Archives for "weekly roundup"
PPC Management Weekly Roundup 2/25
Brr! It’s cold in the Bay Area this Friday (rumors of sea level snow have been circulating this whole week), but the world of PPC marches gamely onward. We have a juicy PPC management round-up for you this week with articles about mobile PPC, testing, landing pages, and more. Read on and take action!
First, an article from Siddharth Shah on Search Engine Land on how market volatility can lead to inconclusive test results. We’ve all been in this boat. Did the changes we made really have any impact? What did we learn, if anything? Before you spend your time and money testing, you need to calculate the minimum impact your test would need to have to be measurable.
If that’s a little heavy for you, how about some good tips on getting started with mobile marketing? Marketing Insider Daily offers the neophyte mobile advertiser sound advice for finding mobile friendly keywords, choosing the right settings, and optimizing ads and landing pages for mobile devices. It’s never too early to test the waters of an interface that shows every sign of being the next big thing for advertising.
Tom Demers over at Search Engine Journal offers us another fine article on a common PPC problem: a PPC campaign that just isn’t driving any traffic. He first helps us to diagnose the issue — whether your bids are too low, your keywords are too restrictive, or your quality score is in the gutter — and gives us practical next step solutions. Great if you’re relatively new to PPC and are scratching your head as to why the traffic isn’t pouring in already.
Next, we really like Heather Schwartz’s collection of 4 critical PPC maintenance tasks and how to streamline them. Not only do we highly recommend these tasks (going through search queries to add negatives and new keywords, updating your opportunities tab, using contextual targeting tool), but we also like the way Heather shows how quick it can be to do all of them, regularly.
Finally, Ryan Woolley at Search Engine Watch shows us why landing page testing is so important for our bottom line. Even a half-percentage increase can have a major effect over several months. He walks us through setting up A/B landing page tests using Google’s website optimizer with plenty of screen shots and clear instructions. Thanks, Ryan!
And that’s it for this week! As always, if you’re looking for PPC management software to automate a good chunk of your daily tasks, swing by to get a free two week trial of ClickSweeper. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for more PPC news.
1/14 Weekly Round-up of PPC management articles
Here it is, the round-up of useful and interesting articles on PPC published this week. No self-promotion in these articles, just solid info and advice we thought you could use. Check out these goodies and get out there and apply them!
E-commerce over the holidays offers us some valuable lessons for PPC in the new year. Leisa Hall from Search Marketing Insider reflects on the value of customer reviews, timing site updates, and testing new tools. You might not want to hear this, but it’s truly never too early to start preparing for the next holiday season.
Have you heard of remarketing without really knowing what it was? It’s essentially a second chance to catch some of the fish that slipped your initial net, and Google has a tool for it. Zach Olsen from By Data Be Driven provides a useful tutorial on how to use the Adwords remarketing tool.
Jen Doyle at Marketing Sherpa rounds up the most commonly used PPC tactics and looks at their effectiveness against the effort involved with each. (Geek alert: cool chart!) Is bid adjustment or ad copy testing more effective? You’ll have to check out the study to find out. The answer might surprise you.
Broad match can spend your budget in unusual ways, as one dentist found out when his broad match keywords triggered impressions and clicks for male enhancement queries. Chris Crum over at WebProNews looks at Google’s session-based broad match feature and concludes that irrelevant keywords can be costly. If you didn’t know about session-based broad match, well, it’s just one more reason to keep monitoring your search query terms and add negatives or switch to phrase match.
That’s it for this week. If you’ve written something useful, enlightening, or amazing about PPC, leave us a comment with the link and we’ll consider it for next week’s round-up.
P.S. ClickSweeper made the top 10 list at Visibility Magazine for best PPC bid management software this week. Woo!
Weekly Round-up of Best PPC Articles
Don’t have time to sort through every article written on PPC management in the last few days? We’ve done it for you. Here are some highlights from the ever changing PPC world this week.
From the official Google Adwords blog: 10 of our favorite Adwords innovations from 2010. If you haven’t heard of Adwords Campaign Experiments or Click-to-Call Phone Extensions, hop over and educate yourself on ways to make Adwords work smarter.
From Search Engine Land’s Greg Sterling: Obamacare Adwords: Partisan Outrage or Public Education? The keyword ‘Obamacare’ triggers ads sponsored by the government that link to the Obama administration”s official healthcare page. Is this use of taxpayer dollars public education or unfair partisan influence?
From Search Engine Journal’s Kate Morris: Top 5 Things to Test in your PPC Campaign for the New Year. A nice round-up of tests to run on your PPC campaigns this year, some basic, some not. (Hint: Google Campaign Experiments has now shown up twice in this list. Better get on it.)
From Certified Knowledge, guest post by Chris Thunder: Understanding the Adwords Disco Dance. Understanding the process your customers go through is key to improving your PPC conversion rate. In this article, Chris Thunder puts his own spin on the process with an acronym: DISCO. (Discovery, Interest, Study, Comparison, Order.) No mirror balls, just good, solid info for PPC marketers.
Enjoy! And if you haven’t already, why not sign up for a free trial of our award-winning PPC management software?