Happy Halloween loyal PPC Hero readers! I hope its full of chills and thrills 
… As for myself, I always manage to channel my inner child and go all-out for Halloween, good times! Enough chit-chat, here’s our PPC roundup for the week.
- We were having discussions about optimizing some ad groups for a client and the topic of breaking keywords up by match type came into the conversation. I found this article from The CLM Blog that gives some useful insight into the subject!
- The adCenter blog outlines the new upgrades to the Microsoft interface that just took place. The interface has always been a little clunky, so lets all hope these improvements make campaign management a little easier.
- Anyone close to the New York area should definitely consider attending the Google Marketer’s Playbook at ad:tech New York on Nov. 3rd and 4th. The Google pros will be giving out tons of advice and tips at this digital marketing conference. There are also past presentations and webinars that are live on the Google Business Channel.
- Good news for beer and champagne drinkers! Google is now allowing advertisers to promote the sale of beer and champagne in their ad text. For some reason it was blocked, however a Google rep told Pratt at Gonzo SEO that the ban is now lifted. However you still can’t promote the sale of hard liquor in your ads. Too bad for all the whiskey drinkin’ clients of yours.
- George Michie (from the Rimm-Kaufman Group) wrote an interesting post at Search Engine Land. He proposes a counter-argument to the typical PPC bidding strategy in relation to the buying cycle. His hypothesis? “If keyword level performance data suggests a keyword is underperforming, it probably is.” In other words, the keyword that generated the sale is the most important and the general keywords likely had nothing to do with that sales event.
- The Post Click Marketing Blog suggests a “surgical” approach to your PPC keywords. Or in layman’s terms – focus the spectrum of keywords you’re targeting into a narrower funnel and avoid the “garbage in, garbage out” mentality.
- Did you catch the “Disconnect in PPC vs. SEO” post at SEOMoz last week? It tried to explain that the investment for PPC and SEO was inappropriately lopsided towards PPC. John Ellis read that article, and he wrote a solid rebuttal that does a great job of explaining why PPC should have a higher investment threshold.
     | do some of that social network stuff. |
In regard to the CLM blogs results on match types:
Amy outlined the results of an experiment that would lead to the conclusion that the exact match type performs better than the phrase match type which in turn performs better than the broad match type.
This is an intuitive result. The exact match will attract more targeted prospects than the phrase and the broad. Of course there is a direct relationship between how targeted a prospect is and conversion rate.
This is all good and well but from a practical sense can be misleading. An interesting addition to the tables of results would be quantity of sales from each match type. Sure, exact match may convert better, but when you are converting a significantly lower amount of prospects (lower impressions/lower clicks), the actual number of sales may be negligible.
Companies with deep pockets who want more sales wouldn’t mind a lower conversion rate (higher cost per sale or lead) so long as the ROI is positive. In the end it’s all about ROI.