Clever PPC & SEO Keyword Generation Tips

Keywords are the most fundamental building block of digital marketing. As the picture on the right implies, they are the key to your success within online advertising. Whether you’re a PPC or SEO professional (or both), there is not a day or minute that goes by when you are not thinking about keywords. I’ve been generating and managing keywords for nearly nine years, so you’d think I have exhausted every trick in the book. Not true! I still find some clever strategies each and every month and wanted to share some of the latest ones that are top-of-mind. You never stop learning in this incredible field. Remember, the best keywords are the trending ones, oes that have not yet become popular, ones that are not in any of the automated tools yet. Today’s tips are all about forecasting the future and beating the competitive rush!

PPC & SEO Keywords

Attend industry events and become a futurist. Learn about all of the latest trends in your industry. Chat with industry leaders. Attend seminars and ask questions. Become a thought leader yourself. To the extent you can leverage industry events to predict the future, you can start buying those keywords today. You can start building high quality content and engaging user experiences around them now. The only constant in this world is change. Predict the change and act on it now, you will build a competitive moat by doing so!
Devote some time each week to reading cutting edge literature. You need to go beyond the easy stuff. Blogs are so fun and easy to read, and are a great place to start. However, I also recommend reading technical literature, non-profit studies, academia research, and other dense material. Such studies are not always the easiest to read, but will truly provide cutting edge trends before they hit the mainstream. Digital marketing is not just about being good at our trade, it’s also about becoming a deep expert within your field.
Sit in on customer phone calls, visit your call center. Customers offer a true wealth of knowledge and inspiration. After all, any business is in business to help their customer. If customers speak to certain pain points, why not address them in your product, paid search, and organic strategy.
Collaborate with partners via business development calls. Does your company have strategic partnerships? Learn about new and exciting trends through partnerships, as a team. Just make sure that you are giving back as much as you get, all partnership as a two-way street.
Collaborate with anyone and everyone in your company who will listen. While your call center is a perfect starting point, there are so many other key functions in your company who can provide a wealth of knowledge around new trends. Some of my favorites: Executive leadership, product management, and sales.
Hire a really, really great SEM Agency. The best agencies, like my friends at Rocket Clicks, truly get to know your business. They are not only masters at PPC, SEO, and UX, but take true pride in becoming vertical leaders/masters within your industry. The beauty of this vertical integration is amazing ideas, such as predictions of where the industry is headed and how to stay ahead of the curve from a holistic marketing perspective!
Keep testing! New trends often take time to work. There are so many times that I have experienced bad keywords transforming into good ones. Keywords that are negatives today may become positives tomorrow. Past performance is not always an indication of the future. Remember to keep testing new ideas and never lose hope in future trends. While you may lose some money testing, the long term upside is tremendous.

Image of Keyword © iStockPhoto – gunnar3000

Grow Your Business: Free $100 AdMedia Credit

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment May 21 0

I’m a huge believer in the diversification of traffic sources. In the world of digital marketing, there is only so much cost-effective search demand on major search engines. A winning strategy involves diversification across many search engines, ad networks, social networks, and so much more. In diversifying traffic, I recommend reaching out and testing different advertising networks. Today, I am thrilled to share one of my favorites (A PPC Ian Blog Sponsor), AdMedia. In addition to introducing this awesome ad network, I’m also thrilled to share a special promotion they are running with their Free $100 AdMedia Credit. It’s easy: When you open an account and make your initial deposit, AdMedia will match your deposit up to $100!

AdMedia is the Superior Precision Marketing Platform. Their network spans 1,000s of sites across a plethora of verticals, offering a multitude of ways to increase digital advertising traffic and conversions for your business.

I’m particularly impressed with AdMedia for two reasons. First, they have a really great team. You may recall that Francesca from AdMedia wrote this guest post here on PPC Ian just a few months ago. Second, AdMedia’s suite of advertising solutions is truly comprehensive. They’re more than just a contextual network. AdMedia offers solutions that target prospective customers from so many angles. Some examples:

Contextual targeting based on keywords, subject matter, and the site’s theme.
Advanced remarketing solutions that make it easy for customers to navigate back to your site.
Really cool image overlay ads and intextual ads, products that make the overall site experience more interesting for publishers, advertisers, and consumers. Advertise to prospective customers in new and exciting ways outside the standard search and display campaigns.
Thank you email advertising, 404 Bucks, and Ditto domains products. AdMedia offers a very clever and comprehensive suite of advertising opportunities. Chat with them today and learn new ways of advertising you may have not thought of before!

With their Free $100 AdMedia Credit (they will match your initial deposit up to $100), I highly recommend giving AdMedia a spin. It’s a super way to diversify and expand your digital marketing program.

Image in this post © AdMedia

Leverage Ad Copy Across Your Organization

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment May 20 2

I’m a huge fan of ad copy testing. Implement Google conversion tracking, set your campaigns to optimize for conversions, and test every single day. Sooner or later, your overall system conversion rate (from impression to conversion on your site) will increase! This means higher revenue and higher margins (since Google rewards increased CTRs with lower CPCs). In addition to catapulting your PPC program to the next level, ad copy testing can have implications and use cases across your entire organization. Here are a few of my favorite use cases:

Leverage ad copy to test offline marketing messages. Does your company do direct mail? How about press releases? How about print ads in magazines and newsletters? One thing is for sure: The cost of testing messages on Google AdWords and Bing Ads is extremely cost effective. Collaborate with your entire marketing organization. Test messages via PPC before running them in other marketing programs. The added benefit: Ideas that come from your offline marketing organization may end up as winning online messages.
Consider incorporating winning ads into your website’s language. You should always be testing ads, landing pages, and user experience. I’m a big fan of Big Testing, a concept made popular by my friend Scott Brinker, Co-Founder and CTO of ion interactive. If you’re running big tests on your landing pages and website, you may not be quite as focused on marketing language and value proposition. This is where you can gain so leverage from your search marketing program. Leverage SEM to help drive brand positioning and value proposition on your website.
Communicate winning ad copy with your call center. If you have a large call center, perhaps they can benefit from your winning ad copy by weaving components of your ads into call center scripts. It’s all about integrating your winning marketing language across the customer experience. Also, make sure to sit in and listen to customer calls. Spend time with your call center reps. Call centers are an amazing source of ad copy testing inspiration.

I hope these tips help out. How do you leverage ad copy testing for the benefit of your overall company?

Check Out My Geo-Targeting Tips

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment May 3 0

I’m a huge fan of geo-targeting. While it’s been around forever, there are so many unique and great ways in which you can leverage advanced geo-targeting. So, when I got the opportunity to write a guest post on the amazing PPC Associates blog, I thought it would be a super idea to share my Top 5 Geo-Targeting Tips. Have you heard of PPC Associates? They are Silicon Valley’s SEM Agency, and have a truly great blog (one of my favorites). Also, they have one of the best teams around. I’m really honored that my guest post got a lot of interest and even made Search Engine Land’s Day In Search, May 2, 2013. Please check it out and let me know what you think! Do you have any special geo-targeting strategies?

Image in this post © PPCAssociates.com

Check Out My PPC Landing Page Tips

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Mar 17 2

Last week, I attended SMX West and bumped into my good friend Hillary Read from PPC Associates, Silicon Valley’s SEM Agency. PPC Associates is a great friend of yours truly, PPC Ian. From time to time, I have the pleasure of guest posting on the amazing PPC Associates blog, and today I wanted to share with you my latest guest post: A Landing Page Checklist For PPC Pros. This post went live last week on Wednesday, March 13th and wanted to highlight it here in case you have not seen it yet!

PPC Associates Guest Blog Post

With ever increasing competition on Google AdWords and Bing Ads, how do you stay ahead? Well, you certainly need to be a world class campaign manager. You need to be on top of your game when it comes to keyword generation, account structure, match types, negative words, ad copy, bid strategy, beta testing, tracking, cross-channel advertising, reporting/analytics, and so much more. However, the lever that perhaps holds the most leverage is landing page testing. Increase your conversion rate and your media margin will immediately expand. You can either pocket the profits or reinvest them via bid increases. Often, it is advised to bid higher since you will get exponentially more traffic volume and oftentimes increased dollar margin, especially if you look at cross-channel attribution (although at slightly lower percentage margin). Thanks PPC Associates for the opportunity to guest post, make sure to head on over and read my guest post today!

Image of PPC Associates © PPCAssociates.com

3 Things to Avoid When Writing Ad & Marketing Copy

By Guest Blogger Leave a Comment Mar 7 2

Hey Everyone,
PPC Ian here. Today I’m thrilled to share a guest blog post by my good friend Francesca StaAna of AdMedia Online Ad Network. I’m a tremendous fan of AdMedia, their blog (in fact, I just guest posted there), and their entire team. So, when it came time to run the latest and greatest guest post here on PPC Ian, Francesca came to mind at the top of the list. I wanted to take this opportunity to sincerely thank Francesca and AdMedia for the awesome guest post. Without further ado, let’s jump into the things you should avoid when writing marketing copy!
All the best,
Ian

AdMedia

When it comes to creating ads and marketing materials, most people strive for stunning graphics and attention grabbing images. And while there’s certainly nothing wrong with that (your ads need to look awesome, after all), graphics can only take you so far. It’s important to note that design is only half the battle and you need to pay just as much attention to the actual content of your ads.

Unfortunately, some people seem to have forgotten this, which is why a lot of ads and content on the web miss the mark when it comes to converting their audiences.

Below is a list of the top “DON’Ts” that advertisers need to be wary of. Be sure to steer clear of these mistakes whenever you’re writing content for your ads and other marketing materials:

(1) Putting cleverness over clarity – Keep in mind that main reason why you write anything – whether it’s ad copy, a blog post or an email – is to communicate a message to the reader. You don’t write to blow people away with how witty you are or to show off your wide vocabulary (at least not in the real world); you write because you want to get a message across so that the person on the other end would take the necessary call to action.

With that said, it’s essential to put your audience and your key message first when it comes to writing the content of your ads and marketing materials. While it’s perfectly okay to be witty and to inject some word play into your copy, don’t do it at the expense of what you need to say.

The challenge here of course, is striking that balance between being overly witty and insipidly direct. Be as clever as you can be, but make sure that the core message of your content doesn’t get lost in all that creativity.

Exceptions: There a few situations that can excuse people for being clever instead of clear. Trying to build up curiosity by being vague or mysterious on purpose is a good example of this.

(2) Being self-absorbed – Resist the urge to talk about your product/service too much, and instead focus on addressing the needs of your readers. While it may be tempting to go on and on about how great your company is, or how many awards you’ve won, remember that your readers don’t necessarily care about those things. What they do care about though, is making their lives better, more fun, or easier.

Keeping asking yourself the question of what’s in it for THEM? Determine the needs and wants of your customers and write your ad copy in a way that addresses those desires.

(3) Stressing features over benefits – Features pertain to a product’s or service’s unique aspects or components. Example: Rear bumper sensors found in new luxury vehicles.

Benefits on the other hand are the outcomes or underlying perks brought about by features. For instance, being able to park more quickly and easily is a benefit brought about by the rear bumper sensors mentioned above.

Recognize that there’s a huge difference between features and benefits, and when it comes to sales, highlighting the latter has proven to be more effective. When advertising your product or service, aim to go beyond the features.

List the components of whatever it is that you’re advertising think of what customers will get out of those features. You should then focus on selling those benefits and experiences rather just promoting a product’s functions.
Do you see these errors in the advertising realm? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Author Bio: Francesca StaAna is from AdMedia, an online advertising network that connects advertisers to consumers through multiple channels including search, display, social, mobile, and more.

Advanced SEM Trademark Strategies

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jan 15 0

I just wrote a guest post called Advanced Trademark Strategies For Large AdWords Advertisers on Acquisio’s blog. What is Acquisio? It’s the performance marketing platform of choice for large online advertising agencies.

When presented with the great opportunity to write a guest post, I opted to go with a highly tactical post for large online advertisers. Upon brainstorming a few topics, I narrowed in on trademarks, specifically your own brand name. When you’re a large advertiser, your own brand name is often one of your most profitable and important keywords. With such profitability and scale comes a ton of responsibility. Despite its importance, however, I feel like brand names are often placed on a “set it and forget it” mode. My post is meant to spark some creativity and excitement in taking your own brand name campaigns to the next level. Complete with 5 advanced tips, I encourage you to head on over to Acquisio’s blog today and check out my guest post. I put a lot of effort into this guest post, so I hope you enjoy it. Also, make sure to arrange a free demo today with Acquisio. They offer one of the most amazing SEM platforms around and are the platform of choice for SEM agencies. Thanks, Acquisio, for the opportunity to guest post!

Image in this post © Acquisio

Online Marketing Tips For Small Businesses

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Dec 9 0

Here on PPC Ian I’m often blogging about enterprise-level online marketing tips, strategies, and advice. Today, I wanted to focus on small businesses. Small businesses face a unique set of challenges and opportunities in the online marketing landscape. Whether you are CEO of a startup or responsible for growing a new product within an existing company, I hope these tips help accelerate your growth!

Tip 1: Leverage Paid Search To Build Insights

Support Small Business

When your business is brand new, it takes time to build brand awareness, organic search traffic, a strong following on social media, and a customer database. At the same time, you need traffic right away to start testing your website and building your business. It’s all about testing and iterating. So, what can you do? I always recommend starting with paid search campaigns. You will not have a ton of marketing budget as a small business, but I still recommend investing a small amount on paid search. This will jump start your sales and drive valuable insights about your website.

Tip 2: Stretch Your Search Marketing Budget Wisely

This tip is an extension of the last one. While I recommend launching paid search campaigns, any new business will have a strict marketing budget. How do you stretch your budget and get the most efficient results? Here are a few of my favorite tips.

Start with exact match. Exact match is the most profitable match type.
Opt into Google.com and Yahoo.com/Bing.com. Stay away from search partners/syndication, content match/display, and mobile search. When you’re just starting out, it’s all about focus. There will be plenty of time to scale later as your business grows. I have found that exact match campaigns on Google.com and also Yahoo.com/Bing.com are the best, most profitable place to start out.
Implement budgets so you don’t spend too much.
Implement day parting so your campaigns are live during the right times (will differ depending on your business model).
Start out with aggressive bids. The foundation of any new AdWords or Bing Ads account is a high click-through-rate. While search engines are supposed to normalize by position, I always find it advantageous to start out in the top few positions to establish the best possible history.
Consider hiring an SEM agency such as Rocket Clicks. Online advertising is complex. Get advice and help from the best.

Tip 3: Develop A Rock Solid Tracking Strategy

The beauty of online marketing is it offers the ability for precise tracking. The beauty of a small business is you’re starting fresh and can set up the perfect tracking strategy. If you’re selling goods online, you should not only track orders, but also order value and repeat purchases (to understand revenue per customer). If you’re selling a financial product that involves in-person interaction with your customer, make sure to track lead forms via your website and also back end conversions and lifetime revenue. Let’s say you’re trying to get customers to your store. This one is a bit more difficult to track, but try to offer a unique coupon code online (or series of codes) to track offline sales back to online advertising. The possibilities are endless.

Before you start any marketing efforts, it’s all about developing a rock solid tracking strategy. Your strategy should go as deep in your conversion funnel as possible. It should span both online and offline conversions. It should take phone conversions and also mobile conversions into account. Your business is new so it’s the ideal time to develop the perfect tracking strategy.

Tip 4: View Sweat Equity As Your Competitive Advantage

While large businesses have tons of money and can go aggressive, small businesses have the competitive advantage of being nimble and having tons of sweat equity. When you’re a small business, you can move fast and make big time investments (since one person can oftentimes own most or even all of the online advertising strategy). I recommend publishing amazing content daily (or even several times a day), going all out on social networks (especially Google+), developing and publishing amazing video content, and more. Turn your online marketing business into a content powerhouse. This will take a ton of time and will not produce results overnight, but will truly pay dividends in the long run. And, you may be able to outmaneuver some of your big competitors because you’re nimble and fast.

Tip 5: Have Clear Goals In Place

This tip ties into the measurement and tracking one above. When you’re starting a new business, it’s easy to be all over the place. There are a million things to do. There are so many campaigns and metrics to manage. At the end of the day, however, each business must have a clear purpose and mission. Choose metrics and goals for your online campaigns that support these goals. Watch them like a hawk. Make sure to include clear financial results in your goal set.

I hope these tips help out. Best of luck in growing your small business!

Image of Support Small Business © iStockPhoto – KLH49

Getting Your SEM Program Ready For The Holidays

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Nov 15 0

Can you believe it? The holidays are upon us. When you’re managing a large scale SEM program, the holiday season is always important. It’s typically the time of the year that can either make or break your entire year. Today, I’m thrilled to share some awesome tips that are sure to help your SEM campaigns thrive during the upcoming holiday season.

Tip 1: Develop Your Bidding Strategy Now

Winter Landscape

During the holidays, it’s all about seasonality. You will see your conversion rate change over time. Certain days will have high conversion rates. Others will have low conversion rates. Also, volume will change over time. Certain days will not matter too much. Others (such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday) will comprise a tremendous amount of conversions. Here’s the great thing about seasonality: It’s like clockwork. If you’ve been in business for a while, take a look at trends from past years. Leverage past data to forecast the future. And, bid accordingly!

If you have an automated bidding platform in place, such as InsideVault, you are in luck. If you don’t, you may want to move quickly and get one in place immediately. During the holidays, it’s all about precision in bidding. It’s all about dialing in your campaigns and making quick changes. Take advantage of advanced bid management technologies to get the most out of your SEM campaigns during the holidays.

During the holidays, you will in the weeds, you will not have a ton of time for strategy. My closing tip on bidding is to get your playbook ready now so you can focus on execution during the holiday season.

Tip 2: Coordinate An SEM Team Holiday Schedule

Online marketing is like trading stocks except the market never closes. It’s a 7-day, 24-hour marketplace. During the holidays, people take time off. It’s the holidays, after all! You want to take time off and you want your team to take time off. We all work hard these days and it’s important to make a conscious effort to keep the balance. That said, it’s critical to have one person on call at all times. You never know what will happen. It’s not worth the risk. Make sure to coordinate a holiday calendar so there’s always someone covering the campaigns!

Bonus tip: Coordinate the holiday schedule of your search engine reps too! Make sure to understand the best way to contact everyone (I suggest mobile phone) so it’s easy to get in touch.

Tip 3: Plan Out Innovative Holiday Marketing Strategies

The best part part of the holidays is they offer a plethora of opportunities for fancy marketing campaigns. I’m talking about special seasonal offers, custom landing pages, holiday ad copy, and more. The holidays are an amazing time to innovate and take your SEM campaigns to the next level. Get your team together and brainstorm strategies. Get all of the hard work done before the holidays. Then, when the holidays arrive, execute upon your seasonal marketing strategies.

Tip 4: Manage Your SEM Budgets Closely

This tip ties into the first one. The holidays offer so many opportunities. The last thing you want to do is cap out of budget towards the end of December. Make sure to manage your budget closely. Consider turning off (or throttling back) your campaigns on low performing days. Save your budget for the most important days.

Bonus tip: Double check all of your IOs before the holidays. Make sure they do not expire in Q4. If they do, be proactive and renew your contracts before it’s too late. The last thing you want is an IO expiring during the holiday season.

Tip 5: QA Everything Consistently

QA your ads, your landing pages, your campaign settings, and even your site. You never know what might go wrong. What you do know is that you cannot afford any downtime during your most important days of the year. If you do all of your strategy and planning before the holidays, you’re only left with execution and QA. Make sure to QA everything so you can sleep at night.

I hope this tips help out and I’m wishing you (and your SEM campaigns) and amazing holiday season!

Click-Through Vs. View-Through Conversions

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 3 7

Running display campaigns and trying to understand their effectiveness? I’m betting there are two key performance indicators (KPIs) at the top of your list: click-through conversions and view-through conversions. Today’s post quickly defines the two and then offers some insights on understanding/valuing each.

Full Potential

Click-through conversions are king! They represent customers who actually clicked your display ad and then converted on your website. This is the exact same way most savvy marketers manager their pay per click campaigns on AdWords and Bing Ads. If your display ads perform from a click-through conversion standpoint (at or below your target CPA), you are golden. This is the way you should be measuring things because the ads inspired immediate action.

View-through conversions, by contrast, are a bit more fuzzy. These “conversions” mark customers who saw your display ad and did not click it directly, but navigated back to your site via another channel and ended up converting. One could argue that the display ad impression(s) helped inspire the eventual conversion. However, since there was no direct interaction with the ad unit, one could also argue that the conversions would have happened anyways.

So, how do you place a value on view-through conversions? First and foremost, try to drive click-through conversions and leverage that data as the primary reason to run your display campaign. However, let’s say you’re above your CPA target on a click-through perspective or simply want to help add more context around the value of your campaigns? I have two tips…

Tip one involves a little work. You will want to run two display ads 50/50. The first one is your normal ad. The second one should be a random public service announcement unrelated to your business. From a view-through perspective, which one performs better? If you can prove the first one (the ad for your business) drives more view-throughs, you have proven the power of view-through conversions for your business.

Tip two is a little easier. Sophisticated display advertising platforms allow you to look at view-through conversions by time elapsed since the display ad impression. Did the conversion happen one hour after the customer saw your ad? Or, did it happen seven days later? If you see that most view-throughs happen quickly after the customer sees your ad (versus after more time has elapsed), this helps prove the power of the view-through in assisting conversions.

Hope these quick tips help out and best of luck with your display advertising campaigns!