Archive for the ‘Basic PPC Strategies’ Category

Finding good help: it’s like the great professional field leveler. No matter how good you are at doing what you do, it doesn’t really mean you’re gonna be great at finding someone else who is good at whatever you need them to do- and that’s an issue, because a terrifying percentage of important projects are contingent on everyone doing their business both correctly and intelligently. The problem, in terms of our industry, arises because whether you’re an expert PPC manager …

Like many of you, I enjoyed a quintessential summer weekend during this past 4th of July holiday. I feel like I did almost everything people enjoy doing on warm summer days. My activities included spending time at the pool, eating lunch in the park, visiting a zoo (the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago is absolutely wonderful), watching World Cup games, and grilling out with some friends just before topping off the weekend with a traditional Indianapolis fireworks display.

All in all, …

In my last post I discussed how to understand traffic trends in your PPC accounts. We went over looking at year-over-year data, utilizing tools such as Google Trends, keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing and staying abreast of the latest industry news. Now that you how to analyze what might happen to your traffic in the coming months, let’s talk about how to adjust your account to address these shifts in traffic.

The great thing about PPC is that it is easy to track and measure. When you link your PPC account with Google Analytics or other data program, you can exponentially expand your wealth of data to really understand who your user is and how they are finding you. All of this is great, but the data doesn’t do any good unless you use it. Don’t wait until your account is in trouble, looking into data now can help you …

Changing keyword bids is going to be a task that faces you with some regularity if you’re managing any PPC account. It would be fantastic if we could just manage ad group bids and never consider the cost of our individual keywords, but it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes, you have fabulous keyword performers who need to be supported with better bids, hanging out in an ad group with massive overspenders who need to take a time out or …

Knowing your audience is essential to knowing where to target your ads, but sometimes you don’t know your audience as well as you think you do.  You can gain valuable information about your audience through your conversion form.  If you run an email list, this will not only help you target your advertising, it will also help you target your mailings. To know your audience, you must know who is converting, both in the demographic form (i.e. income and age) …

As a PPC campaign manager for business-to-business (B2B) clients, there’s one question I always ask: “Will you share your leads with me?” I don’t want to muscle in on their territory. I want to know how effective their PPC campaign is.

I recently read a great article by pay-per-click (PPC) Guru Brad Geddes concerning Post-Click Conversion Optimization for Long Sales Cycles that really made me think about how PPC conversions and revenue are tracked for B2B clients. Geddes states that …

It is easy to get lost in the details of bids and keywords with your PPC account but have you asked yourself recently what are you really trying to achieve? It may seem like a silly question but think about it. If your response is just X number clicks or X cost per lead, then you have some thinking to do. Taking a step back to outline your audience and goals can do wonders for your PPC account.

Think back to …

One thing we do regularly for our clients is run search query reports from Adwords and MSN, pull all queries that are resulting in unqualified impressions or clicks, and add those in as negatives.

Doing this can really help narrow down your keyword list and prevent unqualified traffic from seeing your ad and not clicking – which prevents your impressions from skyrocketing and therefore lowering your click-through rate. But negatives also can prevent people from clicking on your ads, …