I just finished reviewing Mike Seddon’s/KKSmarts Adwords Course (not an affiliate link) and found it to be quite useful and loaded with lots of clever tips. His material is easier to understand than the default guide on Adwords. I was a bit overwhelmed with Adwords when I first started and a program like this could have easily reduced my learning curve. The program includes one workbook and 4 video series covering important Adwords topics. The videos can be viewed online or downloaded.

What You Will Get:

Online Version

There are 38 total videos in Google Adwords Course and each folder is conveniently sub-divided for easier access and quicker reference.

I think both PPC beginners and intermediates can learn a lot from Adwords Course. Even if you’ve been an Adwords advertiser for over a year, you can still learn by going through over-looked Adwords features. I like Lesson 3 about Landing Pages and Ads the most because it’s a good “refresher” on conversion.

For more information - (Not an affiliate link) Adwords Course by KKSmarts

I appreciated the sales letter for the program because it was straight to the point without any hype.

Interesting bit. I’m a newbie when it comes to actually using Facebook. I’m confused with what to do with those silly little requests. Some are cute and clever but I guess I am one of the few who just don’t get it.

I edited my Facebook profile late last night before my Internet access decided to snooze on me. I cleared the content on each tab including the “relationships” section that had the marriage field checked . The entire time, I thought the system would just leave my status hidden as per the claim below the first box:

Apps Can Think for Themselves

When I got up this morning, I got text and email messages from folks extending their support. Honestly, I thought they shared my frustration towards my Internet service provider. I let it lapse throughout the day until I received a warm message from a local social media guru sharing words of encouragement about my marriage coming to an end. I was really shocked and was about to call out foul-play thinking someone hacked my profile.

So I stormed to my account and saw on the feed/story that I am no longer married  along with an image of a  heart broken in half.

I then asked Aaron to check his profile and he too, saw the message.

Linkbaiting Bots? I think Sooner than Later

So I guess if you point your relationship status to the  empty field, their engine defaults you as being single. But that’s expected of bots. The part that amazed me was how it created a “story” with great extremes on possible consequences. It churned up a fake story so compelling, that it evoked emotion that led to an action by its readers. It got me thinking if there could be a way to use this to our advertising advantage? I’m sure I’ll figure it all out one day. But for now, I have to buy Aaron dinner.

Feel free to share with me your thoughts and opinions on this matter. The weirder and more idealistic, the better

The web has a wealth of information (and misinformation) which makes it tough to filter out the noise. PPC is also tricky because most of the time, there are no definitive answers and everything varies. The results of campaigns are hardly the same even if a landing page is stolen and re-used. Note: There are ways to reduce web copy theft which I’ll cover next week.

If you’re new to PPC and want to start out properly, you may get overwhelmed with the amount of research and execution involved. After finding your niche, keywords, keyword organization and landing page, the next objective is to determine the main sources for traffic.

Yahoo Search - Good Overall Starting Point

I see this tip shared quite a bit online. A lot of folks start with Yahoo because of its traffic converting slightly better than Google. In most circumstances, Yahoo’s CPC is lower than Adwords which is an incentive to new advertisers. The downside with Yahoo is their lower quality, spammy search partners. These are mainly domainer pages or junk, spyware infested sites. They finally allowed advertisers to exclude search partners but only upto 250 sites. I have an Adwords campaign where I have over 1000 sites excluded so 250 is a bit stingy.

So if you want to collect data for a test campaign, Yahoo is good if you limit to search and exclude spending money on their search partner program. Here’s $25 of free credit to help you get started.

Microsoft AdCenter - Less Risky, More Free Money

Vista is a vicious program that caused me tremendous grief and pain but other than that, I give Microsoft AdCenter a high approval just like XP. It is excellent for the new, super cautious advertiser on a limited budget. The two downsides are lack of market share which means fewer data and a weak content network. But if it’s your first campaign, the content network will provide little value anyway because you have very little control over it.

Microsoft is working really hard to attract advertisers and have released some of the best free tools available. My favorite is the Ad-Intelligence Office Excel plug-in and it’s compatible for both 2003 and 2007 version. The free keyword tool is the best of its kind because you access real live data, not cached like all the major tools. Aside from the cool tools, they’re also giving you a generous $75 worth of adcenter ads to get you started. Aaron and I tested Ad Intelligence back in January of this year - here’s our review.

Google Adwords - Cutting to the Chase for Immediate Results

Lots of mixed opinions from seasoned advertisers if Adwords is the best traffic source for initial testing. Advertisers in favor of Adwords as the entry point knows that Google delivers some of the highest traffic quality online. Google’s king-size ownership of the market allows advertisers to test campaign performance, keyword efficiency and landing pages with fast, accurate data to influence any changes. You’ll know in a shorter period how your offer will fare.

The other team knows Adwords as the most competitive channel on the market. A lot of new advertisers are easily discouraged if they’re not prepared for the fierce competition ahead.  Expect incuring higher costs, complete lots of quality score requirements and face that risk of getting slapped around.

Again, there isn’t a right or wrong answer and agree with the logic of both sides.

Summary to Help Alleviate Confusion

Everything varies with PPC so choosing which platform to advertise in will depend on your product/service offer, competition, market size and campaign structure. Now that you’re familiar with the ups and downs of the major engines, here’s a quick summary of my baselines:

1. If you’re in a competitive market such as insurance, mortgage, male reproductive organ enhancements, payday loans and etc, Yahoo or Microsoft could be a smarter choice because you’ll get the data you need at a fraction of Adword’s budget requirement.
2. If your product is really niched with little traffic and competition,  Adsense can be prioritized. This will help you extract data faster, from a very rich source without exhausting your budget.

The Google content has had multiple forms of content targeting available for years.

• Keyword Targeting: this uses contextual matching algorithms that align your ad exposure with keyword themes inside your ad group.
• Placement Targeting: formerly called site targeting, this allows you to target particular websites and subdomains.

We have generally been more of a fan of keyword targeting than content targeting because it does not require you to buy the backfill inventory and irrelevant inventory that you often buy when doing site targeting.

Today Google announced the launch of a third type of ad targeting - a hybrid of site targeting and keyword targeting blended together. Google’s blog post on the topic mentioned 2 ways advertisers can use this to refine their ad campaigns

• setting custom bids on specific sites: useful for sites that have good inventory, but have an intrinsic value much higher or lower than other sites in the Google Network
• creating hypertargeted ads: if much of your exposure on a site comes from content about a specific attribute you can create ads that are specifically targeted to people interested in that feature or attribute

Here are the two examples Google gave…

• Set custom bids for specific placements. Let’s say you’re selling laptops, and you’re using the content network to advertise on pages relevant to the keywords ‘laptops,’ ‘laptop computers,’ and ‘laptop accessories.’ After checking your Placement Performance report, you see that you’re getting sales at a great ROI from three technology review sites. You also see a few sites where you’re getting sales, but your costs are too high to advertise effectively on them.If you currently have a $1.00 bid for the content network as a whole in this ad group, you can now add the high- and low-performing sites as placements into your ad group with custom bids. For example, you might set a $2.00 Max CPC for the three high-performing sites, and a $0.50 Max CPC for the low-performing ones. Meanwhile, you’re still using the keywords in your ad group to target relevant pages across the content network, but now you’ve adjusting bids for the sites in the network that perform better or worse than average.
• Show your ad only when both keywords and placements match. Suppose you check your Placement Performance report again and see that your laptop ads are showing often on sites that discuss how to make laptops more energy efficient. You know that you sell some of the most energy efficient laptops available, and you’d like to write an ad that highlights the power-saving benefits of your products. But you don’t want to show this ad on pages whose readers aren’t as concerned about energy conservation.Now you can create an ad group containing the same ‘laptop’ keywords you’ve been using and add each of the energy efficiency sites as placements. Next, change your campaign settings so that your ads show only on the sites you’ve added, and only when their pages are relevant to your keywords. This gives you the freedom to write an ad highlighting the energy-saving benefits of your laptops to this unique audience, since you know that your ad will appear only on relevant pages on the placements you’ve selected.

In the next few weeks, I will try, test and collect data from this new hybrid platform. I guess this indicates how Google is trying to attract advertisers to its network. Search is synonymous to Google and that itself is a huge marketing accomplishment. However, us advertisers know that they want so much more.

This giving away a fully functional, leave on your server, analytic software started with a hosted program called tracking 202. I guess the fact that tracking 202 was hosted caused a bit of confusion at one of the marketing forums. It really sucks to create tools from your own pocket and then get accused of potentially stealing keywords.

That’s when Wesley Mahler, CEO of prosper 202, listened to his user-base feedback and immediately developed a free self hosted analytics software. I liked tracking 202 because it’s easier to set up. However, after playing with the self hosted program on Wesley’s Mac, I was instantly sold on the product. The weird thing is that the product is free. You can download here. This is not mandatory but if you like the product you can help out by donating here.

Aaron did this something similar to this two years ago by creating an entire suite of search marketing tools and not charge a penny for it. I honestly feel that our seo tools and prosper 202 are better than some of paid and expensive products in the market.

Take advantage of these tools. They will save you time, money and help you gather the right data so that you make more.

Google sent out an email to pay per action advertisers announcing that the program is being phased out at the end of August.

Google is constantly working to offer features that will provide a better experience to our users. As part of Google’s recent acquisition of DoubleClick, the Performics affiliate network is now a part of Google and has been renamed Google Affiliate Network. To consolidate our offerings, we will be phasing out the AdWords pay-per-action beta in the last week of August 2008. As an alternative to pay-per-action advertising, Google offers two products that allow you to manage your advertising on a CPA (cost-per-acquisition) basis: the Conversion Optimizer and the Google Affiliate Network. To learn more about these options, visit http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=97264.

How aggressively will Google market their new affiliate network? It seems the current integration plans are a bit haphazard, requiring AdSense publishers to sign up different affiliate accounts, and forcing users to sign up under ConnectCommerce.com. If you login to an AdSense account Google warns “Referrals is being retired during the last week of August 2008, so we recommend that you do not implement referral ad code on your site at this time” yet they do not tell you to sign up to promote affiliate offers.

I recently spent hours playing with Ad Planner Beta, Google’s newest Adwords tool. If you thought Adwords Editor made your life easier, consider being spoon fed with Ad Planner. The program is amazing, especially if you site target on Google’s content network. It’s a lot like Quantcast, only much more accurate.

Google Does the Work for You

Demographic Filters

Just type in any URL and the tool will group it with other relevant sites. To get even more laser targeted, there is a demographics option where you choose:

• location
• language
• age
• education,
• income and
• gender

Site & Category Filters

After getting the results, you can sort through the data according to

• impressions
• page views
• unique visitors
• index
• category

You can find sites with audiences related to any particular site. Here are sites related to seobook.com

And for any particular site you can find audience details, similar to those provided in Google Website Trends, but with the addition of demographics information.

Filter by AdSense Formats

Here’s the fun part - You can easily handpick relevant sites that are involved in the Google content network. It even allows you to choose the types of media available.

Tons of Great Opportunities

While site targeted advertising tends to be less profitable than keyword targeted ads, if you’re using the content network for brand exposure or e-commerce, the Ad Planner can help you research and reach your target market.

And there are a variety of great non-AdWords related uses for this tool

• compare your traffic levels to competing sites
• find sites worth doing direct ad deals with
• find affiliate sites worth emulating
• find sites worth pitching stories to or writing guest columns for
• find sites worth buying links from or buying outright

Geo-Targeting AdWords

To improve tracking and save on a cost per click basis, I separated one of my campaigns into countries where English is the main language. I used Adwords editor to carbon copy each campaign from the main one and everything were kept the same except for the target area. The countries all seemed to fare well when grouped in one campaign but when separated, the numbers returned to me were disturbing. I realized that the countries expected to outperform did so-so and very poorly, ROI wise. I would have never known this if I didn’t test on a regional basis. The ratio of ROI was 4: 2.5: 1 where the best campaign did 4 times better than the worst.

Optimize Your Account For ROI, Not Clicks!

Another note is that my CTR was highest at the region that converted the lowest. I’m going to study this further and see why some countries did better than others. I had an entire week to collect data and will now dissect the Google reports. At least my quality score increased from the higher CTR.

The lesson I learned is to never assume anything with PPC advertising.

Do you think it’s possible to sell a product you don’t know about? I guess in the offline world, aggressive salespeople can get away with it but not in the attention starved Internet. It’s important to assume your website visitors as having an extremely short attention span. If they’re not happy with your site-design or if your headline is irrelevant to what they’re looking for, they will leave your site in a heartbeat.

This is why knowing your product plays an important role. If you sincerely understand the problem your product solves, you will understand the mentality and buying behaviors of your target market. You will then customize your landing pages including the headlines and content according to their needs. In addition,  familiarizing yourself with your products will help magnify your keyword list. Knowing your product will open doors and broaden your scope for promotion.

When you buy ads direct from a publisher they usually charge a premium rate above what that ad inventory would sell for if it was sold through an automated ad auction. When Google launched site targeted AdSense ads years ago it was a cheap way for advertisers to buy specific audiences. Perfect for brand advertisers, but not as good for direct marketers. Why?

Advertising in Deep Dark Corners

It turns out that when you buy site targeted ads you typically first get exposure on the least valuable pages and least valuable ad units within a site. It makes sense that if all you want to do is advertise on a particular site then of course Google is going to sell you the inventory they struggled to monetize with their traditional keyword targeted PPC ads. So if the site has an offbeat category, or an AdSense ad block that is below the fold in the right column, those are the ad positions you are buying first.

Overpaying for Premium Exposure

You can buy your way into the more premium positions on the best pages too, but in order to do so you must bid high, which means you end up bidding at premium rates on the best pages, and you end up bidding too high for the backfill / remnant ad inventory on the least valuable pages. Not only are you losing money buying that off targeted backfill inventory, but you are competing against the most targeted ads on the most valuable pages, so it is hard to make money from buying site targeted ads unless they have a small niche site or are in a category where the ad market is exceptionally inefficient.

How to Buy Site Targeted Ads

There are some hacks around the issue of wasting money on site targeting though. The easiest of which is to look for footprints (URL, footer text, author name, etc.) on a site or the section of the site you want to advertise on and bid on those related keywords. If there is a section of the site that is irrelevant you can look for related footprints that are specific to those pages and use them as negative keywords.