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.

Managing PPC – a merchants viewpoint

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.

Adwords Optimization Tips

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.

Top 10 Features of Adwords Editor

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.

Adwords they do listen

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.

SEO and PPC Positives and Negatives

Just what is the role of the PPC affiliate in Affiliate Marketing?

The PPC affiliate spends a lot of time on a PPC campaign, researching keywords and phrases then optimizing the keyword list and experimenting with advertisement variations continually tweaking and modifying all variables to get the best from them, improving traffic quality and gaining the highest possible return for the merchant.

Couldn’t I just do this in-house or use a PPC agency?

Certainly you could but all the set up and maintenance costs would come from your company advertising budget.

The affiliate takes all the financial risk when setting up and maintaining a PPC campaign and if keywords do not convert or anything goes wrong it’s the affiliate that is out of pocket not the merchant.

It’s in the affiliate’s interest to work hard for merchants, as they are paid only on results, affiliates manage campaigns effectively and efficiently without using a merchant’s company resources, whereas if the merchant does his own PPC this requires a person to do it who will undoubtedly be in a salaried position adding to the company advertising costs.

Subcontracting a PPC campaign to an agency also incurs addition fees over and above the cost of the actual advertising.

Conclusion

Basically the PPC Affiliate does the majority of the work involved in PPC advertising but only makes money if it’s done right, thus minimising the financial risk for the merchant. Leaving the merchant free to use the budget saved in other areas of the business.

The role of Pay per Click (PPC) Affiliates

Pay-per-click (PPC) search engines will help to drive targeted traffic to your website. You only pay for the traffic you receive and for new sites the cost of getting traffic can be lower in comparison with search engine optimization (SEO).

The major players in the world of PPC are Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing, which was formerly Overture.

Bring targeted traffic to your site with Google AdWords

All of the PPC search engines have rules as to the style of your advertisements and relevancy which establish what words you can bid upon for your website, some engines will not allow trademarked terms in the ads or the keywords, do not use superlatives such as BEST and CHEAPEST in your PPC adverts as the editors will reject them, same goes for excessive capitalization.

Here are some guidelines to help you start your pay-per-click campaigns

1) Come to a decision about your objectives: do you wish to promote your whole website, just a certain product category or even just one product?

2) Perform keyword research: this can be done in part using the tools provided by the PPC search engines, so you are only bidding on words consumers are actually searching for.

Do not be too generic with keywords, words such as “shirts” may provide a lot of traffic however sales will undoubtedly be low making the term unprofitable. Research less popular, cheaper keywords and phrases for example “pure cotton shirts” as those suggest more about what the customer is looking for.

If using Google Adwords remember to use Broad, “Phrase”& [Exact] Match the three key phrases pure cotton shirts, “pure cotton shirts” and [pure cotton shirts] will give different results.

3) When writing ad copy use descriptive titles: put the search term or phrase in every title, this can be done very easily and dynamically in Google Adwords by using {KeyWord:default title} the default title is used if the keyword phrase is over 25 characters.

Using titles in this way makes it clear to the customer just what you are selling and therefore discourages clicks from uninterested users by as a filter; it attracts good traffic to your site and deters bad traffic that is less likely to lead to a sale.

4) Use deep linking: do not send all the traffic to your homepage as the customer then has to search your for what is he is looking for, deep link directly to the page which details the product related to the search term. Make it easy for the consumer to find what you offer or they will simply use the back button and click through to your competitor.

5) Continually monitor your PPC campaigns: adjust budget, keyword costs, ad copy, all of these will help them to become more cost effective and increase ROI. Also weed out ineffective keywords and continue keyword research.

Increase traffic to your website. Get Google AdWords.

Using PPC to its best potential requires a lot of time and effort, ok you can simply cobble together an advertisement and a set of keywords and they may show a profit however that is a very hit and miss approach and for every successful campaign there will be a number of failures.

A Basic Guide to PPC