Often when you see articles about PPC (pay per click advertising) they are written by someone with an agenda, either an affiliate talking up his (or her) ability or an agency advocating that their service only way to manage PPC, it comes as a refreshing change to read Affiliates vs the PPC agency- managing the two from a merchant’s perspective by Naomi Brown of Firebox.com who broaches the subject from a merchant perspective.

The article discusses the difficulties and advantages of working with both affiliates and PPC agencies together, and offers useful advice for other merchants who may want to go down this route as well as some excellent tips for affiliates who may wish to promote the merchant using their own ppc campaigns.

Since February Inside Adwords has been running a series of articles by Stephanie Lim about Adwords Optimization, here are links to the full set.

AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 1 – Assessing Your Industry and Audience
Helping you to understand your competition and Customer base.

AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 2 – Assessing Your Website and Goals
Evaluate your website and define your goals.

AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 3 – Account Structure
Use the information gleaned from Part 1 and Part 2 to structure your Adwords account.

AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 4 – Keyword Basics
General keyword advice and formatting, core keywords, and keyword variations and modifiers.

AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 5 – Beyond Keyword Basics
Refine your keyword lists to increase efficiency and conversions.

AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 6 – Ad Text
A guide to improving the quality of your ad text.

It’s not very often that I come across an article that is worthy of reproduction however I have just read AdWords Editor’s “Top 10 Favorites” on the Inside AdWords Blog and was well impressed, hope you like it too:

Whether you’re just learning about AdWords Editor now or you’ve been with us since the beginning, we hope you’ll find the following list of favorite features useful.

10. Find duplicate keywords in your account with just two clicks of your mouse.

9. Copy or cut and paste between ad groups, campaigns, or even across accounts.

8. Make bulk changes to destination URLs using the Add/Update Multiple tools or Advanced URL Changes.

7. If you need to edit your keywords or ads in a spreadsheet, copy the items to edit from the data view and paste them into a spreadsheet. Make your changes, then paste the contents of the spreadsheet directly into the appropriate Add/Update Multiple tool.

6. Undelete and activate previously deleted text ads.

5. Search your account quickly. Perform simple word searches, or do an Advanced Search to find items that meet the multiple criteria that you specify.

4. Easily find and edit bids, destination URLs, and text for ads, keywords, or sites.

3. Submit multiple exception requests at once.

2. Automatically organize your keywords into ad groups based on common themes.

1. Save a snapshot of your account for archiving or for sharing. Later, you can import the archive file to restore your prior account settings.

The AdWords Editor folks are always interested in hearing your feedback, so email them at adwordseditor@google.com if you have any comments or suggestions. If you haven’t already downloaded AdWords Editor, you can get started now.

One thing that has always bugged me about Google Adwords is that if you wanted to temporarily stop one or more keywords or ad variations the only way to do it was to delete them, well now in response to feedback they can be simply paused here is how they announced it on their blog last Thursday:

Pause your keywords, sites and ad creatives
Have you ever needed to pause certain ads and keywords when your inventory was low? Or have you ever wished you could temporarily stop serving image ads on certain sites during the weekdays?

As of today, all AdWords advertisers can pause and resume keywords (for keyword-targeted campaigns), sites (for site-targeted campaigns), and ad creatives. As you can see from the picture below, this feature is functionally similar to the pause/resume feature on the Campaign Summary page – we’ve simply extended it to the keyword, sites and ad variations tabs.

As an Affiliate my preferred method of delivering traffic to my merchant partners is by search engine optimisation (SEO) however I am the first to admit that SEO is an area in which I’m not particularly adept so unfortunately in order to scrape a living I’m forced to rely heavily on pay per click (PPC).

I would estimate that my annual turnover from Affiliate Marketing is generated 20% from SEO and 80% from PPC it is my aim in 2007 to attempt to bring the figures a lot closer together ultimately a complete reversal would be ideal.

As a starting point for my shift of focus let us take a look at the positive and negative aspects of SEO and PPC.

SEO Positives

• SEO does not necessarily involve a financial investment, other than the cost of the time concerned in the optimisation procedure.
• SEO is a cost efficient marketing method.
• SEO can be done either in-house or it can be contacted out to a specialist company.
• High search engine rankings can have a positive effect on branding.

SEO Negatives

• It may take a long time to gain good positions on the major search engines, weeks, months or even years.
• A lot of effort may be invested into search engine optimisation for very little return.
• If a good position in serps is achieved maintaining that position may prove difficult due to the competition from other websites.
• Changes in search engine algorithms can wipe out good SEO position in an instant.

PPC Positives

• Speed of execution. PPC enables advertising campaigns to be implemented very quickly. It often takes only a few minutes until the advertisements are live.
• Campaign results can be seen very quickly and adjustments made instantly.
• Finding the right niche keywords can be very lucrative.
• PPC can be out sourced to a pay per click specialist.

PPC Negatives

• Every click adds to the cost of sales.
• Quality score rules for landing pages are making it more difficult, or expensive to gain a good position on PPC.
• Click fraud, while the PPC search engines constantly battle against this there can be no denying that it does happen.
• The competition for the top PPC ad slots in many instances is as rife as that for similar positions in organic search.

Hmmm that’s enough pros and cons to be going on with and it looks like i’m going to have my work cut out over the coming months, if you have anything to add or a bit of SEO advice please get in touch.