Intelligent PPC

After spending way too much time managing pay per click accounts for agencies while watching the economy wobble around like a drunken sailor, I’ve come to a conclusion. The most cost effective pay per click campaign is managed in-house by a competent professional, well-versed in the business for which the campaigns are set up. Trouble is, there’s a shortage of competent professionals. Often, the analysts you can find work for agencies and don’t know jack about your business sector – you end up being the guinea pig for some PPC management firm. I know. I trained those analysts using your campaigns.

Even if there wasn’t a shortage of trained pay per click analysts,  there’s a misconception among a lot of businesses that pay-per-click management is a part-time job that can be piled on along with other responsibilities like, oh, graphic design or web development or even bookkeeping. A successful pay per click campaign can be likened to a Rubik’s Cube, where someone is constantly moving the little colored stickers. You get everything aligned just so and what happens?

Look at this – editorial guideline change… oops, another quality score adjustment… wait, Yahoo wants to charge WHAT to activate this keyword? Who has time to split test an ad, much less a landing page? How do I keep up with all these keywords? What do you mean my ad is disapproved – it was working yesterday before we updated the website!

If you don’t 1) understand what makes a PPC campaign work, then 2) actually apply that knowledge, you might as well walk over to the window with your $10,000 a month PPC budget and throw all that money in the street.

What’s the answer? Like I said before, you need a competent in-house professional. Chances are either you or someone like you who already works there is well-versed enough in basic internet technology and your business, to train successfully as an in-house pay per click analyst.

Our goal at Intelligent PPC is to give you the ammunition to take on that unwieldy Google Adwords account and get it under control. We don’t want to manage your account – we want to show you how to manage it.

In another pay per click strategy post in another life, we broached the subject of how to advertise wisely on the content network by splitting out your campaigns so that your content network ads are running in a campaign that’s dedicated to the content network audience. But what about the complaint that campaigns on the content network are often unwieldy and money-grubbing, spiraling out of control the moment you blink?

Enter Placement Management from Google – think of it as working the old style content network in reverse. Instead of going into a campaign set-up trying to dig through those “categories” and add a list of sites you think your ads might perform on, you can now set up your content network ads to blast all over the content network to start with (only for a few days). Run a Google Placement Report after a few days to see where clicks are wasted and then selectively block the money pits as you find them. Don’t let your ads run too long with out checking in on this report or some of those keywords are liable to get away from you. I set a Rainlendar reminder for 48-60 hours, then I run the Google Placement Report, sort by highest spend, and whack out the sites I don’t want to waste money on anymore.

It’s easy to be seduced by big brand names… “wow, I can run my ads on MySpace!” Great, millions of teenagers will see your ad for a free trial download of the latest professional firewall protection on the market and you’ll pay for hundreds, maybe thousands of clicks made by unqualified buyers who don’t need professional firewall protection – they just responded to the ad that said “free download.”

The second most important key to success on the content network is controlling it. Keep tabs on the content network and you can easily control the spend and make the most of the dollars (or cents, in some cases) that do get spent there.

{Part I in a series  –  Michelle}

This is probably one of my favorite topics [possibly because another name for it is "intelligence"]. I enjoy all that research. I like accumulating massive amounts of information and trying to find the patterns, the keys, the cogs that make something tick. I’ll spend hours taking screen captures of web pages, running trend reports, checking search volumes, working up spend estimates, and examining text ads until I’m cross-eyed, only to have my client look at page one of the report and say, “These aren’t my competitors! I already told you who I compete with. You wasted your time.” Thus we arrive are reason number one to perform a competitive analysis…

There are lots of people in other businesses out there bidding on your terms – you need to be aware of them and their PPC strategies in order to compete effectively.

I can safely say that in the last few years, once has a client actually handed me the name of a serious pay per click competitor right off the bat. Nearly without fail, the business owner’s perception of who they compete with simply doesn’t match the reality once you start actually looking into the ads themselves. There are all kinds of reasons for this – everything from a misguided opinion of “where” they compete to the failure to establish regionally targeted paid ad campaigns. When push comes to shove, though, in pay per click you are competing with whomever else is bidding on your words.

One of my favorite conversations of this type occurred with a client who sold pole barns. I was told no less than a dozen times that a pole barn is not the same as a steel building and they don’t compete with people who sell steel buildings or metal buildings – pole barns are something altogether different. So I went to Google and typed in “pole barns” and got this:

I showed this to the client and I was told that people who really need a pole barn know the difference… um, hello, this is a search on “pole barn” and 6 out of eleven paid ads are for steel and metal building makers. Sure, my client’s ad was there (because I’m not stupid and bid them onto the page) but in studying competitive numbers, you need to include all the people playing in your sandbox, not just the ones who sell the same item you sell. In point of fact, these other companies that he considered not to be competitors were out-bidding him on his main product keyword. That makes them a PPC competitor, regardless of what they sell.

To make sure you get the best picture of the playing field, use a tool designed to monitor Google ads regardless of geographical area, like Ad Goo Roo, Spy Fu, or Compete. That’s a lot easier than running 700 sample searches in the Adwords Ad Previewer. If you don’t know who else is running ads against you, and at what times they’re most competitive, you may find yourself spending more money than necessary in senseless bid wars against companies with deeper pockets.

You’ll want to make note, not only of the domain names that consistently appear on page one SERPs for your terms, but you will also want to make note of their ad copy, placement, and timing (are do they seem to be running on a timer schedule). If you’re utilizing one of the afore-mentioned tools, you can export all of this data to a spreadsheet for analyzing, resorting, and general havoc-wreaking. If you’re not using one of these tools, you can hire a professional PPC analyst to perform this task for you, or sometimes you can simply purchase an analysis on your market sector.

The point is that you need to be aware of a much broader spectrum of competition when you’re operating a pay per click campaign. You’ll also want to go back and investigate these web sites your competitors operate in order to 1) fully assess their level of competition and 2) see if they are fulfilling any consumer needs that you aren’t, which would cause a shopper to choose them over you. This sort of direct comparison will be the topic of the next article in this series. Stay tuned!

{keep an eye out for the next article in the series}