JANUARY HIGHLIGHTS
Speaking of love, thanks for all the support we’ve seen from all of our PPC Hero fans! January was an especially great month! We had our highest pageview month ever with 89,309 pageviews and 44,581 visits. We also had our highest pageview day to date on 1/9 with 4,678 views. Jeff’s “145 PPC Must-Do’s for 2012” broke our single blog post record by nearly 1/3! Squeeze every drop of PPC goodness out of 2012 with these tips, tricks, and must-do’s – there’s even a PDF download!

Bethany authored the second-most popular article, “4 PPC Misconceptions of AdWords Keywords.” Bethany did a fantastic job discussing the truth behind four common misconceptions that PPC managers often believe, from not deleting keywords because of lost account history to new keywords’ quality scores reflecting their performance.

The third most popular article, written by Rob, was entitled “The Single Biggest Mistake You Can Make in PPC.” Rob’s seemingly simple piece of advice, “Don’t ever make a change without fully understanding your desired outcome,” may be harder to follow through on than you would think. Taking his advice, however, will ensure that you don’t make the mistake letting “the bad chocolate” slip into your PPC box simply because you didn’t think through your end goal and desired outcome!

JANUARY BLOG SERIES AND VIDEOS
We enjoyed a great January blog series on Ad Testing, “How to Ad Test Using Best Practices” that covered a variety of topics from general best practices to setting up and running ad tests to the challenges you might face when testing your ads. I thought that Kayla brought out some great points about overcoming the challenges of ad testing. It may be difficult to wait for as long as needed when gathering data for testing, and even harder to “pull the trigger” and make the call on which ad to run, but you will be glad of your decision when the results pour in.

January’s most popular Whaddya Know Wednesdays video was on “How to Use Pivot Tables for PPC Data” http://www.ppchero.com/how-to-use-pivot-tables-for-ppc-data/). In the video, Sean explains how to make all your huge PPC data sets more digestible by using Excel pivot tables. Not only does he have excellent content to share, but also the soothing background music will provide you with a little midday relaxation!

UPCOMING IN FEBRUARY
This month, we’ll be presenting a blog series about showing your PPC account some love. Learn how to coddle your accounts and let them love you back with extraordinary results! Additionally, you can look forward to a guide on how to effectively inherit large PPC accounts.

WEBINARS
In January, Jeff presented an excellent webinar entitled “Growing Profits with Growing Budgets: When and How to Increase PPC Budgets.” If you missed it, you can view the recording here. In the pre-webinar video/interview below, Jeff explains the topic a bit more. I was excited for the great turnout of attendees we had, Jeff did a fabulous job of presenting tips when asking for an increased budget.

This month, Kayla Kurtz will be presenting another free webinar, “Ad Writing and Testing- Benefits and Best Practices.” It’s on Monday, February 20, from 5-6 (EST), and you can register here to preview a checklist for ad writing best practices, learn effective ad writing techniques to increase ROI, increase quality score, and decrease CPC, as well as receive a manageable calendar of how to test accurately. I highly suggest that you tune in for this next webinar – Kayla has great insight into ad writing and testing, and I’m looking forward to hearing her recommendations!

HERO CONF
If you’re a regular reader of PPC Hero, you’ve undoubtedly seen our posts about Hero Conf! If you’re at all interested in hearing from some of the best paid search speakers in the industry, you’ll want to register sooner rather than later. Space is truly unlimited and filling up quickly. Last Friday was the end of our super early bird special and a third of the total slots are already taken…with 70 days to go!

The next discount expires March 9 – Day 1 is $600 (discounted by more than 20%), Day 2 is $1350 (discounted by more than 25%), and both days are $1560 (discounted by more than 35%). Besides making you more awesome, the benefits of Hero Conf include:

• Hosted in Indianapolis, IN – home of Super Bowl XLVI! Less than a half-day from every major metro area in the US, Indianapolis is a safe and inexpensive city.
• Exclusive PPC content. There will be no “clutter” with irrelevant material. You can attend with specific purpose and leave with ready-to-implement strategies to improve your PPC campaigns.
• Low speaker attendee ratio. You will have opportunities to interact with PPC experts and ask questions related to your specific account issues.
• Accelerate professional skills and opportunities. You will have the opportunity to network with other professionals and vendors to understand and learn from what works in other industries. You will have the opportunity to make connections with potential partners and contacts to improve your business long term.
• Extended agenda. A full day of content will absolutely get your money’s worth.
• Best of both worlds perspective – Hero Conf includes speakers with both the big picture and “in the trenches” experience. You will get a broad understanding of industry best practice as well as issues you face day-to-day.

We are also delighted to announce two new speakers: Merry Morud, Online Marketing Account Manager at aimClear, and Bethany Bey, Account Manager at Hanapin Marketing and Blog Manager of PPC Hero. Merry will be speaking about social PPC, and Bethany will be presenting on the frustrations and opportunities in the life of a PPC account manager. Click on over to the Hero Conf website for the official and most up-to-date speaker list!

HERO CONF SPEAKER INTRODUCTIONS
We’ve had the opportunity to meet several of our Hero Conf speakers already! We have enjoyed an article by Shawn Livengood, and interviews by Matt Umbro, Marc Poirier, and our own Jeff Allen. I’m personally looking forward to hearing these gentlemen speak about Account Structure, Conversion Rate Optimization, Retargeting, and Mobile, respectively. (John Lee

CUSTOM ILLUSTRATIONS
Last month, Hero Conf presented three new movie posters – blockbusters that have been “hero-ized!”

In “The Wizards of Paid Search”, PPC Hero skips down the yellow brick road in search of the perfect PPC tip.

PPC Hero and SEO Boy are the stars in “Conversion Rate Redemption.”

In the third poster, PPC Hero explains how to “Avoid a Paid Search Slump.” Life is like a box of chocolates, but with Hero Conf, you know what you’re going to get – awesome PPC content presented and attended by dedicated paid search professionals!

This month, look for a poster based on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – “PPC Never Takes a Day Off!”

Thank you again for reading PPC Hero. We hope to see you at Hero Conf in April, and have fun showering your PPC accounts with love this month!

P.S. We’re hiring some great PPC Account Managers!

Applications are due by 5pm EST Thursday, February 9, so get started on that cover letter!

The ideal candidate…

• loves the Internet;
• obsessively makes to do lists;
• possesses a “whatever it takes” attitude;
• feels comfortable talking to a CEO or Joe the plumber; and
• eager and willing to tackle new experiences and situations.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING

• Account Management – work independently and with a team of other Account Executives on 5-10 PPC clients. Some are short-term consulting arrangements, while a vast majority are long-term engagements. You’ll be developing and optimizing client accounts to meet their established goals. Responsible for communicating with clients via email, phone and/or in-person, as well as completing and sending regular performance reports.
• Goal Setting and Tracking – work with clients to establish goals and to implement tracking for those goals, which will vary greatly in nature: rankings, traffic, leads, sales and/or revenue.
• Research, Analysis and Problem Solving – website audits, competitive research, keyword research, analysis of web analytics and much more. Research and implement best practice strategies for PPC and implement the best tactics to help our clients achieve their goals.
• Blogging – nearly 40,000 people read Hanapin’s blogs each month. After 6-12 months, become a muse at Hanapin and write for PPC Hero, our blog that covers the PPC industry.
• Marketing and Publicity – all Hanapin employees help grow the company through writing blog articles, making content updates to our corporate website, writing client proposals, speaking at conferences and seminars, networking, referring new clients, etc.

TRAITS, CHARACTERISTICS, AND REQUIREMENTS

• Ability to work on-site at our Bloomington office
• Eagerly willing to tackle unfamiliar problems and research “best practice” solutions
• Innate sense of urgency to complete projects quickly yet thoroughly
• Ability to prioritize tasks and focus on the vital few instead of the trivial many
• Keen critical thinking skills and problem solving abilities
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and demonstrated ability to “think on your feet”
• Can easily toggle between working independently and with others
• Strong interpersonal and organizational skills
• Demonstrated ability to manage deadlines
• Ability to work outside of normal office hours as needed or required by client projects

EXPERIENCE

• A four-year degree in marketing, advertising, finance, or related areas
• One or more years of experience in PPC, or
• Two or more years of general marketing experience.

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

• Competitive annual salary, paid every two weeks via direct deposit
• Paid time off for vacation, personal days, sick time and holidays
• Casual dress
• 100+ hours of initial and on-going training annually
• Self-scheduled working hours after six months of employment (eight hours from 7 am to 7 pm)
• Summer hours (Friday office hours are reduced to six in lieu of the normal eight)
• Performance reviews at 30/60/90/180 days and annually thereafter with the opportunity for raises every 12 months
• Simple IRA and company match
• Health, life, vision and dental insurance
• Paid parking pass
• Use of company-owned laptop (MacBook Pro) plus a second monitor
• Fringe benefits such as tuition reimbursement and adoption assistance
• No bureaucracy – direct and regular contact with our leadership team
• Recently renovated office space within walking distance of downtown Bloomington

HOW TO APPLY

1. Send an email to pat.east@hanapinmarketing.com
2. As the body of your email, include

1. A short but sweet bio/intro
2. A blog (personal or work related) you read regularly and why
3. Why this particular position and why Hanapin interests you
4. Where you learned about the job opening
5. If you’ve applied for a position here more than three months ago, please denote that and also include two examples of areas you’ve improved in or skills you’ve acquired — since the last time you applied — that would make you more valuable to our organization.

3. Attach your resume as a PDF.
4. Apply no later than 5 pm (EST) on Thursday, February 9, 2012. No phone calls or walk-ins, please.

HOW THE APPLICATION PROCESS WORKS

1. Due to the number of anticipated applications, we cannot respond to everyone. If we invite you to the first round, however, we’ll do so you within one business day of your submission.
2. If you are selected for the first round, and for all subsequent rounds, you’ll be notified via email if you do or don’t move on.
3. There are four rounds to our interview process:

1. written questions/answers via email
2. a telephone interview with two team members
3. a reception and information session
4. a face-to-face interview with two more team members

4. While we will accept applications until 5 pm (EDT) on Thursday, February 9, 2012, we’ll begin the first round as soon as we begin receiving applications.

Hanapin is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

• We moved into our newly renovated downtown office in the Certified Technology Park.
• We hired 16 new employees, pushing our head count to 22.
• We grew revenue by double-digits for the seventh consecutive year.
• I was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year at the 7th Annual Fuse Business Innovation Awards.
• We held our first two volunteer events at Habitat for Humanity and the Hoosier Hills Food Bank.
• We announced Hero Conf and our awesome, star-studded speaker lineup!
• Total blog visitors increased 49%, year over year.
• Total unique visitors increased 33% year over year.
• Total pageviews increased 66% year over year.

I’m extraordinarily proud of our team – they’ve put in a lot of hard work and effort, and it clearly paid off! Big thanks to Rob Boyd, our Account Supervisor, for leading our paid search team, and to Bethany Bey, our Blog Manager. Not only did she lead our blogging efforts, she single-handedly generated 6% of our total pageviews last year!

2012 is already off to a great start! We’ve already landed a new client, and it’s only the third business day of the year! So, I guess we’re really not starting “fresh,” it’s just business as usual here. Now, a quick recap of the blog highlights from December and what’s on deck for January!

DECEMBER HIGHLIGHTS
The most popular December article was written by Jeff Allen, with 4 PPC Mistakes that Kill Your Career generating 958 pageviews. Another one from Jeff that I think is one of the best blog posts of the year is Better PPC Results Start with “Yes”. Just replace “PPC” with anything else in your life, and you’ve got a great recipe for success! Must be that Utah influence that keeps him cranking out such good articles!

The third (more below on the second most popular article) most popular December article, with 587 pageviews, was 7 Tips for PPC On A Budget by PPC Hero Ally Mike Williams. Mike put together a great blog post with tips that can help you stretch your small-budget accounts, such as choosing a niche and traveling down the long tail.

Last month, the PPC Hero team put together an excellent series on AdWords extensions. Out of this series came the fourth most popular article, written by Felicia Coover. Ad Extensions In 5 Days! Site Links – Small But Mighty!! generating 569 pageviews.

One of my favorites was a blooper reel that Amanda created for our Holiday party. Forewarning, parts of it are NSFW, so put on your headphones!

MULTI-CHANNEL FUNNELS
The team also created an informative guide to Google’s Multi-Channel Funnels with five chapters packed full of tips for PPC managers. This great guide ended up being our second-most popular article in December, with 671 pageviews. It’s one of Google’s biggest and most important innovations in recent memory, so we also wrote a follow-up post called 5 Questions You Need To Answer About Your PPC Account Using MCF. And, there’s even a video!

More MCF goodness from Google below:

• http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/08/introducing-multi-channel-funnels.html
• http://www.google.com/analytics/analytics-funnels.html

UPCOMING IN JANUARY
This month, we’ll write a blog series on Ad Testing, which should start next week. The series will cover everything from best practices to ad testing strategies, and I’m personally looking forward to seeing what the team produces on this blog series. We’ll also continue our “Ultimate Guide” series with a new guide at the end of January covering URL tracking.

WEBINARS
Hanapin’s second webinar, Budget and Bidding for Successful ROAS, was a great success this last December. January’s webinar will be an excellent one that you won’t want to miss. Jeff will present “When and How to Increase PPC Budgets.” Discover three tricks for ensuring increased revenue and profits, learn what reports to show your clients to justify increased budget – saving their time and yours – and get tips for effectively selling to a client! Register here to join us for this incredible webinar on Monday, January 23 from 3-4 pm EST.

HERO CONF
Over the past couple months, I hoped you’ve noticed the movie poster adaptations promoting Hero Conf. Our illustrator, Jeremiah Murphy, has done a great job of revising blockbuster movie posters with PPC Hero as the star to let everyone know about our first paid search conference!

In November, Marty McFly stepped aside for PPC Hero in PPC Is The Future, and in December, PPC Hero and friends went searching for conversions in O Conversions, Where Art Thou?

Keep your eyes open for two new Hero Conf posters coming soon – our own spins on The Wizard of Oz [edit: my team got to this faster planned - here's the link: http://www.ppchero.com/the-wizards-of-paid-search/] and Forrest Gump.

The conference itself has picked up quite a bit of momentum since we announced it in October. We have a fantastic line-up of speakers, including two newly confirmed speakers: Elizabeth Burkholder, Agency Lead at Google, and our own Jeff Allen, Account Executive at Hanapin Marketing. The current speaker list includes:

Andrew Goodman
Founder and President of Page Zero, a full-service marketing agency.
Follow on Twitter @andrew_goodman 

Brad Geddes
Founder of Certified Knowledge, an online paid search training and toolset provider.
Follow on Twitter @bgtheory

Crystal Anderson
Spearheads the Paid Search division at Seer Interactive
Follow on Twitter @CrystalA

Elizabeth Burkholder
Agency Lead at Google

Elizabeth Marsten
Director of Search Marketing at Portent Interactive

Jeff Allen
Account Executive at Hanapin Marketing, PPC Hero blog author
Follow on Twitter @jeffallenUT

Joe Kerschbaum
Vice President of Clix Marketing, Author of Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour a Day
Follow on Twitter @JoeKerschbaum

John Lee
Director of Client Services at Clix Marketing
Follow on Twitter @John_A_Lee

Joanna Lord
Director of Customer Acquisition & Engagement at SEOmoz
Follow on Twitter @JoannaLord

Kevin Lee
CEO and Co-Founder of Did It
Follow on Twitter @Kevin_Lee_QED

Lisa Raehsler
SEM/PPC Strategy Consultant at Big Click Company
Follow on Twitter @lisarocksSEM

Marc Poirier
Co-Founder and CMO of Acquisio
Follow on Twitter @marcpoirier

Marty Weintraub
CEO and Founder of aimClear
Follow on Twitter @aimclear

Matt Umbro
Senior PPC Specialist at Exclusive Concepts, Founder of PPC Chat
Follow on Twitter @Matt_Umbro

Matt Van Wagner
President and Founder of Find Me Faster
Follow on Twitter @mvanwagner

Melissa Mackey
Search Marketing Manager at Fluency Media
Follow on Twitter @Mel66

Nate Jeo
Paid Search Operations Manager at Overstock.com

Robert Brady
Director of PPC & Conversion at Trafficado, Author of the blog Righteous Marketing
Follow on Twitter @robert_brady

Shawn Livengood
Online Marketing Manager at BuildASign.com, Author of the blog PPC Without Pity
Follow on Twitter @slivengood

Hero Conf is a break from the “normal” search conference. It’s in the Midwest, where everyone can easily travel to in less than half a day and overnight accommodations won’t cost you as much as the conference registration!

The content is also 100% paid search – every single panel, every single speaker, and every single activity we have planned revolves around PPC! No need to sit through non-PPC tracks; you can focus solely on PPC! This conference has an extended agenda that is jam-packed from start to finish (starting Sunday night with a welcome reception and ending with a lunch on Tuesday for those attending Day 2) with exclusive content from agency pros, in-house specialists, software companies, and even Google!

It’s also an intimate conference – the ratio of speakers to attendees will be 5:1 – which is one of the smallest I personally know of and it allows you to really learn from and network with everyone on a much deeper level. This small ratio increases the chances that you’ll come away with some great tactics and strategies that will accelerate the performance of your paid search account!

Hero Conf will take place on April 16-17 in Indianapolis. Through February 3, take advantage of our discounted pricing! Day 1 is $450 (discounted by more than 50%), Day 2 is $1200 (discounted by nearly 30%), and both days are $1320 (discounted by nearly 40%). Register here: http://www.heroconf.com/pages/Register.html.

Even though we fell short of goal, it’s important to celebrate what we did accomplish. We started our blog re-investment in March, and we’ve shown significant growth! Comparing the 275 days since then to the same time frame before that, we increased visits and pageviews 54% and 76%, respectively! And, comparing March to November, monthly visits are up 61% and monthly pageviews are up 76%!

POPULAR NOVEMBER POSTS
Last month, our series on How to Prepare PPC Accounts for the Holiday Season drove the highest weekly traffic in November. And, we had our highest pageview day in the history of the blog on 11/22 with 3,941 pageviews!

Our top blog post in November was a guest post by Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing. His article, If You’re Not Using This Gmail Ad Targeting Tactic, You’re Missing Out generated 1,222 pageviews in the past few days.

The second and third most read articles were written by our own Jeff Allen! Google Bottom Ad Placements Eroding CTR and 4 Questions to Ask Your Google Analytics generated 829 and 712 pageviews, respectively. Jeff writes some very introspective articles on paid search. Check out his author page for more of his Utah goodness!

Our top video post was How to Prepare a Landing Page Report in Excel by Amanda and Jessica, which generated 462 page views.

HOOSIER HILLS FOOD BANK VOLUNTEER DAY
On the Monday evening before Thanksgiving, nine Hanapin employees volunteered at the Hoosier Hills Food Bank. HHFB collects, stores and distributes food to non-profit agencies that feed the hungry in Bloomington, Indiana and the surrounding counties. Since opening in 1982, Hoosier Hills Food Bank has distributed over 30 million pounds of food. We had a great time repacking rescued meals into family-size portions for distribution, and enjoyed the opportunity to help out our community!

WEBINARS
Hanapin held our first ever webinar, Tips to Boost Quality Score: Structuring Your Account for Success on November 29. If you missed it, feel free to check out the webinar recording! Abby covered account structure best practices, offered tips for boosting Quality Score through your account structure, and included a step-by-step process for analyzing account Quality Score. We had a great turnout for the webinar and are excited to present our second webinar on bidding and budget strategy on December 15, 2011 at 1 pm EST. Registration is open, and you can get more details here. Speaking of December events…

DECEMBER TOPICS AND BLOG SERIES
The end of the year provides the perfect opportunity for reflecting about the past 12 months and looking forward to a new year. Therefore, we will be presenting a video about PPC changes in 2011 and our predictions for 2012. You can also look forward to the rest of our series on Ad Extensions that is currently running. Check out Kayla’s intro post and Felicia’s post on site links!

WIN AN AMAZON GIFT CARD!
Everyone likes Amazon Gift Cards, so we are offering $25 gift cards to five participants in our PPC Hero Readership Survey. Please take a few minutes prior to December 20th to share a little bit about yourself and how you fit into the PPC industry in order to enter the gift card drawing.

CUSTOM ILLUSTRATIONS
November saw PPC Hero and friends celebrating four holidays: Veteran’s Day on 11/11/11, Absurdity Day on 11/20, Thanksgiving on 11/24, and Cyber Monday on 11/28.

In December, PPC Hero will celebrate the anniversary of everyone’s favorite iPhone and iPad game, Angry Birds, on 12/10. On 12/25, we’ll celebrate the holiday with gift giving, family, and leaving cookies and milk for Santa! PPC Hero is also looking forward to bringing in 2012 on New Year’s Eve (12/31).

HERO CONF
We had the pleasure of announcing confirmed Hero Conf speakers a couple of weeks ago. We’re excited to hear the following speakers on April 16-17 in Indianapolis this coming spring.

• Andrew Goodman
• Brad Geddes
• Crystal Anderson
• Elizabeth Marsten
• Joe Kerschbaum
• John Lee
• Joanna Lord
• Kevin Lee
• Lisa Raehsler
• Marc Poirier
• Marty Weintraub
• Matt Umbro
• Matt Van Wagner
• Melissa Mackey
• Nate Jeo

We have a great mix from across the industry – folks who are regular speakers at SES and SMX (like Raehsler), in-house folks (like Jeo from Overstock.com), emerging influencers (like Umbro who started #ppcchat), and elder statesmen in paid search (like Goodman and Geddes). We also have folks from the paid search software industry (like Poirier) and regular keynoters (like Weintraub).

We have also confirmed two new speakers since our announcement on November 21st! It will be a pleasure to have Robert Brady, author of the Righteous Marketing blog, and Shawn Livengood, author of the blog PPC Without Pity, join us at Hero Conf. We’ll announce our agenda later this month, so stay tuned for that, as well as for further Hero Conf updates!

We’re now at the 240-day mark of our blog re-investment, and the Hanapin team continues to make great progress toward our goals. Comparing the previous 240 days to the same time frame before that, we’re now up 47% and 67% in visits and pageviews, respectively! Two months ago, we were at 31% and 47%, so we continue to make great strides.

Our specific company goal is to increase monthly pageviews to 91,906 by December 1. October finished at 75,547 so we’ve achieved about 82% of goal. We need a big, big November to hit our goal, and the team has some great content planned for November! But first…

TOP POSTS FROM OCTOBER
October produced our highest pageview day in the history of PPC Hero! October 18 generated 3,844 pageviews. The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords Quality Score was still a favorite article among our readers, followed by The 10 Cardinal Sins of Paid Search Marketing, written by guest blogger Ellerton Whitney. The third most popular article in October was the PPC Toolkit: Resources for Improving Your PPC Accounts by Abby Woodcock, which highlighted available resources on PPC Hero, covering topics ranging from Google Analytics to Remarketing.

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER
As I mentioned, we announced PPC Hero’s first paid search conference, Hero Conf, which will take place on April 16 & 17 in Indianapolis, IN. We have several top-tier marketers lined up, and I can’t wait to officially announce them!

Another October highlight was Sarah, Felicia, Dave and Kayla’s great series on ‘How to Manage a ___________ PPC Account,’ which covered how to manage a low search volume account, an account with a small budget, an account that doesn’t run in AdWords, and an e-commerce account with no conversion tracking. They really covered it all in this informative series!

Last but certainly not least, we have a new PPC Hero Ally, John Rampton! He posts every Monday and has already written six posts! By the way, if you’re interested in guest posting on PPC Hero, please email ppchero@hanapinmarketing.com.

NOVEMBER BLOG SERIES
This month, lots of businesses are preparing for the upcoming holidays, so we’ve decided to bring you an exciting series to help you get your PPC accounts in top shape before Cyber Monday! Kayla has already posted the intro to the series, and Sarah has written the first post about holiday-specific keyword research. The entire series features a distinctive Christmas theme, and it runs this week, giving you plenty of time to prep your accounts before the holiday rush!

ON DECK FOR NOVEMBER
This time of year provides lots of opportunities for giving and volunteering to help the less fortunate. The Hanapin team will be volunteering at the Hoosier Hills Food Bank to package food in a few weeks. This is a great opportunity for us to get to know our co-workers better and to help others! We’ll take plenty of pictures, and I’ll post them next month.

Toward the end of this month, we’ll post a guide to Multi-Channel Funnels (aka Multi-Channel Tracking and aka Cross-Channel Reporting) for paid search. Our quality score guide was such a big hit that we’ve decided to create ‘ultimate guides’ for several topics, and multi-channel funnels will be our second in the series (at least, it’ll be as close to ‘ultimate’ as we can get since multi-channel funnels were just released two months ago.

PPC VIDEOS – WHADDYA’KNOW WEDNESDAYS
In October, Amanda put together several informative videos for us. For easy viewing, we’ve included titles and embedded videos below!

Stay tuned this month for upcoming installments of Whaddya’know Wednesday, which will include our 5 favorite things about the new adCenter interface!

CUSTOM ILLUSTRATIONS
PPC Hero celebrated World Vegetarian Day on October 1 with Ms. Clicks, although he got in trouble for his lack of manners! Just recently for Halloween, PPC Hero and clan decided to dress up as The Addams Family!

In November, PPC Hero will be celebrating four holidays. On 11/11, we will have a special image to commemorate Veteran’s Day. Absurdity Day is on 11/20, so PPC Hero will be celebrating the crazy! Thanksgiving, on 11/24, is a time for us to give thanks for family, friends, and the good things in life, as well as stuff ourselves eating a delicious dinner! PPC Hero will have a custom image for Cyber Monday as well on 11/28, which is quickly becoming the biggest online shopping sales day of the year!

Thank you, as always, for reading PPC Hero! We’re excited to be starting a new month with all of you!

Our specific company goal is to increase monthly pageviews to 91,906 by December 1. August finished at 66,838, so we’ve achieved about 72% of goal. Considering we were at ~42K pageviews in March, I’m very please with the progress the team has made.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM AUGUST
There are a handful of blog posts that performed really well in August, and I’d like to give credit where credit’s due! Our “Starting An AdWords Account From Scratch” series brought in the highest pageview day (8/10) for 2010-2011 with 3275 pageviews. That week was also the highest pageview week ever with 16,614! Our Ultimate Guide to Quality Score was the most-viewed article for the second month in a row, so we’re planning another “Ultimate Guide to….” If you have topic suggestions, please post in the comments. Last but not least, Bethany wrote a whopping eight blog posts last month, and her post about her top five AdWords filters was the second-most viewed.

ARTICLES FOR SEPTEMBER
We’ve noticed that the articles that seem to generate the most interest are the ones that cover core topics of PPC – things like keyword research or keyword bidding, which are both essential to understanding PPC well. So, two of our articles (out of 20-30) will focus on those core PPC topics this month! We’ll reveal our techniques for SQR (search query report) mining in adCenter, and we’ll look at the reliability of first page bids and how much weight you should put on them as an account manager. We’ll also have some coverage of a Bing/Yahoo! workshop in Chicago that Dave and Felicia attended yesterday. Hopefully, we’ll have some insightful and never-before-seen information for you!

BLOG SERIES
At Hanapin, we love the Display Network. Properly done, it can generate a huge amount of traffic and conversions and really help grow an account once your Search Network is largely tapped. Many advertisers shy away from it either because the leads aren’t that good (not necessarily true) or because they simply don’t know how to properly advertise on the Display Network. We’ll cover the basics that every PPC manager should know and cover some advanced techniques for improving performance. The potential traffic from the Display Network is larger than that of the Search Network, and if you’d like to learn how to fully taking advantage of it, look for this series toward the end of the month.

CUSTOM IMAGES
This month, we have four days that PPC Hero will be celebrating! September 13 is “Defy Superstition Day.” Dave already told me that he’s dressing up as Stevie Wonder for the day. He was such a good sport for SEO Boy, and I hope he’ll do the same for this one! September 21st is “World Gratitude Day,” and I know I’ll be appreciative of Dave dressing up as Stevie Wonder on the 13th. September 27th is Google’s birthday, and regardless of there being different days of when Google was founded we wouldn’t be here without them, so we’ll be celebrating them regardless!

Last but not least, we’ll have a special PPC Hero image to commemorate 9/11. It’s the 10th anniversary, and I still remember where I was when I heard the news. I was about a quarter mile away from work, driving north on 37 and listening to Bob & Tom. When the first plane hit, they weren’t sure what was happening. After the second plane hit, they said they assumed it was terrorists, and I actually thought how irresponsible it was to say that without verifying first. Wow, how small I acted, and who knew all of the terror that would happen that day.

On a much lighter note, I’d like to highlight the video our team posted last Sunday. It was for “Race Your Chair Around The Office Day!” and who knew that Abby and Bryan has such a rivalry! We work hard and like to have fun too, and we’re adding several more Account Executives to our team. Today is the last day to apply!

VIDEOS
Speaking of videos, Amanda has been doing a great job with “Whaddya’know Wednesdays” She rolled up her sleeves and with little direction, has been cranking out some great videos. In particular this month, she’ll look into the lives of PPC managers and how we prioritize our PPC tasks. The multi-interview format has been pretty popular so we’ll be following that same format for this one too! (BTW, we’re trying to secure the ppchero username for our YouTube channel to replace ppcheroblog. If anyone knows how to expedite a request and make sure the right people see it, please post in the comments. Thanks!)

As always, thank you for reading PPC Hero!

Hanapin Marketing is a paid search agency based in Bloomington, Indiana. Founded in 2004, their focus is on helping enterprise-level clients eliminate untargeted traffic while increasing conversions with no increase in budget. Everyone on their team is certified in Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter, and they’re one of 200 agencies globally that has a team of dedicated Google AdWords representatives. They publish PPC Hero, the industry’s foremost blog on pay per click advertising. Hanapin has worked with more than 150 clients, including several Inc 5000 winners and Fortune 500 companies. The company carries zero debt, is profitable, and has generated double-digit annual growth since its inception. Hanapin has a talented staff of 16 employees with plans to add 10 positions by the end of the year.

Account Executive – Bloomington, IN

We are currently seeking several Account Executives to join our team, with and without PPC experience, who want to work with some of the best companies nationwide. While PPC experience is preferred, it’s not required, as we have a comprehensive and intensive 12-week training program to get you up to speed on everything we do. Spend your days where your talents and intelligence are appreciated and make a difference!

The ideal candidate…

• loves the Internet;
• obsessively makes to do lists;
• possesses a “whatever it takes” attitude;
• feels comfortable talking to a CEO or Joe the plumber; and
• eager and willing to tackle new experiences and situations.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING

• Account Management – work independently and with a team of other Account Executives on 5-10 PPC clients. Some are short-term consulting arrangements, while a vast majority are long-term engagements. You’ll be developing and optimizing client accounts to meet their established goals. Responsible for communicating with clients via email, phone and/or in-person, as well as completing and sending regular performance reports.
• Goal Setting and Tracking – work with clients to establish goals and to implement tracking for those goals, which will vary greatly in nature: rankings, traffic, leads, sales and/or revenue.
• Research, Analysis and Problem Solving – website audits, competitive research, keyword research, analysis of web analytics and much more. Research and implement best practice strategies for PPC and implement the best tactics to help our clients achieve their goals.
• Blogging – nearly 40,000 people read Hanapin’s blogs each month. After 6-12 months, become a muse at Hanapin and write for PPC Hero, our blog that covers the PPC industry.
• Marketing and Publicity – all Hanapin employees help grow the company through writing blog articles, making content updates to our corporate website, writing client proposals, speaking at conferences and seminars, networking, referring new clients, etc.

TRAITS, CHARACTERISTICS, AND REQUIREMENTS

• Ability to work on-site at our Bloomington office
• Eagerly willing to tackle unfamiliar problems and research “best practice” solutions
• Innate sense of urgency to complete projects quickly yet thoroughly
• Ability to prioritize tasks and focus on the vital few instead of the trivial many
• Keen critical thinking skills and problem solving abilities
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and demonstrated ability to “think on your feet”
• Can easily toggle between working independently and with others
• Strong interpersonal and organizational skills
• Demonstrated ability to manage deadlines
• Ability to work outside of normal office hours as needed or required by client projects

EXPERIENCE

• A four-year degree in marketing, advertising, finance, or related areas
• One or more years of experience in PPC, or
• Two or more years of general marketing experience.

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

• Competitive annual salary, paid every two weeks via direct deposit
• Paid time off for vacation, personal days, sick time and holidays
• Casual dress
• 100+ hours of initial and on-going training annually
• Self-scheduled working hours after six months of employment (eight hours from 7 am to 7 pm)
• Summer hours (Friday office hours are reduced to six in lieu of the normal eight)
• Performance reviews at 30/60/90/180 days and annually thereafter with the opportunity for raises every 12 months
• Simple IRA and company match
• Health, life, vision and dental insurance
• Paid parking pass
• Use of company-owned laptop (MacBook Pro) plus a second monitor
• Fringe benefits such as tuition reimbursement and adoption assistance
• No bureaucracy – direct and regular contact with our leadership team
• Recently renovated office space within walking distance of downtown Bloomington

HOW TO APPLY

Please visit http://www.hanapinmarketing.com/careers_open_positions_ae.aspx and follow the application instructions.

HOW THE APPLICATION PROCESS WORKS

1. Due to the number of anticipated applications, we cannot respond to everyone. If we invite you to the first round, however, we’ll do so you within one business day of your submission.
2. If you are selected for the first round, and for all subsequent rounds, you’ll be notified via email if you do or don’t move on.
3. There are four rounds to our interview process:
   1. written questions/answers via email
   2. a telephone interview with two team members
   3. a reception and information session
   4. a face-to-face interview with two more team members
4. While we will accept applications until 5 pm (EDT) on Thursday, September 1, 2011, we’ll begin the first round as soon as we begin receiving applications.

Hanapin is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

We’re now at the 150-day mark of our blog re-investment, and our team at Hanapin is making great progress toward our goals! Comparing the previous 150 days to the same time frame before that, we’re now up 25% and 37% in visits and pageviews, respectively! Last month, we were at 23% and 32%, so we’re making great strides.

ARTICLES
We’ve got a variety of topics on the docket for this month. We’ve already written about how to diagnose a problem PPC account, and we produced a video with 5 tips to improve a PPC account’s performance. Later this month, we’ll cover bidding strategies, both basic and advanced, and how various bidding strategies affect the performance of your accounts. We’ll also post the results of our second-tier search engines survey, and one of our PPC Hero allies, Portent Interactive, has written an ebook on how to pass the Microsoft AdExcellence exam. (You can see our tips for passing the AdWords exam!) We’ll post a review of their ebook, and in the meantime, you can view their complete AdExcellence guide.

BLOG SERIES
We’ve written a handful of blog series this year, and they’ve generally focused on the fundamentals of paid search. In April, we wrote one on Google Analytics, and in June, we wrote one on Excel. Both were well received, so this month we’ve decided to focus on another fundamental – how to setup a paid search account from scratch. We’ve setup quite a few PPC accounts here at Hanapin, and we’ll tell you all the ins and outs. For those newbies out there, this’ll be a great how-to guide to help you through the process. Are you using the right settings? Have you split out search from display campaigns? How did you structure the account? And, for those PPC experts, don’t pass this one over! I bet we’ll surprise you with one or two things you’re not doing that you should be!

CUSTOM IMAGES
This month, we have three holidays that PPC Hero will be celebrating! August 8 is “Sneak a Zucchini on Your Neighbor’s Porch Day;” 8/10 is “National Lazy Day,” and on 8/28, we’ll have a video of the Hanapin team for “Race Your Chair Around The Office Day!”

THANK YOU
Last but not least, I’d like to thank a few of our PPC Hero allies for making July our biggest pageview month ever! The folks over at BoostCTR started a weekly column for us called Ads In The Wild. The folks over at 7Search, AdKnowledge, and eZanga contributed to our series on second-tier search engines. And, thank you to everyone who linked to and tweeted about our revamped and ultimate quality score guide. The day after we published it was our highest pageview day since July of 2009! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Hockey players have to get better individually to succeed as a team: You want a PPC account manager who is competitive and has a desire to constantly improve their own skills, as well as the performance of their accounts and agency team. Paid search is very much like a game. It’s a game for who can write the best ads, generate the highest click-through and conversion rates, and deliver the best results – and not just the best results among the folks on your team, but among all advertisers competing for those same keywords. If you don’t have a competitive fire in your gut and you simply split test for the sake of split testing, you’ll lose out to the person who always wants to get better individually and as a team.

Hockey players build relationships: “It’s been 13 years since my last competitive game yet I run into former teammates, competitors, coaches, and player parents all the time…even in business,” Rob says. The hockey network is strong. Before launching PPC Hero, 100% of our business came from personal relationships or referrals. Now, clients say they’ve been reading our blog for years. They feel like they’ve developed a relationship with us, which makes it easy to trust and hire us if they’re looking for a paid search agency.

Hockey players are accountable: At the end of a tough loss in a game, everyone is down on themselves and thinking about what they could have done better, and it translates into practice the next week. We learn from our mistakes and celebrate our victories. Running paid search campaigns is all about identifying what you’ve done well and intentionally replicating that, but it’s also about identifying what you could improve on and prioritizing that list according to biggest and quickest impact on an account.

We hope we’ve shown through these employee profiles that being a great search marketer is not so much about one’s background or degree – it’s more about one’s personal traits and characteristics and how those translate into account management. We’ve learned this through eight years of hiring new folks to join our team, and we hope this knowledge helps you bring on great search marketers too!

First, it would probably help to define a life scientist. Life sciences “comprise all fields of science that involve the scientific study of living organisms, like plants, animals, and human beings.” A life scientist would naturally be someone who studies in the field of life sciences, and, prior to Hanapin, Jessica earned her degree in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As you may have read in the first post of this series, we’ve been hiring people for eight years at Hanapin, and we’ve determined that one’s personal traits and characteristics are more important in determining their success as a search marketer than one’s background or degree. Thus, we thought it’d be important to exemplify this idea by profiling our three Account Supervisors who all fall into some kind of stereotype. Below is our profile of Jessica Niver, the “life scientist!”

Natural interest in how parts of a system work together to make a whole: There are many facets to a high-performing paid search program. From keywords, to ads, to landing pages, to bids, to budgets, and countless more buttons and levers you can push and pull in an account. Beyond interactions within a PPC account itself, you must account for the interactions between SEO and PPC and the ways in which changes in one area of online marketing can affect the performance of another. Even beyond those parts of the system, the best paid search program can’t help a bad website or bad business model. Great search marketers make recommendations to their clients on fundamental changes they can make to their business, whether it’s something as simple as changing the offer (e.g. free shipping on orders more than $50) based on lifetime customer value or what competitors are doing or a bigger wholesale change like targeting a new customer segment (e.g. market to Christian authors and setup a new publishing imprint) based on high search volume (customer demand) and lack of competitors (market gap).

Everything plays by the rules of evolution: Data doesn’t lie, and the best ads are the ones that have the highest click-through rates. They’re the ones that resonate most with customers. They offer something competitors don’t (otherwise, they would have clicked on those ads, right?). The best ads aren’t the ones that the boss likes the most or that are the freshest. “It needs to be refreshed” is a standard reason that marketers use for writing different copy. The same thing applies to keywords: the best ones generate the most conversions within the client’s high/low cost per conversion range. They’re not the ones that best describe the business (though they sometimes are), they’re not the ones that have the highest search volume (though they sometimes are), and they’re not the ones that are most or least expensive (though they sometimes are). The data tells you what is best, and whatever isn’t best gets paused or deleted in favor of the ads, keywords, landing pages, et. al. that do.

Interest in identifying a “disease” and “curing” it: Because there are so many facets of a PPC account, and because there are so many moving parts (new advertisers coming into the space, searchers’ habits changing, Google or Bing making a new announcement, and countless other variables) a paid search account is a living, breathing thing. What works one day doesn’t always work the next day. Sometimes there’s a discrete and identifiable reason, like a setting you inadvertently changed that you can simply change back. Sometimes there’s a less visible reason, like a high cost per lead after you’ve added new keywords but the high cost per lead isn’t attributable to those keywords. What if some were duplicates? Google should display the one with the highest quality score, thus generating a good cost per lead, and we’ve found that this doesn’t always happen. Duplicates can confuse Google, and removing the ones with poor quality score can make the entire system perform better. It took a while to find that one out, particularly because it shouldn’t happen and because it takes a persistent mind to find the root cause.

Ability to focus on both the tiny, “cellular” level and big picture “ecosystem” level while balancing the best interests of both: Google likes to throw lots of curve balls at us by having several different types of quality scores. There’s the visible quality score, which is the keyword-level quality score. There’s a landing page quality score. There’s an account-level quality score, which is the overall health of the account, and there’s even a historical quality score, which is kind of like a crowd-sourced quality score from all advertisers for a single keyword. All of that is a long and complicated way of saying you have to keep an eye on lots of different parts of the account and determine which ones matter and which ones don’t. Also, you often have to make a decision on which ones matter most and prioritize the “curing” of them ahead of others and establish the time frame for when you do not just assess and triage them but when you can work on them.

That’s a wrap for our second “stereotypes” profile! We hope you now know that you can trust a life scientist to do great work on your PPC account. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s profile about the “hockey player.”