You might not be.

I was poking around in Google Shopping results the other day and found that there are some merchants who have partnered with major brands that are essentially “piggy backing” off their name through the Google Shopping Feed.

At first, I thought NewEgg was being just really clever/sneaky by changing their store name in Merchant Center to “New Egg – The Unbeatable Sale.” But what I discovered is that Unbeatable Sale is actually a merchant of NewEgg’s that sells through the NewEgg site (and as a result is covered under a number of their policies).

At the same time, Unbeatable Sale gets to use the NewEgg brand name as their store name in Google Shopping results:

So I started digging more. Turns out Unbeatable Sale is a lot of places:

So who else is doing this?

Well, Sears and Walmart:

And in this case, they get double listings – as they are technically two different “stores” on Google Shopping.

I rooted around a bit more on Sears side, particularly in the Pricefalls.com merchant service as it kept cropping up in the places I was looking. I found that it’s not hard to get into:

Heck, Pricefalls does the Google Shopping feed for you.

Same products?

One thing I looked at was whether or not Sears.com and the Sears.com-Pricefalls store were selling the same items or not. The answer to that is no (or at least not for the few products I tested) – there are different products being offered.

I’m still not crazy about the overall concept though. The big name retailers get to take up multiple results with partnering merchants, but technically – not really. I don’t consider it to be the same as eBay or Etsy, which are straight up marketplaces. I consider Sears to be Sears, so it seems weird and unbalanced to me.

Maybe you already knew about the duplications, but lately I’ve been noticing how much more they’re appearing in the results. Everyone else out there cool with this? Or no?

The post So You Think You’re Buying from Sears appeared first on Portent.

About the PPC Essentials Referral Program

Have a business in mind that needs help managing their AdWords or adCenter paid search accounts? Point them in the direction of Portent and earn some money while doing it.
To begin the referral process, submit your name, your email address, and the name of the person you are referring on our referral page. Then, let the person you are referring know about our PPC Essentials package. We even created an email template for you that is easy to copy, paste, and send!

(Note: We will absolutely NOT contact them- until they contact us first. Promise. We don’t roll that way.)

However, when the person you referred does sign up for our monthly management package, we will send you $50 via PayPal.

Refer as many people as you would like. We will send you $50 for each successful referral.

To learn more about our PPC Essentials referral program, visit our client referral page.

About PPC Essentials

PPC Essentials is an expertly managed PPC program and consulting package for businesses looking to spend between $500 and $3,000 a month on paid search advertising. There are no contracts and you can start and stop your service at any time. With packages starting at just $250 a month, Portent provides businesses that don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on management fees an outlet to expert PPC management.

To learn more about our PPC Essentials management package or sign up for a free 10-minute account audit, please visit our Essentials package page.

The post The New PPC Management Referral Program that Gets You Cash appeared first on Portent.

1. Separate Networks. Search, display, content, syndicated search partner.

Google recommends serving your ads on all its available sites. Of course it does. If you want to rack up a ridiculous number of impressions while overpaying for clicks from visitors who are not at all interested in what you have to offer- go for it!

A much better tactic is using separate campaigns to advertise individually on the Search Network, Display Network, etc. Each advertising network has been developed to reach visitors with different goals on different types of sites. The structures of your campaigns need to be adjusted based on the network you are serving. Separating your campaigns by network can save you a ton of time and money- not to mention a headache.

2. Use negative keywords.

Effectively adding negative keywords into your campaigns can help eliminate irrelevant clicks from visitors looking for something other than what you have to offer. For example, if you are selling high-end stereo systems for cars, you probably want to filter out terms like free, cheap, and discount. That way, people using those search terms won’t be able to see your ads and you don’t have to waste your daily budget on clicks that won’t convert.

As your campaigns begin to develop and mature, there will always be unwanted keywords and phrases that leak into the account which are triggered by broad and phrase-match keywords. Removing these unwanted keywords will help eliminate unsolicited clicks from visitors not looking for what you have to offer.

3. Don’t “set it and forget it”- think of your account as a living thing that needs to be cared for.

While the initial building steps of campaign setup and launch can be long and tedious, your work has only just begun once your ads are up and running. Forgetting about your account will come back to haunt you. Depending on the size and budget of your account, set aside a chunk of time one or two days a week when you can sit down and monitor what is going on. This would be a good time to look into adding negative keywords, adjusting bids to reach your optimal ad position, and finding out just what ad copy renders the highest conversion rate.

These campaigns need to be cared for. They can change quite drastically without proper monitoring and time needs to be built into your weekly schedule to keep everything on track.

4. Advertise only where you can deliver.

Location targeting is vital for any small business looking to stretch its paid search dollars. Does your business ship internationally? If not, make sure to show ads only in your home country. Looking closer, an electrician serving a small geographical region can target only the cities they work in.

These location targeting areas can become as widespread or granular as you like. Target a single location, or group together a combination of various countries, states, territories, and cities. Successfully implementing geographical targets within a campaign can drastically improve your ROI by excluding clicks from locations beyond your business’s reach.

5. Don’t forget- there IS customer support. Call that 1-866 line if you need to talk to a human being at Google or Microsoft.

There may be a times when you want to pick up your computer or laptop and throw it off a nearby wall. I recommend refraining from that. Coding breaks, errors occur, and there are times an automated help menu just doesn’t cut it. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and talk to a real human being.

You mean I actually have to interact with another person? Yes. It’s not so bad, and you can get personalized account attention from somebody who knows the ins and outs of the platform you are working with.

So there you have it- five critical tips for PPC success for small businesses on a budget. Utilizing these tips will help stretch your PPC dollars by not only growing the number of clicks you earn each week but by also by serving your ads to the visitors most likely to convert.

Tired of managing your small business’s PPC account? Portent now has a package for that. Check Out PPC Essentials– expert PPC within your reach. See how Portent can help your small business grow.

The post 5 Critical Tips for PPC Success for Small Businesses on a Budget appeared first on Portent.

1. It’s free to sign up! AdWords charges you $5 for account activation.
2. Don’t dump your entire AdWords account in. That’s just silly. Use the 80/20 rule. 20% of what you’re doing in Google can go over to adCenter. Just like a house fire, take only what you treasure most. Then accumulate later.
3. There are settings hiding at the ad group AND campaign levels. Like the networks you’re about to advertise on. If you have settings at both the ad group and campaign levels- the ad group level TRUMPS the campaign settings.
4. Don’t do the Content and the Search Partner network to start with. Stick to Search only first. See how that treats you.
   
5. Geography by default is set to ALL locations. This means Afghanistan and 200 other places. Do yourself a favor and change that. (Unless of course, that is what you want….)
   
6. Don’t do incremental bids to start with. Start with manual bids.Wait and see what happens their before jacking up bids 20% on Mondays between 7am-12pm to women.
7. Start higher on the max bid per ad group and come down if needed. The traffic is less than on Google, start hot, cool down.
8. TAG your ADS. The back end of any destination URL in the account (be it an ad or keyword level) must have a UTM tag appended to it in order to show up to Google Analytics as paid search. Otherwise, it will be classified as Bing organic by default. Use this UTM generator to help you out.
9. Dynamic keyword insertion doesn’t do initial caps-unless your keyword list is entered in like “Initial Caps.” If you do like normal humans and have your list all in lowercase- DKI will pull it in as is, no matter what you do (adCenter has announced that this process will be updated and improved in the near future). If you want to use initial caps but not change your keyword list, use {param2} which will display exactly as you put it.
   

That’s it. That’s 9. If you want more, you’ll just have to come back another day or do yourself a favor and subscribe to the Portent Blog RSS feed.

The post 9 Tips for Setting Up an AdCenter Account from Scratch appeared first on Portent.

Scientist: Well, Homer, I guess you’re the winner by default.

Homer: Default? Woo hoo! The two sweetest words in the English language: de-fault! De-fault! De-fault!

Welcome to my big post of de-faults in AdWords and adCenter that will trip you up, cost you money, cause confusion and eventually make you second runner up to an inanimate carbon rod. (And if you have not seen Deep Space Homer episode in the recent past or ever, you need to go do that. After you read this, of course. 5th Season.)

Microsoft adCenter

1. adCenter for small and medium businesses just changed their name to Bing. I should get that out there first. Don’t let the name fool you. You are still using adCenter and you are on Bing and Yahoo. Not just Bing. And it’s still going to be called adCenter for years (You haven’t forgotten what KFC stands for, have you?). It’s just now the “paid search platform formerly known as adCenter.”

2. Locations. Whenever you create a new campaign you’ll be presented with location targeting options. By default, it’s all locations worldwide. Do yourself a favor, hit that dropdown and try and narrow your selections by country at least. Unless of course your customers in Afghanistan shop the same was as the ones in Burkina Faso.

3. Ad Group Settings TRUMP Campaigns settings. This does make sense. If you’re bothering to drill in that far and set up special settings at the ad group level, you’d want those to override the campaign level ones. However, if you don’t know about it, you might end up sad. Right now, adCenter has a great default in place to help you NOT do that.

4. Networks. This is the one that makes me cry inside. By default, new campaigns (no longer at the ad group setting thanks to the above default) are enabled into all 3 networks that adCenter offers: Search (Bing & Yahoo.com), Search Partner and Content networks. Content network works the same way Google’s Display does: it shows your ads alongside content on “relevant” sites that have signed up to show adCenter ads on their sites. Syndicated Search Partner Network shows adCenter ads alongside search results on sites that have signed up to use the Bing search engine on their own site’s search engine.

You want to start with the Search network ONLY, just Bing and Yahoo.com. You can’t see what is Bing.com vs. Yahoo.com, but the behavior is the same: it’s someone who went to a search engine and typed in a query. Don’t be a victim of network settings.

Google AdWords

Yeah, I made you read through the adCenter stuff first.

5. Locations. By default, new campaigns are opted into the USA and Canada together. I haven’t seen this cost the bucketloads of money that some of the other settings have, but if you don’t ship to the Great White North and don’t want to anger any Canuckle-heads with your anti-Canadian shipping policies, best not to advertise to them in the first place.

6. Devices. Again, not bucketloads of cash on this one, but it’s coming. As mobile usage rises and your site still looks like Snooki the morning after, you’re going to want to either start segmenting the traffic by device or exclude devices that aren’t useful for marketing the business on. Want to dump Snooki? Check out GoMo from Google. It’s free.

7. Keyword Matching Options. As of this year, the definition of “exact” match isn’t exactly exact anymore. Be default, new campaigns are enabled into showing plurals, misspellings and other “close” variants. So if there’s a big difference on how much you make between the keywords [wedding invitation] vs. [wedding invitations], and have those keywords separated out, you’re going to want to visit this setting.

8. Networks. Yeah, this one again. This is the default setting I see trip up the most new advertisers and cause the most wasted money. By default, the Display network is enabled on any new campaign. It’s also set to inherit whatever bid you set for the ad group if you don’t specify one for just the Display network.

Go into your Network settings and disable that check box next to the Display Network. Ignore the warning that pops up alerting to you to that fact that you won’t be (gasp!) showing on the Display Network, and move on with your life. If you want to advertise on the Display Network, great. But do it in a new, separate campaign. Visitors/users of Search and Display are just too different to be lumped into one campaign network setting.

9. Display Network’s Automatic Placements. If you do decide to do separate Display network campaigns (first thank you for separating search and content, you deserve a parade), watch out for those automatic placements that will buy you a few thousand impressions, a handful of clicks, and a lot of nonsense. I’m talking about: gmail.com, adsenseformobileapps.com and anonymous.google.com. (OK, so you can’t block that last one yet, but I still hate it.) You might find success with those first two, but do a separate campaign for managed placements and try it there.

10. Optimize for Clicks on Ads. Whoever thought this up as a “recommended” option and as the default for new campaigns sucks. While I’m sure their corner office is very nice, there should be less evil in the world, not more. And now that AdWords is mandating that after 30 days that this setting will automatically kick in as the default (even if you opted out) makes it even more evil.

By default in new campaigns, the ad delivery option is set to optimize for more clicks, not conversions. If you would like to test out different ads based on conversions or clicks in an A/B test, change this setting to “rotate.” Then you’ll have your test. For up to 30 days. If you edit an ad, that resets the 30 days count. If you don’t like this setting, check out this SEW post for suggestions on how to handle the changes.

Thanks for checking out my long ranting list of dangerous defaults: the silent killers of new PPC advertisers and the trolls that live under the bridge for the experienced strategists.

The post 10 Dangerous Defaults in PPC appeared first on Portent.

But it can be complicated and difficult. Especially on a budget. And time consuming.

PPC Essentials Package

That’s why Portent is rolling out the PPC Essentials Package.

PPC Essentials is Portent’s expertly managed PPC package for businesses with paid search budgets under $3,000 per month. The package allows businesses operating on a small budget to have an account set up or managed by a certified AdWords/adCenter professional.

For $250 a month, Portent will provide professional campaign review and optimizations, including:

• Compelling ad copywriting,
• Keyword and negative keyword expansion lists,
• Local, social, and product extension ads,
• Strategic ad scheduling and day parting.

Portent will also perform quality score, CPC, and CTR reviews to make sure your account is running like a finely tuned machine. Working on your account throughout the month, we will test and tweak settings to bring you higher quality traffic, conversions, and leads.

As a part of this package, you will also receive end of the month reporting delivered to your inbox, access to a paid search expert, and our PPC Tip of the Month e-newsletter.

The best part is that there are no contracts. There’s no need to be worried about getting tied up in something that may not be what you really want. PPC Essentials gives business owners the flexibility to cancel service at any time.

Dive in and learn more about how Portent’s PPC Essentials Package can help your business today.

The post Expert PPC Management Within Your Reach appeared first on Portent.

If you have not registered yet, don’t be shy, registration is quick and easy. And the best part is it’s free. Who doesn’t like free things?

Join our Event page on Facebook, and don’t forget to tweet with us on Thursday using the hashtag #PortentU.

The post Thurday’s Free Webinar: PPC for Cheapskates appeared first on Portent.

Allow me to help you visualize:

Notice that in my simple search for “clothes,” there are four ads at the top, eight on the right, and two at the bottom. The same ads for Oakland Apparel and Clothing at Freddy’s appear at the top and the bottom of the page. In this circumstance, the top ad for Oakland Apparel would be in ad position 1 while the same ad on the bottom would be in ad position 5.

Upon further research, we have been able to determine how this effects average ad position calculations – whichever ad receives the click gets the credit. However, whenever these ads are double-served, it only counts as one impression and not two.

Duplicate Ad Position

But wait, that’s not all. In this instance, the first ad on the bottom AND the first ad on the right-hand side are calculated as being in position 5. The ads at the bottom are considered a continuation of the ads on the top, just as the ads on the right are. Hence, there are two position 5 ads on the same search results page.

Quality Score

Quality Score (QS) in adCenter is based upon keywords, landing pages and user experience. AdCenter explicitly says QS doesn’t impact ad position. But something just doesn’t feel right. Technically speaking, if you were to increase your keyword bids based on an average position, wouldn’t this in some way (while not direct) be influential? We did receive this bit of info on this particular question:

The average position would be calculated for the first ad unless the second ad is receiving clicks and then it would blend the positions. If the second ad doesn’t receive clicks, then your average position would be the average position of the first ad. Therefore, if you are trying to optimize and increase QS by raising bids, your average position would be accurate.

We’ve been finding more than one interesting anomalies in PPC lately. Have you noticed this or any similar issues before? Let us know in the comments.

The post Microsoft adCenter’s Illogical Ad Position Calculations appeared first on Portent.

Download the MSN adExcellence Exam ebook free. Tell your friends. Do not spend any time watching video after video after video. It’s the guide to passing with as little time as possible dedicated to studying.

The post MSN adExcellence Exam Guide appeared first on Portent.

The adCenter full length video training center doesn’t have ANY text versions, but it does have the handy “start the test” button at the bottom.

To start:
Have or create a Windows Live ID to take the exam. And create a profile.

Benefits of passing the exam are a logo/badge. Companies with 3 more individuals that pass it become members of the adExcellence Membership Directory a very bare bones looking directory of 1,000 members. (It looks like if you leave your company space blank it’ll sort you towards the top on the first page.)

It costs $50. It’s 100 questions long over a 90 minute time period. A passing score (80% or higher) is only good for a year and then you have to take it again.

The nice thing is once you pass, it does tell you what your pass rate was per section of the test.

And now, all 7 sections in order- and yes each one at the bottom links to one before and after it. Happy studying!

Part 1: Introduction to Microsoft adCenter
Part 2: Getting Started
Part 3: Targeting
Part 4: Tracking Ad Performance
Part 5: Optimizing Ad Performance
Part 6: Microsoft adCenter Budgeting and Billing
Part 7: Microsoft adCenter Desktop (Beta)

The post Complete Guide to Taking the Microsoft adExcellence Exam appeared first on Portent.