Paid Search

When you’re managing 30+ Yahoo Sponsored Search accounts, you tend to get a lot of administrative and marketing mail from them. Though I do my best to keep apprised of the latest changes in their service, there’s just too much information to care about all of the time. For example, they’ve been running a webinar series for making the most out of your campaigns, which, as PPC Hero cares to point out in good detail, can be a mixed bag of advice.

So why did my eyebrow raise to see that Yahoo will now offer me $20 as a thank-you gift for attending the webinar and then filling out the survey? A gift which I can get up to three times?

The reason I’m not attending these webinars is not because I need $20, but because my perception of time/value is just not there… and $20 sure isn’t changing anything. I even think their webinars are GREAT… for the right market.

For example, look at the titles of these:

How to Create Successful Campaigns
How to Create Successful Keywords and Ads
How to Improve your Ad Quality

All nice topics, covering some pretty hearty stuff like geo-targeting, automatic keyword insertion, landing page quality, and other factors that effect the success of a campaign. The problem is, I already know all this, which means that as many pieces as Yahoo sends my way, I’m still not going to be interested.

Missing the Boat

My frustration with Yahoo’s service, especially compared with Google’s, is their failure to provide powerful tools for account managers like myself. The topic of these webinars and the frequency of their appearing in my inbox is just more evidence of that.

Where’s my offline editor for managing multiple ad campaigns across several accounts?
Where’s my master account so I can easily review the status of multiple clients?
When can I pull reports for multiple accounts automatically, based on specified parameters?

While I appreciate Yahoo’s effort to keep customers apprised of how to make their campaign work for them, my feeling is that they’re doing so as the expense of professionals who need more than what you’ll get out of an hour-long slideshow.

This morning has been a good one for link baitable story titles — Problogger has the astonishingly good “How to Write Posts That Set StumbleUpon on Fire” and the bent logic of “How to write terrible meta tags” brought me to the UK’s Leapfrogg Blog. FYI, the article had some fine advice but very little about writing terrible meta tags.

I did keep browsing around to an article I found totally delightful — Save Money, Increase Sales, Eat Waffles! This one is a case study of PPC landing page and ad copy relevancy based on the top results for an innocent query, “buy waffle iron.” The author makes clear in wry, illuminating prose how important good landing pages and well-matched ad copy are to effective paid search ads. A point that should be taken to heart since out of ten ads displayed for the search, only 4 had anything to do with waffle irons.

It still boggles my mind that so much money is poured into PPC by advertisers that don’t seem to grasp the fundamental truth of paid search: success is defined by specificity. This means a tight relationship between the keywords, ad copy, and landing pages. A handful of refined phrases and target pages that convert well is far better than a vague campaign that gets poor CTR, or even worse, poor CTR AND poor conversion.

While it’s deceptively easy to start a pay per click campaign, recognize that it is an art that is difficult to master. Avoid money pits by honing in on targeted keywords, start with reasonable ad budgets until you can get the basic mechanics of your campaign working, and then expand slowly when you can justify cost with strong conversion. And never stop critiquing your own work!

Alright, you’ve got some money you want to put into pay per click, but what do you do now, and more importantly — how do you make it work for you? We pack all the paid search tips we can into three minutes of solid campaign-building advice. Stayed tuned for our ongoing series on ppc for even more tips, tactics, and secrets to paid search success!

SEO Audio: Episode 17

Microsoft, in its desperate scramble to get back on the online ad train, today announced the availability of the Gatineau Web Analytics program, an enhancement to the MSN AdCenter paid search platform that’s also open to webmasters in general. Like other analytics programs (*cough cough* Google *cough*) there will be information on specific visitors, clickthrough tracking, keywords, demographic/geographic information as well as analytics to help advertisers better track the success of their AdCenter campaigns.

It’s interesting and invigorating to see MS taking this market so seriously, even though they’re clearly far behind where Google, and even Yahoo, are. I must admit that I, like many other paid search managers, find the AdCenter software cumbersome and even frustrating to use. Yet, the traffic from MSN is more captive (and cheaper) than the competitors and results in strong conversions, making it a vital paid of every comprehensive paid search campaign. I look forward to using the new analytics program and hope it makes my job of keeping paid search campaigns profitable more easy… Let’s just hope they make it easy to use for people managing multiple accounts, multiple campaigns, and many, many ad groups.