You can find this box on the homepage, right above the PPC Hero Twitter feed. Want to know how to boost your spend without increasing CPL? Ask PPC Hero! Want to know more about expanding your account on the Display Network? Ask PPC Hero! Your questions will be used as inspiration for full blog posts as well as answered in a new monthly Ask PPC Hero series.

Let use know if you have any questions in the comments below. We look forward to hearing from you!

ARTICLES
Late last month, I received an email from a friend of mine at One Click Ventures. They’re an e-commerce company that buys undervalued web properties, redesigns the sites, and markets them smarter and harder. They do quite a bit of PPC, and they’re transitioning their accounts from credit cards to invoicing to make reconciling easier. It’s relatively easy in Google AdWords, but harder than it should be in Microsoft adCenter. You can actually hurt your performance in adCenter by transitioning, so we’ll have articles covering the process on both search engines to make it as quick and pain-free as possible for you!

We’re also updating our quality score handbook and our quality score survey. We’ve had lots of great articles on quality score since launching the handbook four years ago, and these will update our definitive guides! Our current handbook still ranks in a top position for pageviews month over month, so we’re excited to be able to offer a new and improved version.

SERIES
Last month, we expanded Jessica Cates‘ post on Excel tips into a full-blown blog series. Her post generated twice as many pageviews of any other post, and the series helped make June our highest visit and pageview month ever.

This month, we have not just one series but two!

The first is about second- or third-tier search engines. We’ve asked reps from several search engines to write a guest post to give you more insight into the benefits of adding them to the mix, and we’ll also put to rest whether they’re called second- or third-tier engines (we’ve used both on PPC Hero!).

The second series is called “why to trust a (insert stereotype) with your PPC account.” It’s the brain child of Amy Hoffman, one of Hanapin’s Account Supervisors and mobile search nerd. I’ll be penning it myself, and it’ll focus on how and why certain backgrounds make for good PPC managers. I’ll write three of them to highlight each of our Account Supervisors, and I’ll post them each Monday starting on the 11th. Amy is the “farmer’s daughter,” Jessica is the “life scientist,” and Rob is the “hockey player.”

HABITAT FOR HUMANITY
Taking a cue from PPC Hero, on June 22nd, the team headed out to do some good in the Bloomington community! As voted on by our readers, we headed to help out Habitat for Humanity. The sun was shining and a good time was had by all. For search marketers, we found ourselves surprisingly good at moving and building walls, hammering nails, and framing floors. We look forward to cruising by the finished product and hope the future residents enjoy their new home!

BELLHOPPED
Now, for the first of our two big announcements! Bellhopped is a new website that we’re launching later this summer. The purpose is to help clients find great paid search firms by budget, experience, background, contract terms, location, and more! The entire team brainstormed the name based on the characteristics we want the site to emulate: trustworthy, clean, intuitive, reputable, informative, warm, welcoming, and custom. We thought of more than 100 names and ultimately the winner was Bellhopped since 1) bellhops emulate all of the characteristics we want and 2) adding “ed” to the end is a nice play-on-words to say “you’ve been Bellhopped” when you find a great paid search firm on our site.

We hired a firm from Tennessee called Level 2 Design, and they’re doing a fantastic job on our retro web design. Below is one of the pencil sketches they did of the exterior of our hotel and the colorized and final version of the same. We’ve blurred it to leave something to the imagination before launch!

You can sign up for announcements here: http://www.bellhopped.com/

HERO CONF
The second announcement is that we’re launching our own paid search conference! Hero Conf will be October 17 & 18 in downtown Indianapolis. While registration isn’t open yet, here’s the general schedule:

Day 1 will be a traditional conference format with two tracks of speakers. We have ~10 slots available, and we’ll reach out to folks in the industry soon, so if there’s someone you think should speak (including you!), send me their name at pat dot east at hanapinmarketing dot com. We’re targeting 50-100 attendees, who are in-house or agency paid search marketers of varying skill levels and experience. We’ll start early in the morning and go until 5 or 6. We’ll have a social event that night or a welcoming event the night before!

Day 2 will be a more intimate workshop where up to 15 attendees will work on their account with 1 or 2 Hanapin team members. Unlike attendees from day 1, these folks will be managing accounts in-house with at least $25K/mo in spend. We’ll help them generate better performance for their accounts, show them the strategies and tactics we use, and help them implement the things they learned from day 1. We’ll start in the morning and be done by lunch-time.

Keep your eyes peeled for more details coming soon!

Thanks again for reading PPC Hero, and I’ll see you again in a couple weeks!

Since March, when we started the reinvestment in our blogs, the team has really focused their efforts, and it’s paying off in spades. We’re engaging our readers more by getting topic suggestions from them and holding contests, we’ve restarted our blog series, and introduced new elements like the video blog and Twitter interviews. Overall, visits and pageviews have grown significantly as a result! Comparing the previous 90 days to the same time frame before that, we’re now up 19% and 25%, respectively, for PPC Hero! (We inadvertently lost some stats on SEO Boy, though we’re looking into whether a second analytics program was tracking.)

Since I’m already talking about the Hanapin team, before I get into what’s in store on the blogs this month, we have a lot happening that I want to share first.

We have two new Account Executives starting next week, who join the five who have already started this year! We’ve already begun looking for two more – with 2+ years of paid search experience managing accounts of $50K/mo in spend – and if you fit the bill, please email me at pat.east@hanapinmarketing.com. We’re also hiring for a sales and a marketing position too, and once those are filled, we’ll be at 80% capacity of the new office space we just moved into! And, most important, the team has been killing it on their accounts! Two clients have significantly increased their budgets this year – one has tripled and another has nearly doubled! We also picked up a competitor to Groupon, so the team is busy trying to slay that IPO’ing beast!

On to the blogs…

Last month, Jessica Cates posted her top five Excel tips for PPC managers, and it went off like gangbusters! Among our how-to posts, it alone comprised a third of our pageviews! Since it seems you liked it so much, we’re doing a full series on Excel this month. We’ll expand on the list of Excel functions in Jessica’s post and even create Excel worksheet templates.

Two more topics on deck are general campaign setup and which default settings to change (shocker – the default settings by Google aren’t always the best ones!) and a to-do list for everything PPC.

We’ll continue with the Twitter interviews, which we’ve named “Heroviews.” These are interviews with folks in the SEM industry that are conducted completely over Twitter. Our first was with Tom Demers and last month’s was with Matt Umbro, which focused on lead generation. We’ll announce this month’s Heroview on the PPC Hero Twitter account, and you can follow the interview with the hashtag #heroview.

The video blogs have been really popular too! Hanapin’s Creative Specialist Jessica Rooney launched a new feature, Ticker Tuesday, last month, and it’s slowly but surely attracting its own audience. Most notably, we’ve surpassed our monthly goal for pageviews by 21%! Similar to ESPN’s “Pardon The Interruption,” there’s a running clock on the screen that counts down the time. So far, we’ve covered topics such as bidding, adCenter’s quality score, and setting up data feeds in Google’s Merchant Center. There’s also a great 15-minute video blog on enterprise-level PPC and how to manage those large accounts.

For SEO Boy, we’ll write about creating custom reports in the new version of Google Analytics. We’ll also explore Klout – what is it, how does it work, and if you should use it.

Also on SEO Boy, our June contest is a blog scavenger hunt! We’ll post a question each week and readers will search through our archives to find the answers. As always, we’ll have a prize. I’m told it will be a “summer goody basket.” Maybe a tasting box from Foodzie?!

Last but not least, custom illustrations! SEO Boy has already celebrated ‘National Leave the Office Early Day‘ and we have two others on deck for both blogs. We’ll celebrate the First Day of Summer on 6/21 and Social Media Day on 6/30. And, in case you missed last month’s custom illustrations, here’s a quick recap: Star Wars Day, Cinco de Mayo, and Geek Day.

Thanks again for reading and helping make our blogs big successes!

NEWS UPDATES
For both blogs, we’ll continue writing our news updates, and for PPC Hero specifically, we’re paying extra attention to breaking news that we receive from Google as one of their agency partners. They recently paid us a visit to help plan for the rest of 2011 and are giving us unprecedented access to webinars, white papers, and other materials. If there’s new information to report on AdWords, you’ll hear it from us first!

UPCOMING ARTICLES
For PPC Hero, we have several topics lined up. Among them are ‘how to create a test conversion’ that should increase your ROI since you’ll be able to verify and pinpoint tracking issues sooner and ‘the effects of broad modifiers on an account’ which will give some good tips and insights on how keyword and match type selection impact your account’s performance.

For SEO Boy, we’re writing about ‘analyzing SEO data.’ At first, I thought this topic was a bit vanilla, primarily because that’s a fundamental service that Hanapin provides to all our clients already. However, when I read a recent tweet from SMX about how the “next wave” of SEO reporting will go beyond just reporting the data and start to give the client insights from that data, I changed my mind. This should be a solid post, and I’ll lay even odds that you’ll start seeing posts from other agencies about what Hanapin has been doing for years.

We’ll also write about whether or not SEO is dead. Of course it’s not dead, but this debate has been revived again through recent news, primarily because prominent entrepreneurs like Chris Dixon have been misinterpreting startups not doing SEO well or claiming that that it’s not the foremost tactic any longer as a sign that SEO doesn’t work. Danny Sullivan, as always, has a great response to Chris and we’ll put our two cents in too.

MAY CONTEST
The past two months, we’ve introduced a new feature on the blogs – a contest for our readers. We hope it gives you a break from your daily search marketing work and we know it’s fun for us to create for you! Last month, we did SEO haikus on SEO Boy, and we were even graced with a live appearance from SEO Boy to announce the winner. Thanks to Dave Rosborough, one of our Assistant Account Executives, who was a good sport and dressed up for us! This month, we’ll have “best dressed” PPC manager on PPC Hero. The team has some interesting and fun guidelines, so keep on the lookout for the announcement.

CUSTOM ILLUSTRATIONS
We have three custom illustrations this month, and two of them are for the uber geeks out there! We’ll have illustrations for Star Wars Day (5/4), Cinco De May (5/5), and Geek Pride Day (5/25). If you have any ideas for June that you’d like to see, please post them in the comments.

TWITTER INTERVIEW
Last month featured our very first Twitter interview. Not an interview with someone from Twitter, but rather an interview with someone in the SEM industry, which was held completely over Twitter. Tom Demers of Measured SEM was kind enough to be our first guest, and I think it went great! You can find a full transcript of the interview here. There’s another one in the hopper for this month, though the team hasn’t told me who the interviewee is yet, so it must be a good one! We’ll announce it on the PPC Hero Twitter account and you can follow the interview with the hashtag #heroview.

VIDEO BLOGS
Last but not least, you’ve likely noticed the videos our team has been creating. We have several on PPC Hero and just posted our first on SEO Boy to announce the SEO haiku winner. As part of our investment in our blogs, we’ll continue making more videos, led by Hanapin’s own Creative Specialist, Jessica Rooney.

This month, Jessica will be creating weekly videos that will provide extra insight into account problems that may have viewers stumped. The series started yesterday and is called “Ticker Tuesdays” (with the clock being the “ticker”), and they are visually similar to ESPN’s “Pardon The Interruption,” with no shouting, of course. The hook of our Tuesday video shorts is that the answers will be given in a minute, with a running clock on the screen that counts down the time. The answers will be listed on the side of the screen as they come up. The first Ticker Tuesday episode, posted this morning, was about how to make good accounts great. Keep an eye out next Tuesday for the second episode about advanced bidding strategies.

That’s it for this month! Thank you for being a loyal reader, for helping our re-investment pay off so quickly for us, and for all your wonderful comments and feedback!

In March, I wrote that Hanapin is increasing the investment in our blogs. They’re a great source of pride for us, we have a lot of fun with them, and they generate quite a few leads and business too! To that end, we did several new things last month: we added more custom illustrations, a new blog series, and we announced Hanapin’s volunteer initiative (more on that below). While last month was great—every single one of our engagement metrics on both blogs improved—I think this month will be even better! (Do you see the connection to Empire now? It’s better than Star Wars, just like this month is better than last month. Feel free to vehemently disagree in the comments. )

The team has planned a blog series for this month that I think many of our readers will find useful. Four Hanapin team members took the Google Analytics certification test and passed last month. They’ll share their insight with you, including how they prepared, what they learned while studying, and how the knowledge they acquired now benefits their PPC and SEO clients.

In addition to the blog series, if the team keeps up last month’s pace, they’ll write nearly two blog posts every business day! Two topics for PPC Hero will include Google Merchant Center tracking and new geo-targeting strategies in AdWords. For SEO Boy, two topics will be Piracy in Google SERPS and a follow-up of Google Instant and how it has impacted SEO over the last seven months. Last but not least, we’re expanding our journalistic skills to start covering PPC and SEO news. We’ve always focused on writing in-depth posts based on our client experiences, and now we’ll be offering breaking news updates too!

Following suit with last month, we’ll continue adding custom illustrations each month for the rest of the year. Two of our April illustrations will be for Earth Day (April 22) and Easter (April 24). There’s another one too that’s already been posted…we thought it was pretty clever.

Because we’re Hoosiers, we ran our own version of “March Madness” on PPC Hero. It was so well-received, we decided to conduct a new contest every month, and “SEO Haikus” is up for April! To celebrate National Poetry Month, we’ll be asking for your best “SEO Haikus” for SEO Boy. There will be a prize for the best one too, so keep your eyes peeled on how to submit them!

Hanapin is making a big investment in our blogs this year, and we’re doing the same with our team members and our community. Thank you to everyone who voted on which one of Bloomington’s 300 non-profit organizations Hanapin should volunteer at. This summer, we’ll devote a half-day of volunteerism to Habitat for Humanity. We’ll be sure to post pictures of the event!

Finally, good luck to Bryan, one of Hanapin’s Assistant Account Executives. Today is his first full day living in Europe! He’s taking advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play football professionally! His contract is for the next two months and for one additional month if they make the playoffs. He’ll be doing that while also working for Hanapin remotely. I know he’ll do well, and after you watch his highlight film, I think you’ll agree!

April is going to be a busy month on PPC Hero and SEO Boy. We believe in offering high quality, fun content for you, our readers! We know you’ll continue to find that content here on our blogs every month. As always, thank you for reading!

Suggestions Box

We here at PPC Hero work hard to keep you informed of the latest industry trends, but the best way to provide you with the information you want is to ask. So that’s what we’re doing. If you’ve visited our site in the last couple of days, you may have noticed this pop up box in the lower left hand corner of your screen:

If there is a topic you’d like more information on, just fill out this box and hit send. We will use your suggestions to determine which topics to write about. Feel free to make your suggestions as broad or as specific as you want. Here’s an example of one of the suggestions we’ve received: “best practice for modified broad match implementation and optimization.” Yesterday, Amy responded with her post Revisiting Modified Broad Match. So don’t be shy, send in your suggestions today so we can provide you with the information you need!

Categories Tab

We’ve also reorganized our categories page to make it a better resource for you to search for posts by topic.

If you click on our categories tab at the top of the page, you’ll now see a list of our categories arranged alphabetically. This should make it easier to find articles on the topics you want to learn more about.

If you have a question or comment on how to improve our blog please post them below. We always appreciate our reader’s feedback!

Have a high CPL and can’t seem to lower it?

Want to optimize for conversions but don’t know if you should try Google’s new ad setting?

Are you wanting to break out a content network campaign but aren’t sure of the best strategy?

Well, it’s your chance to Ask PPC Hero! Just tweet us (@PPCHero) about your “villain” and our blog superhero will help you fight it! PPC Hero will answer your questions himself, live, in our April video blog. So get tweeting!

• Part 1: Introduction to our hiring process series
• Part 2: The job announcement and writing portion
• Part 3: The phone interview
• Part 4: The meet-and-greet and in-person interview

And today is Part 5: The Wrap-up! We know that every company’s hiring process is different and, therefore, every company has tips and tricks they’ve learned over the years about what has worked best for them, for their company, and their industry. At Hanapin, we’ve spent quite some time brainstorming about our process and refining it. We wanted to share our personal tips and tricks with you in hopes of helping you also uncover amazing search marketers.

On Monday, Jessica posted the introduction to our hiring process series, explaining why we do what we do and what you could expect from each post. On Tuesday, Jessica C. did an excellent job of explaining the job announcement and writing portion of our hiring process. Read through her post for all the great information she gathered. Below is a recap of some of her most important take-away points:

To Post Or Not To Post?

At Hanapin, we feel it’s best to cover all our bases, plain and simple. Here’s a sample of where we typically post our job listing:

• Career Builder
• Monster/Hot Jobs
• Talent Zoo
• eMarketing Silo
• Marketing Pilgrim
• SEOmoz
• Our local newspaper, The Herald-Times
• Linked In
• SEO Boy & PPC Hero
• Twitter
• College Job Boards

Filter, Filter, Filter

We treat every step of our hiring process as a filtering system, right from the get-go. Even our job listing serves a two-fold purpose:

1. Acquire applicants.
2. See if those applicants can follow directions.

Check out Jessica C.’s post to see a sample of our job listing. In it, we give applicants very specific instructions. If they don’t follow them, they are not chosen to advance to the next round: the writing portion. Below is a list of the questions we typically ask an applicant in the round 2 writing portion:

1. Why do you love the Internet?
2. What’s the most challenging work problem you’ve ever encountered? What could you have done differently?
3. Describe a situation where the workload was beginning to be too much.  How did you meet deadlines and maintain the quality of your work?
4. What’s the single most important lesson you learned from your parents?
5. What would make you not a good fit for (position)?

These questions not only give us insight into why the person is applying, they also give us a glimpse into their personality. We couple this Q & A list with the applicant’s resume and cover letter to help us ask the right questions in the next round…

Mm What ’cha Say?

Steve did a great job covering our telephone interview process. Here are some take-away points from his post:

• Phone interviews are special because they give us our first real look at the communication abilities of an individual and an opportunity to hear the stories that support the resume.
• Determining the right questions to ask is the one of the hardest things to do in preparation for the interview. You want to ask questions that encourage the candidate to reveal something important about his or herself and are not impossible to answer. Remember, the purpose of a phone interview is to find out whether or not this person is worth inviting to the next stage of the hiring process…Use it as a tool to collect information and make an informed decision about someone.
• If you are having trouble coming up with ideas for questions, I recommend sitting down and determining what traits you value in the position you are trying to hire and then formulating topics around them. As a word of caution, it’s also important to remember that certain questions are illegal for companies to ask. If you’d like to know more about those kinds of questions and their legal alternatives, see jobinterviewquestions.org.
• We conduct phone interviews in pairs so that a candidate gets more thorough feedback that’s from more than one perspective/opinion.

Mix & A-Mingle

The meet and greet portion of our hiring process is an office favorite. Amy did an excellent job explaining the purpose of the meet and greet. Here are some take-away portions to part 4 of our series:

• It gives each candidate the chance to connect with everyone.
• If we’re on the fence about people, we bring them in to the meet and greet because it’s a lot easier to gauge a person’s personality in person.  It’s a good buffer before the final interview, for one, because we are able to further narrow down the pool and, for two, sometimes we get some odd ones.
• Conversely, the meet and greet also offers us the opportunity to show a glimpse of our personality; if the fit isn’t right, a candidate can bow out gracefully after the meet and greet, no harm no foul.
• The final interviews take place at our office. Multiple team members are involved in the interview process for each candidate, which allows us to develop a balanced perception of how well the candidate will work with our team and within our industry.

Why We Do What We Do

Over the years we’ve worked hard to refine our hiring process, and we will continue to do so down the road. However, for now, we think our detailed process ads quite a bit of value to our company. The following are some Hanapin team members’ opinions about the value and importance of our hiring strategy:

“It allows us to truly know the people we’re hiring in a way that I don’t think people at other companies get to. I think it’s important especially for a small company that we can gauge the personalities of the people we’re hiring, so the meet and greet and in-person interview are especially valuable to us.”

-Bethany Bey, Account Executive

“You get to see, especially through the meet and greet, putting a face with a resume and seeing how people interact with various team members and that’s important. Seeing a person’s ability to follow directions…with all the specifics of each round you get to see a person’s attention to detail and that’s a big part of the industry.”

-Bryan Watson, Assistant Account Executive

“I think the main value of our long and in-depth hiring process is that it allows us to discover little pieces of information about people that don’t come out normally with the “one interview” method. And sometimes those little pieces of information that people don’t think are important to mention but that end up coming out during the various different types of interview are the most important things in determining if someone will fit with our team or be able to think in the way we need them to.”

-Jessica Niver, Account Supervisor

And That’s A Wrap!

At Hanapin, we’ve worked hard over the years to refine our hiring process. Overall, we feel it’s quite effective right now, but we’ll certainly continue to refine it down the road. We have learned some valuable lessons along the way, and we are thrilled to have been able to share our hiring process with you, as it now stands, through this series. We hope we’ve helped. Happy Hiring!

At Hanapin Marketing, just like any other company, we use phone interviews as the next stage of our hiring process following the resume and cover letter evaluation. Phone interviews are special because they give us our first real look at the communication abilities of an individual and an opportunity to hear the stories that support the resume.  It also gives an individual the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge of internet marketing and competence as a potential employee.

Phone interviews require preparation from both the candidate and the agency. The candidate must rehearse their answers to numerous well-known interview question (i.e. tell us about a time you faced a conflict at work). The agency’s interviewers must review the application materials to develop an understanding of the candidate they will speak with. Once the materials are reviewed, a series of questions are developed to help uncover additional information about the candidate.

Determining the right questions to ask is the one of the hardest things to do in preparation for the interview. You want to ask questions that encourage the candidate to reveal something important about his or herself and are not impossible to answer. Remember, the purpose of a phone interview is to find out whether or not this person is worth inviting to the next stage of the hiring process, the in-person interview. Use it as a tool to collect information and make an informed decision about someone.

Although every organization has their own set of questions they like to ask, it’s important that some of them focus on understanding how a candidate thinks, what their experience level is, how comfortable they are speaking on the phone with strangers, and how well they react to the unexpected. Personally, I like to ask questions that encourage candidates to reveal their attitudes towards group work and continual learning. That is because I feel that a positive attitude towards collaboration and an ongoing, concerted effort to consistently grow are fundamental traits of a great Internet marketer. If you are having trouble coming up with ideas for questions, I recommend sitting down and determining what traits you value in the position you are trying to hire and then formulating topics around them. As a word of caution, it’s also important to remember that certain questions are illegal for companies to ask. If you’d like to know more about those kinds of questions and their legal alternatives, see jobinterviewquestions.org.

At Hanapin, our interviews begin in a traditional manner. We start by calling the candidate, introducing ourselves, and then explaining what will happen during the phone call. We ask our questions and then give the candidate an opportunity to ask questions of us. After working through all of the questions and getting a better idea of the candidate’s background, the interviewers reconvene to compile their notes. It’s important to compile notes on the interview immediately following the interview while everything is still fresh in everyone’s minds. Once this information is compiled our team submits it to our key decision maker, usually our CEO Pat East, who then decides whether to invite the candidate to an in-person interview.

Tomorrow, part 4 of our Behind the Curtain series will be posted. Amy will be discussing the in-person interview and our personal favorite–the Meet and Greet–over at our partner site, SEO Boy. In case you missed the prior posts from this 5 part series, I’d encourage you to check them out. See part 1 and part 2.

This week on both of Hanapin’s blogs we’ll feature a series of articles about the techniques we’ve used to locate and evaluate new team members, some lessons we’ve learned by trial and error, and give some tips for making sure the team you assemble encompasses both the personal and professional characteristics you need to fully leverage your internet marketing team’s potential. Our hiring process has always been a bit more detailed than most, and the characteristics on which we evaluate potential employees are somewhat unconventional. That’s a great thing because gathering the right amount (and kind) of data is essential in making decisions that will create the best possible marketing team, and our unconventional process has allowed us to gather some valuable, but often overlooked, information about applicants.

Since we’re talking about the hiring processes we’ve used to create a team of integrated marketing professionals- everyone here does both PPC and SEO – our series this week will span both of our blogs! On Tuesday, Jessica C will lead off with an overview of our job announcement process, as well as the initial questions we use to evaluate applicants on SEO Boy. On Wednesday, Steve will discuss our team-based phone interviewing method on PPC Hero. On Thursday we’re back to SEO Boy with Amy when she explains one of the most-talked about elements of our hiring process, the “meet and greet”, as well as how we select final candidates and conduct final interviews. Finally we’re back to both PPC Hero and SEO Boy on Friday with Abby’s wrap up summary of the process and the value we think it’s provided to Hanapin as an agency. Check back on both PPC Hero and SEO Boy to follow the series progression- each day’s post represents a step in our hiring process, and will reveal why we’ve determined that it’s valuable in discovering specific types of information about our candidates and helping us to assemble an awesome team!