Pay Per Click Insider TipsBetter Pay-Per-Click Results Start Here – We Guarantee It!

…but you may still want to try it.

At this point is there anyone in America who isn’t on Facebook? The site boasts over 200 million active users, and more than 100 million log on to Facebook at least once a day. This is obviously a very engaged audience, just what you’re looking for as a marketer.

While I was at SMX in Seattle a few weeks ago, I sat down with some of the Facebook folks who were there (a bunch of very nice, very evangelical Facebook fans) and they took me on a great tour of the Facebook interface.

It’s really easy to quickly create ads in Facebook, and very user friendly, especially for small businesses as you don’t need a lot of money to get started. You can target different audiences, different locations, set a budget, and monitor progress using the reports. You can purchase ads using a CPM or CPC model, which makes it very easy to test the same messaging as you would use in your pay-per-click campaigns.

So does it work? During last year’s Pay Per Click Summit in Los Angeles (Sept 2008), I surveyed a bunch of attendees and asked whether they had tried Facebook as an advertising vehicle. Only about 10% had, and out of that 10% maybe 3 or 4 had experienced good results. But now it’s 2009 and Facebook has re-vamped their advertising platform, and also put the ads in the upper right hand “call-to-action” portion of their pages so after SMX I asked my Twitter and Facebook followers, and discovered advertisers give it very mixed reviews.

This time maybe 20% of folks surveyed had tried Facebook Advertising and approximatley 50% were getting good results, but that’s hardly competitive with the kind of response you would get from advertisers using AdWords, where conversion rates of 20% and more are possible.

So who are the folks getting the results? Basically the same folks who get good results using Contextual Advertising. So it’s really not fair to compare Facebook to Google. In fact, they are just another large publisher (like the Wall Street Journal or ESPN.com) and you need to create, target and determine the CPA for your ads accordingly.

Contextual Ads can work extremely well for products that are impulse buys, or for branding, and the more targeted they are to the content on the page the better. Advertisers selling mortgages, insurance, entertainment, weight loss products, etc. are all doing very well with Facebook advertising, as are affiliate marketers generating leads for these types of businesses and for other products.

So can it work for your business? Just like any form of advertising you need to test it. If you are currently doing contextual advertising with something like Google Adsense or ContextWeb then it’s easy. Just set up similar campaigns targeting the same placement and demographics on Facebook and test against each other to see what works.

If you are not currently using content ads then it is very easy to set up a campaign in Facebook.  Here are some tips to get you started:

1) Most rules of pay-per-click also apply to Facebook marketing. Make sure your offer matches the landing page, and the keywords/images in your ad are consistent with the landing page also.
2) Include a call to action in your ad. Just like writing an AdWords ad, but punchier.
3) Less is more when it comes to text/copy and graphics. In fact writing like the “National Enquirer” might be totally appropriate as you only have a few minutes to catch people’s attention. Big headlines can work. This is not AdWords where folks are already looking for what you are selling. With Facebook you’re trying to get people’s interest when they are focused on something else entirely, so make your headlines snappy.
4) Consider testing a contest. I’ve heard of advertisers getting good results with them, and they may appeal more to social media users who aren’t really in buying mode.
5) Geo-target your campaigns well. If you don’t ship to Canada or the UK – don’t advertise there.
6) Try segmenting your campaigns by gender to make them more targeted
7) Use people in your graphic ads if possible. Just like on landing pages people respond to pictures of other people.

Just remember, as with Contextual Advertising, you shouldn’t try this form of advertising (or actually, any advertising at all) if you don’t have good tracking on your site. Content ads can take more tweaking to get them to perform, and you may need to test and track many variations before you find that sweet spot.

Have you tried Facebook Advertising? If you have, we’d love to hear your results. Tweet me at @ppcsummit or post a comment at www.ppcsummit.com/newsletter in response to this article. We’re also considering adding a session on Social Media Advertising at our upcoming PPC Summit in Los Angeles in September. Please let me know if you are interested in that also, and we’ll add it to the agenda.

To Your Continued Success Online,

Mary O’Brien
Chairman and Founder PPC Summit

By Brian Lewis, Vice President, Engine Ready, Inc

Instead of thinking of your landing page as a “page,” think of it as a group of individual elements that your visitors will see. Your best chance of getting your visitor to convert is to carefully guide them through those elements in a logical way that convinces them to buy or fill out your lead form.

A great way to improve your conversions is to treat your visitors like untrained dogs.

Think about it.  If you want an untrained dog to follow a specific path, you need to put them on a leash and guide them.

They also need very clear and reinforcing guidance to get them to do what you want.

To get the most out of new visitors you need to guide them in the same way through your page to complete the desired action. Just like an author who tells his story in a sequence of ordered chapters, you want to tell the story of your product or service offerings in a pre-determined order of page elements. The more control you have over the visitor’s experience, the more control you have over your conversion rate.

Without this guidance, your visitor will act like an untrained dog running in every direction and ultimately running away.

How many times have you visited a web page, been overwhelmed by multiple headlines, scattered boxes of long copy, and numerous images and not had a clue where to start reading on the page? How long before you lost your patience and decided to move on to a competitor’s site?

Examples of  Winning Landing Pages
Want to see landing pages that convert? You can start by searching the sponsored listings for popular (and therefore very expensive) keyword phrases such as “refinance,” “debt consolidation” and “antivirus.”

Click on the top three ads and look for commonality in page layout and use of web page elements. Due to the high cost of these phrases, top placement is generally a pretty good indication that these pages have been well tested and are converting.

An easy way to remember how to design a high converting landing page to get MORE conversions is with the acronym MORE:

• Marketing Effectiveness:
o Your copy should focus more on selling the benefits versus the features of the product or service and focus on the visitor, not your company
o Be sure that your unique selling proposition (USP) is clearly communicated
o Place a persuasive message above the call to action
o Have a dominant “what’s-in-it-for-me” headline
o Prominently display all available ways the visitor can contact you
o Be sure that your privacy policy, and/or return policy are prominently displayed

• Offer Clarity:
o Have a strong and compelling incentive for the prospect to take action
o Avoid multiple different calls-to-action
o Articulate the details of the offer including answers to when, how and what the prospect is entitled to in a clear manner
o Position the main call-to-action above the fold, and if your copy continues below the fold, repeat the call-to-action also below the fold
o Create a sense of urgency with terms such as “Start now” and “Apply now”

• Readability of Page:
o Your copy/ information should be displayed in a summary format using short paragraphs or bulleted text for quick absorption, with options for the visitor to drill down for more information if desired
o Use a clean uncluttered background, and dark text on a light background with a moderate use of white space to aid in the readability of the page
o Use no more than 3 to 4 fonts
o Be sure the lengths of your lines of copy are less than 60 characters to promote easier reading
o Use bold text, exclamation points & colors sparingly, for emphasis only
o The use of an arrow to your call-to-action has increased conversion rates in many cases
o Usage of attention-attracting features such as animations, video and audio should not distract the visitor from your main selling points
o Keep your copy left justified and use no more than 3 columns of text on the page

• Engagement with Visitor:
o The headline on the page should follow the same theme as the keyword phrase and ad creative
o If you have a form, it should require only the absolute minimum amount of information
o All data entry fields should be clearly labeled with examples if necessary (555-123-4567) and contain format validation with appropriate feedback
o Tell your visitor exactly what you want them to do
o Minimize the number of clicks needed to complete the desired action
o Include credibility/trust/security logos near the submit/order button
o The action button should stand out and call attention to itself
o Your action button should reinforce the benefit, e.g., “Download Whitepaper,” or “Get Quote Now,” instead of saying “Submit.”

Finally, don’t forget about the critical importance of testing and metrics – at a minimum, measure conversion rates, average order values, and bounce rates of your various landing pages.

Don’t assume your visitors are already trained to convert on your landing page. Keep them from running away by taking control of their visit experience. Walk them through your page, and increase conversion by appropriately using web page elements supported by a MORE conversion methodology.

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Brian Lewis is Vice President at Engine Ready, Inc. A speaker at many industry conferences, and noted author, Lewis has over 20 years experience bringing businesses profitable results through digital and direct marketing.

Mr. Lewis earned his B.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego and his M.B.A. in Finance from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, graduating both schools with honors.

by Jon Rognerud, Entrepreneur.com

Why do you have a hard time getting (converting) web traffic when it’s *this* easy?

The lifeblood of all businesses online is traffic. I mean – targeted traffic that you can begin to test for conversions.

#1: Keyword Research
Keyword research should be #1 on your list – always. Try tools like Google Keyword Tool, SEO Book Keyword Tool, Market Samurai (free trial). Get more ideas using the search based tool. If running PPC (you should), look at PPC data and keyword portfolio overall that is most closely aligned to your market need: write and optimize for those terms. The most competitive should be in focus, but the higher converting term is most often not the most highly trafficked term. Discover how they search the web and target your terms accordingly. (Informational, Transactional or Navigational)? “Armani black leather jackets for women” is better than “leather jackets,” for example. Use search engine optimization (SEO) to create a set of themed pages to match your findings.

#2: Social Media & Link building
Most know and agree that the Google algorithm relies heavily on links for ranking, especially in competitive markets. Most of these tactics are low cost entry points. Offering quality, and something of value will create link opportunities by default, and should always be your goal. Spend more time thinking about this and submit to quality properties than the useless “300 directories for $49.99” approach.
a. Article Marketing - 400-600 words with real value. Think about the users and webmasters (who    may use the information) first. Make sure to include at least 2 links in the resources box. One could be the actual company name, another, an anchor text keyword. Think users, and then search engines. Make sure to submit to top article directories within your category and sub-category. You can use Yahoo directory and DMOZ to get a sense for activity and relevancy in your marketplace. Use EzineArticles to start.
b. Answering questions - Providing value to your community is always a good thing. See the top answer search engines and get started. I have used Yahoo Answers and Yedda, they are all pretty easy to use. Remember to not “pitch” your own business. Provide real, useful answers. Of course, you’ll get a link back to your site, but the “value” is more important long term. If one of the answers (example Yahoo) appears high and gets you more traffic, you can target additional ads on that page too. (Sponsored Results). If you cannot spend the time yourself, an expert author or an outsourced model works well for an hour a week to work on this.
c. Activate the social communities and start sharing your (quality) content
        a. Start with one of two at first. Look at what your competition might be doing. Then, check – Digg, Reddit, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Youtube, Technorati, Stumbleupon. But – don’t forget to look at: Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Zimbio.com, Scribd.com, Docstoc.com, Slideshare.net, eHow & Wetpaint.com. For competitive terms you can get to first page ranking using these trusted web properties. It certainly can build your brand and company reputation much quicker. All this for free (outside of your time, of course)! Use socialmarker.com to bookmark your best content across multiple accounts easy and fast. However, do not spam – and try to keep the various content channels unique, not just duplicate content.
        b. Distribute your videos via tubemogul.com, and for a paid fee, try trafficgeyser.com.
        c. Use budurl.com to track your clicks and visitors from Twitter, and use ping.fm to distribute your “tweets” across multiple social platforms – in seconds! Remember! Creating your trust and authority using relevant link building is a “never-ending” task for you.

d. Blog Strategies
      a. A little more advanced topic, but creating PR or Traffic pumper sites with (WordPress) blogs that are relevant to your business, can work very well. Create newsworthy sites and promote them. Use an inter-linking strategy to feed traffic and PR juice to the destination sites of more “core” (money) sites that you own.
e. Directories
      a. Get Yahoo (paid), DMOZ (free) listings established. Look at goguides, gimpsy, skaffe and botw.org as well (not free). This strategy will yield more link/authority juice than 100’s of low quality directories.

#3: SEO
SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of crafting keyword rich copy and building search friendly websites to appear high in the rankings in the natural search results pages. Consider the power of blended search in all your doings where video, news, podcasts, images, maps all display into one “Universal Search,” as Google calls it.
     a. TAGS: TITLE, DESCRIPTION, H1, ALTs – Make sure to describe your page using keywords in these tags.
     b. LOCAL SEO: If you are a local business, make sure you get your listings into the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing/Microsoft). You can use getlisted.org to check your listings, and ease the process of submission. Do NOT spam by faking multiple listings and phone numbers. See Google Local for more details, and the steps you can take. Make sure to read David Mihms Local ranking success factors.
    c. Google Webmaster Tools: Make sure to set up a free account here. Look at the diagnostics, links, what Googlebot sees, and terms that Google qualifies. Do they match your major topics and keywords? Tune accordingly and continue to build links, as mentioned.
    d. Analytics: Google Analytics, Getclicky (free/paid) – to make sure each page is getting the right keywords and traffic that you had planned for each topic and subtopic.

#4: Plan to Fail? Or…
…fail to plan. Be clear on your strategic plan for all online endeavors. Make sure you have short and long term goals in mind. A SWOT plan can really help you. Look at the competition using (free/paid) SpyFu.com, Compete.com and SEMrush.com tools. If you want a quick overview of your competition that includes social popularity and traffic measures, try quarkbase.com. However, it’s important not to over-obsess on the competition. And, think about conversions as your end goal, not rankings.

Summary
Using the above tactics – along with tracking your competition’s URL and keywords in your space via Google alerts (www.google.com/alerts) will get you ahead of your competition and the search engines. 
 
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Jon Rognerud is Entrepreneur.com’s SEO columnist, an SEO consultant and the author of The Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization, in bookstores now. He has more than 20 years experience building software and marketing projects, including creating content and application solutions at Yahoo!/Overture. His SEO company provides search marketing solutions for small to midsize businesses.

by Kim Toomey, Anvil Media, Inc.

Social Media is More than a High School Reunion.

We all know we should be engaged with social media as companies try to communicate with customers and monitor what’s being said. Think of social media as bringing word of mouth marketing into a visible medium.  Never before have businesses had real time access to what is being said about their products and services, and all of this content is perfect for parsing out keywords to use in other search engine marketing (SEM) activities based on what your customers think of your brand.

People are going to search for the terms that they know and use when it comes to your company, so make sure you’re optimizing your site with those phrases.

Keyword research has never been a science, but most would agree that the wider variety of tools you can initially brainstorm with will result in a more targeted and successful keyword list. Google’s Keyword Tool, WordTracker and Keyword discovery have been some of the heavy hitters in the past. But with more social media sites popping up with elaborate search features, the flood gates have opened.

Use the Right Tools: There are plenty of tools out there to help you find conversations that are going to be beneficial to your research.

• TwitterSearch is Twitter’s own search engine, and with great advanced search options, is a great starting place. You can look for an exact phrase (your brand) in a certain location with a positive tone, and voila! You can see what your customer’s are saying about your brand.
• Collecta is a new real-time search engine that scours social media sites as well as blogs, news and Flickr for your search term.  You can filter your results if you don’t want to see pictures or news articles for example. Don’t expect these new breeds of search engines to take over the search marketplace anytime soon, but they can provide more helpful results than Google, Yahoo or Bing.

Sort through the Clutter: Once you begin searching for conversations about your company, what exactly is it that you’re looking for? Frequent misspellings are a good place to start. Do you have a store front located in a city that’s not easy to spell? How about variations of your brand name? Do your customers say Dr. Martens or Doc Martens? 

While you may not want to use these variations on your website for search engine optimization (SEO), you will want to use them for Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. 

• Social media conversations are also great ways to determine what your customer base thinks your most popular product is. If you have a site with many different offerings this is great information to have so you can make an informed decision about what content belongs on your homepage.
• Don’t forget to consider seasonality and that the needs/wants of your customer will change, so make it a point to revise this at least every quarter.
• Lastly, look for the adjectives that are being used when describing your company or product. Do you have a “cozy restaurant,” “rugged backpack” or “time-saving software?” Chances are you’re already aware of some of these descriptors, but it is always important to check your perception of what you are offering with your customer’s perception.  Use these descriptions in all the usual places where you would put SEO effort on your site, because chances are that other people are looking for a “cozy restaurant” for dinner tonight.
• Beyond keyword research, this information can also be used in offline marketing materials when describing your company or products.

Keep up with the times
Now that you have some keyword ideas down, you should also verify your information against social media tools that pull top trending keywords. These are great resources for finding “now” keywords; topics that are mainstream right now. Twitter’s rising trends are also found in Twitter’s search tool, and show what topics are being most discussed in Twitter at that moment. TweetVolume is another Twitter tool that allows you to see how often a word appears in Twitter. You can enter up to five words at a time to compare traffic. This tool is particularly helpful if you’re trying to decide between variations or synonyms of a popular keyword phrase.

Facebook Lexicon is a similar tool that pulls top phrases being used on user’s walls. One of the more interesting aspects of Facebook’s tool is that it also provides demographic data for their keywords which may help you make a final decision on keywords based on your target audience. Select a keyword and Facebook will show you how many people are posting that word in their profile daily as well as the age and gender of these users (still in beta, so only a limited number of keywords are available for the demographic data). 

One last overlooked social media research tool is Delicious Tags. Delicious is a bookmarking service that has been around for quite a while and gets overlooked in the social media world because it’s not very flashy and exciting. Delicious has a “popular tags” list on the homepage. The great thing about Delicious keywords is that if you click on one, it gives you a list of related tags that are also popular. While Food is a popular tag, it also suggests recipes, cooking, health, restaurants and travel as related keywords.

There is no right or wrong way to build a keyword list for your website. As the Internet continues to evolve, be on the lookout for new ways to discover what is being said and searched for online. I recommend using social media keyword research to supplement traditional methods and tools for now. What your customers are saying about your company is important on many levels; thanks to the internet and social media all of their comments are now traceable and easily accessible.

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Kim Toomey works for the Portland-based SEM agency Anvil Media, Inc. She has expertise in all aspects of search engine marketing and specializes in social media strategies. Toomey has been responsible for the development and execution of dozens of search and social marketing campaigns during her time at Anvil.

By Mary Huffman, Ionic Media

Every click from a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search ad costs you money.  Now, that click may only cost $0.05, but over time those nickels can add up…if you are not getting the most value from those clicks once they arrive at your site.  Strive to make your site as “convertible” as possible.

In this article, we discuss how to maximize your conversion rate on your lead generation site.  In our years spent driving traffic to lead generation sites using PPC, search engine optimization (SEO), banners and other tactics, we have found that the website is generally an after-thought for most companies.  We want to change this attitude.  Make every click count.  Turn every visitor into a lead by following proven conversion improvement strategies.

In short, you want to communicate the right message in the right way so the user has an understanding and active interest in the “payoff.”

Before we discuss the website changes you may want to make to improve your conversion rate, let’s look at the end of the process…What is the payoff for a user giving you his contact information?  When we talk about the “payoff,” we mean the incentive you will give them to provide their personal details.
     * Can they download a white paper? 
     * Are you giving them a free trial? 
     * Will they get an exclusive coupon? 

You want them to happily give you their contact information.  Too many times, a marketer says, “My product description is enough to make them want to get more information.”  But if the process is not fully disclosed (e.g., “A salesperson will call you within 4 hours.”), the user can be fearful about how their information will be treated and whether a cadre of very persistent telemarketers will begin hounding them.  Make it worth their effort by offering a payoff and clearly describing the follow-up and usage of their contact information.

Now onto improving the website and making it a super-converter…

1.  Know your target and think carefully about the 2-3 messages you want them to understand about your company.
*Ensure you understand your target market and what they need from your product.
*Articulate the 2-3 messages you want them to understand about your company.  Make them compelling and   clear.   Most people cannot keep a laundry list of benefits straight.  Keep it simple – focus on the main points that set you apart.

2. Reduce your entrance bounce rate by making the content on your site directly relevant to what they need from you at that moment.
*Help the first-time visitor see immediately that you have what they need.  Have different landing pages for different buckets of search terms.  For instance:
   - The user coming from the keyword “copper re-pipe” is led to a page that focuses on copper re-piping.
   - The user coming from “chicago re-pipe discount” is led to a page which emphasizes the discounts offered by your business and your geographic coverage within Chicago.
*You only a have a few seconds to convince someone they are in the right place.  Think about how you will convince them so they will look around for a bit more time.

3.  Make the site design and copywriting invisible (in a good way).
*The last thing you want is for a user to notice a spelling error on your site or be distracted by a rainbow of colors.
*Instead, you want to make the copy readable and the structure clearly marked so there is a clear path to the action you want them to take.  It should be perfectly obvious what you want the visitor to do on any page of your site. 
*Here are some tips to improve usability and readability:
   o All text should be 10 point or larger
   o No paragraph should be longer than 4-5 lines
   o The widest text column should be a fixed column, set for no more than 60 characters
   o Ensure all text links are easy to see (color contrast with surrounding copy) and that the color noticeably changes after the link has been clicked.
   o Get users to their destination quickly (in two clicks or less)
   o Ensure global navigation is clear, consistent and helpful

4. Include several ways for them to contact you.
*Maximize the number of leads you receive by offering a variety of easy-to-understand ways for them to contact you.  Some people will prefer email while others will prefer a phone conversation
*Include an easy to see form on the first page they see (and possibly every page they see)
*Keep your form short and simple.  Test a long form against a short form and see the difference.  Sometimes it is worth it to get less info on each lead but get a bunch more leads coming in!

5. Run at least one test per month so you continuously improve your conversion rate.
*Tweak your site regularly and measure results continuously.
*Test the most likely culprits first (e.g., headline, columns, call to action, copy, button, hero shot)
*But don’t forget that more obscure changes can sometimes make a big difference (e.g., testimonial placement, testimonial with and without a photo, third-party security symbol placement, color palette on the page, color of the button)

We encourage you to always push for the most effective online site you can develop. 

A good rule of thumb for your website is to do a quarterly “stranger” review.  Find someone who is unfamiliar with your site and ask them to visit the site with you.  Ask open-ended, non-leading questions, such as, “Where does your eye go on this page when you first look at it?  Second?  Third?”, “What do you think you would do if you came to this page on your own looking for X?”, “Tell me what you know about this company without looking through the site.”  You want to proxy the experience that a user has at home (without the business owner sitting over their shoulder).

Make every visit count by tuning and testing your website so it can be a super-performer.

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Mary Kingsley Huffman is a co-founder and Executive Vice President at Ionic Media. Previously, she was Director of Marketing at Overture Services. Prior to Overture, Mary was an Engagement Manager in the London office of McKinsey & Company, specializing in marketing solutions. Mary has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA from UCLA.

The devil is truly in the details for paid search managers. I hope that this article will help you attend to more of the details in your accounts – like better ad text writing, stronger negative keywords and better bidding management. The bottom-line is that if you are not spending a tremendous amount of time on large account management changes, you will have more time to attend to those all important details that can make the difference between PPC success and failure.

AdWords Editor 7.0
AdWords Editor is Google’s free, downloadable campaign management application. Download your AdWords account to your computer, make your changes, and then upload your revised campaigns.

Tool Description and Functionality:
This indispensable tool should be an integral part of your pay per click management arsenal. With account management features no account manager should be without for day-to-day maintenance for all your pay per click campaigns. The old way of managing large campaign templates are gone and now AdWords Editor has given us a way to not only easily manage your Google AdWords campaigns but also to export entire campaigns into a format that can then be converted to YSM and MSN campaigns quickly and easily.

Tool Review:
• Web Site: http://www.google.com/adwordseditor/
• Rating:  ****
• Benefits and features include the ability to:
- Navigate your account quickly and easily
- Make bulk changes to keywords and ad text
- Work offline, then upload your changes
- Copy and paste keywords and ad text
- Circulate proposed changes and get feedback
Cost: Free

AdWords Editor is without a doubt the best FREE tool on the market. Use this tool to do all you Google account edits locally.

Release Notes:
After you install AdWords Editor, you’ll be notified automatically whenever a new version is released. (You can determine which version you have by going to the Help Menu > About AdWords Editor.) The release notes cover what’s new and what’s been fixed in each release.

AdWords Editor Features and Reviews:

AdWords Editor’s “Top 10 Favorites”
Have you wondered how to make the most of AdWords Editor? Or, if you haven’t used the desktop application, are you interested in learning about its most popular features?

Annie Hsu from the AdWords Editor team spoke with users and compiled a list of the top ten reasons they love this campaign management application:

10. Find duplicate keywords in your account with just two clicks of your mouse.

9. Copy or cut and paste between ad groups, campaigns, or even across accounts.

8. Make bulk changes to destination URLs using the Add/Update Multiple tools or Advanced URL Changes.

7. If you need to edit your keywords or ads in a spreadsheet, copy the items to edit from the data view and paste them into a spreadsheet. Make your changes, and then paste the contents of the spreadsheet directly into the appropriate Add/Update Multiple tool.

6. Undelete and activate previously deleted text ads.

5. Search your account quickly. Perform simple word searches, or do an Advanced Search to find items that meet the multiple criteria that you specify.

4. Easily find and edit bids, destination URLs, and text for ads, keywords, or sites.

3. Submit multiple exception requests at once.

2. Automatically organize your keywords into ad groups based on common themes.

1. Save a snapshot of your account for archiving or for sharing. Later, you can import the archive file to restore your prior account settings.

Campaign Manager Review:
Best features of the AdWords Editor from the perspective of Senior PPC Account Manager follow. Katie Bivens has more than three years experience managing dozens of accounts with Google, YSM and MSN on a daily basis.

Here is what Katie likes best about AdWords Editor:
• Faster to use then working inside AdWords online
• Ability to export campaigns from Editor into an Excel document for importing into Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN
• Allows for the manual manipulation of Excel templates for all engines
• Easy bulk updates that would normally take hours in Excel.  Also includes fast bid changes
• Editor ad text counter tracks characters and turns color when there is an overage in character length

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Heather F. Lutze is owner of the Findability Group (formerly Lutze Consulting LLC).  She is a nationally recognized Internet marketing speaker, trainer, and consultant in search engine placement, cost per click models, natural search, and ad campaign tracking.   Her book The Findability Formula: The Easy-To-Follow, Non-Technical Guide to Search Marketing was published in January 2009.

In the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) content has always been considered king.  But is it in Pay Per Click (PPC)? 

Content is in fact very important in PPC, but other things are equally important.  Identifying these can be the key to running a successful campaign, or running a really successful PPC campaign.

What I want to do here is to give you a few tips and tricks we commonly use to find the gaps in most PPC campaigns.

All of the search engines look at conversions to determine the quality of ads and landing pages. They also use a version of their organic ranking algorithm to ‘grade’ the various elements of your campaign – which directly influences your placement and price. So things like the age of a page and the back links to that page are just as important in natural search results as they are in paid search results.

In many markets the big guys dominate and run up the cost of this valuable traffic to a level that most everyone else cannot monetize. So how can you get to the top spots? After all, being in the top three paid results on Google carries certain privileges like syndication across other networks. AOL, for instance, converts twice as much as every other network that uses Google’s top PPC ads in their search results. These are merged into their organic results just like they are on Google.

Now assuming that you are familiar with techniques like day parting, site placement and keyword weighting, what I’d like to show you is how to implement more off-campaign techniques to improve your conversions.

First off, most of the larger bidders (corporate types) employ PPC companies or professionals. Coming from this scenario first-hand and managing millions in PPC budgets I can say that the majority of these people test and create landing pages. Whilst this is a great idea, the fact that they create new pages is a problem. As I mentioned above, the PPC algorithm is a chunk of the organic algorithm, so you should use existing pages and change the content to include CTA’s or call to action elements. Match back link anchor text to the keywords that your PPC uses.

The next tip is to target ‘break out’ terms. These are terms that have drawn new attention. We use three techniques for this:  Google Alerts, Google Insights and DomainTools.com.

Google Alerts allow you to tell Google that any time it finds a particular term on a website, news article or other source that you want an email sent or an RSS feed updated. This monitors anything to do with your targeted term and can provide many longtail terms that you can target.  Be one of the few that are actually targeting these terms and your bids are cheap and your click through is high. By the time everyone else comes around, you already have the best history and you stay at the top of the results for less than anyone else pays.

The next tip is to get an upgraded account through DomainTools.com. The cost is only a few dollars per month depending on your settings. For example, if we are primarily targeting the gaming market, we monitor new domains for new operators springing up in this arena. DomainTools will let you know newly registered, domain transfers or just about any change that happens.

Upon receipt of this daily report we decide whether to add the domain, the keywords or both. We may even create a completely new adgroup. How many new start-up’s have you seen in the last six months for bingo websites spending mass amounts of money on off-line advertising? (Since trademark infringement has become so loosely regulated or even allowed, this is useful information.)

The third tool that we use for exploiting breakout terms is Google Insights. You may be familiar with Google Trends? Well this is a new and improved version that gives great information. Google Insights allows you to nail-down recent trends much better than Google Trends.

Besides giving regional search levels, top searches, and a host of other features and filters, it gives you Rising Searches – which we call Breakout terms. You may add this to your iGoogle dashboard and see every day if anything has changed or a newcomer is breaking out in your market. The key to this technique is to find the hot keywords and target them quickly. The various paid engines have loosened their grip on trademark infringement so look into it carefully and find out what you can and can’t get away with.

In closing I’ll say that the PPC market is a competitive market, but with a little ‘outside-the-box’ thinking, you can do very well.

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Gary R. Beal has been in the Search Engine Optimization field for 12 years. He attended Ohio State University in the US and holds a Masters Degree in Biometrics and Mathematical Statistics. Gary is currently the MD of Vanguard SEO based in Leeds. He has been instrumental in the development of many SEO and PPC tools as an analyst and consultant. Gary specializes in Search, Pay Per Click, Affiliate Management and Email Marketing and he has worked for many years in lead aggregation for highly competitive industries such as Online Gaming, Banking and Finance, Insurance, Travel and Investments, and primarily specializes in SEO for the gaming industry. You can contact Gary at Gary@VanguardSEO.com .