Now, I love my coworkers but they also set pretty high bar. When I inherited a major cosmetics account from my colleague Michael Weigand, I knew I had my work cut out for me, specifically in the holiday season.

Throughout the year I kept track on my progress versus Michael’s results. Call it friendly competition (I must crush him). In September I started doing Holiday season preparations. I found that while we were still producing similar levels of revenue, over time our ROI had started to dip.

I’m the dark blue line

When I started examining individual campaigns, I discovered that the most dramatic ROI changes were happening in our branded campaign.

The gap widens

When I looked inside the branded campaign, I found that the major workhorse of the campaign was the exact match version of their brand name. That’s not especially surprising to anyone, I’m sure. What was a little more surprising to me was that the impression share on this keyword was only at around 80%.

My campaign regularly spent under the budget I’d set for it and I’d never received a “limited due to budget” notice from AdWords. So I was a bit puzzled at missing out on 20% of search volume for an exact match keyword set to advanced delivery with what by all accounts should have been a sufficient budget.

What I found was that as I continued to “optimize” the account by adding new keywords, it started to siphon away the impression share that my original keyword was exposed to. The bigger the campaign got, the more confused AdWords became.

Confused is putting it politely, actually. AdWords was straight up dumb in how it chose what keywords to match to searches and how it allocated budget between them.

I’m already a big believer in segmenting campaigns by match type, keeping my exact match keywords in their own campaign separate from broad or phrase. With the impression share issue I was having I decided that this time I would take it a step further.

I separated the exact match brand name keyword into its own campaign with its own budget separate from everything else. I was taking no chances with leaving money on the table for my best keyword during the holidays. When you do this you actually want to move everything else into the new campaign- leave your prize pig alone.

We made the change in October. The results blew my mind. In the previous year during the holidays we saw ROI start to drop as a function of the major increase in holiday traffic. Keep in mind ROI dropped from fan-freaking-tastic to just regular fantastic (official units of measurement).

What we saw as we went into the holidays this year was that our ROI went up at the same time that traffic spiked. When we looked at the holiday season (Nov-Dec) we managed to increase ROI by over 30%. The traffic spike plus the surge in ROI combined for an overall increase in revenue of more than 60%!

This is why there is a picture of money at the top

So do the results translate? Will it work for other brands? Will it work for your brand? We wanted to know.

So we tried it again.

My colleague Timothy Johnson and I looked at one of his client’s accounts. They were seeing year over year decreases in PPC after a huge improvement in organic rankings had reclaimed a bit of the online search pie.

The two channels together were cooperatively outperforming last year’s revenue. Sometimes, though, that explanation just isn’t going to get you off the hook with a client who wants to see improvement in every channel, every year.

We noticed a similar trend that our exact match name wasn’t getting quite the exposure that it could, so we followed suit and gave it its own campaign and a budget it couldn’t possibly spend.

Without adding a single keyword to the account, we increased visits by 11%, revenue by 41%, and transactions by 46%.

I’ll say it again; we didn’t add a single keyword and we didn’t take anything away from SEO. Organic revenue actually grew at the same time.

Do you have any high performing keywords that aren’t getting their fair share of impressions? Your brand name is definitely a good place to start looking, but is by no means your only option.

The main thing I want to get across is that if you have a keyword that’s performing well and it’s important that it shows as often as possible, don’t give AdWords any chance to do otherwise, because it will. Because AdWords is dumb.

Photo Courtesy Of: 401(K) 2013

The post Are You Optimizing Your PPC Campaigns To Death? appeared first on Portent.

Keep in mind that this presentation was created for advanced paid search specialists. The purpose of the session was to get people thinking “outside the box.” My job was to go so far outside the box that it would be almost uncomfortable and to also bring humor to what can be a very tedious job, managing paid search campaigns.

Read the warnings and disclaimers slide thoroughly. Use common sense and remember that the content network is a GREAT place to try stuff like this. Content network ads have to be attention getting in order to get that person to leave the content they’re currently viewing. These tactics are a fantastic way to do that. And yes, they really work.

The post Writing Killer Ad Copy…and not getting arrested appeared first on Portent.

1. Build Up & Be Smart.
   Pick a few items or products to start out with. Go with broad long tail keywords and with more of a budget on those niches rather than trying to break right out of the gate into [wedding invitations], [wedding favors], [wedding dresses] and [wedding photographers] — which are the most expensive wedding keywords out there. The idea is you build up your account’s credibility, Quality Scores and garner some revenue that can be recycled back into your marketing efforts.
2. Create Relevance.
   If you sell wedding invitations, but only 6 kinds and are going up against a giant that sells 600 kinds, you might want to take another look at that campaign. You’re just not going to be found to be as relevant, you’ll pay the higher cost per click and sure you’ll get some visitors, as long as your ads show, but you just won’t be out there long enough advertising with enough funds to capture enough visitors to get the ones that will end up converting. So go after the niche…
3. Be Realistic.
   If you can’t compete with the giants on the big stage, start with a niche and get them where they’re not. If you sell wedding invitations with pink daisies, build a campaign around daisy wedding invitations. It’ll be far more affordable and you’ll be highly relevant. Ask yourself what you have that’s unique or special that you can market.
4. Invest In a Budget.
   If you can’t meet a certain threshold of spend, you’ll just never get enough visitors to get the ones that convert. A budget of $300 a month for wedding favors just isn’t going to do it. You need more like $300 a week at minimum (at least if you follow the rest of the tips here) to get out there and get enough face time on a search engine results page to get the quality visitors you need.
5. Be Realistic.
   I really mean it, hence the repetition. If $3 cost per click is for a $4 item, it’s not a niche you should be going after right now. If you really must (since it’s the only thing you sell) than you better build one heck of a product or landing page to help get those cost per clicks down.
6. Sell During the Best Time of the Day.
   It really matters. A lot. For items that the bride and groom make a consensus on, let’s face it, they’re not going to sit there and surf the web together for hours. You know when they do it? During lunchtime at work. Then they go home and show the other what they found, email themselves a link or email the significant other a link. Big purchases such as wedding invitations are primarily done from home in the evenings. Customer sees what they want online while surfing during lunch, couple gets home from work, takes a look together and then processes the order there.Now this is where PPC loses some of it’s sales. While they might have found your site during the day via a PPC ad, they may have a direct link, bookmark or organic search that they perform at home to find your ad again. But it is also fair to say that a lot of couples will perform the same search again (particularly for those longtail keywords) and try and find their way back to the site they same way they got there in the first place.

   So make sure you’re there when they’re looking by using ad scheduling. And if you can do incremental bidding, do it. Look at your traffic patterns around 11am to where they’ll start dropping off (around 2pm) and then back up again around 6pm. Turn your ads off when they don’t need to be running, drop the bids when they should be on but not full blast.

7. Have Deals.
   Weddings cost a lot. A lot. As if you didn’t know. While there might not be as many limits on budget when deciding the wedding dress and bands, you know that where the pocketbooks will tighten is on the “extras.” Items like wedding favors, bridesmaid and groomsmen gifts, monogrammed anything, cake toppers, thank you cards. The little things that add up so fast. So how do you convince the couple to choose your extras? Make them an offer they can’t refuse. Bulk discounts are great for bridesmaid gifts, package the matching thank you cards in with the wedding invitations for half off, free shipping, and personalized anything go along way to assure the bride and groom that their money is well spent. And then promote those deals like crazy in your PPC ads.
8. Get the Free Stuff.
   See if you can find a free AdWords credit if you’re starting a new account. Same for Yahoo and MSN. Then there are directories, product feeds and bloggers that could be promoting your items for you. Submit your site to all the free directories you can find for your wedding niche. Go after Google and MSN’s free product feeds. Write a couple pieces of inventory off and send them to a good wedding blogger for review. While that last part isn’t technically PPC, it sure doesn’t hurt to know. Yahoo’s product search feed isn’t free, but it is pay per click based.
9. Use Google Checkout and Live Cashback.
   Check them out and see if they’re do-able for you. Nothing like a nice colorful badge right there in your advertisement to help draw eyeballs to your listing. Plus it’s an added convenience for your customer if that’s the way they prefer to pay…OR GET PAID.

The wedding industry is immense, both in size and competition, but it’s also growing.  Each year, more and more couples seek unique items and good deals online.

There’s still plenty of room for you to get in!

The post Winning In the Wedding Industry with PPC appeared first on Portent.