Office/House Tour
Seems that everyone is doing an office tour.
Amit has his new place in florida
Zac has a blog post showing lot of people’s offices…
Paul showed off his new house.
So… I can give into peer pressure. Here is my house/office:
Entries Tagged as 'PPC'
TRACK YOUR ADS!!!11!!
Somehow my wife talked me into going with her and my 3 daughters to the mall for clothing shopping. *hint* If your wife suggests you go to the mall with her and the girls for some shopping… so NO. (but do it nicely).
Needless to say I was bored out of my mind. Malls these days don’t have much appeal for me. At all.
But.. I did see something interesting. There was a person at one of those kiosk booths in the center of the mall using facebook. I was shocked to meet an actual facebook user. (Someone who really is into it.. not someone who just uses for ads and a little bit of networking). So I asked him a few questions about how he used it and what he thought of the ads on the left hand side. Turns out he clicks on the ads from time to time but hasn’t ever bought anything off them. This led to him telling me that he actually has been working on making facebook ads for their product. He was limiting it to just two state (Utah and Idaho). I told him that since the product was geared more towards religious people to not limit it just to those two states, but use religions as targets (Mormon, LDS, Christian, Protestant, Catholic, etc..) and leave it for worldwide or national. Then I asked him if he was able to track a sale from an ad. I wasn’t sure if he got what I meant at first so I explained about creating a bunch of different ads on facebook and tracking each one to know if it resulted in a sale…
If you are not able to track a click on an ad to a sale (or action/goal) then you are really just throwing your money away. Sure at first you need to throw a bunch of different ads and keyword /landing page /domain combinations. But after you have some data and conversions you need to revisit the campaign and optimize it. You can NOT do this without some sort of tracking. (And yeah I know google, yahoo and MSN all have tracking features.. but for some reason they never seem to catch 100% of the conversions. It is kinda annoying which is why I have a supplemental tracking system)
Send each keyword to a landing page with a separate tag. mypage?k=1000 or mypage?k=keyword (I recommend against using the keyword instead of a number in your tracking) and then carry that identifier out to the conversion. This way you know which ad/keyword combination resulted in a sale without relying just on your PPC provider to have accurate tracking (they are really good, but not 100%). Plus with this method you can track for PPC providers that don’t even have tracking (facebook and others).
Blindly Adding Keywords
I saw a crazy ad on gmail today. I was viewing emails from someone in utah. (Plus I live in utah). This ad was so untargeted it registered on my WTF meter. Here is what they did…
Their primary keyword is jazz obviously. However… putting jazz in any keyword suggestion box will also return utah or utah jazz (the NBA team). Instead of reviewing the automated suggested keywords, they just dumped them all into their PPC campaign… bad idea on Adwords. This will result in a lower CTR and wasted clicks. (Don’t worry I didn’t click it)
So… look before you blindly add keywords. (Or have some sort of algorithm check for you)
Free PPC Software for Mac, Windows & Linux
Ok, I have an idea for some free PPC software to put out there. There is zero PPC software that is for Mac or Linux (that isn’t web-based). So I am gonna start with something small. Maybe a PPC campaign builder with exports for Google, Yahoo and MSN that runs on Mac, Linux and Win.
Up to this point all my in house PPC software is Windows only via C# and MSSQL Server. I then run it via parallels/vmware. This will be a learning experience for me since I haven’t made native mac or linux software yet.
Want Some Free PPC Software?
I always wonder about this. You see these products being pushed that supposedly help you in PPC campaigns and so on. I wonder, why are they selling it? If it is any good they would be using it internally to beat competition. I say this because all of my PPC software I use is written in house by me. Right now I have no plans to sell any of them. It seems that many PPC programs out there don’t do much more then you can do with some research and Excel.
That being said, I had an interesting idea. Someone give me a PPC program that they see that they want for free. I’ll look at it and see if I can throw together a free version in a weekend and give it out just to prove a point. Or if there isn’t one that you use, then suggest features you would want in a PPC application and I’ll try to throw a free PPC program together in a day or so.
Update: Ok.. changed a little bit so I don’t have people come after me. Don’t give me a ppc app to copy. But if people post things they wish they had in a PPC app, I’ll still try and put one together in a weekend.
How I Run My PPC Campaigns
Ok here is my secret.
I have a picture which illustrates this concept.
- Pick a niche
- Build a community/site around it
- Pick a bunch of keywords and relevant ads — illustrated below
- Submit them to a bunch of different PPC engines — illustrated below
- See what sticks — illustrated below
Dayparting - 35% increase in conversion rate and a 46% drop in cost per conversions
Dayparting is the fancy word for when you say you only want your ads shown at certain times of the day or that you want to pay more during some time periods and less during others.
I’ve got a campaign running entirely on google’s content network. I scrapped together a quick chart of conversions and mapped them out by hour of the day.
You can see the the spike in the afternoon and the drop in the early mornings..
All times are MST and 1 = 12am (if you are getting confused by the numbering on the bottom.)
Here is how it was converting at this time. Since this was on the content network I had my bids relatively low. 15 cents per click. These stats are for the 7 days before I did the Dayparting adjustment.
Based on this I adjusted my min bid to 5 cents a click and used Dayparting to increase it up to 15 cents per click for the times when I would get the most bang for my buck.
So for everyday I’ll be bidding 5 cents at low times, 10 cents from 8am to 3pm (plus 10pm to 11pm) and then 15 cents at the premium time (3pm-10pm)
So far pretty boring right?
Now look at the stats for the 7 days after Dayparting.
Do you see it?
Lower Cost, Higher Conversion Rate, Higher CTR, and so on.
Long story short I just made adjustments to show the ads to people who were likely to convert. The only thing that went down were clicks and impressions (which makes total sense since I am now showing the ad to more qualified people) This resulted in a 35% increase in conversions and a 46% drop in cost per conversions, this is a good thing.
Keyword Tracking Basics
This is a short video I made of how keyword tracking works. Some people were asking me about it. I figured this should be a decent enough overview of how it actually works.
Questions? Comments…
Pay Per Click Is Not The Endgame
I am sitting in the Denver airport at the delta crown room watching N’West and Minn play, but I was thinking about PPC and my plans for the future. Really PPC is not the end game. It is the beginning. There are lots of different ways to gain traffic, PPC is just one of many.
So what is the endgame? In my mind it is a site sustainable by its users. Users come back to your site over and over because you fulfill a need, not because they saw your ad.
Using PPC in a “big plan” site would be a way to get users, but the litmus for the traffic coming to your site will be generating a user that returns on a regular basis. (What do you think many of the places you have been driving PPC traffic to in the first place are doing? 
)
In summary, sure… making minisites and sending PPC traffic to it is all fine and dandy, but to move to the next level you need a site that people go to on their own without ads.
Which PPC Engine Do You Start With?
In reference to my list of working PPC engines, Neil asked, do you test them from the get go or do you only use them if you get a successful campaign in yahoo/google/msn?
You know, I should start with all of them. But really it depends on the niche or my mood, sometimes a combination of both. For example the most recent campaign I created seemed pretty saturated in the big three. I just wanted to run a small test to get an idea of conversion rate, so I picked a tier 2 engine. Since I know historically that the big three usually convert about twice as well as the 2nd tier engines, I can then make a better decision on my campaign when I go full blast with some base conversion rate statistics.
