During an economic downturn many business choose to save many by moving previously out-sourced services back in-house. In the PPC world many companies are choosing to take back management of their Internet marketing campaigns and turn them over to their traditional marketing team.  If you’re a business thinking about having your marketing team manage your online campaigns you need to read Karl Ribas’ post on how letting go of traditional marketing concepts can enhance your PPC management. Traditional marketers and Internet marketers have a different, unique set of skills and Ribas’ tips can help traditional marketers transition to managing online accounts.

According to the Adwords blog, Google has become more adept at identifying where your traffic is coming from. For a while now ValueTrack has made it possible to analyze where your PPC traffic is coming from, but now it has become more specific. You can now track how your keywords are matching. For example, if your site sells shoes, and your ValueTrack parameters are set, and a broad match search from a search partner to Google, your web log will register as such:

{keyword} = shoes

{matchtype} = b

{network} = s

So be sure to take advantage of ValueTrack, and find out where your traffic is coming from.

From their merciless finger-pointing to their record-high expenses, this year’s political television ads have earned national attention.  However, another less obvious – but no less important – advertising method politicians have adopted has quietly risen in prominence: online political PPC campaigns.  Kevin Burns of WPromote shows us that alongside hefty SEO efforts, electoral candidates have relied on PPC ads to not only guide viewers to their sites, but to show up to a astounding number of demographics and interest groups, including that of their competitors.  And the best part?  This is a technique that benefits just as much (if not more) from savvy PPC skills as it does from excessive spending.

Do your PPC ads lack that certain something?  The next time you go to revamp your copy, go the extra mile to do some thorough research to predict what searchers are looking for.  After that, apply some creativity to write a clever, yet professional ad for your potential clickers.  These tips on headline writing for PPC ads from Elisa Gabbert at Wordstream bring you back to the basics of good ad copy, so you can give your ad’s viewers a compelling reason to click through to your site.

So you’re a PPC manager and you’re great at creating and altering PPC campaigns. But what else can you do? Matthew Umbro, from The PPC Blog, asks this tough question in his blog post PPC and So Much More. Umbro says that as PPCers we need to understand the user experience—create top-notch landing pages. We should have coding and Google Analytics knowledge in order to track the success of our campaigns. Take your PPC management to the next level with Umbro’s tips.