Video: Stanford Graduate School of Business

Hello Everyone,

In my last post, I highlighted my presentation at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. The presentation went extremely well and spanned two action-packed hours of PPC, SEO, and more. I’m definitely proud of this milestone.

Stanford GSB Presentation

Today my friend David Rogier, VP of Stanford GSB’s Entrepreneur Club, uploaded the video of my presentation to the Entrepreneur Club’s website! You can check out my online marketing presentation by visiting the Entrepreneur Club’s website or by simply watching it below!

I sincerely hope you find it helpful. Also, I wanted to close out by sincerely thanking Stanford GSB, the amazing organizers of the event, everyone who attended, and of course everyone reading my blog!

All the best,
Ian Lopuch (PPC Ian)

PS – As mentioned in my last post, my PowerPoint presentation is available for free! Simply sign up for my free PPC newsletter by entering your first name and email address in the top right corner of this page or by visiting my PPC newsletter page. You’ll receive my Stanford GSB presentation in addition to my eBook featuring high leverage PPC career tips, all for free! I recommend following along with the PowerPoint as you watch the video. Don’t have enough time to watch the full two hour video? You may wish to scan the PowerPoint and then fast forward to the sections of the video that are most interesting to you! Thanks again!

Video "PPC Ian’s Stanford GSB Presentation" © PPCIan.com (An IJL Productions LLC Website)

My Stanford Graduate School of Business Speech

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment May 12 7

Hello Everyone,

I couldn’t be more excited! I just got back from one of my best presentations ever! I spent two full hours at the Stanford Graduate School of Business educating students about online marketing. I specifically presented on PPC and SEO and couldn’t be more thrilled with the outcome. (Fast Forward: I provide info at the end of this post on how you can download my PPC and SEO PowerPoint presentation.)

Ian Lopuch Speaking

However, before we get into the details, I want to start out by sincerely thanking Stanford GSB’s Entrepreneur Club, Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Marketing Club, and the High Tech Club, the organizations that sponsored my event. In terms of people, I want to sincerely thank:

David Rogier – VP of the Entrepreneur Club and Resident at the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. David organized my event and I can’t thank him enough!
Tia Gao – Co-President of the High Tech Club
Kate Gronso – VP of the Marketing Club
Brendan Marshall – Co-President of the Entrepreneur Club
Tony Hsieh – Co-President of the Entrepreneur Club
Ibrahim Elbouchikhi – Co-President of the Entrepreneur Club

I short, the folks mentioned above are none other than amazing. I was blown away by Stanford GSB’s leadership team. I’m very excited to have some new friends.

As you may know, I graduated from Stanford back in 2004 with my BS in Computer Science and Minor in Economics. In my opinion, Stanford is the best university out there! When VP of Stanford GSB’s Entrepreneur Club David Rogier invited me to speak at Stanford, I just couldn’t pass up the amazing opportunity. As you may know, I’m really big on goals and a big public speaking event is on my list of 2010 goals. I’m extremely excited that this event allowed me to complete my goal (and then some!). Over the past few weeks, I have been working very diligently on my presentation, one that provides actionable tips to optimize PPC and SEO online marketing campaigns. All of the students in the audience have businesses they are trying to launch. I hope that my PPC and SEO strategies help launch their dreams!

During my presentation, I was very thrilled to see an engaged audience for two full hours. How awesome is that! It really was amazing how fast time flew by. Moreover, I was floored with the awesome questions that the attendees asked. This level of interaction really made my presentation fun. It’s hard to find a sharper audience than Stanford GSB students, in my opinion.

For all PPC Ian readers out there, I want to make my PowerPoint presentation available for your viewing! As such, (in addition to my free eBook) my Stanford GSB PowerPoint is now free when you sign up for my newsletter! All you have to do is enter your first name and email in the box in the upper right corner of this page (or on my PPC eBook page). Already on my newsletter list? I will be sending you my presentation very shortly. Thanks again everyone, you are the best!

Sincerely,
Ian Lopuch (PPC Ian)
PS – Big thank you to my beautiful wife, Nicole, for designing my PowerPoint template and for making it look amazing!
PPS – The video of my presentation is now uploaded! Check out my Stanford GSB online marketing presentation video!

All Images In This Post © PPCIan.com (An IJL Productions LLC Website)

Google Content Match Strategies

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment May 5 2

Last week, I discussed some advanced Google AdWords match type strategies. This week I’m looking forward to offering a few more tactical campaign tips that will help you improve your Google AdWords account immediately. While I focused on the search match side last week, I’ll focus on the content match today. Content match is often a confusing and tricky subject for many pay per clickers. I’m hoping to remove some of that confusion with this post inspired by a PPC Ian reader!

Content Match Strategy 1: Create Separate Search and Content Campaigns

Content Match

I’m going to start out with a very simple yet often overlooked strategy. Always create separate campaigns for search and content. I repeat: There is no good reason to ever mix the two. Search and content require very different strategies for success, both in terms of structure and also ad copy. Moreover, it’s very difficult to break out content match once you have something that works. In short, if you mix the two, you’re setting yourself up for long-term failure. Even if you create two identical campaigns in the short-run with the intent of tweaking them over time, this is a far better strategy than going with just one campaign.

Content Match Strategy 2: If It Works, Leave It Alone!

From my experience, content match is very sensitive. Any small change to ad copy, keyword composition, or bids can totally destroy a winning content match ad group. For that reason, I’m a huge proponent of leaving my content match ad groups alone. If it works, I make as few changes as possible. If I must make a change, I try to keep the changes minor. If I want to test something new, even if it’s just a minor variation on my existing ad group, I’ll go ahead and create a new ad group.

Content Match Strategy 3: Start With Realistic Bids

This tip ties directly into the last one. From my experience, bid changes can totally mess with your content match campaign. For that reason, I always start off with very realistic bids in content match, bids that are where they need to be in the long-term to ensure profitability. In my video about launching a new AdWords campaign I share my strategy of bidding 200 percent of your long term bid out the gate when launching search match campaigns. This is totally important in building a great quality score and click through rate from the beginning. However, the strategy is very different in content: Always start with your long-term bid and leave it alone.

Content Match Strategy 4: One Keyword Per Ad Group Works!

If you’ve worked with me in the past, you know that I’m a big fan of one keyword per ad group in search. In fact, I like to take credit for inventing the strategy back in 2005. The ClickEquations blog recently posted about The Myth of Single Keyword Ad Groups (thanks to another PPC Ian reader and friend for pointing this post out). I couldn’t disagree more in the world of search. I was leveraging the one keyword per ad group strategy all the way back in 2005 and it has worked consistently on the right set of keywords. It definitely doesn’t make sense for all keywords, but can work wonders for certain keywords. However, I’m here to say that it can also work well for content. It wasn’t always this way. Back in the day, content needed several keywords to form an opinion of your theme and match your ad group to a relevant webpage. These days, however, content is a lot smarter and if you’re trying to gain as many conversions as possible and have an offer that’s broadly appealing, the single keyword strategy may work wonders even in content match.

Content Match Strategy 5: Experiment With Combinations

I’d like to close out with a really cool tactic: Leveraging mathematical combinations. Let’s say you have a set of 10 high volume keywords. I’ll always start off with all the 1 combinations of this set (10 single keyword ad groups). Then, I’ll start experimenting with other combinations such as all the 3 combinations (120 ad groups). As you can see, the number of ad groups can quickly balloon out of control! For this very reason, I’ll often separate my combination experiments into their very own account. The beauty of this strategy is that you can sometimes strike gold. The vast majority of your ad groups will go nowhere and you’ll eventually end up pausing them. However, a few of them will often take off!

Another similar tip: Try repetition within keywords in content. You would never buy the word "mortgage mortgage mortgage" in search. In content, however, these repetitious keywords can really help out. A sample adgroup targeting mortgage refinance might include the following keywords:

refinance
refinance refinance
mortgage
mortgage refinance
refinance mortgage
mortgage refinance refinance

Image of Computer Screen Content © iStockPhoto – Petrovich9

PPC Match Type Strategies

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Apr 27 7

It’s been a while since I’ve taken a deep dive into tactical campaign management strategies. As such, I wanted to focus on some low level tips today that will directly impact your campaigns. Specifically, I’m going to focus on Google AdWords match types and how you can leverage broad, phrase, and exact match to their fullest potential.

Tip 1: Always Start With Exact Match For Added Control

Dart Board

If you watched my recent PPC Ian video about launching new AdWords accounts, you already have a preview of my first tip today. It’s really simple: Always start with exact match, period. Exact match gives you the most control out of all match types. Exact match has the highest revenue per visitor out of all match types. Exact match is straight-forward and simple.

After starting out with exact match, you’ll have a great understanding of which keywords work and which don’t. In the cases where the keywords don’t work, you will have minimized your losses because you started with the most controlled match type. Now, it’s time to expand to phrase and later broad. As an ideal structure, I always like to see the largest number of keywords on exact, fewer on phrase, and even fewer on broad. Also, I’m a huge fan of separating the different match types into separate adgroups. Sure, this creates more adgroups, but you’ll see later that it offers even greater control for a niche strategy leveraging negative words.

While this tip may seem very basic, it’s amazing how rarely it is followed. Time and time again, I have experienced AdWords accounts over-weighted in broad match. Oftentimes, accounts are exclusively focused on broad match with very few exact match keywords. I can’t underscore it enough: The healthiest AdWords accounts are over-weighted on exact match.

Tip 2: Leverage Broad Match For Keyword Generation

I really like tip 2 because it ties into tip 1 very nicely. Once you have established your baseline of exact match keywords, it’s time to start experimenting with phrase and broad. I especially like deploying phrase and broad match variations of my top tier exact match keywords. Not only do they offer great volume expansion opportunities, but they also offer amazing keyword generation opportunities! You heard that right: I leverage phrase and broad match to generate more exact match keywords. The beauty of this tip is it keeps feeding back into tip 1 (over-weighting in exact match). As my phrase and broad match variations start generating some serious traffic, I’ll run a search query report. Those search queries that drove conversions (and are missing from my exact match keyword set) are immediately deployed as brand new exact match keywords. Why deploy them on exact? Simple: Exact match offers the greatest control in terms of traffic quality and also bidding.

Of course, it’s very important to not go overboard here. Search engine accounts need to remain manageable so it’s a judgment call whether to let phrase and broad match take care of a certain query or to deploy the query as a new exact match keyword in your account. If a query has driven a conversion, it’s important to deploy it in my opinion.

Another important point: 20 to 25 percent of Google queries are new. Because of this very fact, it’s important to have good phrase and broad match coverage. Moreover, it’s important to go far enough down the tail on phrase and broad match to help the algorithm match to all of these possible new queries. My point: Remember to keep things balanced and invest time building out phrase and broad match as well so you definitely capture those 20 to 25 percent of new, unique queries.

Tip 3: Leverage Negative Match Types To Improve Bidding Accuracy

I’d like to close out with my most advanced match type strategy. Remember under tip 1 when I said that I like to separate the different match types into different adgroups? That all comes to play with my final strategy of creating added bidding efficiencies with savvy match type execution. It’s really simple: Once I’ve separated the three match types into different adgroups, I like to leverage negative match types so the phrase and broad match versions get none of the exact match traffic and the broad match version gets none of the phrase match traffic.

Let me explain this through an example. Let’s say we deploy three keywords in three separate adgroups: [mortgage], "mortgage", and mortgage. Let’s say we have no negative words. Let’s even say that the exact match version is bid the highest, the phrase match in the middle, and the broad match the lowest. (Side note: This should usually be the strategy.) No matter what, the phrase and broad match variations will always get some amount of exact match traffic. Moreover, the broad version will get some amount of phrase match traffic. If the user types in the exact match [mortgage], it will sometimes get mapped to "mortgage" or mortgage. Why? Google likes to test.

We know that exact match offers the best quality traffic. Pay per click is all about optimization. Now, if some of that really high quality traffic is getting attributed to the other match types, we are probably over-valuing phrase and broad and under-valuing exact. What’s my solution? Easy: I’ll add [mortgage] as a negative keyword to both the phrase and broad adgroups. I’ll add "mortgage" as a negative to the broad adgroup. That way, my traffic is always perfectly segmented by match type and I’ll bid as effectively as possible. Another option: Place your exact, phrase, and broad keywords in separate campaigns. That way, you can also use campaign level negatives if you’re not fond of adgroup level negatives. Personally, I like to place negatives on the campaign level that are just plain bad keywords. I like to place negatives under this strategy on the adgroup level. These are two unique types of negative keyword strategies and it’s easier to keep them straight if I have them stored in different places.

Remember, good data is the foundation of a solid biding strategy. Leverage this structure and match type trick to your advantage and you’ll run circles around the competition!

Image of Dart Board © iStockPhoto – adventtr

Building My Internet Real Estate Empire

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Apr 20 3

PPC Ian has been very busy over the past few weeks! Not only have I been working harder than ever at my PPC career, but I have also been developing domain names in my spare time. The more domains I develop, the more my Google AdSense, Commission Junction, eBay Partner Network, and Amazon Associates earnings rise. In short, I’m on a roll and have concluded that my 2010 goal of developing six domain names sets the bar way too low! I’m proud to say that I’ve already exceeded my 2010 goal and am therefore raising my goal to 20 sites this year. Longer term, I’m looking to develop 100 sites and then 1,000. Today, I wanted to share my thoughts around domain names and especially the parallels between domains and real estate.

Domain Names Are Virtual Real Estate

Sold Sign

In my opinion, domain names are the virtual parallel to physical real estate, a simple yet extremely revolutionary concept. Just think about it: There are only so many great domain names out there. What’s a great domain name, you ask? Simple! Great domain names are keyword-rich. They are exact matches to highly searched phrases as judged by Google’s Keyword Tool Great domain names are typically on one of the major TLDs such as dot com, dot net, or dot org. Great domain names, like great real estate, get a huge amount of free traffic. Free traffic comes via type-ins or from the natural results on search engines. My personal conclusion: Keyword-rich domain names on the important TLDs are the virtual equivalent of real estate. We all know that wealthy individuals own a lot of real estate. Over the coming decades it’s my hypothesis that the next round of wealthy elite will be virtual real estate investors (and I’m personally investing in this hypothesis).

How do you select the best names? Find high search volume phrases (exact match) via Google’s Keyword Tool, preferably in verticals where the CPCs are competitive. Then, hand register the domains if possible or acquire them on the aftermarket from a site such as Sedo. I actually bought the domain IJL.net from Sedo a few months back. You may wish to check out my post about buying domain names on Sedo.

Domain Names Carry Property Taxes

Another very interesting parallel to real estate: Domain names carry property taxes. With physical real estate, you pay property tax to the county. With domain names, you pay property tax to the registrar (such as GoDaddy or Moniker). A portion of your registrar fee goes to ICANN, the Internet’s governing body. Forget to pay your property tax and you could lose your virtual real estate!

Real Estate Investments Yield Positive Cash Flow

Those of you who have known me for a while know that I’m a huge fan of Robert Kiyosaki. I have read most of his books with my favorite being Retire Young, Retire Rich. Robert Kiyosaki eloquently points out that real estate can either be a liability or an asset depending on cash flow. Basically, real estate that takes money out of your pocket (revenue is less than expenses) is a liability and real estate the puts money in your pocket (revenue is greater than expenses) is an asset. I apply this very concept to domaining. I don’t want to own domain names that are earning less than their registration fees. I only want to own domain names that are assets. My friend Jason from DNPimping.com recently highlighted this very concept in his article about registering too many domain names. The point: Your domain investments should yield positive cash flow.

Why Not Lock Up As Much Real Estate As Possible?

Synthesizing all of this, I have personally concluded that it makes sense to lock up as many domain names as possible. As long as I can develop them (or work with others to outsource the work) and at least break even, it’s worth buying more and more domains. At the end of the day, I want to own an absolute empire of Internet real estate.

So far, I’ve been mainly focused on cash flow from type-ins and SEO. That’s for good reason: I’m all about cash flow as a measurement of investment value. However, we haven’t even talked about equity value and other added benefits. The beauty of all of this: Domain names are an investment vehicle that has proven to also exhibit rapidly increasing equity value. This was never more apparent than seeing domains sell for huge prices at the TRAFFIC conference. Another benefit: I can always build out my domains into full websites, drive pay per click traffic, and make a fortune in the future!

Outsourcing Is Everything

So you may be wondering, how does this corporate PPC guru have time for all of this? That’s an excellent question! I actually don’t. Between excelling in my pay per click career, working out, spending time with my wife, updating PPC Ian, and living life, there’s very little time left. However, that’s why outsourcing exists! Thankfully, I have built some amazing relationships with writers, web developers, and domain development experts. My strategy: I’ll work closely with others to build out my domain names while adding my own finishing touches on top, of course. Here’s to accumulating my Internet real estate empire!

Image of Sold Sign © iStockPhoto – GJS

Video: Launching a Google AdWords Account

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Apr 11 7

Hey Everyone,
Due to great feedback from everyone, I’m excited to share my fourth PPC Ian video today. Specifically, I’ll be discussing some practical tips for launching brand new Google AdWords campaigns in a brand new Google AdWords account. From both personal experience and also questions from PPC Ian readers, I know this is a topic at the top of everyone’s mind and I sincerely hope my tips help make your launch a tremendous success!

Airplane Launching

There are two different career paths within the corporate pay per click world. Those in the first bucket take on large existing campaigns and are tasked with maintaining the baseline while slowly growing. This line of work is very challenging because many of the easy growth initiatives are already completed. The second PPC career path involves launching brand new search engine marketing accounts from scratch. It goes without saying that this is a difficult task. Sure, the sky is the limit in terms of opportunities, but there are numerous hurdles one may face in launching new campaigns, in a new account, for a new site.

I personally live both of these career paths each and every day as someone who has managed PPC teams in the corporate world for over five years. Large companies always have baseline businesses (bucket 1) which are supplemented with new, higher growth businesses (bucket 2). Earlier in your career, you will sometimes fall into one of these two buckets, but as you progress, there’s no doubt you will enjoy experiencing both of them. I hope you enjoy today’s video!

All the best,
PPC Ian (Ian Lopuch)

P.S. As a related post, you may wish to check out my landing page quality score tips, a very important aspect of launching a new AdWords account.

Video "Launching a Brand New Google AdWords Account" © PPCIan.com (An IJL Productions LLC Website)
Image of Airplane Launching © iStockPhoto – sharply_done

Search Engine Marketing Spring Cleaning

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Apr 6 2

The spring is finally here and my wife and I are doing some spring cleaning around our home. It’s time to streamline our lives and get rid of stuff we don’t need. Similarly, it’s the perfect time to think about spring cleaning in the world of online marketing. Today, I’m excited to highlight a few brief tips around how you can remove clutter and stress from your daily routine. Keep your search engine accounts in perfect order and the simplicity will take your numbers (and sanity) to new heights!

Tip 0: Back Up Your Search Engine Accounts

Window Cleaning

The following spring cleaning tips will potentially transform your search engine accounts quite a bit. For that reason, please back up your accounts before making any of these changes. It’s important to always have a PPC rollback plan. Mistakes happen. It’s all about how quickly you can recover. Above and beyond having a rollback plan, I’m a huge advocate of regular backups because I worry about the worst case: What if something major happens to your account(s) completely out of your control and you need to reproduce them immediately? Have great backups and you’ll be the hero of your organization! My tips for successfully backing up your search engine accounts:

Leverage AdWords Editor for Google
Leverage bulksheets for Yahoo (and remember to include all components)
Leverage your search engine reps for adCenter (or their editor if you’ve got it)
Store all of your backups somewhere very secure that’s being backed up routinely by your IT department

Tip 1: Remove 0 Impressions Keywords

About a month ago, I shared a few simple tips to easily grow your PPC campaigns. For those of you that know me, tip number one was no surprise at all: Consistently deploy keywords. Looking back at day one of my online marketing career, I was advised to consistently deploy keywords and that keywords are the primary driver of growth. To this day, the keyword deployment strategy holds very true, especially on Yahoo and Bing. However, here’s the downside with consistent keyword deployment: Your search marketing accounts can get massive, cluttered, and even unmanageable.

I’m going to flip things around for my first PPC spring cleaning tip: Filter through your keywords and delete those keywords which have driven 0 impressions in the last month. If a keyword has driven 0 impressions after a month (and bids are at reasonable levels), it’s ok to remove that keyword permanently from your account. There are very few cases I actually advocate deleting keywords, and this is one of the rare ones. Of course, you’ll want to review any keywords on your list that have high search volume. There will be exceptions and you’ll want to break those out into new adgroups and optimize until they work. However, the vast majority of the keywords caught by this filter will be superb candidates for deletion.

Another important tip: Keep a log file of the deleted keywords so you don’t generate and deploy them again by accident.

Tip 2: Clean Up Old Ad Copy Tests

After campaigns pass through enough hands and survive enough years, the mess of abandoned ad copy tests can be astounding! We all have those adgroups that have five or more ads in them set to rotate evenly, but have one or two ads that are the clear winners in terms of click through rate and conversion rate. Now is the perfect time to go through all of your old adgroups and pause all ads except the best ones. Some things to think about in your ad copy test cleanup:

It will be a manual task that involves judgment but is well worth the time investment
After you’re done, shoot to have just one or two ads in each adgroup
The ads to keep are the ones with both the highest click through rate AND the highest conversion rate
Once you’re done pausing the loser ads, make sure to turn ad rotation to optimize (unless, of course, you plan on running some new tests right away)

Tip 3: Face Reality on Failed Tests

Many of the campaigns I have launched have turned out to be complete failures. I embrace failure because I know it’s part of my journey towards success. Moreover, failure means I’m getting out there and testing creative PPC ideas. However, I also must admit that I sometimes let a test run a bit too long with the hope that it will build up history and turn around. In your spring cleaning, it’s time to face reality!

Go through your tests as objectively as possible and pause the losers. Each campaign you pause frees up resources to try the next big thing. Even consider pausing entire search engines. We all have certain second tier search engines that work and those that fail. Sometimes we let the failing second tiers run too long because the reps are extremely convincing and we believe it will turn around. In my experience, second tiers that don’t produce quickly are simply not worth your time if you’re managing a multi-million dollar pay per click business. It’s time to face reality and pause the losers. The beauty of it all: Time to start thinking about the next round of ideas to test!

Tip 4: Spend Some Time Organizing Your Desktop

I could go on and on about PPC campaign spring cleaning, but I feel the above tips are the perfect start. Complete these tips across all major search engines and you’re on your way! However, this list just wouldn’t be complete without drawing focus to your computer desktop, your files, and your physical desktop. In the world of corporate PPC, we’re rushing around from one thing to the next. We’re like Wall Street traders, except our market is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However, I can’t underscore it enough: You need to take time for yourself. One great way to improve your overall leverage, productivity, and sanity is spending a few hours doing the following:

Clean up your computer desktop
Clean up your physical desktop
Clean up your email inbox and file important emails accordingly
Take time to reflect on your accomplishments and record them in your company’s task manager (this comes in super handy when performance reviews come around)
Back up all important files and emails on your company’s file system
Actually take some time to dust and clean around your desk
Maybe bring in a plant or photo or two for your desk

There you have it: My top spring cleaning tips for online marketing professionals. Now, it’s time for me to start executing upon these initiatives!

Image of Window Cleaning © iStockPhoto – matspersson0

Search Engine Relationship Management Tips

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 30 5

I’m really excited about today’s post because it covers an important component of the pay per click career path that sometimes gets overlooked: Search engine relationship management. Specifically, I’ll be discussing a few tips to get the most out of your relationships with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. At the end of the day, it’s all about leverage. Manage your search engine relationships efficiently and your profits will skyrocket!

Tip 1: Your Search Engine Reps Are Part of Your Extended Team

My first tip is really simple, yet extremely powerful. It’s easy: View your search engine reps as if they are part of your internal team sitting just a few cubes away! Thinking of your reps this way is very powerful. Let’s say your internal team is comprised of three people, one for each first tier search engine. Now, let’s say you have three search engine reps, again one for each search engine. Rather than having three team members, you actually have six! Now, just think how much work six hard working individuals can accomplish, it’s very powerful stuff.

In reality, this tip is not completely true because your reps are not exclusively dedicated to your account. Even if you’re one of the largest spenders out there, your reps will still have a handful of clients. At the same time, if you are a large spender, your reps will have extra support on their end making the relationship quite powerful.

Tip 2: Your Reps Are Resources – Keep Their Queue Full

So now that we’ve established that your reps are part of your search marketing team, we’ll discuss some great ways to manage these "new" team members. First and foremost, would you ever have your internal team sitting around without any projects to work on? Of course not! Pay per clickers are very expensive and valuable resources. As such, you want to manage your reps just like your internal team and keep them working on the highest leverage projects possible at all times.

From my experience, most reps will go the extra mile. Some projects you may want to consider assigning your reps: keyword generation (both positive and negative), keyword review, keyword categorization, content match suggestions, account growth opportunities, and advanced intelligence. From my experience, those teams that invest sweat equity really do win the PPC game. Sometimes, however, you really need to divide the manual work on the keyword generation, review, and categorization side of things. Involving your reps in the process (in addition to your internal team) is the perfect way to gain scale on those valuable sweat equity type projects, helping the divide the work!

Tip 3: Leverage Search Engine Reps For Advanced Intelligence

What can your reps do that you’re not able to internally? They can provide advanced intelligence around your overall market, search engine trends, and most importantly what your competitors are doing. Therefore, I always like to have at least one intelligence style project in the queue. Now, here’s a word of advice: If you’re always looking at the market and competition, you’re looking backwards. For that reason, I’m always focused on setting new trends. I want the competitors to be following me. At the same time, it’s important to be aware of the market, just don’t spend too much time or else you may lose your first place position.

Tip 4: Manage It All With Weekly (or Bi-Weekly) Calls

The cornerstone of my personal management style hinges around weekly 1-on-1s with my reports. The 1-on-1 provides the perfect opportunity to dive into projects and also career progression. Now, you’re not going to dive into career progression with your reps, but you’ll definitely want to stay on top of their queue. How will you do this? Weekly (or bi-weekly) calls are essential. You’ll want to take close notes, get ETAs, and really stay on top of your reps just like you would with our internal team. Execute on all of this properly and you’ll ensure great productivity!

Now, let me flip this the other way. Excitingly, many reps will bring up great new ideas that you never thought of! They will help drive your priorities. I also like to view these weekly 1-on-1s as a status check on your own work, the work that is being driven by your reps. It’s a great two way street and a reality check for your own progress as well.

Tip 5: In-Person Meetings Are Key

Something I’ve learned over the years: Personal connection is critical in building great business relationships. You really need to know your reps on a personal level and meet them in person for the optimal relationship. It’s easy if you’re in San Francisco like me and can hop on over to Google’s office in a matter of minutes. However, if you’re out of town, I strongly encourage you to make the trip. It will really impress your account management team and will take your search engine relationships to the next level!

As a closing thought: I’m a huge proponent of beta tests. Build strong relationships with your reps (and add as much value for them as they are for you) and you’ll get included in beta tests. This can be a tremendous way to advance your business while being the first mover on new and innovative products before they’re released to the general market.

Three Different PPC Career Paths

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 22 18

As you know, I’m a huge fan of the corporate pay per click career path. This career path has been extremely rewarding for me and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. PPC may sound like an extremely focused discipline and it is. At the same time, there do exist multiple career paths within pay per click (and online marketing in general). Today, I’m looking forward to discussing three of my favorite career opportunities and my thoughts around their strengths and weaknesses.

PPC Career Path 1: The Agency Route

Careers Achievers

A few weeks ago, I attended SMX West. If you’ve been to SMX or another search marketing conference such as SES or ad:tech, I’m sure you’ve noticed the huge number of search marketing agencies. Put simply, agencies such as iProspect are big business and are only getting bigger. So now that we’ve established that agencies are a huge force within online marketing, let’s discuss a few of the pros and cons of the agency career path.

The biggest pro of the agency career path, in my opinion, is the ability to work with a variety of clients. In the agency world, you’ll typically get several accounts across a variety of verticals and business models. Moreover, these accounts change over time! In my opinion, this puts the search marketer on the fast track to accumulating a very deep knowledge of online marketing. Another benefit of the PPC agency career path: You get serious client face time. If you enjoy the human side of things as much as crunching the numbers, the agency career path can give you that optimal mix.

So, everything sounds perfect, right? Of course not! There are pros and cons with all decisions in life. There’s one big con that comes to mind with the agency path. As an external party, you are one step removed from the core business operations. This typically equates to less day-to-day financial visibility and responsibility. Agency teams are given volume and CPA goals, but it’s sometimes not the same as living and breathing the numbers like an internal team. This isn’t the agency’s fault, it’s a data integration thing. Just think about it: As an agency, you’re not going to be hooked into all of the client’s back end data. An internal team, however, often has access to more intimate data which often equates to more precise financial responsibility.

Pay Per Click Career Path 2: The Startup

Another popular career path in pay per click is the startup route. Let’s start with the pros again. First and foremost, startups offer the ability to grow quickly. When I say grow, I actually mean growing several things: your skills, responsibilities, title, salary, and wealth (via stock options). It’s essentially a case of risk and reward. Startups are the riskiest career path because of their volatile nature (most startups fail). However, if you’re able to join a successful startup (like I did), the benefits can be tremendous! Startups, especially earlier in your career, can be the fast track to rapid pay per click career growth. Moreover, if you leave a startup at a senior title and are able to earn the same title (or even higher) at a more established pay per click organization, you are absolutely golden.

Of course, there also exist several cons with the startup career path. First and foremost, it’s much more challenging to launch brand new pay per click campaigns versus growing and maintaining existing ones (like many of us do at larger companies). This is a good challenge in the sense that you can master PPC much quicker launching a business from scratch. At the same time, it’s a con because campaign launches can fail. If the business model isn’t perfected, your pay per click campaigns could very well lose money for an extended period of time. Moreover, as the pay per click manager, you may get blamed for these losses even if they are not under your direct control. This is definitely pressure that you want to be ready to handle!

The second big con of startups: You may be on your own. Unless you’re rather senior, pay per click is a team sport. Startups, however, have limited budget and often have a pay per click team of one. If you’re super independent, this may be a great route for you. If you prefer a team, however, a larger company may make a lot more sense.

PPC Career Path 3: The Mid To Large Sized Direct Advertiser

All career paths presented here are awesome! However, if I had to rank them, I’d tie the first two as the (very close) runner up and I’d make the mid to large sized direct advertiser the clear winner. Let’s start with the pros of the mid to large sized direct advertiser. Remember in the agency section when I talked about data issues? This is rarely a problem at a large direct advertiser. You can hook directly into your organization’s immense data and leverage it for complex bidding decisions! This alone is the biggest advantage of the direct advertiser: incredible statistical maturity and opportunity.

Now, let’s talk about resources. At the agency, you’re typically working at a company that’s very biased towards one skill set: online marketing. At the startup, you typically have individuals spanning a variety of disciplines but rarely have access to them because everyone is very resource constrained. Now, at the mid to large sized direct advertiser, you frequently have the ability to work with legal, finance, engineering, sales, and product management. In my opinion, this cross-functional nature makes the mid to large sized company a stellar candidate. I said it before: PPC is a team sport. It’s not only a team sport in terms of having a team of PPC managers, it’s also a team sport in terms of working with the broader organization on landing page tests, site tests, ad copy tests, keyword generation ideas and more.

Moreover, let’s not forget budgets! Agencies are often given a fixed budget dictated by the client. Startups are typically budget constrained. Mid to large sized direct advertisers, however, will frequently have unlimited budgets as long as campaigns meet a profitability threshold. You want to be managing budgets in the multi-millions, right? Let’s also talk about budget for hiring and PPC automation. You’re going to have a lot more of it at the mid to large sized organization.

As said earlier, there are cons to every career path – no single path is perfect! In terms of this path, I’d say the largest obstacle can be speed. Let’s face it: The larger the company, the more checks and balances. You can’t just test any ad copy you’d like. You need to get full legal approval and your manager’s buy-in. Another con: Sometimes, career progression can be slower at very large companies. You’re just one person in a sea of many. You really need to stand out if you want to grow rapidly. At the same point, I’m confident that you will stand out if you’re taking the time to read this post!

Leveraging ccTLD Domain Names In PPC

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 15 11

I started domaining back in 2007, but really caught the domaining bug in 2009. Over the last year, I have been absorbing pretty much any information I can get my hands on regarding the domain industry. A big turning point in my domaining education: Attending T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Las Vegas.

Global Flags

Lately, ccTLDs have been getting a ton of buzz. What the heck is a ccTLD, you ask? ccTLDs are country code top level domains. Some of the really popular ones are dot us (United States), dot me (Montenegro), dot in (India), dot de (Germany), and dot mx (Mexico). In fact, according to Ron Jackson, ccTLDs sales are now outpacing gTLD sales (global top level domains such as dot com, dot net, and dot org). So why am I talking all about ccTLDs on this pay per click search engine marketing blog? Simple: I’m here to pose a test (slash challenge) to all of you. My challenge: I propose that ccTLDs will become an important part of pay per click online marketing within the US over the coming years. The remainder of this post will explain why!

ccTLDs are Cheap Right Now

I’m going to start off with a freebie for all of you loyal PPC Ian readers. Here it is: Right now (as of 11:44 PM pacific on 3/15/2010) the domain Degrees.mx is available to hand register for only $49.99 on GoDaddy! I’m serious. If I wanted to go out and buy Degrees.com on the aftermarket, I’m probably going to be out anywhere between $1,000,000 and $10,000,000 depending on how good I am at negotiating.

Why is Degrees.mx a great domain name? This is obvious to anyone in the education vertical. Education is one of the most lucrative and competitive verticals on the Internet. With a domain like Degrees.mx, you can have great display URLs in your pay per click campaigns like Accounting.Degrees.mx and Business.Degrees.mx.

The challenge here: Users aren’t as used to seeing the dot mx ccTLD. My hypothesis: I think it will work as a PPC display URL in the US. Will it perform as well as the dot com, dot net, dot org, or even dot us? Most likely not. Is it going to beat a long, convoluted domains like so many of us use? Quite possibly, in my opinion, definitely worth a test! Now, I don’t have the time or resources to test this, but would love to hear if one of you does. Could be some money on the table here. Because of their cheapness, I view ccTLDs as a great option, one that we’ll see more of in the US and global pay per click landscape over the coming years.

The Meaning of ccTLDs Transcends Their Country

One of my personal favorite ccTLDs: dot me. I have been accumulating a portfolio of dot me domains since the first day they launched several years back. While dot me is the official ccTLD of Montenegro, it has been marketed as a global TLD. In my opinion, it makes total sense: dot me is all about "me."

Let’s take another really popular category: mortgage refinance. Imagine if you bought the domain Refinance.me. In my opinion, this is an awesome pay per click domain. It flows really well and is personal. The Internet keeps getting more and more personal. If you don’t reach out to your users on a personal basis, you’re not going to get the conversion. Dot me ccTLD makes the personal connection easy.

Another great ccTLD: dot co. Dot co is the official ccTLD of Colombia but it’s being marketed as the next huge global TLD. It makes sense: What do you think of when you hear dot co? I think of company and commerce, very similar to dot com. For that reason, there’s a lot of opportunity here. Currently, GoDaddy is taking pre-orders for the dot co ccTLD (to be released to the public later this year) so it’s a great time to start thinking about investing in a few for your PPC future!

PPC Organizations Are Becoming More Global

Let’s go back to my first hypothesis, that one can successfully leverage generic sounding gTLDs in the US AdWords market. Let’s say I’m wrong. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time! I love testing and embrace my failures because they only mean I’m one step closer to success. If I fail every week, I know I’m doing my job and pushing the boundaries. In this case, I’d like to argue that these generic gTLDs are still very useful in paid search. Why? The industry is becoming a lot more global. A lot of the easy money in the US is gone. However, when I look at other countries, we’re just getting started. Buy your domains now so that you can leverage them in the future.

One nuance: Degrees.mx is unlikely to work in Mexico because it’s an English word. However, if you choose countries where English is very prevalent, especially in the business world, you’re golden. One example: Degrees.in. I imagine this would do well in India.

As a closing point, make sure to research before buying domain names. Some countries have restrictions. A good example is Canada. Unless you’re a Canadian business or citizen, there are some restrictions that you’d want to become very familiar with before registering dot ca domains. There are ways to make this happen, but I’ve been sticking to the basics myself: Registering domains that don’t have restrictions such as my beloved dot me!