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
• Spend as much time optimizing landing pages as you do in your ppc account
• Landing Page A/B testing
• Be aggressive with the first test

• Heat maps and eye tracking- See what is getting the most attention on your landing page, move things around and experiment
• Speed
• Load time underrated factor in landing page optimization
• Use free page test service, and see what is making loading time slow