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Whether it’s Cyber Monday or the week before Christmas, you need to be set and ready to go with your PPC campaigns in advance.  Missing out on extra holiday traffic can be detrimental to your revenue. Here are five things you can do now to prepare for this holiday season.

1. Run keyword reports from last November (2008) through January (2009) to see which keywords converted well last year during the holiday season. More than likely those keywords will perform well again this holiday season. Make sure you bid higher on those particular keywords for the next coming months to take advantage of the additional traffic.
2. Start running promotions early. If you plan on running any promotions like free shipping, gift with purchase, or a discount, start running that promotion in early or late October, or possibly early November. Yes, the economy is still down, but people still have to buy Christmas presents. Like last year, people are looking for the best offer they can find and are willing to spend more time researching many different websites to find the best offer. Check out your competition to be sure you’re promotional offer beats all others.
3. Create a holiday gift finder landing page.  It’s true that some people know exactly what they’re looking to buy and will type in very specific, long tail keywords. But there are people who are buying gifts for their neighbors, co-workers, or just people they don’t see very often and have no idea what to get these people. By having a gift finder on your site you’re calling out great gift ideas at great prices. You can even categorize your gift finder by price, gender, age, demographic, and some sites even create categories like ‘for the chef’, or ‘for the pet lover’ and will feature these types of products in that category.
4. Re-activate paused campaigns now.  If you have campaigns that are paused during the summer months because they don’t convert well, consider turning them back on for the holiday season.  Since so many people are buying even if you get a one-off conversion you may yield a very high ROI.
5. Be ready for ‘Cyber Monday’. Cyber Monday is known as the Monday after ‘Black Friday’. (Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, the largest shopping day of the year for brick and mortar.)  Cyber Monday is said to generate sales from people who couldn’t find what they were looking for in-store.  Make sure you’re keyword bids are set higher for this day over any other day. If you’re going to have a holiday gift finder, have it up and running on your homepage before this day hits.  If you’re going to have a special promotion for the holidays, be sure you have it up and running before this day comes. If you don’t take full advantage of Cyber Monday traffic you’re missing out a lot of potential holiday revenue. This day is also known to have really awesome sales and deals online, so if you don’t have any of those, try and talk your client or upper management to at least do a free shipping promotion on orders of $xx.xx to drive up your average order value.

The biggest tip is to make sure you are prepared and not working on your holiday PPC campaigns when it’s too late. Be ready for the traffic, have your keyword bids and budgets set, and monitor your accounts daily so you can make adjustments if necessary. Happy Holidays!

I had a few co-workers here in the office search for the same keyword and some found our ad, while others did not.

I asked my Google Reps about this and they mentioned two things of particular interest.

1. Because I was hitting my campaign budget almost daily, our ads were only showing periodically  in order to keep our ads displaying for most of the day. This was happening despite the fact that all of my campaign settings are set to ‘accelerate’ which means they will show our ad each time someone searches for a keyword until the budget is depleted.

2. They also said that because my keyword bid put us below page 1, our ads would only show part of that time, whether your hitting your daily budget or not.

The ad is showing. It’s not showing all the time because of the low bid, says my Google rep.

I asked for any documentation on this and she didn’t have anything to give to me to support her comment.

The point of the story: watch out for those keywords that are below page 1 in the Google SERPS. If they’re important keywords that must be shown, maybe think about increasing their bids.

Also, I have had this problem with new clients before, where AdWords says their ads aren’t showing, but their campaign budget is set to $5/day and their keyword bids are at $1 each. Obviously, Google is going to stop showing your ads at some point to be sure you don’t go over your campaign daily budget.

And always remember to check your settings for each campaign and if you want your ad to come up as many times as it can throughout the day, then chance your default settings from ‘standard – show ads evenly over time’ to ‘accelerated – show ads as quickly as possible’.  This will help you ads be active anytime anyone does a search on your keyword until you have hit your campaign budget.

The answer, as always: It depends. Are you a veteran online who is trying to drive a specific part of the business? Or are you a first-timer trying to find out what exactly happens in this untapped advertising medium? Do you have a thriving storefront business that you’re seeking to expand, or are you an online-only retailer dealing with razor-thin margins?

There’s lots to it, of course, but budgeting always starts with your basic strategy.

With these thoughts in mind, here are a few tactics to consider:

Budget by product line or service offered
Perhaps the most logical to first-time online advertisers, budgeting by product line is probably the easiest to conceptualize. This budgeting tactic involves the simple campaign strategy of devoting a campaign to each individual product line, and setting your daily budget accordingly. Because you have organized your account with product-specific campaigns, you will be able to easily check whether or not you are on track to hit your monthly spend goals or limits.

Budget by desired conversion
If you have a website that seeks to accomplish multiple things, you have a different type of budgeting task. There are many sites that seek to drive, for instance, “Contact us” form completions, online purchases, email newsletter subscriptions, and job applications. Each of these four elements impacts the business in a different and beneficial way.

To budget by desired conversion, then, pool your keywords into relevant groups by conversion type. From there, organize these keyword groups into separate campaigns and track your spend, similar to in the first option. You may run into difficulty here, as several keywords may have overlapping conversion possibilities.

Alternatively, you may consider “by landing page” rather than “by conversion” budgeting. Rather than adjusting keywords on a desired conversion-by-desired conversion basis, you could simply run the same keywords in each campaign, and use advanced dayparting options to focus spend on a different landing page according to the time of day.

In addition, if your company has separate business units or altogether separate budgets handling these tasks, you might want to go so far as to create completely independent online accounts.

Go where the traffic takes you
The most basic tactic is sometimes the best tactic. One budget. One campaign. Press “Go,” and see what happens. Rather than try to make the internet and a competitive online advertising space fit your motives, simply deal with the nature of the market. This is the easiest budgeting tactic, but probably the most harrowing.

It can be particularly helpful for new online advertisers, however, as high conversion rates can indicate your strengths relative to the rest of the online sphere, while high search-traffic terms can call attention to areas where you can expand and improve your business.

Another note on budgeting: I have always found that, at the outset of a campaign, you are better off operating with a full flow of water, rather than a trickle. Be aggressive, and let your keywords build quality score. As the month progresses, more carefully track your day-by-day spend to ensure that you are tracking towards your ultimate goal.

Also, as you set your daily budgets, always remember that, as a rule, weekends will see lower search and click traffic than weekdays. Therefore, never simply construct a monthly budget and divide by 30 to set your daily budget. Consider, instead, that you will probably spend about 80% of your budget from Monday through Friday, though this figure can vary drastically based on the contents of your site and the demographics of your target market.

Do you have any other budgeting tactics that you have used? We’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Though my colleague mentions it as a crucial weekly task (on Tuesdays), all too often, I see bid editing and bid maintenance as an ignored annoyance by less-devoted PPC practitioners. However, with proper execution and attention to detail, a test of alternative bidding strategies can bring forward great benefits and drive ROI to new heights.

Here are some of the ways to do it best:

Hold Everything Else Constant.
It should go without saying, but make sure that your test is with ad copy that you’re comfortable holding steady for a bit of time. You want to make sure that you only test the impact of alternative bids on results. For this reason, leave your headlines, ad text, display URLs, and landing pages constant.

Do It Over a Weekly Basis.
I’ve previously discussed how, depending on the product or service, different days of the week perform differently. In order to prevent overreaction to a new bidding strategy caused not by the bid, but by the day of the week, start your test on a given day of the week, and wait until the following week to check in on results.

Track Everything. Everything.
An inventory to consider – bid placed, price paid, ad position, impressions, clicks, click-through rate, conversion rate, total revenue, revenue per sale, cost-per-acquisition, ROI. I have seen an increase in bids show an increase in conversion rate, but with a corresponding drop in average sale that offset the increase in number of sales. (Follow that?) By tracking every metric, you will be sure to see what your ultimate results actually are.

Focus Only on High-traffic Keywords.
Depending on your site and your product line, there are probably just a handful of keywords that are your key drivers of traffic and conversions. These terms, and not the five word (including a verb) long-tail keyword of your dreams, are the ones to test. In order to acquire actionable results, you need actionable data, and this can only be achieved with lots of data. Consider working with your top trafficked term, and move from there.

Challenge Your Own Conventional Wisdom.
It is easy to become complacent with your thinking as a PPC manager, and to draw conclusions too soon. I am generally averse to bidding for top position, due to costs and a belief that the top spot brings in too many impulse clicks for my liking. However, a bid test on a key term with one of my clients showed the bid increase to bring in better traffic (that is, higher conversion rate, bigger-ticket sales) than I had been getting even out of the two or three spot. By the same token, I saw a client’s conversion rate and ROI skyrocket after a drop from mid-position to the bottom of the page. These things happen, and it is up to you as a campaign manager to make sure that you consider all possibilities.

Consider Initiating Tests at the Start of the Month.
For PPC vendors out there, this should be standard operating procedure. Often, clients are in an end-of-the-month review cycle. Initiating a test at the start of the month allows you the opportunity to fail. It is up to you to make up for loss in sales, leads, or registered users during those final three weeks (and, depending on the client relationship, to let the client know that you’re initiating a test in the first place).

Bid management is a tactic so simple, and yet so easy to ignore. I’d love to hear your thoughts on bid maintenance – and your bidding success stories – in the comments.

For a bit of perspective, with Google, your Quality Score and first-page bidding system is a living breathing thing.  When a keyword drops below a certain threshold, your Quality Score drops, and so does your “estimated bid to reach the first page.”  This real-time data is extremely important to quality PPC management.

Yahoo! instead pushes out massive changes all at once.  Starting yesterday afternoon the entire PPC Hero team started receiving emails with this general message:

This is a courtesy notice to inform you that the minimum bid requirement on one or more of the keywords in your account ‘Generic Account Name‘ [*********] has recently decreased.

And the emails kept coming…  all night.  I can’t imagine this being a good strategy for Yahoo! pushing all of that out all at once.  Plus, for us advertisers, that means we’re potentially in the dark about potentially important changes coming down the pike because we have to wait for the email blast.  But I digress.  I’ve had my rants on Yahoo! before, yet I keep coming back for more.  At least I haven’t lost TOTAL faith in Yahoo! and I had reason to receive those emails at all.  I’m still getting some solid results for quite a few of my clients.

I’d be interested if anyone else was a part of this ‘minimum bid requirement’ email blast yesterday/last night?  Let me know in the comments below!

This week we are featuring guest articles from our PPC Hero allies! We requested submissions from our readers and we received excellent responses from some great PPC bloggers! The PPC Hero team will return to our regularly scheduled articles next week. Enjoy!

The hardest part of every advertising campaign is determining how much to spend. There are numerous variables to work with like what the reach will be (# impressions) and what the company will get in return (ROI). Determining those will be more difficult if you have not worked with paid search before. It’s like asking a new marketing intern what the budget should be for the entire department on their first day to work. Many PPC experts don’t always have the best answers because the real truth is that it’s relative to what your goals are and your comfort level.

So what should your starting budget be? Here are a few tips to help you determine that and also when you should start thinking about increasing that budget. We will be covering Google Traffic Optimizer, the calculations necessary, spend level tips, and finally the points at which you should consider adding to the budget.

Google Traffic Estimator
In paid search there are a few steps to assist in budgeting. First, you need to build your list of keywords. Here are some resources for that. Once you know what you are bidding on to start with, price out those keywords. The Google Traffic Estimator is the best free tool out there (but you have to have an AdWords account to access it). Enter your terms, location and see what Google recommends for max spend.

Calculation
Then determine your max to spend a month. Think about how many leads it takes you to close a sale, phone call or walk-in. Think of those as clicks, how many clicks a day would you need to close a sale? Let’s say you have a 10% close rate. So you would need at least 100 clicks a day to get 10 sales.

Now what days of the week do you realistically think you will get the most clicks? Are you closed on the weekends? If so, count how many business days there are in one month. Let’s say there are 23 business days this month. Take your average cost for each click, let’s say $1.00, and multiply that by how many clicks you need a day, 100 x $1.00 = $100. Now take that amount and multiply that by 23, $2300. That would be your monthly budget.

Don’t Spend Too Little
Compare that to your first number and work from there. The only real risk is setting your budget too low. Few companies will see a return on such a low spend and can produce a false negative ROI on the campaign. Be sure to give your campaign a fighting chance, you don’t want to spend your entire budget in the first few hours of the day. Don’t shortchange what could be a triple digit ROI campaign.

Adding to the Budget
Once you know where to start, let it run for a few weeks at least. Then start messing with bids, calculating ROI, and changing budgets. Play with geo-location, keyword match types, and day parting (if you are B2B do you really need to be bidding at 2am?) where relevant to make your budget last and increase conversions. You will want to increase your budget if you:

• Notice your ads turning off towards the end of the day
• See a message from Google indicating that you are not getting all the traffic you could be getting
• Run numbers that say you are doing great and could even stand to spend more
• Just remember to be very careful, detailed, and take baby steps. One mistake can cost you lots, but the rewards from a well-run campaign are endless.

Guest Blogger Bio: Kate Morris is the Director of Client Strategies at New Edge Media. She specializes in paid and natural search, and recently getting her footing in social media marketing. You can find her on twitter @katemorris.

**An important note to remember is that Google pulls demographic information only from the content network. Some sites like social networking sites do ask their users for demographic information. The demographic reporting in this tool is a combination of content network sites that do contain demographic and some sites that do not.

How to view your demographic information:

1. Select a specific campaign from your Google Adwords account that you want demographic information on.
2. Click the campaign settings link at the top of the campaign.
3. Go down to the middle of the settings page where it says Networks and Bidding. Click on the demographic bidding link to the right. See screen shot below:

Once you click on the demographic bidding link, you should see a page that looks identical to this:

Now that you’re in the report section of the demographic bidding, you can view which age and gender click through on your ads most frequently and convert. In the screen shot above, you can tell that a majority of my users are female between the ages of 18to 24.

What you can do with the reporting information to improve your PPC campaigns and Quality Score is increase your bids on the age and/or gender that have a higher click-through rate or conversion rate. By doing this you can increase targeted traffic to your site and increase sales/conversions.

To increase your bids on a specific age and/or gender simply click on the ‘edit’ button under the ‘make adjustments’ column.  This will allow you to add a percentage of increase to your existing bid.

The bad part about the feature is that the date ranges for the demographic reporting is for the past seven days only, and you can’t compare date ranges to see your improvements.  However you can still run a campaign report in the reports section of the Adwords interface to see if your CTR or conversion rates have improved.  You can also use this feature in MSN adCenter, however the feature is not yet available in Yahoo!

I think this is a good feature if you can actually get conversion data out of the reports.  If you’re  mainly working to improve your click-through rates and  have money to spend then it would be okay for that too. The only problem I find is that most of my clients on the content network the conversion data wasnt’ showing up. Therefore I couldn’t feel confident in increasing bids demographically based off CTR alone.

Why is PPC budget distribution important? First of all, the fact that you’re distributing at all is a good thing! I’m a strong believer that putting all of your paid-search eggs in one basket is a poor decision. It is important to test your advertising in more than one search engine (AdWords seems to be the default). The second point is that when you’re dividing your monthly budget between search engines, you need to provide that account with an appropriate budget. What do I mean by appropriate? Most of your money should be spent where most of the traffic is, etc., etc.! Thirdly, knowing your PPC budget distribution will allow you to set strong goals for your campaigns. Check out this post from ShimanSandler.com for an example of how PPC budget distribution is used for planning and strategy.

Surprisingly, not many other PPC blogs talk about budget distribution and how this decision is made within their PPC management process. A great example of someone who is talking about their budgets is the RKG Blog (Rimm-Kaufman Group). The last report they made was in July and they reported a spend breakdown as follows: Google 80%, Yahoo! 15%, Microsoft 5%. Their reporting is based on aggregate totals of all of their PPC clients.

Using the RKG Blog as my inspiration, I set out to analyze my own clients’ budget distribution. The following stats are based on an average of 2008 monthly spend:

For my own clients, the proportions vary a little – with considerably more money going towards Yahoo! than in the RKG Blog example. My numbers are closer to their report a full year prior in 2007. This goes to show that numbers can fluctuate and that spend is particular to advertiser, client and performance metrics. Additionally, I’ve got a fourth category titled “Other.” This is for 3^rd tier search engines like Ask.com, Business.com, etc. This is a great exercise for any PPC advertiser to follow for perspective on where their money is going. But that’s not my point today!

The real question here is how do you decide how much budget to allot to each search engine at the onset of a new pay-per-click campaign? I would propose that everyone gives the “big 3″ search engines a fair chance when kicking off a new campaign. Go ahead and follow my general breakdown as a STARTING POINT. Give Google 72%, Yahoo! 26% and Microsoft 2% of your campaign’s monthly budget (leaving “Other” search engines for a later date). This will give you a baseline for determining a budget distribution plan.

As you progress and accrue monthly data of your own, you can determine core performance metrics per search engine. Use this data to reassess your budget distribution. If MSN is rocking for your PPC campaign, increase the budget! Find an under-performing campaign or ad group in Google or Yahoo! and transition that money to the better performing account. One of the first lessons I was taught in managing PPC is that it’s all about “swapping” the good for the bad. Find the campaigns/ad groups/keywords that are working well in terms of your most important KPI and then start removing spend/attention from those campaigns/ad groups/keywords that aren’t working well. Again – literally swap the good for the bad.

I hope that this serves as a simple starting point for determining budget distribution when creating new PPC campaigns. If you have any questions or would like to add to the discussion – please drop me a comment!

When I received the notice of this change I called my Yahoo Representative (whom I like very much). He said reserve pricing will help block out lesser-quality advertisers by increasing bids so much that it will not be viable for them to target irrelevant keywords. With this change, I told him that they also out-priced my client, who is EXTREMELY relevant for these now over-priced terms.

We chatted for a while longer and the only solution we could conjure was to work on my quality score. I told him that the quality index for all my ads were extremely high (4 or higher). So, basically, he said that I’m stuck with these new keyword prices. My response: not necessarily, because I can shift my PPC spend elsewhere.

With the quality index program that Yahoo has in place now, reserve pricing should have nothing to do with advertiser quality (as I was told). This has everything to do with squeezing more cash out of advertisers. Yahoo said it best on their blog:

While figuring out the value of a keyword can be complicated, we may look at a number of things to determine what it’s worth: for example, how many advertisers are bidding on your keyword, and what they’re willing to pay for it.

This means that they determine how much advertisers will pay, and then stick it to you. Yahoo says that they will reward advertisers for quality campaigns. I have seen this in affect in a few campaigns with minimal decreases on my CPCs. However, these would have to be some serious rewards in order to make this campaign viable for me again. I know that this campaign is of high quality and I’m still getting stuck with these outrageous CPCs. Basically, decrease my CPCs would have to go back to where they were to begin with.

I like Yahoo. I like rooting for the underdog.  But sometimes they make it difficult.  However, this doesn’t mean I’m going to throw in the towel right away, but they have me against the ropes. Has Yahoo’s reserve market price affected your campaigns? Let me know!

The new minimum bids are a little bit like auction house reserve prices, and can be based on multiple factors, such as your keyword quality and the keyword’s value—or how much we think that keyword is worth.

Yahoo’s first step towards a quality based PPC platform was with the Quality Index system for ad texts. This gives your ad text a score based on how relevant your copy is in comparison to the ads that it competes with. But Yahoo’s push to institute quality based minimum bid prices is all new. Before, all keywords had a minimum bid of $0.10. Theoretically, you could still pay less than that based on relevancy, competition, etc., but $0.10 was the bottom line.

The new process follows the Google model and essentially enforces a sliding scale for minimum bid prices. Now, a keyword you previously bid $0.10 could have a minimum bid of $0.50 or higher depending on quality, value or how much Yahoo! thinks that it is worth. Yes, on the flip side, your minimum bid could go down. But I’ll get to that later.

What does all of this mean for you? If you haven’t been checking the alerts in your YSM accounts, or at the very least your email – you could have keywords labeled as “Pending Inactive, Bid Too Low.” Keywords with this label have been affected by the new pricing structure. If this is the case, Yahoo! will give you a grace period of “several days” to increase the bid accordingly. After the grace period has ended, your “Pending Inactive” keywords will be shut off until you adjust the bid.

Now that this new pricing structure has been in place for a few days, advertisers are beginning to react to the roll-out. As far as I can tell, the reaction has been negative. Yahoo! accounts that we manage here at PPC Hero have been affected too. In every instance, we have been asked to increase bids. For a few accounts the bids increased to the point where we became quite uncomfortable with the new price.

What really irks me is that Yahoo! isn’t being forthright with information on keywords where the minimum bid actually decreases! There’s currently no way of knowing when the min. bid decreases, thus telling us advertisers we can actually lower our bid due to our relevancy.

When you consider the initial reaction and even our preliminary thoughts on this update, it seems that Yahoo! is really fattening their revenue stream as opposed to increasing relevancy for the end users. To give this a rough test, I have placed a highly targeted keyword into an isolated ad group in one of my Yahoo! accounts. The keyword is the name of the website, the keyword is in the domain and the keyword is plastered all over the landing page. Not to mention it’s about as relevant as it gets. I’ve set the bid to $0.10 and I’m going to wait and see what happens. If I’m asked to increase the bid: a) I’m going to get angry and b) I’ll be pretty certain that Yahoo’s #1 goal is to increase revenue.

What are everyone else’s thoughts on Yahoo’s new minimum bid pricing structure?