Category Archives: Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC Bidding and Violations

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If you have ever wondered why advertisers ask that you do not bid on their brand name there are multiple reasons. If you bid using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising on search engines you may have seen a message like this:

We have seen a lot of publishers bidding on our brand name. If you are bidding on our brand name or any variation of it please pause your campaign immediately! From now on we will strictly enforce our terms. To prevent any discomfort please make sure you are not violating our program terms.

There may be many reasons why they prefer you do not bid on their brand name and one is due to it being a Trademark. As an owner of a trademark you do not want others using that trademark. You need to control the usage of the mark and assure that no one is trying to profit from your good will and the value you have created around that mark. The owner of the mark prefers that they, and they alone, control the advertisements that appear when their mark is searched for. This allows them to control the advertisements and the pages that are shown after an advertisement is clicked. The owner of the mark does not want their mark to be diluted or seen in a negative light for any reason. Allowing many affiliates to bid on their name and present websites as if it is the owner of the marks site, takes away the control of the content from the mark owner.

I have received questions about the bidding of brand names and why advertisers care, hopefully this explains it.

trademark violation

Yahoo and Microsoft are Search Partners

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Yahoo and Microsoft announced their alliance. How does that work? Or does it not work? We do not know yet. It remains to be seen. They needed to first obtain approval, due to monopoly concerns. I am not stating there should be a concern, just that there was. As they stated:

“Microsoft® and Yahoo! have now received regulatory clearance to form the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance in the United States and European Union.”

microsoft advertisingHow the Alliance Effects You
In a nutshell, get used to the logo at the right. While there is an “alliance” you will be using the Microsoft ad platform. There is Yahoo transition information and Microsoft transition information. You can find it all here on a neutral Search Alliance site. It may not be a fast transition however they state to have it completed by the 2010 holiday season but are not promising anything.

Who Will You Interact With?
What they decided to do was split up the responsibilities between both organizations. Yahoo will support what they call the high volume advertisers. Those that spend quite a bit, the agencies and resellers. Microsoft will support the self service advertisers and they will use the Microsoft adCenter.

Benefits
By merging these two ad platforms they will have a greater reach. They state that there will be a reach of up to 150 million searchers. Through the combination of both ad platforms there will be approximately 62% more search volume than on Yahoo! alone. Now for those that are currently advertising on both platforms you will only need to now log into one.

Google AdWords Editor

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Google AdWords Editor, if you use Google and have not heard of it you will probably bow at my feet for pointing it out. It is a great tool, free from Google of course as they want you to spend money with them. However, that aside it will save you a ton of time for many reasons.

google_adwords_editor

Time Savings
There are many ways in which you can save time. One of which is the fact that you can credit, edit, and otherwise manage everything without being online. You will eventually have to upload your changes before they will be live however all the work can be done offline.

That is good, but this is great. Consider the fact that you can copy and paste. Wow, what an amazing concept, and I once heard a VP of Engineering say that copy and paste is Magic – ha ha. Don’t worry, I didn’t hire that one someone else did. That aside, it does save you a ton of time because you can copy and paste anything you like within the editor, whether it be campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ads etc.

Another huge time saver is the find ability to make a mass edit or replacement. You may have 4 ads in 10 different ad groups, 40 combinations. If you need to make a change to the destination URL you merely sort them and highlight them all, then change the URL once and they are all updated.

If you do not use AdWords you are reading this thinking it is ridiculous to point out something so obvious, however for those that use AdWords through a browser they will know that the above is not possible. Only with the Editor can you save time this way. If you are managing multiple campaigns, ads etc. and multiple accounts this can be a huge time saver. Take that extra time and go get a caramel bar from Starbucks, okay maybe that is just what I do, do whatever you do and enjoy the extra time. You’re welcome.

Get Started
You can download the free AdWords Editor here. You may also find this short 2 page pdf with shortcuts, from Google, also helpful as a cheat sheet here. There is a lot more you can do but you might as well jump in and get started. They of course provide help online which is very straight forward and explains the features well.

Constant Optimization of PPC Campaigns

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Search engine marketing optimization is critical to obtain the best possible return on investment. There are many factors to consider when marketing via a search engines pay per click platform.

Many factors are within your control to test, analyze and optimize, while other factors are not. Whether your competitors bid on the same keywords, what price they are willing to pay, changes in customers search behavior, changes in industry terms or new features, and other factors may be out of your control. It is possible depending on how you set up your campaign that your daily spend can vary greatly. You may even lose all traffic and not obtain visitors on a particular given day due to factors beyond your control.

Not only do you need to test every possible variable such as the advertisements, time of day, geographic targeting, mobile devices, landing pages, keywords, and many more, but you need to constantly watch the campaigns closely to assure you are maximizing your return on investment.

I wrote about this topic more extensively here.

AdWords Bid Simulator

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Everyone loves to be able to predict the future. Now if you could only predict your future spending and whether or not additional spending would result in better results or not. Google AdWords is trying to assist you in doing just that. Here is their explanation of the simulator:






Bid Simulator takes some of the guess work out of cost per click (CPC) bidding by estimating the number of clicks or impressions you could have received if you had used a different maximum CPC bid.

From Google’s official blog here is the post related to the AdWords bidding simulator, see the tutorial here, and/or watch the video below:



Bid AdWords
A great way to bid adwords is to first be able to determine your potential best price for the ads. While this may not show your return on investment, if you already know the value of the words this will allow you to attempt to scale at the best price. Adwords bidding is an art, but with the simulator they have added a science element to this.

Typically you would have to change your bids, wait until they take effect and watch your spend change. This could take time and you would have to keep track of your changes to determine the optimum price. However with the bid adwords tool you can do this in real time without spending any money.

Google AdWords Position Preferences

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AdWords Position
Here is a short tip with Google AdWords and position preferences. AdWords will allow you to request what position your advertisement is placed in. This can greatly impact your budget. In other words of the 10 positions, 1 being the top and 10 being the bottom you can choose where you would like to be.

Why would you want to do this?
Well, you can save on budget when you are initially testing a campaign. Many times the position you are in will determine the number of clicks you obtain. I have heard some speculate that the top position or second position may obtain a decent amount of clicks solely due to the fact that they are first and the level of interest of those individuals may not be as high. While the level of interest of those that read down to the advertisements to find the one that best matches their current interest may be a better quality lead.






Regardless of whether that speculation is true, the sole fact that the top two positions may obtain clicks much faster means that others will assure you burn through your budget faster. There are reasons why you do not want to exceed your budget every day which turns your ads off for the remainder of the day. You may want your ads to run all day and therefore need to control the number of clicks and the price to assure you do not have your ads turned off.

Where to Find Position Preferences
Within AdWords, while in a campaign you choose to edit your settings and you will see as you scroll down on the right-hand side you can check the box for adwords position preferences. Then save your campaign settings. Next go into a campaign and into the key words, you highlight all of the key words with the check box and choose to edit your keywords. The next page will have a column that allows you to choose the position from 1 to 10. Therefore you can choose to be, as an example, only in positions 3 through 6.

This is not the default so be sure that you edit your campaign settings. Give this a try if you want to limit your budget particularly in testing. You may find over time that this works for better quality leads across all your campaigns regardless of testing or not.

Yahoo Quality Index Much Like AdWords Quality Score

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A better quality advertisement on Yahoo can allow you to obtain higher rankings in their pay per click search marketing without increasing your cost per click.

Yahoo Quality Index
Much like the Google Quality Score that I wrote about recently Yahoo has their version which they call the Yahoo Quality Index. Essentially they are trying to determine if you have a relevant advertisement. They wish to present quality advertisements to visitors of their site. The better your Quality Index of your advertisement, the more likely you will achieve a high ranking position in relation to other ads and spend less money than others that have a lower Quality Index score.

How is the Quality Index Computed
To compute the Quality Index Yahoo looks at your advertisement, the keywords in the ad, the keywords you are targeting, how many clicks you receive and how you compare to others that are your competition.

What is Good and What is Bad
When reading the Google Quality Score a 1 is bad and a 10 is best. For Yahoo Quality Index they show a bar with 1 to 5 bars, 1 is bad and 5 is best.

How to Increase Your Quality Score
To increase your quality score you need to micro manage your advertisements and campaigns. Create ads that incorporate your keywords, either hard code them by typing the word in the ad or use their “insert keyword” function. [Note: When using the insert keyword be careful to check that inserting a keyword will make sense when the full ad is being read by a user]. Therefore the more relevant your keywords to your ads the more likely your score will be higher.

Also, although Google and Yahoo have not said this (at least I cannot find it) I firmly believe from experience that the correlation between the keywords, the advertisement, and the landing page the advertisement is sending the individual to, makes a difference as well. So make sure your landing page correlates to the keywords you are using and the advertisement.

Conclusion
Manage your Yahoo ads much like you would your Google ads, optimize keywords – ads – and landing pages for the higher score, higher rank, and cheaper overall cost when compared to your competitors.

Google Quality Score to Rank Higher and Pay Less

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AdWords Quality Score
Did you think that with Google AdWords the highest bidder won? Many do, but that’s not always the case. AdWords Quality Score is a score from 1 to 10 for each of your keywords as calculated by Google AdWords.

Rank Higher for Less Money
If you have a higher Quality Score for a keyword than another bidder you may obtain a higher listing result and with a lower maximum CPC bid. How is this possible? It is made possible by the way Google AdWords calculates your Quality Score.

Calculating Quality Score
The AdWords system looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text as well as the search query. It is also speculated that the landing page and relevance to the ad text as well as search query may also be relevant however I have not seen that stated by Google. Quality Scores of keywords can change.

Test it out by creating a campaign and ad group with only a few related keyword phrases and then include them in a text ad. You can see the Quality Score within the AdWords editor or within the web based AdWords system, you just have to enable it.

GoDaddy Hosting Promo Code

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GoDaddy Hosting

Use GoDaddy hosting promo code FAN20 for 20% Off website hosting. The FAN20 hosting coupon for 20% off on hosting is always the better deal. However, if you choose a month to month plan you will want to use coupon PETS1 for 10% off web hosting. With the free online advertising credits you actually make money on this deal. Go to GoDaddy Here.

GoDaddy Hosting Coupons
FAN20 – 20% off Hosting plans of 1yr or more [ direct link here ]
PAN1 10% off month to month plans [ direct link here ]
FAN123 20% off Website Tonight Website Tonight is a point and click website setup and design product [ direct link here ]
HOSTFEB1 $7.99 34% Off Hosting – 1 year Deluxe Hosting for $68 instead of $103 [ direct link here ] February Special

* See the entire list of Go Daddy Coupons here for hosting, domains, auction accounts, SSL certificates and more.

Most think of GoDaddy for domains but they are also very competitive in their hosting. For 12 months of web hosting you get a great package and it ends up only costing $45 with the promo coupon FAN20. Simply enter the promo code at checkout. On the right side of checkout you will see a box that reads Enter Promo or Source Code. Click that link and a box will appear where you enter the godaddy hosting coupon. Once you enter it hit the Apply link and the discount will be applied.

Step by Step Instructions for Applying the Coupons at Checkout.

Web Hosting Perks
With the $45 a year package you also get $95 in free advertising credits. These are credits with Google, MSN and Facebook. Looks like you can make $50 after you redeem the credits. Same information can be found on the Squidoo page about GoDaddy Hosting in detail.

Website Hosting Types
godaddy hostingThere are multiple types of hosting accounts available. There are the typical hosting accounts to create any presence you like. Also available are accounts specific to WordPress, blogs, podcasts and more. You can also have entire servers, dedicated servers, virtual dedicated servers and even cloud servers. You can even have application add-ons, analytics and additional IPs if needed for your hosting.

Recently they added what they call their 4GH Hosting. This is their 4th generation hosting. There is also a godaddy wordpress hosting account to get up and running fast. Most hosting companies put your site, your web space, on one computer. Other websites are also on that one computer. This is the typical definition of shared hosting. There are problems that can arise. For example if someone elses website that is on the same computer has problems and brings down the computer than your site goes down also. If your website or another website on that computer becomes very popular the amount of traffic can also cause server problems. That can bring down your site. What larger companies typically do is use a load balancer. Load balanced web hosting takes the incoming traffic and routes it to one of many computers, your website hosting files are copied onto multiple computers and therefore the “load” (which are visitors to your site) is spread among many computers. Now your site does not go down due to too much traffic, nor will another site cause you problems. There is much more that the 4GH godaddy hosting does for websites you but that gives you an idea of it’s website hosting capability.