Well, over the years, MozCon has evolved its schedule to include social, content and much more, just as the industry has. The speakers are hand picked by a committee at Moz each year and the 2014 line up included topics on:

• SEO
• Analytics
• Psychology
• Branding
• Social Media
• CRO
• Mobile
• Local SEO
• PR

That’s a heck of a list.

Why is PPC Here?

Short answer: because you can’t ignore all this red:
my presentation for MozCon, with the guidance of the MozCon queen, Erica McGillivray, we very intentionally chose Google Shopping and Product Listing Ads as the subject, because of its past close ties with SEO. In fact, when it first launched as Google Base, it was technically SEO. SEOs would go into Base, upload product feeds and see if they could get traffic from Froogle or Product Search, as it was called before it went to an entirely paid platform in October of 2012.

Nowadays, it’s called Google Shopping and it’s all paid – but the advancements and optimizations that are made through paid have serious SEO and content benefits. In fact a recent post on the YouMoz section on leveraging panda to get out of product feed jail, while geared towards SEO and content, could make a powerful argument for a site or navigation restructure using data or content from paid product feeds. So, yeah, PPC belongs. (Even if just a little bit.)

Disclosure: I did test the outline and the presentation itself on a few SEOs at Portent first. They seemed unharmed by it.

In fact, after I gave my presentation at MozCon, I had several SEOs come up and tell me they learned something or realized something about PPC that they didn’t know and that it was relevant to their own work. Heck, in the future they threatened to go to more sessions on paid search tracks, instead of always just going to SEO.

To me, that was a win.

Cross-Geeking Out

It also occurred to me that sometimes, we continually send people to the same conferences or they go and they stick only to the track that is their everyday specialty. I think we need to break that pattern. We should be challenging ourselves to cross-conference and learn more about the specialties we aren’t in everyday. I would rather have a session be over my head (like a super technical SEO session) and I have to stop and think about how all the pieces fit together rather than complain that the last session I was in wasn’t advanced enough.

Considering the rise of paid social and content promotion as well, we’re all blending into “marketers” more and more, away from that “specialists” label whether you like it or not.

So, I challenge you to go cross-geek out. Go to a social media session where they talk about their tools. Go to an SEO session where they talk about the changing SERP. Go to a content session where they talk about how they decide what to write. You’ll be glad you did. You might even make a friend.

I know I enjoyed MozCon as a PPC person. I cross-geeked out on social communities, web psychology, international SEO, semantic search and mobile SEO. What’s not to like about that?

How Did YOU Get In?

Yes, that was a real question and by more than one person. The only answer I have to give on that is “because I’m awesome.” And I can prove it:

Thanks, LinkedIn and my students at the University of Washington.
(The serious answer can be found on the Moz blog.)

Now What?

Feel free to check out the line up for MozCon 2015. (I’m not on there again, but that’s OK, I’ve started therapy.) Next time you go to a conference, be sure to read all of the sessions, not just your usual track. Sign up for webinars on different subjects, there are tons out there everyday and for every level. I went to one on email marketing the other day, something I’ve never really done! Ask someone you know or trust either in your field or at your company that is in another field to make a recommendation. And if you like to deal in volume, ask on Twitter, you’ll get a ton of responses.

And last, but not least, after 8 years and 8 months at Portent, I have to say that this is my last blog post on the Portent blog. This post is my 107th post in total. A distant 2nd to Ian’s 1500+ posts, but it’s a second place I’m proud of.

It has been an honor and a privilege to be a part of Portent. I will miss the culture, the work and most of all the staff, immensely.

Most of all, thank you for the opportunity to learn how to be a “pay per clip” marketer! It’s been a great ride.

To stalk me on future adventures, you can find me on Twitter @ebkendo

Live long and prosper!

The post PPC at mozCon – Challenge Yourself to Cross Geek Out appeared first on Portent.

Sure, it’s not the first idea of its kind, I’ve heard of CEO swaps and product teams rotating between each other while under the same company, but what made this particular swap different was the level of sharing and time that each party committed to in the pursuit of a dedication to the craft and polish of a trade- search.

How it worked

First, Toni came to the Portent office in Seattle last December. Then I went to the Tulos agency in Helsinki for two weeks in September (I couldn’t do a month – he was able to bring his family, I was not). Each Geek agreed to provide their own CPU/laptop and the agency provided a desk space, wifi/internet connection and inclusion in any team or company (non-client facing) meetings or trainings. It was agreed that neither Geek could “work” on any client account to avoid any working-visa type issues, but could consult, answer questions and give opinions. The Geek would carry on their own “home” workload (albeit 10 hrs ahead or behind) as best they could from the remote location. Additionally, since I work with multiple services as a division head, I was allowed to lightly interrogate the other services at Tulos, including SEO, CRO, Analytics and Operations (Yes, we signed NDAs too).

What did it cost?

• Airfare
• AirBnB
• A few meals (both agencies provided a meal per diem for the Geek)
• Team meals (taking the Geek out with the various teams)
• Some patience and understanding on behalf of the agency that was missing their Geek

In some respects, it was cheaper than attending a conference and far more interactive. Toni even did the math in his own blog post.

What did you learn?

That “what did you learn” is a terrible question, but when you reach a certain level of experience or expertise in a given industry, it becomes less “what did you learn” as in which lever to pull to get a 10% lift, and more of an expanding of experiences that will shape the bigger decisions and policies you put together that may affect a much larger group of people or even a company.

Personally, I got a first-hand look at not only another search agency, but how another ecosystem and culture worked. Now I get to steal and borrow everything I liked and they can do likewise. The biggest difference I think between sending a senior specialist that works directly on client accounts and a vice-president that oversees a division of four different channels (PPC, SEO, Social, Analytics) is that I have the ability to directly roll out and affect change in my own agency with a higher impact, faster. You might think that this seems like a mismatch of a swap but, honestly, I think we sent the right person to start with and so did they. I can tell you after 8+ years in the industry, I needed to not only see the inside of the “trenches” of these departments and the entire company, but without the distraction of my own agency.

Specifically, if you really want to know what I learned – it was actually quite a bit about Yandex from Tulos’ Yandex expert and got a tour of their ads UI and Direct Commander (AdWords Editor equivalent) as well as some very good insights around CRO and Analytics offerings and workflow.

And, most importantly, by not being constrained by clients or profit margins,  both companies were able to share knowledge and experience on a level that simply can’t be taught in a classroom of given at a conference.

Was it worth it?

Yes. When boiled down, this was a very simple, not overly complex program, but a part of a big idea that was technically executed upon by two individuals with a LinkedIn and Skype connection. After 8+ years in the industry, I can say that it was the kind of fresh air, reassurance and having the “brain space” to go and have this experience has not only renewed my interest in the industry, but in what I’m doing and what I’m bringing to my own agency as well.

Plus… we’re not alone in the world!

One thing we definitely appreciated on both sides of the world is how very alone we can feel sometimes with our own internal trials and tribulations, whether that’s with clients, keeping up with the industry or testing and trying new technologies and platforms. By getting to compare notes from an operational and business standpoint (I had coffee with their operations head), not just search, this feeling of “you know what, we’re doing just fine” was a welcome feeling on both sides. Obviously every company will have its quirks and problems and most often we get the filtered slant from our friends about their workplaces and colleagues with guarded information or a focus on the negative and here in the Geek Exchange, there’s very little hiding all that with a front row seat.

How can I get in on this?

You’re in luck, Toni and I want to expand the program and we’re looking for a few good agencies to conduct some experiments in this big idea with us.

Recommendations to consider first:

• Two weeks minimum commitment, anything less is not enough
• Ability to schedule any meetings/trainings at the agency being visited ahead of time. Block calendar time with the right people, even if you don’t have an agenda yet
• Able to provide an org chart/seating map to the Geek
• It’s good PR. You should promote it more formally on social channels and cross-promote
• Show off a little – if you’ve got a Geek that likes to speak or write, get them on your blog or as a guest presenter
• Geeks should be senior or above in competency of search knowledge and a top company contributor
• Geeks should also be able to influence or change department or company policies with their learnings

We’ll be launching a site later this month and I’ll be linking/posting my State of Search presentation here, so stay tuned for updates!

The post A Big Idea: The International Geek Exchange appeared first on Portent.

I agree with my fellow search colleagues in the area of outrage, it’s just not acceptable what is being taken away in favor of a murkier, harder to control setting in terms of managing your keyword list. Some of us were using true exact match in a very specific and profitable manner and this loss of control seems senseless.

For example, we have a couple of clients that have a huge brand name, brick and mortar stores, online presence and a rabid social media community. We’ve been using the exact match of their one word name to dispel same named entities and direct traffic to the appropriate places, at a great CPC and high CTR. Everyone wins in this scenario, Google gets money for the clicks (instead of organic), users find what they’re looking for and we get the visits for Google at a great rate with the corresponding transactions.

So that brought me back to the WHY. Seriously, WHY?

The default setting for new campaigns is close variants, so only those that are well versed in PPC marketing would know to not only change that setting  but also why you would want to change it. Additionally, the advanced search community practitioners number far less than those out there new to running their own campaigns for their business, in house or otherwise, so what would it hurt to leave that level of control available for those that know how to use it?

The claim by Google is that only 7% of queries are misspellings and that we’re missing out on those queries. I would say that if I had two campaigns, one for that true exact match and one for the rest, would I not I still get that query anyway? The claim that it would “simplify” things and therefore you would only need one campaign with the close variants argument ignores that now we’re going to have to comb through search query reports (which aren’t available in real time) to add negative keywords, after the fact. And after we may have paid for a click or two as well, which if you deal in $100+ clicks is just not OK.

So, again, WHY?

The conspiracy theorist in me started going to a couple of different places; the timing, surprise and overall oddness of this change just isn’t sitting right. At least with enhanced campaigns it was clearly a money thing. (It’s always a money thing, but that trail was a lot easier to follow.)

1. Rolling this change out in September, right before holiday, means that Google will be capitalizing on matching more ads to queries, driving up clicks/cost as traffic volumes increase.
2. Google’s filed a few patents focusing on entity names, relationships between queries and intent and their database about entities (especially since acquiring Freebase) has swelled to over 250 million. This means that they can match a query for “Dec” to “December” and “Michael Jackson” to whether or not you mean the singer or the Homeland Security guy. Check out Bill Slawski’s recent article on this.
3. Then check out how Knowledge Base Entities can be used in searches– these example queries may be longer and in question form like, “what is the movie where Scarlett Johansson is the computer” and more likely will trigger the result you’re looking for based on the additional attribute information given in the query, especially when checked against their Knowledge Base. Whereas if you were to search for “Her” as a keyword, the SERP could be very different looking. Are they trying to close that gap so that they can start showing ads on those longer queries more often? It’s very unlikely that you’ve bid on that phrase in a keyword list.
4. The accuracy and quality of matching has improved in AdWords immensely in just the last few years.  Stop and think about what “broad” match meant in 2007 and the types of queries that would match the keywords on your list versus how it works now in 2014. This is probably where the confidence is coming from in a move like this. If the search query report still resembled anything like 2007 with a broad match, people would have stopped using the platform.
5. How long do you think it is before we get “intent” or “informational” as bidding options? Or something along those lines? Aren’t we already kind of doing that with Google Shopping and Product Listing Ad units?

My hope is that we (the search community) are able to change Google AdWords’ mind on this loss of control, because as long as people still type words into a search box, keywords are still relevant, and until we are in a place where we can control these intent, entity and attributes like keywords, we’re still going to need that level of control.

Sign the petition here, if you haven’t already.

The post Unexpected Loss of Control: Google AdWords Exact Match Controversy appeared first on Portent.

You really should do a short, written profile for every client you write ads for.

Why?

Because all the fanciness, automation, calls to action or free shipping offers won’t attain that last level of achieving total conversion rate prowess without it. People still click on the ads. People still buy. And people are all kinds of whacked out.

And depending on what you sell, those just might be your kinds of people.

Get Started

First and foremost, this should be a relatively simple exercise. If it’s taking 5 hours, a branding team, designer and a guy in India, you’re doing it wrong. The goal of this post is to try and make this approachable. So the first step is not telling anyone. Seriously. This is one of those things that if you’re an agency, the client will get overly into, demand to see and edit. If you’re in-house, a branding team might try and invade your cubicle and insist upon reviewing the stock photo you used for “branding guidelines.”

Just stop there. You’re writing 95 characters. Not Hamlet. Some guy already beat you to that anyway.

But- this means that there are resources for you to draw from. These types of resources and information should be available to you (since you supposedly work there) easily enough to get started.

Grab Whatever Is Already There

If your company already has a persona built out, cool, steal it. You’re probably not going to need all 4 pages about Golfing Greg, but it’s easier to pare down than start over.

The client or company should have some kind of mission or vision statement somewhere. When they talk about themselves, how do they do it? With humor? Seriousness? Razor sharp wit? Hang onto that, you’re going to need it later for tone. Wherever the company or client is talking about selling features, take note.

What is the lifecycle of the customer? How long do they take to buy? Can they buy online? Have to talk to a sales guy? Is it a major investment on their part or within the buying range of a thing to try?

The Keywords

Yeah, these are going to be important. They’re just the things you bid on after all, at least for now. And they just might indicate to you a few things like- where the customer is in the buying cycle (where do you get the most volume? Conversions?)

What are your top keywords? Grab those and set them aside, because when you go to write this thing, you’re going to use them in it. What better way to get you in the ad copy/landing page Quality Score happy zone?

Picture

You should pick one. It helps. Just pick one that is:

• Not a famous person
• Not anyone you know
• Free or stock is OK
• Embodies the physical traits you’re looking for

(A weight loss company might want someone a little stockier, while a Christian supply store might want someone a bit more pious looking, for example.)

Good example:

Bad example:

Name Your Persona

It doesn’t have to match or rhyme, but it is easier to remember. It should fit within the vein of the desired brand. Personally, I like to scroll through customer reviews, find positive ones, and utilize names from there. I love if I have a target age range to use so that I can go review the most popular baby names for those years. Remember when Rachel on Friends named her baby “Emma” in 2002? That name hadn’t been in the top 10 ever. Now that name has been in the top 10 for the last 11 years.

You know who has a great site for aggregating the top names for males and females over the last 100 years? The Social Security Administration. Michael has been in the top more often (44 times) and Mary with 42 times than any other male or female name. Check it out by decade or even by state. Kentucky kicked off 1990 with 891 ‘Joshuas’.

Specific Tools

The number one question I get when someone is developing a persona is “what tools should I use?” with the hope that I’ll point them to some magical website where you can enter in some demographics and basic info and it’ll spit out a beautiful, short persona. While I wish that were true (someone want to tackle this?) it requires a bit more legwork than that. Typically I end up using about 3-4 tools to build a persona, here are a few that you might find helpful.

Facebook

You already knew this one. Lookalike audiences, age ranges, genders galore. Specifically, I like to start a “new campaign” without the intention of actually launching it. They just expanded the bejeezus out of their targeting capabilities to include income, relationship status (getting super granular), automotive, travel habits and charities.

Followerwonk

It’s a moz app. Analyze your own followers or those of competitors. It’s wicked fun. For example, I compared followers of the 3 major sports teams in Seattle.

The US Census

It’s free, it’s online and there’s a plethora of information if you’re willing to look for it. This is a must if your persona needs to be geographically targeted at all. Find age ranges/groups, ethnicity, population density, affluence.
For example, I did a presentation to a local hospital about which zip codes to concentrate their budget on in a greater metro area.

At first, the median home price here and salary level would make zip code 98105 look attractive in that sense, more than the 98125 seen here.

But, upon closer inspection, we see that the population density of an area of roughly the same size is much more. And that the numbers of home sales occurring are slightly less- why might that be?

Turns out that 98105 is the primary zip code for the University of Washington, which has a very dense population and explains the affluence level. Any home that close to a major university s going to have tremendous property value, but not a lot of available homes to buy or rent and there will be more people crammed into that area.

Customer Reviews/Forums

It’s where the people are. What are they complaining about? What do they love? What pain points did your product or service solve that you can roll into your persona?

This is a gold mine of potential persona names, styles of writing, sophistication, education and tech savvy levels. You’ll have to do some sifting to find those nuggets of gold but they’re in there.

Google Analytics

Find your customer geography, loyalty, recency and return numbers and roll that in as well. Is your product or service something that will bring them back or require them to buy again (like a refill) or will it be more of a large one time purchase?

Search Suggest/Ubersuggest

Ah, Google search suggest. Supremely helpful in finding out what people search for in connection with your keywords as well as how they write. Do they spell it “you” or “u”? Is it “soda” or “pop?” Makes a difference when you’re trying to learn the language of your customer.

Ubersuggest is Google search suggest on crack. Save yourself some time and blast through with this tool.

Glassdoor, Onward Search, Salary Guides

Use a job listing site or niche specific guide or site that can help you find occupations in your desired salary ranges to choose a job for your potential persona.

Putting it All Together

OK, we have a lot of pieces right now that got gathered up. Where do they all go?

Start with the basic bullet list of name, photo, what they do for a living, salary range, male/female.

Then put together WHY their product would be useful/why they would buy- what benefits or features would appeal to them? What problems would your product or service solve? What are pain points that they face?

Then get a little creative. Like a creative writing class.

And you’re DONE. Remember, this is supposed to be a simple exercise, just for you. You don’t even have to write this much. Post it personas are cool too.

The post Creating Personas for PPC appeared first on Portent.

Before I proceed, I’d like to emphasize the following example involves product listing ads which had been managed manually, not using any sort of 3rd party tool. Likewise, the shopping campaign in this example has also been managed manually without the assistance of a 3rd party tool. If you currently manage your product listing ads with the assistance of automated tools or programs, please consider shopping campaigns carefully before going all gung-ho for change.

Background

This particular account is the online retail industry and sells less than 5,000 products total. Prior to being admitted to the shopping campaigns beta, the Product Listing Ads campaign had been set up with a basic structure of one ad group for each manufacturer. We made the switch to the new shopping campaign format and were immediately impressed with the new functions in the user interface, allowing us to separate out product sub-categories (as determined by Google’s product taxonomy) and bidding on them differently within the same ad group:

*Note – Product categories and labels have been altered for privacy reasons.

Furthermore, we were able to add custom labels to the data feed to segment products further, thus allowing us to utilize another level of granularity. In this example, we assigned a label to each product based on price range.

In the end, we were able to set up this new shopping campaign in a relatively short amount of time, using several levels of sub-categories to organize and bid on products. Previously, we would have had to create one ad group per product ID to get this same type of granular organization and bidding flexibility – a highly time-consuming and arduous process. Now, instead of a few hundred ad groups to keep track of, we have one. And of course, we have the option to break things down further, creating multiple campaigns and/or ad groups if need be.

Results

The results were definitive – the shopping campaign format and robust functionality resulted in immediate progress which has been sustained since. For product listing ads, our average CPC has decreased 44%, our average CPA has decreased 57%, and our conversion rate has increased 29%.

If you currently manage your PLAs manually and are interested in a more robust format without having to resort to a 3rd party tool, you can sign up to be part of Google’s beta program.

The post Google Shopping Campaigns Get Results appeared first on Portent.

This post is brought to you by our special guest, Toni Voutilainen. Toni is a passionate PPC practitioner from a Finland-based Internet Agency Tulos Helsinki, operating in Scandinavia. Tulos and Portent are conducting a pilot of an International Geek Exchange program – this article is the culmination of Toni’s visit here to Seattle.

This October, AdWords will celebrate its 14th anniversary. Given the fact that it’s Google’s main revenue source, the search giant has developed the platform with staggering speed.

Some of the recent updates have been quite controversial (like forcing advertisers to target tablets and PCs together), but for the most part I personally think 2013 was filled with great updates. Recently Larry Kim asked PPC practitioners about their favorite AdWords updates in 2013 and wrote a nice wrap-up of them.

Yes, the tool seems to be getting better by the day. But still, if you’re a practitioner that spends most of his days optimizing accounts you probably agree: Google could make AdWords still so much better for advertisers. I have my pet peeves, I’m sure you do, too. So here’s my top wishes for AdWords in 2014 (hint hint, Google!):

1. Show me Statistical Significance

I love testing ads, not just because it’s very effective for getting better results fast, but because you can learn so much about your target audience in the process. But if you’re not careful your A/B testing efforts can be as good as guesswork if you’re making decisions based on statistically non-significant data.

There are 3rd party tools and whatnot that you can use for calculating stat significance yourself, but I really, really, really wish Google would build an integrated calculator into AdWords that would reveal the statistical significance of the metrics you choose. Now AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) was an important step in the right direction back in the day, which brings me to my second humble wish.

2. AdWords Campaign Experiments, out of beta soon?

This is one of the best tools within AdWords, but still probably one of the most underused. Yes, ACE, hidden at the bottom of campaign settings, has been around since 2010 and still isn’t out of beta as if Google never decided whether it will stay or not.

ACE is a great tool, but it has serious limitations – for example, you can only have one active experiment per campaign and you can’t experiment with campaign settings. I can only imagine how much more interesting and easier ad A/B testing or justifying higher bids or budgets would become with a ‘full’ version of ACE, where you could have multiple (not overlapping) experiments in a single campaign. So I really hope Google will release that in 2014.

3. More Attribution Data into Bidding

If you didn’t know it already, Last-Click Attribution is officially dead. It is all too easy to go wrong with bidding if you limit yourself to only looking at last-click data.

One of my retail clients was in a challenging spot with more and more competitors fighting for clicks at the same point in the search funnel – close to purchase. By simply experimenting with certain high search volume and potentially low converting searches and utilizing search funnel data I was quickly able to see ways we could introduce the clients eCommerce site before the competition in a very, very profitable manner as there was virtually no competition. My take for the lack of competition is because the client’s competitors are only looking at last-click conversion data and thus don’t know better.

I could probably do much better if I Google allowed importing a larger multi-channel view, which we thankfully already have in Google Analytics, straight into AdWords. We could easily factor in more of the important metrics in bidding. And talking about Analytics…

4. Expanding GA Remarketing into Search

Remarketing is powerful. But when you’re able to segment your audience according to Google Analytics metrics and then remarket, that’s powerful times ten.

You can already now use either the basic remarketing script from AdWords through which you can target people according to the pages they have visited or update your Google Analytics code, populate remarketing lists within GA and use the vast selection of metrics only available in GA for segmenting your heart out. That’s like remarketing 1.0 vs 2.0.

Now Google already has expanded their basic remarketing script (1.0) so that it can be used for retarget prior visitors not only via display ads but search ads also. Powerful stuff. Now imagine how interesting this form of search retargeting becomes if Google does the same for GA remarketing (2.0).

With that we would be able to retarget prior visitors according to Device Category (no more lumping tablets with PCs! This already works fine with display remarketing, by the way), Browser, Operating System, Visit Duration, Days Since Last Visit, Exit Page, Source, well, you get it.

5. Labels and Automated Rules in AdWords Editor

AdWords Editor is great for bulk changes, or nearly great. That’s because it still doesn’t support the use of labels or automated rules, which is a very needed basic functionality.

For example, being able to label a large set of promotion ads (especially banners) to be run for a specific time period and setting a rule that activates and pauses them – that’s something marketers want and need. Not having those available in a bulk editing tool just seems silly.

6. Historical Quality Score

Quality Score isn’t a KPI, but it’s still a decent proxy indicator of how well you are doing with your CTRs, quality of ads and landing pages relative to your competition, and so on.

It would be much more useful, though, if Google allowed us to see how your Quality Scores has developed with time – of course preferably not only your keyword QS, but that of your account, campaigns, ad groups, ads and sitelinks too. To gauge your progress now, you would have to store keyword reports or use AdWords scripts, which is unnecessarily cumbersome.

7. Secondary/Backup URLs

If you work with retail clients that are not utilizing a feed solution (or AdWords scripts) you probably have had this problem: ad URLs turns bad for whatever reason, perhaps the product is not sold anymore, or is out of stock and you’re wasting money taking visitors to that page.

It would be great if by default Google allowed us to set up secondary or backup URLs for ads that would activate under predetermined conditions, like whenever a landing page turns into a 404 or has certain content on it. Less waste, happier advertisers.

8. Paid and Organic Conversions

One noteworthy update Google recently introduced, is the Paid & organic report where you can compare how you rank organically with the searches you are targeting with AdWords. While it’s nice to still get some organic keyword data, Google has chosen not to share a somewhat key factor in it all – conversions from the two channels, which would make the data much more useful. I hope Google goes all the way with that soon.

Oh, I could go on and on – I was going for just a top 5 list originally. Overall, the more Analytics we get directly into AdWords, the better. But even with some of these updates I’d be very happy to make Google’s next earnings report even prettier.

I’m expecting a great year, how about you? What is on your wishlist for 2014? Tell me below in the comments.

—

Portent wishes to thank Toni (we’ll always have salt licorice!) for visiting and encourages every agency to exchange geeks worldwide.

The post An AdWords Wishlist for 2014 appeared first on Portent.

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads [RLSA] is an extremely useful feature that Google rolled out over the summer. It allows you to serve search ads to people who are on your remarketing lists, and for Portent’s small e-commerce clients, it’s definitely proven profitable.  So if you’re looking for another way to increase your sales, read on.

Set up

RLSAs are extremely easy to set up. If you’re already doing display remarketing, the same tag will also populate the Remarketing for Search List. If you don’t have a remarketing tag on your site, you’ll need to set that up.

To create a remarketing tag, go into the shared library and under Audiences, click on +Remarketing list.

Then put the code at the bottom of all of your site’s pages before the </body> tag.  Your search remarketing efforts won’t work, however, until your Remarketing for Search List populates with 1,000 visitors.

There are a few ways you can set up your RLSA. You can either add your list as an audience to your existing campaigns, or you can create entirely new campaigns dedicated to RLSA.

Adding an audience

Adding a remarketing audience to your existing ad group allows you to bid more for searchers that have already visited your site. I like to use this to bring ads to the top positions for people who are expressing explicit interest in buying your product. For example they’re searching for “buy [your product/service]” or “[your product/service] for sale.”

To add a remarketing audience to an ad group, go to the desired ad group and navigate to the audience tab.

Click on the +Remarketing button. Once there, click on the “add targeting” drop-down menu, select “remarketing,” and add your list.

Now you have to choose your targeting method. You have two options: “bid only” or “bid and target.” This might seem a little confusing if you’re not familiar with the display network. “Bid Only” allows you to select a separate bid or bid modifier that you want applied to this audience.

With “bid only,” your ads will still be shown to people not on your list searching for your keywords, and you’ll bid like you normally would. But if someone who is on your list is doing the search, then your bid will be based off of your remarketing bid modifier.

If you select “bid and target,” your ads will only show to the people in your audience who are searching for your keywords.

Since you’re adding a remarketing list to an existing ad group, “bid only” should be the option you choose.

Separate remarketing campaign

This is the option I prefer when I use RLSA, since it gives me much greater control over my remarketing efforts.

To set this up, create a campaign like you normally would, then head over to the audience tab. Add your remarketing list, just like before, but this time select “target and bid.”

Now choose the keywords you’re going to bid on.

If you’re feeling a little tepid about a remarketing campaign, starting with keywords that show a buyer’s intent is a fairly low risk option, such as “buy [your product/service],” since this is the group that’s most likely to convert.

But what excites me most about RLSAs (and where their power lies) is that they give you the ability to bid on keywords that you would normally never add to a standard campaign.

You can bid on keywords that ordinarily would be too broad and convert at a price that’s just too high. Or you can add experimental keywords that you don’t want in a standard campaign due to a budget restriction. Since you’re only bidding on these keywords for a small audience, there’s a lot less risk with RLSAs than putting them into a standard campaign.

One piece of advice: don’t combine your broad/experimental keywords with your normal keywords in the same campaign.

Even if you’re only serving ads to people who have been to your site, you may accidently rack up clicks and spend your entire budget. Your keywords are potentially still very broad, and even when targeted to an audience of a few thousand, they can easily eat up your entire budget leaving little room for keywords that will convert at a lower price.

There are plenty of uses for RLSAs. Let me know some of your favorites in the comments.

The post Remarketing for Search Ads appeared first on Portent.

Transcript:

Ariana: Hello, and welcome, everyone, to the next installment of the Portent Webinar Series. My name is Ariana and I will be your moderator for today’s webinar, which is Waste-Per-Click – 10 Ways You’re Losing Money on PPC, with our very own Elizabeth Marsten, Senior Director of Search Marketing at Portent, Speaker PC – [laughter] PC – PPC Wiz, and Co-Author of Web Marketing: All-In-One for Dummies. Uh, um, we would love it if you would join us all in this awesome webinar. There are a couple ways you can do that.

You can ask questions within the Go-To-Webinar Questions window, or Tweet your questions using the #portentu. So that’s #P-O-R-T-E-N-T and the letter U. And just so you know, in case you miss out on any of today’s webinar, or you want to review it later, don’t worry; you will receive a follow-up e-mail, which will contain a link to this recorded webinar, a Slideshare link to the presentation slides, and a bit.ly bundle for any resources that Elizabeth will be using in her webinar.

So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Elizabeth. Hey, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Hello. Thank you for having me today and thank you everyone for joining us. And as we said, today’s – today’s focus is on waste-per-click, or the 10 ways that you’re losing money on paid search. It will focus on the Google AdWords platform, but I also snuck in some things about Bing Ads as well. I do anticipate that this will be on the shorter end of our Portent U webinars, just because, you know, it doesn’t take that long to talk about 10 things. But also, what I would like is at the end of the presentation, if you have time before noon before lunch, I would like you to go back into your AdWords and Bing accounts and double-check on a lot of the things that I’m going to talk about today and make sure that you’re not in violation of any of these, um, points that I’m going to bring up today.

And so you’ll have some time to go in and change your account if – if you should need to. Uh, without further ado, let’s see. This is the Portent U hashtag once again, so those of you that missed the spelling of it or tried to put in Y-O-U, it’s just #portentu, and we’ll have those – Tweet those in and we’ll get those to us at the end of the presentation. And so first things first, what is this all about? Um, there’s a lot of wasted – there’s a lot of money in – being wasted in PPC, and it really personally drives me crazy. It seriously is a personal pet peeve.

And I would like to stop the madness. But first, who am I? Why should you even listen to me? I, as Ariana was saying, am the Senior Director of Search at Portent. That is me. I do write about paid search a lot; um, a lot, a lot. And I also like to talk about it obviously ‘cause I’m here today. I have about seven years’ experience in the paid search field now. I actually started as what I thought was a paper-clip manager because I didn’t even know what it was, so that does go to show you that if you, uh, if you really want to, you can pick this stuff up pretty quick.

I work here. This is the Smith Tower in beautiful downtown Seattle. This is not what the weather looks like today, but this is what – where Portent is approximately located, and I did try and put the, uh, little pointy there where – about where the 17th floor is. And I actually think that might be my office there on the corner. So I actually, over the seven – over the seven years, I’ve managed millions of dollars literally. I’ve seen millions of dollars. I’ve managed millions of dollars.

I’ve seen other accounts and I’ve owned accounts. And then the one theme that I see across the board is even if it’s a small one-person business and/or a large multinational, you know, Forbes 500 company, they make a lot of the same mistakes when it comes to PPC. And these are the kind of miss – what we call the kind of mistakes that no one likes to admit. These are the – the secret shame – or are what I refer to as the secret shame kind of PPC mistakes. These are the kinds that no one likes to talk about when they find them.

They just kind of quietly fix ‘em, and that’s why at the end of this presentation, I highly recommend that you go and, uh, take a look at your account settings and make sure that you’re not doing any of these, uh, shameful, shameful tactics. So without any further ado, here are the top 10 things in Google AdWords that I’ve seen repeatedly in PPC accounts that only do one thing, and that is they burn money. They really do. And I love this graphic, so I hope everyone else also does.

Google AdWords, number one – targeting the search and display networks together. So this was an oldie but a goodie, and unfortunately, one that I’ve seen repeatedly. In fact, I was at the SMA West Conference just this last March. We had somebody submit their account to be looked at. Uh, the account was actually in Spanish as it was being run in Mexico, but we didn’t actually need to be able to speak Spanish in order to see that these search and display networks were being targeted together. They were racking – the display network was racking up thousands and thousands of impression and clicks.

They had spent 90 percent of their budget, their monthly budget for this month-long comp-; uh, contest that they were running on the display network, and they couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t get it to perform. And the reason was because they were targeting the search and display networks together. The display network was taking all of the budget away from the search terms, and they just didn’t have the money go for search. So the difference between the two, search would be where you go to Google.com and you type in the query and you hit go and you see the text as there and someone clicks on ‘em, which is a much more targeted, uh, method in, on acquiring a visitor versus a display network – where the ads are being shown alongside or inside of content, and it’s a lot noisier space and you’re trying to pull somebody away from the content that they’re already viewing.

So even Google has admitted that this is a best practice to target the search and display networks separately. When you go into your settings account here at the campaign level, you need to say not search and display, like I have circled here in the red, what you want to have is search only or display only. And as I said here in the little box; if you only remember one thing out of all 10 of these for Google AdWords, this is the number one thing. And so yes, I did start out with the big one, so anyone who signed in late, I’m sorry.

Alright, number two, you want to start with a new campaign – uh, you do – if you start with a new campaign, do not do enhanced CPC bidding right away. Wait until you have some conversion – conversion data first. Then you try it. Enhanced CPC is a tool that Google AdWords allows at the campaign level automatically with a new – new campaign or an old one that tries to use your conversion tracking data to optimize your bids for conversions. You do pick a max enhanced CPC, but what I’ve seen over time and account over account is the system is not that smart.

It is actually too stupid to figure out what a good CPC is for your data because you don’t have any data yet. So make sure that you have some data first if you’re going to try enhanced CPC. Do not do it on a new campaign. It is one of the most wasteful things that I’ve ever seen. Number three, not setting any mobile bid modifiers. So with enhanced campaigns, for those of you that don’t – aren’t already aware, on July 22nd, Google AdWords – AdWords will be transitioning all campaigns to enhanced campaigns that have not already been manually transferred over. So if you don’t know what enhanced campaigns is, you better write this down and Google it because it is a really, really important thing.

Any campaign that is – or any account that’s been created ever and has not already been manually switched over, what’ll happen is computers and – or desktops and tablets will be combined into one. So here in this screenshot, you can see them separated out, but you cannot bid separately for them. They will be lumped together. Uh, mobile devices are automatically put at the same bid as computers and tablets within that campaign unless you set a mobile bid modifier. So in this case, we have a plus zero.

Google wants you to do adjustments in the – in the upwards directions. You might actually want to do it in the downwards direction. So if your site is very, very terrible looking on mobile, you’re going to want to bid down on mobile bid modifiers. So for example, I do have a client whose – whose site is very, very awful, um, when looked on a mobile device, and in order to counteract rising CPC costs and spend on mobile devices that doesn’t – don’t – don’t convert, we actually put negative 100 percent as the mobile bid modifier to keep it from showing as much as possible.

So if you have enhanced campaigns, make sure that you have a mobile bid modifier. If you haven’t moved over to enhanced campaigns yet, make sure that you start looking at that ‘cause July 22nd, they’re going to do it for you. And if they do it for you automatically, this is what it’s gonna say. It’s gonna say plus zero. It’s going to inherit what the rest of the campaign has, and you’re going to be saying, “Ouch,” at the end of July.

Number four, no negative keywords. This one is also an oldie, but people repeatedly don’t do it and it makes me very sad, and that is why there’s the very ugly-looking sad face there because it just – you have to have negative keywords at some level; either at the campaign level, at the ad group level. You can do it as a single word or you can do it in a list format. So for those that aren’t aware, if you have keywords that are – happen – apply to multiple campaigns, so let’s say, you know, the cheap, wholesale, inexpensive, clearance, discount kind of list, you can make a list out of that and apply that same list to multiple campaigns.

You don’t have to add those one by one by one to every single campaign or ad group that you would like to have them applied to. Use negative keyword lists, use negative keywords. You should go into your account, go under the keywords tab, click the button that says CL Search Terms and it’ll show you what is – what’s – what – what queries triggered your ads. You will find negative keywords in there if you don’t know where to find them.

Number five, [sighs] clicking on your own ads. This one makes me laugh so much but I cannot – cannot stress how many times I have had clients – I had one client who racked up $500.00 on himself because he just couldn’t stop clicking on his ads. He had to see where they would go. Just – just don’t do that. There is an ad preview tool within the AdWords interface that you can do to see what your ad will look like as it – as it shows, and then you can check the URL there. Do not click on your own ads. But honestly, Google has made it so you can’t really miss.

Okay, time out since we’re about halfway through the Google piece. I’m going to take a short break. We’re going to look at these kittens. Uh, thanks to Katie for putting this together. I’m sure it took at least an hour of – of well-spent time. We also have my puppy, Lumi. Everyone, welcome to summer. Anyway, as I was saying about PPC, number six, using broad match for all keywords. Now, [sighs] a lot of people when they first start PPC, they just put the words in. They don’t think about the different match types. Different match types really do make a difference, especially if you’re trying to do what I – we call head terms or single – eh, what could be considered like a single word term or something that’s very, uh, high-traffic, like innovation.

You should never, ever, ever bid on innovation by itself. This is terrible. Collaboration, these are some – this is a screenshot from something I actually found. These are terrible. You can see the amount of impressions I got racked up; I didn’t even want to reveal the cost on these kind of stuff, and the – obviously, the conversion rate was horrific because the – a single word collaboration in a broad match means that it pulled in anything and everything that was even remotely close to around collaboration. Now, Google will do some filtering as far as relevancy to – to the account and to the page, but you’ve basically given them a blank check in which to say, “Alright, for anything, you know, related to collaboration, go ahead and show my ads.”

And that is also why you see in the quality score column on the right a 1 out of 10, which is about the worst that you can do other than not showing at all. So do not use broad match for all your keywords. If you’re not sure when you start a – start a new keyword list or new ad group, start with the phrase match. Work your way down or up from there. Phrase is a good place to start.

Number seven, okay, this one is a little bit trickier and not a lot of people know about it. So this is people in my targeted location versus people searching for or about my targeted location. By default is people in, searching for, or viewing pages about my targeted location. This is not good if you’re trying to do any kind of geo targeting whatsoever in – at the campaign level. So if you’re just targeting the United States for your campaign level, it’s okay. It’s not great. I recommend people in my targeted location, especially if you’re watching the pennies at all, usually Google’s pretty good at the country level as far as targeting.

But when it comes to just, say, the Los Angeles area, you want people in my targeted location because that – this setting can trigger then for someone in like Virginia who might be searching for Los Angeles car rentals, which you may or may not want to be advertising to them for, but it does mean that it can show up in Virginia and maybe perhaps you were trying to segment Virginia traffic separate from Los Angeles traffic ‘cause people searching in Los Angeles are looking more for like a zip car kind of thing, whereas – or a replacement car ‘cause they got in an accident, where someone in Virginia is looking more for a rental car because they’re visiting or, uh, becoming a tourist.

So you may have different goals in which that you’re trying to segment these audiences. This default can pull in people from other places around the country as far as that goes. So if you are tight on your money or you are really trying to really narrow down – let’s say you only deliver to people in the Hollywood area, you want people in my targeted location. You – especially if that’s the only area that you serve.

Number eight, ads set to optimize for clicks when you have conversion tracking. So this is the default, optimize for clicks, shows ads expected to provide more clicks. You have a couple ways – you can see you have about four different options here. If you actually want conversions over clicks, I would recommend optimize for conversions or the rotate evenly or indefinitely, depending on how – if you’re doing active ad testing. If you’re doing active ad testing, you want the rotate evenly. If you are not doing active ad testing, let’s say you have your – your – your set group of ads. You have three ads that you’ve continually, um, depend on, you want to go – and you have a conversion-based goal, go with optimize for conversions.

Clicks is just the one that, uh, ideal for most advertisers is actually pretty much a lie unless you’re just trying to get piles of traffic. If you want optimized – if you want conversions, pick optimize for conversions. You don’t have to set a separate bid or anything else. You’re just telling Google, “Go with the better ad as far as conversion rate.” Or if you’re doing a test, rotate indifferent – indefinitely.

Number nine, targeting the U.S. and Canada together. Uh, this is also a default that applies to new campaigns. So if you have an account but have some – some history to it and you start a new campaign and all the other campaigns are targeting the United States, Google usually picks that up and puts the default as United States. If it is a brand-new account or you’ve only got a couple campaigns and you go in and you start a new one, this is – this will show up. They will bundle the United States and Canada together unless – and if – this – this could be something that costs you a lot of money if you don’t ship to Canada, if you – for example, we have a client that does ship to Canada, but the shipping rates are incredible – uh, like basically triple what they are in – in the Continental U.S.

So Canada needs to be separated – separate and targeted separately. And this also goes for maybe you have a Canadian website so you want to make sure that you have the Canada traffic going to the Canada website and the U.S. traffic going to the U.S. traffic – U.S. site. And number 10 for Google, ignoring Google search partner network performance. This was one that a lot of people forget about, especially if they’re new to the PPC game and they just start digging around, this is not something they often dig around to. So the difference between a Google search and a search partner is that Google search is the Google.com; you go there, you type something in, you hit go.

That is all things that are – occur on Google.com. Search partners are – is a nebulous list that we kind of have partial glimpse into out there in the world. So AOL is one. Ask.com is one. These are all places that use the Google search results to display organic results but also ads, but it is technically not a Google property and it is not a Google.com result. So in this case, this is a real example of someone who, uh, is using Google search and Google search partners, and as you can see, the search partner network is really driving a lot of their impressions. And in the case of another, uh, campaign there, only 23 percent of their overall traffic is actually coming from Google search.

Now, you can see the CTR’s pretty low across the board, but at the same time, look at the cost differential between how much you spent on Google search versus search partners. The next level to be – that isn’t on this screenshot, the next level to look at, would be what is your conversion rate for each one of these, what is your CPA for each one of these. It may be in your best interest to actually disable the search partner network from – at the campaign level. So when you go into the campaign level and you go under the settings, there is a checkbox essentially where you can undo search partners and just target Google search.

So if you haven’t ever looked at this, you really should. And on some cases, we have clients that do quite well on the search partner network, and it is perfectly fine to leave them paired together and let them run and everything’s hunky-dory. But in some cases, if you were – especially if you’re tight on budget and especially if you can’t figure out, you know, maybe your CPAs start – your CPCs started, your CPA just dropped off the face of the earth, this is a good place to come look and see for troubleshooting if maybe all of a sudden AOL decided to like you a lot and show your ads repeatedly.

Okay, so pro tip; half of these tips are settings-based. You can go fix them right now. And – well, actually right now; you should wait until the end of this webinar and then go do it, maybe in the last 10 minutes or so. Um, but these are a lot of things that can go in your account at the campaign level settings, at the account level settings, the ad group level settings. Go take a look and see what it is that you can fix.

Now, we have our Bing bonus round, so technically, the webinar was called 10 Ways, but you know, that doesn’t take very long, so let’s go ahead and get some Bing Ad stuff in there too. I mean, they are – they do – they count. There’s traffic in there. So number one, separating search from content network performance. So, uh, Bing Ads has three, uh, areas in which you can target, and so I’m going to go – there’s a couple of ‘em in here. So the first one is search from content network. Now, once upon a time, the Google display network actually used to be called the content network.

They rebranded it and that’s how we know it today as the display network. Very good job, Google. Now, MSN also has the same kind of content network. So these are sites that are, um, belong to the – to the network they’ve applied. They show Bing Ads ads on their pages and they receive, you know, a piece of the – the piece of the click if – if somebody – somebody clicks. But you should treat it the same way you would a Google search versus a display network and separate them, uh, the search network from the content network.

By default, these are all enabled, so you want to uncheck the content network box. If you do want to target content network Bing Ads, do a new campaign. The content network on Bing Ads is far less traffic than AdWords. AdWords has a tendency to just drive up impressions like crazy. The content network on Bing is a lot less, um, robust in that way, so you won’t need to watch it as heavily. But it is something you’d definitely want to separate because you want to be able to tell the difference in performance between the two.

Number two, alright, separating search from search partner for network performance. So as I was saying, there are multiple aspects to the Bing Ads, uh, interface, so there’s search network or all search networks, as you can see here; Bing and Yahoo! search; Bing and Yahoo! syndicated search; and the content network. So we already went over the content network. The one here that I’m talking about is by default, that button there is checked; all search networks, which is Bing and Yahoo! search and syndicated search partners. Do not advertise on the search partner network with the same – in the same campaign as Bing and Yahoo!

So Bing and Yahoo! search owned and operated only is – are ads that show on bing.com and yahoo.com. And no, you can’t actually segment the traffic from between the two, so when an impression or a click shows, uh, from Bing and Yahoo!, you don’t know if it was Bing or you don’t know if it was Yahoo! They call it the unified marketplace and you will never know. It will always be a mystery.

But the syndicated search partner network is – is a little bit different. It is [sighs] they have sites, for example, I believe it’s [sighs] PC World belongs to this, uh, is a syndicated search partner. So when you search on PC World, you will see ads within the search results. That is a syndicated search partner. Some of those are more accurate than others. My experience personally has been pretty horrific as far as the – the targeting capabilities. It’s not been as accurate as we’d like to see it. There have been improvements in the recent past, but whatever you do, if you’re going to check – test the syndicated search partner network, separate it out; do a new campaign. Keep it the heck away from your Bing and Yahoo! search.

Number three, over-layering the demographic and time of day and day of the week bids. So hang on; let me break that down a little bit ‘cause I think somebody’s eyes just rolled in the back of their head. So on Bing Ads, you can segment or you can increase bids based on the day of the week and the time of the day and demographics. So you can do all of these things at once. But if you do ‘em all at once, you actually just told Bing Ads increase whatever my last max CPC is that I’ve set forty percent if you over-layer.

So be very cautious about how many of these you layer on at a time because you could literally throw yourself, you know, 100 percent or more of your original max bid. So in the case here, you know, on Wednesday, I did plus 10 percent. And – and the other thing is you can only go up in 10 percent increments, so you can’t just pick 5 or 17 percent or, you know, 3 percent here and there. It’s 10, 20, 30, 40. So you can see how that can stack up pretty high pretty fast.

So if you don’t have, um, if you don’t have the – the need to stack up all of these, then don’t do it. If you want to test it, that’s fine, but just watch out that you’re going to be layering that up a good 40, 50, 100 percent in some cases. Uh, if you’ve got time – and you can also at the same time, if you see these checkboxes here, you can uncheck, uh, certain times of the day and days of the week as well if you needed to help balance out, um, the layering of the demographics and time of the day. Number four, okay. So this is also one that a lot of folks don’t know.

You actually trump, if you have ad group settings, campaign settings. So if at the campaign level you had, you know, location and, you know, your time of day and day of the week and all that kind of stuff set up, and then you went into your ad group and you’re like, “You know, I think I want to have my ad group show at certain times of day that’s different,” that’s great ‘cause it’ll – it’ll trump the campaign settings.

But let’s say you did that and then you forgot and then you wanted – in that one single ad group, you had changed, you know, the day of the week – the ads not to show, you know, Monday through Friday and you forgot, you’re like, “Man, I want to turn that back on for all of the ad groups.” And you go into the campaign setting and you change it there and you think, “Oh, yeah, it’s good,” it’s not good. You need to go in the ad group and either have it so that it defaults to the campaign settings or matches up with what you want to do.

Just – so just know that whatever you set at the ad group can trump what is at the campaign level. And last but not least, number five on Bing Ads, new ad groups may default to all locations worldwide. So this doesn’t always happen, um, with, uh, continued accounts. You do – if you do a new ad group, it may default to just whatever your other ad groups are targeted to, so like in United States. But if it’s brand-new, this sometimes comes up where you have all locations worldwide. So make sure, and if you create a brand-new ad group, that it doesn’t say all locations worldwide, but it has the United States or the – or that you have this little thing underneath here that says, “This uses your campaign setting.”

I actually don’t trust this too well. If – if I were you, I would just go ahead at the ad group level and put the United States just because you never know, although the ad group, as we were saying, even though it says this uses your campaign setting, with that ad group trumping the campaign setting, I would just go ahead and put it to United States. Okay, so questions. I want to remind everyone as we said, it was going to be on the shorter – shorter end of things. I only had 10 things to say about AdWords 5 things to say about Bing, but I wanted to leave lots of time for questions, and I also want everyone to go back to their accounts and check their settings.

So if you have questions, let’s get ‘em in to #portentu, or type ‘em in the, uh, WebEx question box here. And just for everybody to know, these are the links if you want to go check it out. I actually didn’t have any resource links within this webinar in particular, but this is my – what I call my modest bragging bundle, which has all of the information in there for all my other slide show – share, uh, presentations, the Dummies book, all those other eBooks I was bragging about at the beginning, the Portent blog; there’s a lot of good things in there, uh, so why don’t we go ahead and go with questions.

Ariana: Thank you, Elizabeth. [Clears throat] Those were – excuse me – [clears throat]…

Elizabeth: Technical difficulties.

Ariana: Sorry about that. Those were some great twit – tips. I’m sure that some pocketbooks are going to feel a little bit better after implementing those tips there. Um, so don’t forget, the resources at the bundle and, uh, we’re open for questions. Um, put it in the webinar question box or Tweet us, um, with the hash-tag portentu. Uh, I have a couple questions already in.

Um, Chris asks, uh, “I’m wanting to use PPC to drive people to turn on the radio, not click. I could design creative to drive that message. Here’s my question. Would you buy that CPC or CPM? Uh, CPC seems to – seems like I’d get more impressions since I don’t want, um, want it to be a click.”

Elizabeth: Great question, Chris. CPM, don’t ever do it unless it’s like a media buy or some kind of run of site thing and you’ve really got no other chance. If you’ve got the chance to choose between the two, always pick CPC ‘cause anything after that is a free impression.

Ariana: Great. Uh, question from Chad here. “Do you need conversion tracking and so on to optimize for conversions?”

Elizabeth: Yes, you do. So the AdWords conversion tracking actually is pretty easy, uh, comparatively to a lot of the other conversion tracking codes you might have to do. You literally just go under tools and analysis. Conversion tracking is there. You set up what it is. I recommend one, maybe two at most, because it does aggregate the conversions. So if you have like a sale but you also want to track downloads, pick which one you want or – or be very cognizant when you go in and you start looking at your number of conversions because obviously, a download is going to be worth less than a sale, uh, and you might actually – accidentally, uh, inflate your conversions.

So if you get that little bit of conversion code, write that in; you know, set up a new conversion in AdWords. You’re going to get a little snippet of code. You grab that and you put it on your conversion page, which is probably like a thank you or receipt page, and then every time that fires, it goes and hits back into AdWords and lets it know that one conversion has been recorded.

Ariana: Awesome. Uh, Dror asks, “Will – will you post the – the webinar?” And yeah, we’ll – there – at the bundle here and, um, the e-mail follow-up, you will get a copy of the link to the slide share and the recorded webinar. Um, Nildari – sorry if I say that incorrectly – um, “How much conversion data do I need to collect before activating enhanced CPC?”

Elizabeth: Excellent question, and unfortunately, it is really on a case-by-case basis. Um, enhanced CPC is something I approach with – with caution, uh, as far as the amount of conversion data required. What I’ve found repeated is you at least need to have more consistency than, uh, an actual number. So if you were consistently having conversions like a daily – on a daily basis, like two to three, and you get like a couple of weeks in, that should be enough information for data – for – enough data for Google to start making smarter decisions. But if you’re really sporadic, so let’s say on Sunday, you have five conversions and then Monday and Tuesday you had zero and then Wednesday you had one and then Thursday was like three, that’ll take longer.

I recommend if you’re going to be really – if it – if they’re coming in really sporadic like that, I would say at least a month before you start approaching that. I would do it on one campaign and I would watch that campaign first before just applying across the board.

Ariana: Uh, question from Ryan. “I’m on a small budget and my average cost per click is high, resulting in less clicks and less leads than I’d like to see in my investment. [Clears throat] What’s the best way to go about mark – making improvements?”

Elizabeth: Ooh, my favorite, so the – the small business question. So first and foremost, I start looking at times of day and day of the week. When do I not need to be spending? So take a look at your conversion data. Is anybody even looking at Sunday at 3:00 in the morning? Uh, when are you high? When are you low? That’s one thing you can start doing right there is kind of cutting off when.

The next thing you can start looking at is if you don’t want to cut it off is adjusting the bid, like by percentages during the – those parts of the day. So maybe you cut it back by about 50 percent. You can show up, but you don’t need to necessarily fight for the first position. That’s a couple – one thing I would do. I’d also take a look at maybe even shutting off entire days, like if I don’t even convert on Sundays, maybe just turn it off. Uh, let’s see. What else?

Um, take a look at your keyword list. See what it is that you can cut as far as what’s been a high cost and what’s been, um, not converting as well as the other things. Where can you spend more money? Another thing you might take a look at is do you have a single campaign – did you stick everything in a single campaign and you’re making every ad group in there fight for the budget that’s left? Move things out that are doing well for you so that it has enough room to breathe and potentially get more conversions for you in order to make – maybe make enough money to do – try other things.

Ariana: Um Mari– [clears throat] excuse me. Hang on. Uh, Marianne asks, “Any advice for us listeners managing a Google foundation grant campaign?”

Elizabeth: Ooh, unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of clients that come across the board with Google foundation grants other than, uh, it’s a really cool program and they have a pile of money, uh, in which to go for. So I mean, if you have come across Google grant money, use it all. Get all the data that you can because eventually, you may get cut off, in which case at least you have the data to make better decisions with going forward.

Ariana: Um, so you were talking earlier about people clicking on their own ads. So this kind of was in that same – I’m sure the people that do that also do a search for their Google. So Chad asks, um, Chad asked, “Why do I not see my ad when I Google a particular keyword?”

Elizabeth: I hate this question. Um, because it’s always the one that – ‘cause it’s always at that certain – somebody always does it right at the most inopportune time. So there’s a – there’s a myriad of reasons on why you might not see. So one might be geographic restrictions. You may not be in the area in which you were targeting. I’ve had that happen before. An East Coast client – or actually it was a West Coast client who was visiting his mom on the East Coast and asked me why he couldn’t see his ads. And I said, “Where are you?”

And he said, “New York.” And I said, “Where are your ads targeted to?” And the answer was Washington. So that would be one. Uh, another one might be time of day. You might’ve run out of budget, and so if they ask you at like 4:00 in the afternoon, they might’ve run out of money at like 1:00. Another thing just could be site and search – search behavior. So Google does kind of track your search behavior. If you’re more, um – so for example, if you go to your site a bunch of times and then you Google yourself, do – you actually have a higher chance of showing up, uh, because Google is tracking the kind of behavior that you are doing and you’re – it’s going to show you ads for sites that you’ve already been to because they know that you were – you have a propensity to go there.

Um, any other things might be sometimes it just doesn’t show every single time. You just have to have a little patience. I really – like I said, recommend if you’re going to Google yourself, do it first thing in the morning and don’t click on it.

Ariana: Uh, Mike asks, “What’s the best way of determining how much to spend each month?”

Elizabeth: Okay, so that is actually less of a paid search question and more of a marketing and business question. So I kind of liken paid search budgets to a craps game. You set amount of money – set – set aside a certain amount of money and that is the money that you spend on PPC. And if it doesn’t work, you don’t spend more. So you don’t go to the ATM and get more and spend on a cold table. You – you take a step back and you need to reevaluate. When it comes to picking the initial budget in the first place, you can do a lot of keyword research through just the AdWords tool with the traffic estimator or the keyword planner and get a look at what the CPCs might be.

Take those CPCs, kind of multiply that by the amount of clicks that you think could – you know, across the – that are projected for the month, and then you kind of have a general budget of at least how much Google thinks you could spend on those words. Take that and then the next thing I say is if that number makes your – your stomach drop into your knees, that’s not the right number. You need to have something – or you need to select a budget that won’t make you paranoid and make – won’t make you log in every five minutes to make sure you didn’t spend more than a certain amount.

Always set daily budgets in a way that make it so that you can sleep at night.

Ariana: Uh, Maryanne asks again – uh, “Any advice for customers that want to launch PPC campaigns targeted to foreign countries?”

Elizabeth: Ooh, okay. So you can do a couple different things. So if it’s a massive amount, then you might want to consider separate accounts. But in this case, I would say it’s probably on the smaller end. So you want to definitely set that up by campaign. So one country per campaign ideally. Uh, if you’re going to lump foreign countries together, at least keep ‘em together on the same language. So don’t put, you know, all the – don’t put Turkey in with China. That’s just a bad idea.

Uh, also the time zones kind of thing. So European Union, you can technically align a lot of those, like – so like Ireland and England you could probably put together in the same campaign. But depending on what your goals are, you’re going to want to be very conscientious about how you organize those because for one, you’re spending in U.S. dollars in a foreign country. Um, and then at the same time, you want to be able to see what the performance is across a per-country basis. So definitely different campaigns for each country.

Ariana: Uh, Chris asks, “Do I need both AdRoll and Google to cover my bases, Facebook, et cetera in retargeting/remarketing? Also, do I need to include something about remarketing in my site’s privacy policy?”

Elizabeth: Indeed. So Google remarketing, you can do for just, you know, the Google display network essentially. AdRoll will get you on the FBX or the Facebook Ad Exchange, and that is a great place to be. They do have a self-service, um, package. You can sign up for it and you can kind of go through that. You do have to put some remarketing code on in order to participate it, and you do have to put something in your site’s privacy policy. In fact, AdRoll won’t run your ads unless you can pass this, uh, this little test that they have about it.

So they will – I believe it is they click through, they take a look at it, and it’s pretty specific language that they’ll give you to put on your site. It does need to be on there. It does need to be obvious. Um, and if they kick it back, you can – the best way to get a hold of ‘em is actually using the, uh, the chat feature through AdRoll or through, uh, e-mail support.

Ariana: Excellent. Uh, another question from Mike, um, “In – are there any content networks or search engines outside of Google and Bing that are affiliated markets – uh, networks that are worth looking into?”

Elizabeth: Um, yeah, you could do – I guess, well, affiliated networks, eh, a lot of ‘em are garbage. Um, I really recommend checking out PPC Hero’s list on, uh, second and third-tier engines, so like their 7Search and ABC and, uh, Business.com, those kind of places. It really depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re trying to sell e-commerce retail kind of stuff, a lot of those don’t work very well. Or they’re just too low a traffic in order to pay off in the amount of time that you put into them. Um, but they’re definitely there if you want to look, uh, as if you’re looking for more. Like Ad Marketplace is a good one if you just want to – like for a traffic standpoint.

Uh, and a lot of times, they’ll help you kind of optimize to what it is that you’re trying to achieve. And I’m trying to think; there was one other one recently. They’re literally popping up left and right. I would actually just take, like I was saying, take a look at PPC Hero’s, uh, second and third-tier search engine guide, and you’ll have a pretty good idea as far as to – you know, what you might want to do and what you might want to choose. And actually, one other thing; I didn’t finish Chris’ question I realize, and he asked if he needed both AdRoll and Google.

It depends entirely on how big your budget is and how much you want to – how much you want to cover. Facebook covers different – a completely different audience than the Google remarketing will. So it depends, like I was saying, it depends how big you want to go. But yes, it will cover different bases. Um, Google’s the cheaper on, and it’s the easier one to start with. Uh, AdRoll is very – the self-service platform is easy to use though.

Ariana: Okay. [Clears throat] Another question here. When does it make sense to look into placement on LinkedIn and Business.com?

Elizabeth: Ooh. Business.com I only really recommend if you’re like a B2B. Uh, I haven’t seen great returns on it, but it is there. And I’m talking about B2B like lead generation more than trying to sell something directly. LinkedIn, I’ve seen mixed results, depending on what it is that you’re trying to do and what it is that you’re offering. If you’re going to do LinkedIn, I recommend something like a download or a webinar or a free this or that ‘cause you’re trying to get them in at the beginning of a – kind of like a sales funnel.

Don’t look to LinkedIn to sell directly. Don’t look to LinkedIn to just fill a lead funnel. You’re actually just trying to get them to complete some sort of small action. I see a lot of success with, um, like recruiting companies trying to get people in that are trying to, you know, sign up for a headhunter. I don’t see a lot of success with getting, uh, services sold and, um, uh, not services – or services and products. But if you’ve got like a job that you want to advertise or a webinar, a download, free trials are good things. But otherwise, LinkedIn is quite expensive on a per-click basis.

Uh, so you want to take that into consideration on how – on how much it’s worth to you to get someone in the start of your sales funnel.

Ariana: Uh, Dave asks, “How would you approach growth for an established account that has hit a plateau?”

Elizabeth: Excellent. Okay. So one of the first things we like to do when we have something that kind of hits a – hits a plateau like that is take a look at the keyword lists and take a look at what you’re bidding on already. So you’re probably going after a lot of the obvious stuff, but some of the things you could also be going after might be behavioral, um, or how someone might use something. Uh, when’s the last time you Googled yourself as far as those keywords go, what else – and I’m talking about just like Google search suggests, like type it in slowly and see what else is kind of coming up.

Um, take a look also at the – what products haven’t you tried or maybe you’ve already tried a while ago and you maybe you didn’t do it quite right, go back and take a look. Uh, if you haven’t – if you think you’ve hit the – hit the wall on AdWords, you actually might try Bing. Um, Bing is a good place to be these days. Uh, Bing also – if you’re – it’s an e-tail or retail e-commerce; you might take a look at product feeds, if you haven’t already taken a look at product listing ads or any of the comparison shopping engines. Bing Shopping is actually free if you can establish – uh, get a feed in there.

Um, let me see what else. As far as a plateau, have a third-party person look at it. Have somebody who does paid search that hasn’t looked at – hasn’t seen it before take a look. They’ll come away with at least three things right off the bat.

Ariana: Um, Brad asks, “Are you seeing that advertising on Yelp works or not for local businesses?”

Elizabeth: I actually – sorry, Brad – I haven’t actually played with Yelp much for advertising, uh, for local businesses. I personally, as I use Yelp, can’t imagine that it’s doing that hot, uh, overall ‘cause mostly all I see is tanning. So either someone is trying to drop me a hint because I live in Seattle or it’s – requires a budget that may or may not be, um, amenable to you for local businesses. I do know that Google – Google Local or Google Maps has, um, recently come out with their – they’re finding at least study wise that the advertisements are doing better than the markers on the map, so that might be something to take a look into.

I’d be really curious to see more about Yelp actually.

Ariana: Evan asked, “What was the handle for questions again?” It’s portentu – #P-O-R-T-U – [laughter] I can’t spell today. #P-O-R-T-E-N-T and the letter U. Uh, Marianne asks, “Any thoughts on advertising on Angie’s List?”

Elizabeth: Marianne, I’ve heard that Angie’s List is the devil, so [laughter] you probably shouldn’t advertise there. Now, um, I don’t personally have any thoughts on advertising on Angie’s List. I will say it is very compelling. The amount of advert – the amount – just the pure amount of, uh, vendors on there and the amount of traffic that they pull, they do have a huge brand. They have advertising all over the place. They would have the volume. I wouldn’t completely dismiss it, but I have heard some horror stories about it.

Ariana: Uh, Dave, follow-up question is, uh, “Is it worth it to submit to – is it worth it in submitting keywords to second-tier engines to prompt growth?”

Elizabeth: Yes, actually. If you wisely select your second-tier engines, uh, instead of just kind of spitting ‘em out all over the place, it is worth it for – to – to try and push growth. You won’t see a ton of growth. I mean let’s face it; most of it’s on Google, then it’s on Bing and Yahoo! and then it kind of steeply drops off from there. But it is completely worth it, as most of those tend to be much cheaper. The cost per click, let’s say, on Google, if it’s $2.00; on those second-tier engines, you’re looking more at like $0.50.

Ariana: I have a question, Elizabeth. Um, how often do you, uh, rewrite campaign ads?

Elizabeth: Pretty often actually. So if we’re running a test, and it depends entirely on the amount of traffic that’s coming in; so if it’s a very slow-generating ad group because you’ve got a lot of long-tail keywords in there, it takes this a while to kind of get the – get statistical significance in which to change it. Then there is also the gut feeling. So honestly, when you look at a group of ads and, let’s say on a weekly basis, and you look at it and maybe the – the – the competition’s a little bit close, you can use a couple of things. You can use what’s called PPI, or profit per impression, and that’s something that Michael Wiegand has written about on our blog as far as how to calculate that.

So if you – it looks pretty close as far as CTR and CPA and CPC and all that kind of stuff, you can try to use the impression metric to try and break the tie. Uh, but I do tend to rewrite ads on anywhere between a one to two-week basis, uh, because I don’t rewrite them for every ad group every time. So I do rotate which ones. So in aggregate, it’s probably about more on a monthly basis that an ad group will see – that will have enough data to warrant an ad change.

Ariana: Cool. Uh, Dror, thanks for letting us know that the link, um, to the SlideShare, we’ll get that fixed, um shortly after this webinar. Um, for anybody who tried clicking on it, it says private, so we’ll get that published.

Elizabeth: I blame SlideShare ‘cause I set it [laughter] to go public at 11:00 AM. [Laughter]

Ariana: So something up with their – with their scheduling issue.

Elizabeth: We’ll fix it.

Ariana: Yeah, we’ll fix it. Um, Evan asks, “What’s your opinion on Google PPC keyword suggestions?”

Elizabeth: So Google is – and I also agree with Dave; he blames Ian for the SlideShare. I also blame Ian [laughter] for everything. Um, what is your opinion on the Google PPC keyword suggestions? So the nice thing about Google’s keyword tool or the keyword suggestion tool is that are – they are typically terms that have – they have seen in the recent past. So um, usually at the first pass through, you’ll find a few good things, maybe you know, about 25 percent’ll be useable the first time through you ever use it. Uh, what happens afterwards though, as you – you know, you get like a year down the road, it keeps suggesting the same things to you that you didn’t want the first time.

Now, you can classify certain ones as completely irrelevant and Google does try to recalibrate what it’s showing you as far as suggestions. But honestly, the older the account gets, the harder it gets to use that tool and the more the suggestions actually just become, eh, whatever. So that’s when I would turn to the like the Google search suggest and something like UberSuggest is the tool, or trying to look at other, uh, keyword places like, uh, like behaviors like I was saying earlier about behaviors or alternate, um, uses or, uh, even competitors.

Ariana: Are there any other questions out there in the webinar world? I’ll give it just a couple more minutes and we’ll wait for anybody who’s thinking on a question to put it in. Um, don’t forget you will get a reminder e-mail or a follow-up e-mail that has a link, uh, to the Slide Share and the recorded webinar so you can have all the great audio as long as – as well as the Slide Share. Um, and uh, we, um, have a webinar coming up in July as well. Uh, every month we try to do webinar the last Thursday of the month. And July’s webinar is on the 25th, uh, hosted by Katie Fetting, our Marketing Director.

Um, and I believe the title, uh, I forgot to put it down in here, but it’s Seven and a Half Ideas for Becoming a Brainstorming Genius I believe. Um, so I’m excited to see that. Um, let’s see. Uh, Evan, you say you can only link 10 analytics. Uh, didn’t get the rest of your question there. Does that make sense to you?

Elizabeth: No, sorry, Evan. You can only link 10 – he might be a wrong window thing. Um, [laughter] Katie’s website – uh, just Katie’s webinar should also be updated on the Portent site. And I do remember it has something to do with brainstorming and something to do with being a genius, [laughter] so it’s not to be missed.

Ariana: Um, okay. Uh, if you have any more questions for Elizabeth, you can directly Tweet them to her at e – I always read it, “Eb eBay”; uh, E-B-Kendo, uh, E-B-K-E-N-D-O. Uh, make sure to use the hash-tag #portentu. Um, and uh, as Elizabeth said, it’s on our website for the next webinar July 25th. It’s also on our Facebook, um, marketing tab. So if you have any further questions or want to sign up for the next webinar, check it out. Um, well that – okay. Um, thank you, everyone, and have a fantastic day.

The post Waste-Per-Click: 10 Ways You’re Losing Money in PPC [VIDEO WEBINAR] appeared first on Portent.

Weekly and monthly reporting is one of the most important things I do as a PPC strategist.  Clients invest a lot of money into paid search and need to be able to keep track of progress.   More importantly though, clients need to understand the strategy and the reasoning behind what’s going on.  That’s where I come in: instead of leaving it up to someone else to try and read between the rows of data in a spreadsheet, it’s my duty to convey a clear understanding through quality reports which go beyond outlining standard data points.

I firmly believe in the awesome power of words and communication – we, as human beings, understand the world around us not in terms of logic and technical reasoning, but in terms of narrative and subjective rationality.

Think about it, if a concept is being explained to you that you have little or no prior knowledge of, and you’re charged with making a decision, how do you do that?  If you analyze the symbolism behind one’s syntax, determining if what you’re being told follows the formulas of formal logic, then pat yourself on the back and buy yourself a drink, because you’re in a very, very small group of the population.

To gain a sense of understanding about an unfamiliar subject, almost everyone relates to their past experiences and the instances they recollect from other people, or forms of media, in the manifestation of a story.  They construct a prism of understanding which they find rational based on what they think they know is true and what they expect from these notions.

That does not necessarily mean the decision they make is going to be logical.  It will, however, be rational – based upon the coherence and fidelity of what they understand (which, again, is in the form of narrative).

This notion becomes incredibly important when it comes to reporting.  The absolute worst thing you can do when relaying information to a client is to export a spreadsheet of data and send it without including any analysis.  Like this:

THAT IS NOT A REPORT! That is a series of data which can be used in a report.  Sending something like this to the client will do absolutely no good and, worst of all, could cause confusion on their end, making your life far more difficult than it needs to be.  You may want to focus on one column while the client focuses on another – you could both end up coming away from looking at this data with two completely different rationales of what’s happening and why.

In any report you send, the following questions should be answered in the report itself, clearly and directly, without any additional messages via email or phone call:

• What occurred in the PPC account(s)?
• What change(s) did we make? / Why did we make them?
• What are our goals? / How are we progressing on our goals?
• What change(s) do we plan on making next?

Answering these questions in your reports will allow you to convey the story you want to tell the client, helping ensure they’re seeing data the way you’re seeing data, whether the marketing contact, the intern, or the CEO is reviewing the report.  You don’t need to get super-granular when answering these questions – in fact; too much granularity can lead to additional confusion.  All you need to do is be as clear and concise as possible.

So, how do you do this? Here are 3 tips we hope will help you adjust your reporting strategies:

1. Use text to your advantage –In many of Portent’s reports, we have an overview tab that’s sole purpose is answering the questions above.  It’s the first thing the client sees when opening the report and is laid out in a straightforward format according to these questions.  This is just one way of conveying a narrative – if you prefer something less text-heavy, use text boxes and bubbles to your advantage.  Be sure to call out the key pieces of data you feel are most important to focus on.
   
2. Don’t highlight everything – Do not just include every segment of data you use to your advantage because you feel the report needs lots of data.  That does nothing but overwhelm the client.  Create a template which highlights the (few) most important pieces of data (according to what the client’s goals are), get rid of what you or the client does not need to review on a regular basis, and stick with it.  This will allow the continuity of the story you tell the client to remain intact week over week and month over month.
   
3. Use visual metaphors – Using simple graphs and shapes to format your data in a visual manner is both very important and very useful.  If your client is most concerned with cost efficiency and average cost per acquisition, try using a visual representation like a funnel to help shape everyone’s understand of how effectively the money is being spent.  If your client is most concerned about conversion totals, use a bar or a thermometer-shaped visual which is filled up more each week.  Shapes and colors are simple things to manipulate, and they can help you formulate the basis for understanding data far easier than a dozen rows of numbers.

Make your reports worth your time and the client’s time: use them to tell a story.  You’ll find that answering the question of “what’s next” becomes far easier when the flow of narrative coherence and fidelity shapes your rationality and sense of understanding.

The post Tell a Story – Making Reports Worth Everyone’s Time appeared first on Portent.

When I was 8 years old I wanted to be a paleontologist. So…very…badly. I even had a jean jacket with dinosaurs painted on it with jewels and sequins. (Hey, it was the ’80s.) Then I discovered the amount of biology and sciences (mostly the dissecting and looking at the insides of living animals) that turned me off of it eventually. Never once did I think I was going to be a search marketer…especially since the Internet didn’t so much as exist then.

And that seems to be the case with most PPC-ers today. There was just no way we were going to be able to predict that we’d be doing what we’re doing today. But, what if you were in college or going to be now? How could you go about starting out on the path to search marketing, especially when “Internet marketing” isn’t quite a mainstream major? (Heck, it’s barely a class at most colleges yet!)

So I took to the Twitter stream and asked the #PPCchat community a few questions about what courses they took in school and what advice they’d have for anyone looking into PPC today. Check out the result—I think you’ll find that they make a lot of sense and contain some pretty solid advice. It’s a small (but powerful!) sample. When I go looking for advice, these are the folks I ask.

About you questions:

1.  If you went to college, what did you graduate with? (If not, say n/a)

Most of the respondents did attend college, only 2 did not and 2 had Masters Degrees in addition to their Bachelors. The degrees conferred upon our survey respondents ranged WILDLY from Spanish, Nutritional Science and English Literature to the more closely-related (to PPC) group of Business Admin, Communications, and Neuroscience.

Interestingly, the three respondents who had graduated from college in the last 3 years were all Business Admin majors.

Full list: Urban Studies, Business Admin, English Lit, Media Studies, Spanish, Nutritional Science, Neuroscience, Communications, Mass Media, Graphic Design, Telecommunications.

Takeaway: A degree isn’t required, but it definitely lays a lot of groundwork for well-rounded skills in writing, organization/deadlines, related coursework and possibly a football team to be ashamed/proud of on occasion. The consensus was that if you’re NOT going to get a degree, you’re going to need a PPC or marketing internship of some kind for highly relevant work experience. High school or an online certification alone (like the AdWords exam) isn’t enough to get your foot in the door.

2.  If you could go back – would you have chosen something different?

Only 3 of the respondents would have chosen the exact same major/minor that they had originally. All others would have picked either something completely different or kept their original major and added a minor.

(That whole hindsight is 20/20 thing.)

3.  If you enrolled today, what would you major in?

Of the respondents that would have changed something or picked something else in the first place, they all answered one of the below:

• Marketing
• Business
• Computer Science
• Statistics
• Psychology

So, listen up kids—those are the 5 fields you want to take a good hard look at.

About the industry

1.  What classes would you recommend today?

18 specific classes were recommended as coursework that would benefit a future PPCer on the path to a Bachelors (listed in order of importance with the group):

• Excel (Shocker! And the highest vote getter)
• Statistics
• Javascript/Basic Coding/HTML
• Photoshop/Graphic Design
• Psychology
• Speech
• Writing
• Data Visualization
• Persuasion Theory
• Critical Thinking
• Finance
• Advertising/Marketing
• Math
• Consumer Behavior
• Business Ethics
• Finance

The respondents were not given any direction on this question, like examples, nor were they told what any other respondent had already given, so this is a bit more of a “free form” suggestion list. But you have to admit, looking at the current PPC landscape, this is how you would build yourself a “PPC degree” within one of the 5 majors from Question 3 in the About You section.

2.  Should PPC be a “major” or should it be “Internet marketing” or something else?

The answers given were really great, well-thought-out and varied. I think what this really brings to light is that even amongst ourselves, we’re not sure what the future of PPC in colleges is going to look like. It is, however, across the board agreed upon as something that should be added to marketing or advertising majors in general – as a class, a major, a minor – anything.

Here are some highlights of the responses I received, without identifying info:

I would say PPC would be more suited towards internships/mentorships/apprenticeships. It takes a special combination of ambition, analysis, and creativity to make it in the PPC world.

Internet marketing. While majoring in marketing, not one of my classes ever used the words SEO or PPC once… most marketing programs are outdated and focus on a more traditional approach to marketing.

Definitely should be a sub-set of a marketing/digital marketing program. There’s no need to take a class solely on paid search advertising every semester/quarter.

I think Internet marketing degrees programs will begin to pop up around the country. I took an e-marketing class in school where we focused on AdWords and blogging. To me strictly a PPC major seems too small as far as classes required to take for a major degree.

Not sure PPC should be a major. But a marketing major with an emphasis in Internet marketing would be pretty awesome.

It could easily be a major, and I think it should be.

PPC as a major might be too deep in the weeds. A major encompassing Internet marketing as a whole would be helpful. PPC, SEO, social, email, etc. They all play together – might as well be proficient in them all.

I’m not sure that PPC alone should be a major – it’s a set of skills specific to a handful of vendors. It could certainly be a class or emphasis within a digital marketing major, but any PPC major would be immediately out of date.

PPC should be its own major. The field is so expansive and has enough material and knowledge for students to learn.

Honestly, I’d be willing to hire someone who had an analytical mind, a savvy understanding of the digital world, and good communication skills and teach PPC mostly on the job.

It should definitely be part of Internet marketing, but I don’t think that Internet marketing should ever be a class. I think it should be an internship position that the school secures with specific, well-off companies that are known for doing really great things.

I think it should be a course, or series of courses. College isn’t about silo-ing yourself into one thing, but about experiencing a few things and figuring out what you want to do. PPC is a great field to get experience in as a student (see – Google Online Marketing Challenge), but if you come out of college as a one-trick pony you’re deciding your career before you start.

3.  AdWords Exam – good class material/exam or no?

The Google AdWords certification exam is a two-part online test taken by pretty much every professional PPC person. It’s the de facto way of saying you can prove you know what you’re doing – at least somewhat. (And you get a badge to prove it!) It’s actually meant to be somewhat difficult and not just any slouch can sign up, take it, and pass in the allotted hour time. You need to know the answers.

Opinions varied a lot on this one, splitting pretty evenly on whether or not the exam is classroom material. The opinions against it were pretty strong; citing issues such as timeliness, practical application and not giving Google $50 more dollars.

4.  AdWords Challenge – good class material or no?

This one was very straightforward—all you marketing professors out there, if you’re not already doing this, start looking into it. I can tell you as someone who hires PPC professionals and interns, when I see this on a resume (especially if they were on a team that placed or got ranked) they move to my “maybe” pile pretty immediately for consideration for the first round of interviews. (Provided they bothered to change the “to” company to the correct one and didn’t address me as “Dear Sir.”)

Sage one-liners for the next generation

As if all of these questions weren’t enough, I asked one more “open” question that turned into my favorite part of this whole exercise.

One-liners of sage advice for the next generation:

Regardless of school, get as much on the job experience as soon as possible. – @obiwankikobi

Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors. Expect rough waters and tackle them as learning experiences. – @ghong_ssm

Learn an actual marketable skill while in school (javascript or something like that) – @aTimJohnson

PPC will constantly change – know the fundamentals, common strategies, and basic theories. The rest will change so often that you’ll need to be able to adapt on the fly. – @ryanmoothart

Learn how to understand data sets and create actionable items from that data. – @Kearns89

Practical application. Practice what you learn with something you like. You’ll remember it better. – @ebkendo

PPC: the perfect industry for paper clip enthusiasts – @iNeils

There is always more to learn. – @LukeAlley

Figure out how to make a living doing something you love doing. Acid test for this: when you’re engaged in that activity, you lose track of time. – @Szetela

If you think you want to do online marketing or PPC specifically, get yourself an internship or part-time gig. You have no idea what it’s like until you do it. – @RickGalan

Show that you are passionate about PPC. Always be reading the latest blogs, asking for more to do, and challenging conventional wisdom. If you have the passion for your job, the results and personal growth will follow. – @Matt_Umbro

Never stop learning – @John_A_Lee

Don’t learn in a bubble! Follow PPC pros online, read blogs, & participate in #ppcchat. – @timothyjjensen

Never turn down an opportunity offered to you because you think you aren’t qualified; someone thinks you’re qualified or else they wouldn’t be offering it to you. Take it. Never close the door. – @jazaye

If you can demonstrate an aptitude for learning, along with critical thinking and communication skills, you can learn PPC. And you’ll set yourself up for success in every field. – @Mel66

Take courses that interest you from the best professors, not the easiest graders. – @bigalittlea

That’s it! I’d like to thank the following PPC peeps for playing along and offering up their advice and experiences to share:

• Aaron Levy SEER Interactive
• Chad Kearns Portent, Inc.
• David Szetela FMB Media
• Jasmine Aye Distilled
• John Lee Clix Marketing
• Kiko Correa Portent, Inc.
• Luke Alley Avalaunch Media
• Matt Umbro Exclusive Concepts
• Melissa Mackey gyro
• Neil Sorenson ZAGG
• Rick Galan 1-800-Contacts
• Ryan Moothart Portent, Inc.
• SungGil Hong Spectrum Search
• Tim Jensen Overit
• Tim Johnson Portent, Inc.

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