the other ad at least a little bit before making that determination. Has anyone else seen this?

AdWords Ads Now in Purple!

Robert — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:16:07 +0000

If you haven’t seen it yet, just run a Google search. Most likely you’ll see the new light purple background on the ads directly above organic results. It looks like this:

Subtle, isn’t it? On my monitor it’s so subtle that I didn’t see it at first glance. However, after sliding Firefox over onto my laptop screen I saw it more clearly. Rimm-Kaufman actually got the following quote direct from Google:

“Starting today and ramping up to 100% globally by the end of this week, we’ll be changing the background color for ads that appear above the search results on Google.com as well as our local domains. The ads, which currently have a pale yellow background, will change to have a pale purple background. This change is part of the ‘look and feel’ update to our color palette and logo that we made back in May of this year to keep the Google results page looking fresh and modern. This is purely an aesthetic change to our ads and won’t have any impact on the way we target or serve advertisements on Google.com.”

Look and feel? Here’s why I think they did it?

Google Is All About The Money

Don’t forget that Google makes billions of dollars in advertising revenue EVERY MONTH! Even the smallest change can have a huge impact on their bottom line and they test a lot. Based on what I see, this helps the top ads blend into the organic results. That means more people, even ad-averse people, will click on search ads, thus padding Google’s pockets.

As a PPC advertiser I like it a lot. Accounts with high QS will get rewarded even further by showing above organic results and getting an even higher CTR. For companies in competitive spaces (where high bids are also needed to hit the top 3) it sucks. They’ll have to work that much harder to make their PPC work.

But make no mistake, even though Google says this is “purely an aesthetic change”, I’m sure that dollars and cents made a difference.

Free AdWords Checklist: The 13 Deadly Sins

Robert — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:20:46 +0000

Google reported $6.82 BILLION in revenue for Q2 2010 and most of it comes through AdWords. Awhile back I wrote a series of posts detailing some of the most serious mistakes I’ve seen in AdWords accounts. I call them the 13 Deadly Sins of AdWords.

These mistakes can kill your AdWords performance, so I made a convenient checklist to quickly diagnose any issues. Consider me your priest and this checklist is your confession.

AdWords Certified Partner

Robert — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:32:11 +0000

On a point of personal privilege, I wanted to take the opportunity to announce that Righteous Marketing is now an AdWords Certified Partner. According to Google, “This qualification demonstrates that the company employs individuals with deep AdWords knowledge, and has experience in assisting clients with their AdWords campaigns.” The small print says that I’ve managed over $10,000 in spend over the last 90 days and have passed the new, more rigorous certification exams.

(Imaginary award speech)I’d like to thank Paul Allen for getting me started in PPC during my college internet marketing class. I’d also like to thank Robert Stevens of WriteExpress for taking me on as an intern and then giving me great experience managing a large PPC account, Vizad for letting me manage multiple accounts, and all my current and former clients for trusting me to spend their money (and lots of it) wisely. Oh, and my mom and dad, and my friends, and God for giving me this talent. (Queue music that kicks me off the stage)

Yahoo/Bing PPC Merger Delayed Until 2011?

Robert — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:42:38 +0000

The merger of Yahoo and Bing into a single interface is the most anticipated PPC event of 2010. We talked all about it in 2009 and I’ve been quite excited because I’m not a fan of Yahoo’s interface. Information has been a bit lacking, but last week we got a video on the Microsoft Advertising blog about the topic.

Say what?

Okay, lot’s of fun pencil drawings and clever animation…blah, blah, blah…”WE ALSO MAY CONSIDER POSTPONING THE TRANSITION TO EARLY 2011″. What? Go back to the 1:30 mark and listen to it again. What you hear is Microsoft giving themselves an escape hatch to push this implementation to next year.

Dang! Six more months of Yahoo’s crappy interface.