June 20th, 2008 — PPC Tricks
If you send people to your website via pay-per-click advertising, you know that it’s all about quality. Google want’s to see that your sites are relevant, thus matching the title with the searchphrase is often a good idea, and so is having the searchphrase in the body text of the website.
But you can in fact get a better quality score (and thus cheaper clicks) without having to change one word of copy - just make your site look neat and professional.
Every website that you send traffic to, a Google editor will stop by and look at the page. They won’t read every word on they page, but they will look at the page - and if it looks like a professional site rather than a flimsy one you’ll get a much better quality score.
So, graphics and layout are becoming more important these days too.
May 31st, 2008 — General
While my stay in Berlin I was looking for restaurants to eat. So I googled “restaurants in berlin”.
And guess what I found? Well, of course googles local search listing, but what else? In the sponsored listings, in the number one spot? Again Google’s local listings - an advertisement for maps.google.de !
I thought that is really interesting. Considering that they are one of the biggest data mining companies worldwide they must have a pretty good grip on where the profits are to be made, and this step seems like they’re now pushing their way seriously into some local markets - I guess local magazines will find it increasingly hard to compete with that.
May 16th, 2008 — PPC Resources
Thesaurus can be a truly great source of coming up with new keywords.
There are basically two thesaurus-websites that I user over and over again. One you probably know of already, and the other you probably never heard of yet.
- http://thesaurus.reference.com/
- http://www.lexfn.com
You should check both of them out. They’re totally free and different from each other, so each one is worth checking out. Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of PPC Marketing, so it’s good to diversify your keyword research strategy.
February 27th, 2008 — PPC Tricks
Usually in Google ads there’s the green web-address at the bottom. But recently there seem to be more ads showing up that have a call to action there instead of a link. Just look at the picture of the two ads on the left. The first one has the standard web-address there, whereas the second one has a call to action “Learn More Now”.
This is something that you might want to split-run for your campaigns and see how it affects CTR.
February 25th, 2008 — General
A new way to advertise online? That’s what Yahoo wants to do. After they reclined an offer from Microsoft which offered to buy Yahoo for 44.6 billion USD Yahoo president Sue Decker announced that they had big plans.
But let’s look at that number again: 44.6 billion US dollars and Yahoo did NOT want to sell for that amount of money. Do you know what that is all about? It’s all about Pay Per Click advertisements! That’s how Yahoo generates revenue! From PPC advertising! And they didn’t want to sell for 44.6 billion dollars. That’s a lot of money…
Anyway: Yahoo’s new advertising platform is currently under the name of APEX (advertiser-publisher exchange). According to the Decker it will make it much more easier for both buyers and sellers of online advertising. They are working together with around 500 newspaper publishers to make it easier for them to advertise on a broader, yet still targeted scale.
And Google is not the only company that aims at simplicity: Google tries to make things simpler, and so does Microsoft with their AdCenter and AOL with Platform A.
February 19th, 2008 — PPC Resources
Ok, wanna spy on a real PPC-genius? Some of the real-life results he got from split-testing different ads against each other?
Visit this secret website:
http://www.leadsintogold.com/genius/
February 13th, 2008 — PPC Resources
Want to learn PPC advertising from scratch?
Check out these two pretty new (and FREE!) resources from PPC-giant Google and it’s smaller brother Yahoo Search Marketing.
February 12th, 2008 — PPC Tricks
Headlines are probably the most important element of any ad that you want to test against another headline.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to headlines. Just copy your way to success.
Cosmopolitan magazine! They have some of the best copywriters in the world writing for them and their headlines are worth gold! Just check out their headlines and find ways to use their headlines for your products. And you don’t even need to buy the magazine. Just head over to Magazines.com, search for “cosmopolitan”, click on the cover and will show a large image of the full cover with all the top-headlines!
Resources: www.magazines.com
February 11th, 2008 — General
Brent Sharp just wrote a really good post on how PPC advertising will continue to grow in both market share and total spending. In case you ever find yourself wondering: ‘is this whole PPC thing really worth the trouble to figure it out?’ It’ll be good for you to look at the bigger picture and see where the future is going too: more and more money will be spend online, and lots of it will be in PPC ads!
February 11th, 2008 — PPC Tricks
Negative Keywords are a must. If you are selling umbrellas online you don’t want to google to display your ad when somebody is searching for “free umbrella”. So the word “free” is a keyword that you almost always want to exclude. There’s a bunch of other ones, but here I just want to point out how powerful this can be.
If you can reduce the time that your ad shows up by 50% with negative keywords you will have a 100% higher CTR (click-through-rate).
If you reduce the time that your ad shows up by only 20%, you still get a 25% higher CTR. This will be well worth your time of setting up your campaign with negative keywords.
