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Most PPC managers should be well aware that over the next six to eight weeks, Yahoo & Microsoft will be merging their PPC platforms into an integrated platform called, ominously, “The Search Alliance”. Understanding how the Yahoo & Microsoft Search Alliance will impact your business will help to ensure that any impact is a positive one. This article will provide a brief background of the Search Alliance and more detailed insights into three things you should do to prepare your PPC campaigns.

The Basics of the Yahoo & Microsoft Search Alliance

It’s no secret that Yahoo & Microsoft’s PPC offerings have long been a distant #2 and #3 to Google’s AdWords platform. By the beginning of Q4 2010, Yahoo & Microsoft’s PPC platforms will be merged and all PPC campaigns will be managed under what is now Microsoft adCenter. This will create a larger consolidated network that is likely to pose a greater threat to Google AdWords than either Yahoo or Microsoft ever did on their own. Yahoo Search Marketing will effectively phase itself out and adCenter powered ads will supply both Yahoo & Microsoft properties with paid advertising. This is all slated to be completed before the beginning of the 2010 holiday season.

For more detailed information and regular updates about the Search Alliance, check out the official site: http://www.searchalliance.com/home

How to Make the Search Alliance a Positive for Your Business

Although there are many more nuances to the Search Alliance that could be written about at great length, the three main things to understand about the Search Alliance are:

        I.            Decide Which Transition Option to Use

In preparation for the upcoming Yahoo & adCenter Search Alliance, Yahoo advertisers should now all be seeing a new “adCenter” tab in their Yahoo accounts with three options for transition:

1. Help Me Transition: Will allow you to move existing campaigns from Yahoo into an adCenter account. Since Yahoo campaigns are inherently structured differently than adCenter, I would rarely recommend this option.
2. Set Up Account Only: Create a new adCenter account where you will be able to import campaigns from AdWords, for example, or create new campaigns from scratch. If you don’t currently have an AdCenter account at all, this is the choice for you.
3. No Help Needed: If you have an AdCenter account that is already fairly optimized, then select this option. Your Yahoo account will essentially phase itself out as the transition gets underway.

Note that once you select one of these three options, there isn’t an “undo” button – so be sure about your choice!

      II.            Start Optimizing for AdCenter Now

The sooner you can begin to make sure you adCenter campaigns are optimized, the better. This will help to ensure you hit the ground running when adCenter ads start receiving more and more traffic from Yahoo properties. A great place to start with optimization is to look at what you are doing in Google AdWords. AdWords and adCenter are more similar than Yahoo and adCenter on many levels – some examples of similarities include:

• Keyword matching options: broad, phrase, exact match keywords
• Ad text: 25 character limit headlines, 70 characters total in description

Due to these and other similarities, AdWords campaigns often translate quite well to adCenter. In fact, the adCenter Desktop Tool allows for easy transition of AdWords campaigns by using a simple AdWords Editor export. However, keep in mind that there are still differences between AdWords and adCenter, for example:

• adCenter limits the quantity of negative keywords in each campaign.
• adCenter’s dynamic text functionality is very different than AdWords’ – however it is more robust and many would say better than AdWords, so this is something to learn and become comfortable with to make the most of your campaigns here.

Ensure that you are comfortable with these differences – start optimizing now.

    III.            Be Prepared for Changes Once the Transition Begins

Slated to begin late September through early October, the transition will mean less traffic flowing through your Yahoo PPC ads and more flowing through your adCenter ads until Yahoo is entirely phased out. As that happens, I predict there will be some noticeable changes to your adCenter campaigns. Some things to keep watch for:

1. Increasing CPCs. More market share means that more advertisers are likely to sign on to adCenter, increasing competition and driving up CPC’s in the auction.
2. More traffic. This is obvious, but remember to account for this when looking at your web analytics data, as paid traffic from Yahoo will trail off. For the time being, there is going to be no way to differentiate targeting to either Yahoo or Microsoft properties via adCenter – so report on performance accordingly.
3. Improving functionality in adCenter. If you are already an adCenter user, this will be a welcome change. adCenter has several updates planned between now and the transition, and will need to continue to develop to bring themselves in line with the superior functionality offered by AdWords.

By considering all of the options, making the choice that best suits your business and preparing for the changes still to come, you can help ensure that the Search Alliances is something that doesn’t bruise your business but instead bolsters it.

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Leisa Hall is an Account Director at Anvil Media, Inc. – a search engine marketing agency in Portland, Oregon. Leisa directs Search Engine Marketing strategy for primarily B2C clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500.

Like AdWords, in Facebook the #1 factor governing your CPC is your Click-Through Rate (CTR).  While Facebook doesn’t reveal your ad or keyword Quality Score, you bet that it makes a huge difference. We have some ads that we bid $2 a click and end up paying 5 cents, while we have some ads bid at 20 cents, in which we’re paying 15 cents.

 Why?  CTR.  If you’re reading this, odds are that your CTR is in the 0.030% range or less–which will cause your clicks to be in the 75 cents range for US traffic.  But if you can get a 0.100% CTR, you might pay only 25 cents.  In some cases, you could hit a home run and get a 1.000% CTR and pay a penny a click for high quality traffic that converts.

Ok, so here are some principles to follow to increase your CTR:

1. Ask a question in the ad: Not only will this drive in-line likes (fans), but encourages participation. Consider asking them if they like you or the interest you’re targeting– but make sure you’re still relevant or you’ll be disapproved.
2. Write short ad copy: Sure you can use up all 135 characters in the body and 25 characters in the headline, but odds are that people won’t read it all.  This is Facebook– people are likely not conducting serious business, so make it light and easy.
3. Use a close-up face in your image: Smiling is better, as well as looking directly at you.  This is FACEbook, so use FACEs in your ads.
4. Personalize the image: If they’re a 45 year old white female in the Bible Belt, we’re not going to show an urban teenager rocking out. People usually convert better when the ad model is closer to them– the exception is dating and beauty products. Baby products can be like that, too.  Whatever the case, test it.  We know if they’re married or not on Facebook and can even guess their race– so that is something you can personalize the image with.
5. Capitalize a couple words: Saying FREE is not okay in AdWords, but we see it all the time in Facebook.  You might try it.
6. Use numbers and unusual characters: This works in regular PPC, too.  And if you make a claim– don’t say “We can help you save money on insurance.”  Don’t even say “We can save you 15% on your insurance.”  You need to be more specific– “Save 17.3% in just 3 minutes!”
7. Stimulate emotion:  ”You’ll be sorry.  That’s what you’ll say if you miss Portland Honda’s Labor Day blowout sale!”  Arouse curiosity. Message it as if it was a personal friend talking to a personal friend– “Doris, you wouldn’t believe the sale at Luckys on hotdogs this weekend.”  
8. Send users to your Facebook page: This is where custom tabs, especially a reveal tab or engagement app positively rules.
9. Follow through on the promise on the landing page: Almost nobody does right– if you see it done right, please let me know. In PPC, we know that we must tightly map the keyword to the ad to the landing page. That means if someone is looking for patio furniture, we don’t say “cheap furniture” and dump them on our home page.  But that’s what most folks do in Facebook- send everyone to exactly the same page, as opposed to differing landing pages based on what’s targeted in the interests and ads.
10. Dayparting: We run Facebook campaigns for a number of food companies.  I suppose you could promote breakfast foods at night, but why would you?  Consider how time of day may affect the messaging as well as the type of user you see.  For example, if you’re selling cold and flu medication, you might run ads between midnight and 6 am saying “If you were using X, you’d be sound asleep right now.”  By the way, dayparting is not a feature in Facebook yet, so we had to build our own.
11. Fan targeting: Once you have all these fans, you have to keep the conversation going.  The fan targeting won’t give you much volume, but I’ll bet it has the highest CTR of any ads you run.  It’s the equivalent of social retargeting.

There you have it–now go kick some CTR butt with these tips and let me know how they worked for you!

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 Dennis Yu is CEO of BlitzLocal, a firm specializing in Facebook and local advertising.

As a discipline, search engine marketing (SEM) is made up of several components, traditionally including both search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click marketing (PPC).  Internet marketing, however, is a game that is constantly changing.  With the rise of social networking and social media, it is critical that Internet marketers understand the impact of these channels on search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

Social Media as Content Distribution Channel

Previously, if a company or individual had a blog, post, or article they wanted to get noticed, they might concentrate on SEO, hoping to get better placement in the search engines and boost traffic, getting more people to notice their article.  These days, social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have become new ways of distributing, searching for, accessing, and interacting with content.

This is a trend that is not going to halt or reverse – currently, Facebook users share over 30 billion pieces of content, which includes web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, etc., each month.  Twitter has grown from about 5,000 tweets per day in 2007 to a reported 65 million tweets a day as of June, 2010; because of Twitter’s 140 character limit, many of these tweets contain embedded links to third-party websites.  While not social networks in the strictest sense, social bookmarking and content sharing sites like Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon also offer novel channels of distributing and searching for content outside of the traditional search engine.

While Google remains the most trafficked site in the United States, Facebook is already the 2^nd most trafficked, Twitter the 7^th, and LinkedIn the 17^th most trafficked in the United States; according to Alexa, Facebook is the top website in five countries.

How Does Social Media Impact Search Engine Optimization?

Twitter is now recognized as a legitimate information source and distribution channel – it is indexed by Google (tip- try typing in site:twitter.com into Google.  Over 100,000,000 pages are indexed) and the United States Library of Congress even archives all public tweets.  The social web is the future–Google knows this and, in order to stay competitive, Google has been and will continue to integrate social media assets into its search algorithm and search engine results pages.

While Facebook has long been more of a “walled garden” than Twitter, due to the higher privacy expectations of its users, you can’t afford to ignore Facebook’s impact on SEO.  There are two key things to consider when thinking about Facebook and search engine optimization: the first and most obvious is, “How does Facebook impact traditional search engines like Google and Bing?”.

But don’t ignore the second question–how do you optimize your website to appear in the search results WITHIN Facebook.  That’s right – if you haven’t noticed, when searching from within Facebook, after results from Facebook itself are displayed, “Web Results”, supplied by Bing, are also displayed.  This may not seem like a big deal right now, but you can bet that Facebook will continue to leverage its dominance in the social space to try to become a serious player in the search space.

Facebook’s Impact on Traditional Search Engines and SEO

Because this is such a new area and is continuing to develop, it is hard to gauge the direct and indirect impact Facebook and sharing content through Facebook has on SEO.  If your company has a blog or website and post links to that site on your Facebook, does this benefit your SEO?  If you integrate a “Like” button into your website, and visitors use it to share your content, does this benefit your SEO?

Directly – probably not – these links are running through Facebook and redirects, which likely eliminates any ‘link credit’ you might get.  But that said, it is nearly impossible to quantify the ‘indirect’ benefit to your search engine optimization efforts – that is, users who see your link, visit your site, bookmark it, tweet about it, email it to friends, and so on.

Key Tips About Social Media and Search Engine Optimization

• If your business doesn’t already have profiles on major social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), establish them now.  If you’re not on these services, users who search for you there won’t find you.
• Keep your profiles active – they’re not going to help drive traffic and improve your SEO standing if you’re not using these channels to distribute content.
• Don’t ONLY use social media as a distribution channel - one of the most powerful aspects of social networking is that it is bi-directional.  You’ll gain the most benefit by engaging users, not just throwing content at them.

Stay up-to-date.  The web and the technologies behind it are constantly changing.  Make sure you follow and understand developments at Google, Facebook, Twitter and how they impact your social media, SEO, and search engine marketing efforts. 

PPC Summit offers online training in areas including search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and social media marketing.

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Jason Mikula works as a freelance search engine marketing and social media marketing consultant.  He has experience working with pay per click, search engine optimization, and email and web marketing.

PPC Summit recently conducted a survey of leading bid management vendors and their customers.  Some common themes emerged, some of which were unexpected.  This article captures five of several messages search marketers are sending vendors.  See the full report for other expectations, challenges they’ve faced, and advice they have for their fellow marketers.

#1:  Provide Kick-Ass Support or Else

We interviewed more than 50 people and 41 organizations.  Of the 66 criteria they defined, support rated #1 by a long shot.  “Support” means a lot of things, though, not just an 800-number or Internet-based support.  And quite frankly, some vendors don’t even provide an 800-number.

Vendors better listen and prove they’re listening too, before and after the sale.  The level of support a vendor offers before a sale can foreshadow the level of service you may end up with after the sale.  Sure, some vendors have tiered customer service levels meaning if you pay them extra they’ll be at your beck and call.  With others the amount or type of support you get may depend on your spend level.  For example, you’re spending a couple of thousand dollars a month you won’t have a dedicated account manager but if you’re spending $50,000 a month you likely will.

My favorite pre-sale support story came out of Zappos from Assistant SEM Manager Tim Schaeffer.  When Schaeffer was evaluating vendors he had three companies on his short list.  He sent e-mail messages to all three at the same time and was surprised by the results.  Two of the vendors were located in the same time zone (Pacific).  The third, Kenshoo, was located in Israel which was Kenshoo.  It was midnight in Israel at the time.  Guess who responded first?  Kenshoo.  Guess who got the business?  You guessed it. 

Kenshoo responded immediately.  Both US vendors responded in about 4 hours and one of them was located a five minute drive away!  Oops.

The “support” bucket also now includes customer-requested product features.  Those companies who listen to their customers or solicit customer feedback and turn customer requests and comments into product features or feature enhancements are viewed as more “customer centric” than those who don’t.  Moreover, the customers who have witnessed their ideas transformed into product features are taking emotional equity in the vendor and its product to the point where some sound like a Windows 7 commercial:  “I’m a PPC (search marketer) and I invented [my favorite vendor’s product].”

#2:  Get the Lead Out

Vendors differ in a lot of respects but here we’re going to discuss time to market.  Some vendors have agile software release cycles ranging from about two weeks to three months while others still have annual or semi-annual “major release” cycles. 

Major release cycles are how software companies have traditionally built software:  They plan, build, test, and deploy a big software release that’s packed with all kinds of features and enhancements.  Traditional software development is a linear practice that moves a product down a line through several types of specialists who specify, build, and test the software, respectively.  Agile development involves software releases that are smaller in scope and released more frequently.   It breaks down interdepartmental fiefdoms like coding and testing, among other things, so software teams can develop better quality software faster and more collaboratively.

Among the people we interviewed the difference between traditional and agile releases meant a lot.  Companies with shorter (agile) release cycles are seen as more in tune with customer requirements and also more up to date with Google’s constant algorithmic modifications than companies with slower release cycles.

This finding also ties back to the point about turning customer ideas into product features:  When customers see product features a few weeks or a few months down the road that they personally suggested they become more loyal customers and they’re also amazed how fast their vendor of choice incorporated their idea(s).

#3:  Make Me More Effective

Almost everyone we interviewed had switched vendors at least once or dumped their agency because they believed they could do a better job in-house using the right tools and with the help of the right experts on the vendors’ account team.

“Help” comes in several forms including human assistance and machine assistance.  The human element we’ve already touched on; however, I can say the vendor account teams when they’re good are a valuable extension of the in-house search team.

Machine help is also popular among both experienced and novice search professionals.  Some systems have automated best practice engines that will suggest best practices automatically, kind of like contextual help.  The engines apply algorithms to historical history, keyword prices, the buying patterns of organizations inside or even outside your industry, and then compare the results with your current actions.

Experienced search marketers sometimes ignore the suggestions based on experience.  Seasonal keyword buys are a great example.  They nevertheless value a second pair of eyes, virtual or not, because it forces them to think about what they’re doing and why.  New search marketers like best-practice suggestions because it’s a great way to learn hands-on.

In terms of product features you may have noticed – and we point out in the report – that bid management isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to managing search programs effectively.  Vendors tend to categorize the additional features differently but reporting and campaign management are the two major buckets with the latter including bulk uploads and editing, Quality Score management, and more.

#4:  Help Me Do Business My Way

It’s wonderful some vendors have so many features available for every imaginable vertical market.  On the other hand, who cares?   If a company sells professional services it has no need to tie inventory to paid search because it has no inventory.  The message here is twofold:  1) Make me effective in my vertical and 2) Don’t make me wade through hundreds of features just to guess which 50 actually matter.

(Actually, you can do yourself a BIG favor by prioritizing what you’re trying to accomplish.  That way, what is and is not relevant will be more obvious to you.)

Search marketers appreciate domain expertise but it’s hard to know what you’re missing if don’t know a capability exists.  One gentleman we interviewed is convinced multi-channel attribution is impossible and yet other fellow retailers are doing it with varying levels of success and sophistication.

Vertical market nuances can also play out in sales.  A search marketer who works for a national insurance agency is spending lots of money but on very few keywords so a percentage-of-spend cost model doesn’t work for him.

Help Me Improve ROI

ROI is a moving target and as you well know search marketers are under constant pressure to improve ROI.  Many search marketers are looking beyond last click attribution to multi-attribution and multichannel attribution for two main reasons:  1) Last-click attribution rarely reflects actual human behavior and 2) Paid search is being integrated into overall marketing strategies more than it has been. As a result, paid search is increasingly being compared to, contrasted with, and optimized in relation to other marketing tactics.

Retailers are a good example of a vertical market making this move.  Admittedly, it’s the larger retailers that are pushing the trend forward but as always sophistication flows downstream over time.  Smaller retailers are already paying attention because they’re hearing more buzz about it generally thanks to AdWords search funnel reports.

Not all vendors provide this capability and those who do don’t necessarily support it to the same degree.  At the present time, some search marketers are doing the functional equivalent of sticking a finger in the wind to using complex data models to attribute costs to specific actions.

It’s a growing area and people are interested so expect to see a lot more about this (and more sophisticated solutions) in the near future.

Conclusion

There are a lot of reasons to hate bid management solutions and vendors, especially if their products and/or services don’t align with your business.  If you’re unhappy with your present vendor, you’re wise to take a thoughtful approach to vendor selection starting with your objectives.  Along the way, pay attention to things like responsiveness and a willingness to ensure your success, particularly if your spend level is formidable.

The main message is don’t settle.  You don’t have to.  Most vendors offer free trials so you can take their solutions for a test drive and all of them would be more than happy to be your next business partner.  Just make sure you’re in the driver’s seat or you may end up feeling like you’ve been taken for a ride.

Lisa Morgan is CEO of Strategic Rainmakers, a management and marketing consulting firm that helps organizations meet their strategic business and marketing goals.  Its services include in-depth research, marketing consulting, content development, and strategic initiatives, among other things.  Past and present clients include vendors, service providers, event producers, publishers, and associations.

By Elisa Gabbert, Content Development Manager at WordStream, Inc.

If you’re still building pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns from a traditional keyword list, it’s not doing your business any favors. A spreadsheet is an inefficient, outdated way to manage keywords for search marketing, leading to wasted dollars and lost time.

A keyword database is a completely different approach to research and manage PPC keywords. Compared to a keyword list, it’s:

• Private and proprietary
• Easier to organize and manage
• Easier to update and expand
• More actionable
• Collaborative

Essentially, it’s a flexible infrastructure that enables you to work with large numbers of keywords and quickly determine which pockets of keywords have the most business value. You can then translate your database into a highly effective PPC campaign structure.

Building a keyword database isn’t difficult, and as your campaigns scale, you’ll find it much faster and easier to keep things running smoothly. Here’s the five-step process to build an effective keyword database for PPC marketing.

Step 1: Start your PPC keyword research

The most important part of a keyword database, naturally, is keywords! To build a comprehensive, up-to-date database, it’s important to look at keyword research as an ongoing process, aggregating keywords from multiple sources.

Here are four sources, both public and private, that will help you gain a complete picture of the terms you should be using in your campaigns:

• Public keyword tools: A traditional Web-based keyword suggestion tool is based on popularity; remember that overall popularity doesn’t guarantee relevance to your audience.
• Historical site logs: Your server logs are a great source of keyword data—they contain a record of the real search queries that have led people to your site.
• Web analytics: The keyword reports in your analytics provide a continuous stream of new keywords. Incorporate those new insights into your research.
• Search query reports: The search query reports in AdWords Editor are another source of real data. These tell you the actual search queries that have triggered your PPC ads.

Pooling these sources gives you a personalized database that is highly relevant to your business. Be sure to keep your research up-to-date with traffic and conversion stats to see which keywords do the most work in your PPC campaigns.

Step 2: Segment and organize your keywords
Better keyword research gets you a lot closer to more profitable PPC campaigns, but to reap the full benefits of your research, it’s crucial to organize your keywords into small, manageable groups of closely related terms. This process will improve your campaigns by enabling:

• Better landing pages: It’s easier to write targeted, high-ranking copy around close-knit keyword groups.
• Better ads: Similarly, you can quickly write relevant, compelling text ads for well-structured keyword groups (aka ad groups).
• Better click-through rates: More relevant pages and ads grab a more qualified audience, so your CTRs and conversion rates improve.
• Better Quality Scores: High CTR and relevance lead to high Quality Scores, so you pay less for better positioning.

A well-organized database structure makes everything else you do for PPC, from adding new keywords to managing bids, simpler and more effective.

Step 3: Cut out waste with negative keywords
With strong keyword research, you can identify profitable keyword opportunities. But for high ROI, it’s equally important to identify and eliminate waste. This means discovering negative keywords, or irrelevant terms that eat up pay-per-click advertising budgets without generating quality leads.

Here are a few ways to find negative keyword candidates:

• Generic negative keyword lists: These aren’t a bad way to get started, but remember that generic negative keywords may not apply to your specific niche, and many are likely missing.
• During regular keyword research: When looking for relevant keywords, also keep your eyes open for suggestions that aren’t relevant to your business.
• Search query reports: Regularly look through your search query reports in AdWords and remove irrelevant keywords from your ad groups.
• Organic log files: By using your own log files for negative keyword discovery, you can catch irrelevant keywords before they trigger your ads.

Step 4: Create strong, targeted text ads
The next step is to write text ads for each keyword/ad group. If you followed the above process, your ad groups are already highly targeted, so it should be simple to write strong, targeted ads. Here are some tips for writing effective PPC ad copy:

• Include the top traffic: driving keywords in the title, text, and display URL of the ad when possible.
• Don’t overgeneralize: address a specific segment of your audience.
• Test several ads for each ad group. Google will rotate the ads so you can see which works best.
• Always include a call to action.

In addition, to maximize Quality Score, your ads should clearly be relevant to their associated landing pages.

Step 5: Repeat as necessary to maintain gains
One of the benefits of a keyword database is the ability to expand your research without losing control. So keep monitoring, testing, and tweaking your campaigns to improve results. And keep adding keywords from your analytics! The keywords your clients use to find you are among your most valuable marketing assets.

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Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream, Inc., a provider of advanced SEO tools and pay-per-click software for search engine marketing efforts. WordStream also offers a FREE keyword analyzer tool for conducting keyword research and discovering profitable head, mid- and long-tail keywords.

By Kelly Larsen Director of Marketing, PPC Summit 

At past PPC Summit events, attendees have shown a lot of interest in WordStream’s keyword tool so we decided to provide a more detailed look at how these tools work. We recently had the opportunity to talk with Larry Kim, Founder and VP of Product Development at WordStream, to learn about their new keyword tools. Larry walked us through how the Keyword Niche Finder and Keyword Grouper work and how you can use them to enhance your SEO and PPC results. We wanted to share some of the cool product takeaways in the following Q&A on how these tools can help you better manage the keyword development process.

1.  How do these new tools help Search Marketers do their jobs better?
We launched these free Keyword tools to offer Search Marketers a broader range of keyword development and management options. The Keyword Niche Finder is designed to help prioritize content, keyword targeting and campaign creation based on an entire “keyword universe” surrounding a topic. It helps Search Marketers find the most popular pockets of related keywords (keyword niches) rather than individual keywords. And the Keyword Grouper helps Search Marketers organize their own keyword lists and data into actionable groups and niches.

 Advantages of The Keyword Niche Finder and Keyword Grouper:
a. Identify Keyword Niches Versus Single Keywords – Many times the most popular   keyword will perform best on your site, but not always.

b. Discover In-depth Keyword Variations – The Niche Finder offers popular variations within a given keyword cluster. This helps to vary page content and anchor text – something SEOs advocate – and it helps to structure comprehensive PPC campaigns or Ad Groups.

c. Improve Campaign Structure – These tools help to create a well-organized, semantically themed campaign and Ad Group structure for paid search accounts.

2. What are keyword niches and how do they help SEO and PPC campaign performance?
Keyword niches are groupings of tightly related keywords that can be used to drive paid and organic search marketing strategies.

For SEO purposes, identifying keyword niches helps marketers prioritize SEO workflow, identify promising topics for Web content and blog posts, and ensure that a website is optimized for the most profitable keywords.

As for PPC performance, when you identify keyword niches in your vertical, it allows you to create a strong PPC account structure at inception. This will save time and money by delivering more relevant ads, which in turn generate more clicks and improve your Quality Score.

3. How does the Keyword Niche Finder work?
Let’s take a look at the Niche Finder in action. It’s interesting to compare the results of a traditional keyword tool to The Free Keyword Niche Finder, as shown below. Here are results from WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool:

 
Now let’s look at the results for the same topic using The Free Keyword Niche Finder:
 

The interesting point here is in the difference between the two results, and the way that the two tools function. The Free Keyword Tool looks at the volume of results across a variety of sources (ISPs, search engines, and toolbars). The Free Keyword Niche Finder takes the same data that The Free Keyword Tool is using and then clusters that information semantically. So what we’re seeing here is that some keywords have a longer or more substantial “tail”.

Take one of the more popular niches (“refurbished laptops – dell”) and enter that keyword into the Niche Finder:

 
Assuming we’re using Refurbished Dell Laptops as a campaign, these would make for a series of pretty tight Ad Groups, ranging from approximately 10 – 35 keywords. This allows you to write very targeted ads and create a very specific, compelling landing page for each group.

4. What is the Keyword Grouper and how does it work?
The Keyword Grouper offers similar functionality to the Keyword Niche Finder, but instead of asking for a keyword as input, it groups existing data. You can export data from your analytics or a search query report, drop it into the tool, and then The Free Keyword Grouper segments that data.

Just drop in a list of keywords, and it provides a list of results similar to what you would find with The Free Keyword Niche Finder. This is a nice way to look at either a list you already have, or to examine historical data on a client site or an existing site you may be taking over. You can then leverage the same advantages The Free Keyword Niche Finder offers.

5. How can I get these tools?
The tools are free and easy to use; all you have to do is create a free WordStream account to gain full access to both tools, the Keyword Niche Finder and the Keyword Grouper.

By Heather F. Lutze – review by Mary O’Brien, Founder of PPC Summit

Many small (and larger) businesses put up a website and assume that the “If you build it, they will come” concept applies. Unfortunately, this wasn’t true when the internet started and it’s even less so now. Successful businesses get the fact that your website is now a critical part of your marketing campaign. It needs to be designed to attract search engines AND customers to be successful and Heather does a great job in this book of explaining why.

“Findability” in the title of the book refers to the critical need of every business to be visible on the internet (and particularly in search engines) at that crucial time when their prospect is ready to buy from them. Basically, it’s so competitive now that if you are not on the first page of search engine results you are wasting your time. And -  if you’re NOT there you can be sure your competition will be.

Heather has a great ability to translate quite technical marketing concepts in to terms that beginners and experienced users alike can relate to. I have seen her explain these concepts accepted time and time again, in training she has given at our Pay-Per-Click Summits, and I’m delighted to see that she has used this same relatable quality to get her points across in the book.

Search Engine Marketing can be a complicated subject, particularly for the beginning marketer, and this book does a great job in translating the technical jargon into actionable concepts that you can follow.

Heather describes it as a non-technical guide, but the basics are all covered in an easily readable way that allows a beginner to easily implement a successful Search Engine Marketing campaign. Readers will learn the basics of Pay-Per-Click and also how Pay-Per-Click and Organic Search work together to give you better search engine visibility for your business.

Advanced users might find it a bit basic, but that’s not who this book is designed for. This book is designed for those new to internet marketing who also know that Search Engine Marketing is an important web traffic driver for their business, need to get up to speed fast, and want someone to explain it sequentially.

There are more advanced books out there for those who need to delve into the nitty-gritty, but if you are just getting started, and are a non-technical person who wants easy to follow instructions, then this book is a must read.

You will learn:
•    A complete step-by-step approach to search engine marketing applicable to any product or service, in an easy-to-follow instructional style.
•    How to avoid common search marketing mistakes that cost big money.
•    How to set up campaigns in a smarter way to get better search engine visibility.
•    How search engines work, how search engine marketing works, and how to take advantage of both.
•    The online tools to use that make campaign management easier

By Heather Lutze, Founder Findability Group

As the recession continues, companies are scrambling for new and creative ways to continue marketing while keeping costs down.  That is why, as an Internet marketer, it is exciting to be able to offer Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising as a cost-effective alternative.

In traditional marketing, a business might put up a billboard on Main Avenue, expecting “x number” of people to see it, of that 5% to be in their target audience, and of that to get “x percentage” in leads.  In PPC advertising, businesses now have the option to only show their “billboard” (ad) to interested members of their target audience. It is a revolutionary new way to target, and can save businesses a large amount of capital, in addition to bringing them much higher-qualified leads.

Of course, in order to take advantage of the targeting potential in PPC, entrepreneurs must get in touch with how their target customer searches online.  More specifically, how their target customer searches online when they are ready to buy.

As the Internet continues to play a larger role in consumer’s lives, understanding the buying cycle online is critical to a successfully targeted PPC campaign. The importance of understanding the buying cycle is realizing that a “customer gathering data” and a “customer ready to buy” type in very different search strings.

For example, a person gathering basic information might search “TV” whereas a person serious about making a purchase would type something such as “Plasma, 32 inch televisions in Denver with free delivery.” In this example, the second consumer is a more qualified (and typically much cheaper) click to pay for. For most businesses, you must make a decision of where in the customer’s search process you believe they are ready to buy. Honestly, determining this ideal point in an internet search is the real art behind Internet marketing and PPC targeting. Fortunately, if you don’t have the budget to hire a PPC firm, there are a few tools available to help you get in touch with your ideal keywords:

Tool #1 : Word Tracker (www.wordtracker.com ) – Owned by a private company, Word Tracker generates keyword suggestions based on search volume. In addition, Word Tracker determines how many competing sites are using those keywords and can help businesses take advantage of untapped market niches.

Pros: Generates keywords suggestions and gives strategic recommendations of easy to penetrate online markets.
Cons: Paid service ($59/month).

Tool #2: Keyword Discovery (www.keyworddiscovery.com) – Operated by Trellian, Keyword Discovery also generates keyword suggestions based on search volume. However, Keyword Discovery also offers spelling mistake research, seasonal search trends and keyword density analysis, to help PPC advertisers to really hone in on creating a campaign which maximizes results.

Pros: Generates a very comprehensive list of keyword suggestions, including spelling and seasonal keywords.
Cons: Paid service ($69.95/month).

Tool #3: Google Wonder Wheel (under “show options” when you do a Google search) – If you are new to keyword research and a bit intimated by getting back lists of data in tools like Word Tracker or Keyword Discovery, the Wonder Wheel is a fantastic starting point. Launched in May of this year, the wheel helps advertisers understand the organization of how users search for their product. In addition, the wheel is much easier to grasp, as it uses an easy to read org-chart interface.

Pros: Free, easy to use and great for beginners.
Cons: Strips out a lot of data in order to maintain usability. The Wheel does not include search volume, competitive analysis, or more than a handful of keyword recommendations per “wheel.”

Tool # 4: SpyFu (www.spyfu.com) – Curious how much you are going to pay for each click you receive? It is important to build your keyword list with your budget in mind.  Fortunately, SpyFu offers free analysis on the bid range for keywords. In addition, SpyFu gives great competitive analysis on how many advertisers are competing for that keyword and the ad text they are using.

Pros: Free and gives a lot of great information in just one page.
Cons: The free version only offers limited information (typically only on keywords up to two words long).

Your ultimate goal is to connect with your target customer online and to make sure your paid ads are findable at the best point in that user’s search. Remember, even your ideal target searcher can’t become a customer unless they find you.

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Heather Lutze is the author of the newly released book, “The Findability Formula: The Simple and Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing” (Wiley and Sons). As a nationally recognized speaker and author, she has spent the last 10 years as CEO of Findability Group – a Search Engine Marketing firm that works with companies to attain maximum Internet exposure. Heather is also a lead speaker for Pay Per Click Summit, and previously spent two years speaking for Yahoo! Search Marketing. For more information, visit www.FindabilityGroup.com

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 .