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.
  • 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.