Searchfest 2012: Advanced PPC

Speakers:

Dan Sundgren- Intelius

Tim Mayer-Heddle

Moderator:

Dane Wiseman- Ethology

Summary:

Intermediate-to-advanced best practices for managing PPC campaigns. Learn to research with competitive tools, gain insights into search trends and achieve your performance goals through expert-tested strategies. Understand the key elements of any optimization and overarching performance tips that will lead to better return on ad spend, and ultimately: return on investment. a of your experience level, it’s important to remain flexible in your strategy.

Speaker: Dan Sundgren

Foundation

People
- Need balance of right and left brain to be an effective at PPC
- Technology
  - Great analytics platform (in house and third party)
- Resources (liquor and guessing sometimes works)
- BHAG’s + Strategy + Tactics
  - Get your BHAG out there
- Volume & ROI
  - Once your metrics are solid and put in place, volume and ROI are everything
  - Ad position is a big part of this
- Budgets
  - SEM is a money making machine if you do it right
  - IF you are doing PPC right, budgets are for chumps
  - Budget should be 3 to 4 times daily spend

Advanced Tips

Pull your own data out of Google/Bing, put them in an excel pivot table
Manage your largest volume terms manually; don’t automate
Use editor to pull mid tail terms, make mass bid changes
Find out where your sweet spot is in the time of day, and use day parting
If all match types are in same ad group
- Exact Match, bid at least 40 cents
- Phrase Match, bid 75% of exact match
- Broad Match, bid 85% of exact match

Spearker: Tim Mayer

Advanced PPC Tactics: Maximize your PPC campaign by figuring out where to spend your time

Where to Start
- Do little tweaks every day, and one large task per day
- Keep a schedule of large tasks to do (test new ads, delete underperforming keywords, landing pages etc), and stick to that schedule to ensure they get done
Performers or Under performers?
- Focus on under performing keywords in terms of quality score; try and move a keyword with a quality score of 3 up to 7, instead of a keyword with a quality score of 7 up to 10
- Calculate impression share, and figure out where and how you are losing impressions
- Fix your bids and focus on ROI
Improve Quality and CTR
- Increase CTR by using ad extensions, which also pushes your competitors down the page
- Laziness in PPC management leads to low CTR ; don’t start something and then not go all the way, such as creating new keywords, but then not creating new ad groups and ads
- Put the keyword on the left side of the ad
- Use consistent messaging with custom landing pages
- Ad diversity can work; take risks and don’t always follow best practices
- Use punctuation at end of description line one, and use explanation points.
- Use brand name in display URL
- Offers and Discounts in Headlines
Landing Pages