Our Top 10 Blog Posts for 2008!

2008 was a great year for PPC Hero! We continued to fight for truth, justice, higher click-through rates, lower cost-per-clicks, enhanced conversion rates, better quality scores, and the American way. In 2008, I think PPC Hero definitely leaped a few buildings in a single bound as well as outran some speeding trains (IMO). I’d like to highlight some of our accomplishments by pulling together our best posts for 2008.

Much like Google, a “quality score” for our posts was devised. This score consisted of page views; number of comments by readers; diggs/sphinns; and overall quality of content. Please note, the top posts were determined by our “quality score,” but the below list is in random order!

PPC Hero’s Top Blog Posts for 2008!

• Yahoo tried to sneak one passed PPC Hero, but their efforts were futile. When Yahoo updated their Terms and Conditions for paid search advertising we noticed some odd verbiage in the contract. We discovered that Yahoo had updated their policy to state the they could optimize your PPC campaign… without your prior knowledge, or notifying you at all! You can read more here on this topic.
• One way to set your PPC ads apart from the pack is to make them unique by presenting plenty of benefits within your copy. Let’s face it, users know what they’re looking. You just need to give them a reason why they should click on your ad. Using benefit-driven PPC ad copy can help increase your click-through rate and conversion rate!
• Tired of having to manually  input your Google campaigns into Yahoo!?  Well now you don’t have to with the Yahoo Third Party Converter tool. Just download your Google campaigns and upload into Yahoo in 3 ’somewhat’ simple steps.
• Being certified in Google, Yahoo and MSN is a great way to show your cilents that you know what you’re doing when it comes to paid search strategies and techniques. The test for Google and MSN aren’t that difficult, and you’re entire team can become certified with a $50 payment each.
• Good keyword research is the first step to any PPC campaign.  There are numerous free keyword tools that one can utilize to add variations of your core keywords and more.  Here is a list of the top 6 that we found and a description of each.
• If you use Google Analytics to track your PPC and SEO (organic) traffic, than you must learn the importance of URL tagging.  This post describes in detail how you can effectively tag your Yahoo! Search Marketing destination URLs so that they’ll be labeled as “cpc” correctly in Analytics.
• Well, if URL tagging for Yahoo! wasn’t enough, this post is the follow-up focused on MSN adCenter. Read this to learn how to effectively tag your MSN adCenter URLs for Analytics.
• Back in February, Google announced some changes they were making to the enforcement of display URL policies.  While most of the changes were really in reference to stricter enforcement, this piece of news made the PPC Hero team, and much of the SEM industry, stand up and take notice.
• Landing pages are so important to the health and overall performance of a PPC campaign.  In this post, John describes 5 design changes that can build authority and boost conversions.  The tips range from keeping important elements above the fold to limiting navigation and adhering to a coherent design.
• Here are 3 reports you can run in Google Analytics for free to track your PPC performance.  Once you run these reports you’ll be able to come up with a list of action items to help improve the performance of your ppc campaigns.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 4:10 pm and is filed under PPC Hero News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.