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Archive for the ‘Advanced PPC Strategies’ Category

Are you ready to take your pay-per-click campaign’s performance to the next level? These advanced PPC strategies will give your paid search accounts a kick in the pants! Whether you need a lesson in complex bidding strategies, an explanation of the finer points of improving your Quality Score or a quick study in pay-per-click lead generation – these advanced PPC strategies are your ticket to better PPC performance.

Debunking the Operation Camouflage Strategy: Is Deceit Really a PPC Best Practice?

November 13th, 2007 | John | Advanced PPC Strategies

Since when did deceit become a useful pay-per-click tool? A few months ago I discovered Engine Ready’s article titled Operation Camouflage, The Art of War, and PPC. The folks at Engine Ready spelled out how to hide your ads from competitors in an effort to reduce “competitive click fraud” in Google AdWords.

On the surface Operation Camouflage doesn’t seem like a half bad idea. But I would like to argue that this “house of cards” theory can quickly be blown over. I’ll start by asking a few questions: Is competitive click fraud and ad plagiarism …

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5 Things to Consider When Inheriting a Google AdWords Account

November 5th, 2007 | John | Advanced PPC Strategies, Google AdWords

If you’re a professional SEM, chances are you’ve inherited your fair share of pay-per-click accounts from clients seeking a helping hand. Taking on these clients who have tried their hand at PPC and failed can be a great opportunity for you to prove the value of your services. The downside, however, is that these accounts are undoubtedly in shambles. When you add the wild card of Google AdWords Quality Score to your equation, this becomes an even bigger hurtle to jump. But don’t fret, with a little patience and careful consideration of your strategy, inheriting …

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Don’t Let Yahoo Hurt Your Campaign! Learn 2 Weak Spots In Their Optimizations

November 2nd, 2007 | Joe | Advanced PPC Strategies, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Over the past six months I have been putting a lot of time and effort into building a keyword list for a client. This client operates within a niche market and is geo-targeted tightly to a specific metro area. One day I began conducting additional keyword research and suddenly realized that I wasn’t sure in which direction to head. I had keyword block, much like writer’s block.

However, I’m not afraid to request assistance so I asked my Yahoo Account Representative to present an account optimization that focused on new keywords, and my secondary parameter was a …

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In Google AdWords, Bidding Wars Are a Thing of the Past: Beat Your Competition with These 4 Tactics

October 19th, 2007 | John | Advanced PPC Strategies, Google AdWords Quality Score

All week we have focused on how to improve your Quality Score, how to recognize “myths” and important factoids that lead to a solid understanding of Quality Score. Today’s post is the fifth and final post in our 5-day series, and it is the culmination of a week’s worth of knowledge!

In days gone by, PPC bidding wars were commonplace when trying to achieve top positions in competitive markets. As a result many advertisers were forced to pay outrageous CPCs and had no choice in the matter. Google AdWords’ …

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Keywords Inactive Due to Quality Score in Google AdWords? Here are 3 Actions to Take!

October 17th, 2007 | John | Advanced PPC Strategies, Google AdWords Quality Score

Today’s post on Inactive Keywords is the third blog post in our 5-day series focusing on Quality Score.

Picture this: You arrive at work before the birds begin to chirp. Before you can be “bothered” by email, you log into AdWords and compulsively check your previous day’s stats. Quickly thereafter, a discovery makes your jaw hit the floor. Those wonderful new keywords you added to your account yesterday are all labeled “Inactive for Search” and doing nothing better than collecting cyber-dust.

When Google labels a keyword …

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How to Optimize Your PPC Campaign for Each Stage of the Buying Cycle

October 8th, 2007 | John | Advanced PPC Strategies, Buying Cycle

The buying cycle is a topic that search marketers have labored over and written about consistently through the years. Today I would like to share a few new techniques with you to optimize your PPC campaigns for each stage of the buying cycle.

First a quick reminder of what constitutes a buying cycle:

According to Kevin Lee at ClickZ, the traditional cycle is Attention, Interest, Conviction, Desire and Close.

Search Engine Guide simplifies the cycle by one step, listing it as Awareness, Consideration/Research, Decision and Purchase.

Not to be outdone, Yahoo! takes the buying cycle down to these three steps: …

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Use the Right Keywords with the Right Targeting for Greater Success!

October 5th, 2007 | Joe | Advanced PPC Strategies, Geo Targeting

When running locally and nationally targeted campaigns you need to strike a balance between your keyword focus and your geo-targeting focus. This means that if your targeting focus is wide, then your keyword focus should be narrow – and vice versa: if you’re targeted distribution area is small, then your keyword focus can expand.

You can have two sets of keywords for the same product when advertising to a national audience as well as to one that’s local. The keywords that belong within your national campaign should have a narrow focus. Broad keywords on a national level may yield poor results. …

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How the Heroes Premiere Showcases Paid Search Usage by ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC

September 24th, 2007 | John | Advanced PPC Strategies

Tonight is the premiere for Season 2 of the very popular TV series, Heroes. Being the PPC “Hero” that I am, I thought it fitting to see how well NBC has used paid search in their advertising efforts gearing up to the new season. Are they ranking for key terms? Are they dominating the “big three” search engines?

My first test was to search on keyword: Heroes. NBC crowds the #1 spot in both paid and organic search across all three search engines. The ads on Google and Yahoo! rotate between basic text about watching …

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Thinking Negatively Can Yield Positive Results – The Impact of Negative Keywords

September 12th, 2007 | Amber | Advanced PPC Strategies

The third series in our Revitalize your PPC Campaign in 5 Days is using negative keywords to weed out unqualified traffic, control your spend, and only trigger your ads to show towards more qualified traffic.

Negative keywords are used to weed out unwanted or irrelevant traffic to your campaign. These are keywords, terms and phrases within your ad group that you don’t want your ad to show up for.

For example, if you’re selling books online but you’re not a book club, you should use the negative keyword “book club” then …

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Revitalize Your PPC Campaign in 5 Days!

September 8th, 2007 | John | Advanced PPC Strategies

There comes a time while managing a pay-per-click campaign when you feel as though you’ve done everything. Yet somehow your performance plateaus or worse, begins to trail off. What do you do in this situation? What can be done to thwart this impending disaster?

PPC Hero has the answers! Each day this week we will focus on a different technique that will provide new ideas for a campaign that has stalled or flat-lined. We want to help you revitalize your PPC campaigns!

Here is what’s in store for this week:

Monday – …

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