Paid Search: Holiday Ramp-Up

As you're getting ready to ramp-up your PPC campaigns for the holiday be sure to check out the major retailers in your category for valuable competitive information. When you look at the major retailers or competition look for product identifiers. While you and a competitor might carry a similar product, your competition might use a different product identifier and its an opportunity for you to capture new traffic and customers.

On retailer sites like Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, look for information like:

• ISBN-10


• ISBN-13


• ASIN


• Item Model Number


• Item #

Don't forget to add the product's name and manufacturer ID in your list of keywords/phrases. Let's use the Garmin nuvi 780 as an example:

• On Garmin's site, you'll see Part Number: 010-00657-05


• On Amazon's site, you'll see ASIN: B0011UEUNG and Item model number: Nuvi 780. If you're savvy enough, you'll also pick out the unique identifiers in the URL.


• On Crutchfield's site you'll find Item #150NUVI780.

For one product on three sites, there are at least three unique identifiers (I'm not including the Item model number from Amazon). While these may generate small amounts of traffic (and typically a very low CPC) in your campaign they may convert more often. The Internet is ultimately a research tool and many people will research a product before buying. The buying decision may be based on several factors including price, taxes, shipping costs, etc. The more often you appear in the search funnel the more likely you are to convert a visitor into a customer.

Developing Ad Copy for Your SEM Campaign

I'm in process of optimizing a campaign for a client and thought it would be a useful post to provide some guidelines on how to write ad copy. I'm going to approach this at a high level for now.

1. Make sure your ad copy is relevant to your ad group and landing page. The more relevant your ad is to the search query and landing page content, the better your Quality Score will be and you will experience some cost savings.

2. Using AdWords as the specific example, you've got three lines to work with for a total of 95 characters. Break down each line into three distinct sections:

a. The Headline (25 characters): like headlines in newspapers, you've got to attract the searchers attention. Keep in mind
you're vying for the attention of a searcher who is looking at organic results and your competitors ads.

b. First Description Line (35 characters): you'll find yourself getting creative to convey your message within the character
limitations. State the product/service you're offering in this first line. Its the set-up for line two....

c. Second Description Line (35 characters): here you want to trigger an action. "Buy now" is a call to action and tells people
what to expect when they click on your ad.

I recommend you develop ad copy in excel, create multiple versions and use the LEN formula to calculate character count. Don't implement your ad copy right away no matter how compelling it is. Sleep on it and approach it later to make sure the ads make sense as a whole and clearly state the value a searcher will experience by going to your site. Implement 3 versions of ad copy and see which one performs better (be sure to allow the ads to be displayed evenly).

Successful Paid Search Optimization

Its only been four days since we optimized this account, but, we're really excited about the results so far. When we calculated daily averages before and after the optimization we saw some incredible improvements in such a short time:

- Average CPC decreased 33%
- Clicks increased 63%
- CTR increased 42%
- Conversions increased 58%
- Cost/Conv. decreased 36%
- Cost rose just 8%

Long Time

Its been a while since we posted anything on our blog. Its mostly due to the fact we have so many projects right now that we don't have time for ourselves. Its the case of of the cobbler's son.

I do have to blog about the extraordinary success we're having with two tanning salon campaigns we're running. The two salons are owned by the same company, but, target different geographical areas. Combined they have locations from coast to coast and now is the peak season for the franchises.

We started a PPC campaign for one of the salons last year and it works incredibly well. The campaign incorporates some lifestyle ad groups focusing on needs. For example, brides and bridesmaids will be working on their tans soon. Bodybuilders tan before a contest to further accentuate their muscle definition. Of course, the impression rates for these ad groups are lower than the others, but, they get a better click through rate and conversion rate. Users are directed to print a coupon for use at their nearest location and the parent company reports a 35% increase in salon foot traffic.

The sister salon was started on a PPC campaign in March and it is doing even better than the other. Click through rates are running about 10% and essentially the same keywords were used for this campaign. I attribute this to a few things:

1. We're running it ;)
2. Conversion tracking is helping identify winners from the get go
3. The promotion is better...or at least that's the way we see it
4. These salon locations are in more heavily populated areas
5. Campaign organization. There are 12 franchise owners with their own budgets. The way its organized now we can better manage the campaigns.
6. Acquisio's PPC management tol is helping us better run campaigns and the reporting feature allows us to focus more on actual campaign management. I hated doing reports, but, Aquisio is making tha a lot easier

That's it for now, but, we'll back soon. We've got a lot in the pipeline and we'll be telling the world pretty soon.

Numbers to Chew On

For those online marketers or business managers who engage in PPC and SEO take a look at these numbers from Nielson ReelResearch:

- When a brand name appeared in both natural search and paid search results, the brand attracted 92% of the total clicks
- Natural placement without paid search attracted only 60% of clicks

I’m going to write about advertising’s impact on search queries and how you can monetize other people’s efforts…so come back soon.

Paid Search is Getting Expensive

I've been doing my year end recap to measure performance year over year and its been another prosperous year for our clients. The one thing that jumped out was the rise in PPC costs. I collected terms from each of the campaigns we run and compared costs year over year. Its amazing to see the increase. On average, the CPC rates rose 23% and some individual terms rose as much as 85%!

Some of these terms are brand specific terms and others are generic terms that are important to the business. This trend isn't totally alarming because CPC costs have been steadily rising over the psat few years. Analysts have predicted paid search campaigns would be much too costly for the small guys within the next 3 years.

This leads me to develop a new strategy for 2008 that involves an increase in SEO. My clients' marketing budgets can go a lot further if SEO is beefed up and a focus is put on improving organic ranks for critical terms. Doing this will allow me to use paid search as a supplement for those critical terms and divert money into other profitable channels.

Good luck to you in 2008 and start thinking more about SEO.