While bidding on the branded terms of your competitors is not an innovative practice, poor execution is something we see over and over again. Poor execution when buying on your competitor’s brand names is a terrific way to flush your ROAS down the drain.

When looking to go after this type of paid traffic, it is important to look at two sides of the paid search user journey- first, your account and campaign setup as the advertiser, and secondly, the experience visitors are taken through on your website after clicking your ad. Tying those two pieces together is your best chance for success when advertising on your competitor’s branded search terms.

Below are six actionable tips to implement immediately when bidding on competitor brand terms:

First, we will start in your PPC account.

1. Dedicate a specific budget

Set aside a portion of your account budget dedicated just for generating traffic from the brand names of your competitors.

When assigning this budget, go ahead and throw away your last-click attribution model and account-wide performance metrics— these types of campaigns typically convert at much lower rates than other traditional paid search ventures.

2. Separate competitor brands into individual campaigns

Search volumes are going to vary depending on the size discrepancy of your competition. If you set up one campaign to hold all competitor keywords, the competitors with the highest search volume will end up spending the highest portion of your campaign budget. Your largest and most searched for competitor should not necessarily dictate that they are your most important competitor.

To give those less searched for yet still important competitors a chance to have their customer base captured, segment each competitor into its own campaign to ensure your budget is spent under your control.

3. Customize ad copy

Find a way to make a connection between the users search query and your ad. It goes along with that whole relevance thing. Just because you are in the same industry as your competitor, a searcher may not know that and may have never heard of your company. This is your first chance to introduce yourself and create a connection between your company and your competitor.

Wading through the waters of Google’s trademark policy can be tricky when potentially dealing with trademarked brand names.

Finding a clever way to incorporate both your brand name and your competitor’s into an ad can position yourself for a huge win, leading to strong click through rates.

Once a user clicks on an ad, we must shift our attention to landing page experience.

4. Solidify a connection between your company and your competitor

Once a user hits your landing page, solidify the bridge between you and the specific competitor that user was searching for. Your visitor is familiar enough with your competition to search for their brand name- they probably know that competitor’s product line and the need it fulfills. Your ad created the connection for them, your landing page should drive home that connection.

5. Directly highlight why you are better

You know your product. You should know your competitor’s product. Now speak directly to why you are better. You have to convince a visitor who had the intent of learning about an alternative solution that you are the best option. Directly call out what you do better than a given competitor.
In an ideal world, set up an individual landing page designed around each competitor you plan on competing directly with.

6. Funnel to a soft conversion

Once your ad is clicked on, a connection is made, and persuasive messaging compels a visitor, look to convert them through a soft conversion. Free trials, whitepaper downloads, and free product samples are good ways to do this.

Provide great value to them at no charge— that can motivate visitors back to your core offerings, which is where you collect revenue and tie back value with your paid ads.

By following these six actionable tips, you can begin driving value on your competitor-based paid search terms.

What techniques have you used to drive value when bidding on competitor branded search terms?

The post Six Ways to Win on your Competitor’s Branded Keywords appeared first on Portent.

Looking specifically at clients currently enrolled in Portent’s small business PPC package, PPC Essentials, e-commerce clients utilizing PLAs are seeing sizable returns on their ad spend. While the dollar values of those returns will not impress mega-buck enterprise companies looking to spend and earn big, an extra one or two thousand dollars in additional monthly revenue from paid search can make all the difference for small businesses looking to get their feet off the ground in the PPC marketplace.

Pulling from the full list of active PPC Essentials clients utilizing Product Listing Ads, we can see the positive impact low budget advertisers are earning via Google Shopping. Here are a few statistics from our program-wide survey:

Budget Allocation

Average Cost Per Click

Return on Ad Spend

Takeaways

1. If you currently are not up and running with a product feed, no need to go back to your board and pitch for more money. Allocating a small percentage of your current monthly budget can effectively get the ball rolling in the PLA game. Monthly PLA spend in the accounts surveyed ranged from under $10 to just under $800 – regardless of spend level, ROAS was positive.
2. Dependent on industry, driving a Google Shopping click will cost you less per click than a traditional Search Network click. In fact, within the accounts we surveyed, not a single account posted a higher average PLA CPC than average Search Network CPC.
3. Product Listing Ads can become a viable piece of your paid search revenue source. Through effectively targeted product feeds and campaign structures in AdWords, SMBs can go up against the giants in their industries and come out in a positive position.

If you are a product-driven business engaged in paid search and don’t have a product listing feed – it’s time to get one. There are plenty of guides to help you get started and with Google’s feed specifics, getting up and running can be simple and straightforward.

The post Proof Even Small Businesses Should Be Utilizing Product Listing Ads appeared first on Portent.

Post #1: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Account Structure

Post #2: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Understanding your Campaign Settings

Post #3: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Keywords

Crafting engaging ads is vital to the success of your AdWords campaign. Ads need to be informative, eye catching, and relevant to what a customer is searching for. Ads that are bland are easily overlooked, while ads with irrelevant ad copy can result in wasteful clicks from unqualified customers.

In this post, we will dissect an AdWords search network text ad, while providing some best practices that could make you a ton of money.

Ad structure

Text ads are broken up into five main sections, each with their own rules and restrictions. Every ad has a headline, two separate description lines, a display URL, and a destination URL.

Headlines are the most prominent part of your ad and are the part that a customer will actually be clicking on. This means headlines for each ad should include important keywords that are relevant to search queries. You have limited space to get the attention of a customer as Google only allows for 25 characters in the headline.

Description lines are a little longer than headlines, allowing for 35 characters per line. These two lines give you an opportunity to sell your product or service to a customer. These lines are comparable to an elevator pitch. You may only have the attention of a potential customer for a second, so you need to make that second count by using strong calls to action, convincing them to click your ad instead of the one right above or below.

Display and destination URLs

Each text ad has two separate URLs, the display and the destination URL. The display URL is what a customer will see when viewing your ad. Display URLs can be customized to further explain where exactly the ad is sending the customer. They must be 35 characters or less and contain the same domain as the destination URL. By making clear and descriptive display URLs you can reduce wasteful clicks from unqualified customers.

The destination URL is the actual URL where your customers will be sent when they click your ad. They are behind the scenes of your ad, as customers do not see them. It is important to select a destination URL that will serve as a strong landing page, enticing customers to convert. There are many factors that contribute to strong landing pages. Here are a few tips for making your landing page more successful.

Best practices

When crafting your ads, it is important to follow a few best practices that will help your ads look clean and clickable.

Always use title case and proper punctuation. AdWords allows you to use question marks and exclamation points, but not in excess (one exclamation point per ad – use it wisely). In most cases, use punctuation at the end of each description line to ensure that your ads will flow the way you intended, no matter how they get formatted.

There are many different ways to go about crafting great ad content. You can make your ad edgy, playful, direct, informative, etc… To decide which approach works best for your business, you should run A/B ad tests. Create about four ads for every ad group that utilize different calls to action and highlight different aspects of your product or service. Allow them to run at the same time so you can get a feel for what is working and what isn’t.

After you have crafted strong and engaging ads, it is time to start digging a little deeper into more advanced settings by setting up ad extensions.

Watch out next Friday for our next post on setting up and utilizing ad extensions!

Feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments.

The post Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Crafting Engaging Ads appeared first on Portent.

Post #1: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Account Structure

Post #2: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Understanding your Campaign Settings

If the account structure is the backbone of your AdWords account, then keywords are the blood running through its veins. Building a descriptive keyword list that closely represents your product will give life to your account, put your ads in front of a relevant audience, and reduce wasteful spending. You may ask yourself: Which keywords should I bid on? How much should I bid? What’s a match type?

In this post, we explain some techniques for building a keyword list that will keep your account alive and performing well.

Finding keywords

When building out your initial keyword list, you should try and put yourself in the shoes of your customers. I like to ask myself “What would my mom search for?” Qualified customers that you want to target are searching on Google because they have a specific problem or want. Your keywords should reflect that want in the same way that your product should be their solution.

There are many different tools out there to help you expand your keyword list from a few core keywords to a fully developed list. In AdWords, you can use the Keyword Tool:

The Keyword Tool will take a list of existing keywords or your website URL and generate new related keyword ideas that you probably didn’t think of the first time brainstorming.

There are many other tools out there to find new keywords. A couple of my favorite research tools are Google search suggest and the “searches related to” tool. These are tools right in the Google search engine itself.

With Google search suggest you can type a keyword into Google and then simply take note of the more long-tail keywords that Google suggests to you. Chances are there are a few frequently searched terms right there for the taking.

Searches related to that can be found at the bottom of the search results page.

Match types

Now that you have an initial keyword list, you need to set appropriate match types for all of your new keywords. There are three main match types to select from: broad, phrase, and exact.

Broad match is the default for all keywords. When a keyword is set on broad match, AdWords will show your ads when someone searches for that keyword as well as some slight variations of that keyword.

When in phrase match, ads will only show when that exact phrase is searched but will allow for additional words before or after the keyword (i.e. “buy steak online”).

Exact match (i.e. [buy steak online]) limits your ads to only show when the search query is exactly the same as the keyword with no additional words.

There is no right or wrong time for each match type. In general, it is best to be as specific as possible. So utilize phrase and exact match when applicable to prevent gaining excess impressions from unqualified customers.

After you upload your first list

Once you have your keywords uploaded into AdWords, there are a couple of other useful features in AdWords for finding additional keywords, missed keyword opportunities, and negative keywords.

In AdWords under the keywords tab, you can find new keyword suggestions by clicking the green Add Keywords button. After your keywords have run for a short period of time, you can click on Keyword details > All to find a list of search queries that have trigged an ad in the past. This is called the Search Query Report. This list of queries is a great resource for finding new keywords you should be bidding on, as well as negative keywords that are irrelevant and should be excluded.

Setting Bids

The final step left is setting your bids. A great tool for deciding how much to bid initially is the AdWords Traffic Estimator.

With this tool you can enter in groups of keywords and AdWords will give you an estimate for how many clicks you can expect depending on your bid. You will get a graph that looks something like this:

From this you can determine an appropriate starting bid for that keyword group.

Based off of the keywords I entered to generate this graph, I would start my bidding near $1.50-$2.00 because that is the point where increased bids stops yielding higher click totals.

After you have strong keyword lists built and uploaded into your account, it’s time to start crafting your ads.

Watch out next Friday for our next post on best practices for building your first PPC account!

Feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments.

The post Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Keywords appeared first on Portent.

Here at Portent, we have many Internet marketing teams: SEO, content, and design, just to name a few. But the best team, objectively speaking*, is the PPC team.

*This is completely subjective as I am a member of the PPC team.  That does not mean what I say is not the truth.

We are a special bunch that takes great pride in our work as individuals and as a team.  We geek out on data, we go beyond paid search management and develop strategies to ensure our clients kick everyone else’s ass, and we can pass the AdWords certification tests in our sleep.  But that’s not all. We also have a hierarchy convention which correlates to one the greatest television series to ever grace our airways: “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

I’d like to take a moment to introduce the members of our illustrious PPC team, which may or may not* be an excuse for me to merge our company photos with our corresponding character photos.

*This is definitely just an excuse to do just that.

I present to you the crew of starship “Enterprise” Portent’s PPC Team:

Elizabeth Marsten

Senior Director of Search Marketing / a.k.a. Captain Jean-Luc Picard

Elizabeth is the guru of everything PPC at Portent and became director of the entire search marketing team in 2009.  She has spoken at SEM conferences such as HeroCon and SMX, and has become a leading authority on product listing ads and merchant feed optimization (with presentations and articles on this blog).  She’s also written more than one of our eBooks available for download in our store regarding paid search, from product listing ads to the essentials of PPC to ad copy strategy.

She is the captain of our crew and has dubbed her office “Ten Forward.”  It would have been “The Ready Room,” but there’s a beer fridge in the corner.  So naming it after the USS Enterprise’s bar felt more appropriate.  In addition to being awesome at PPC, she practices and teaches the martial art of Kendo.

Michael Wiegand

Senior PPC & Analytics Strategist / a.k.a. Commander William Riker

Michael has been a PPC strategist at Portent for six years and has been in marketing his entire professional career.  Since Google Analytics came online, he has spent time learning every facet of it: how it works, how to customize it, how to utilize reporting features, and how to implement to any site you can think of.  Rumor has it that when he’s not awake using Google Analytics, he dreams about Google Analytics in his sleep.

With his expertise, experience, and facial hair, he has earned the rank of First Officer in our PPC crew.  He even has an old school poster of Riker from the 90s hanging on the wall behind his desk.  In addition to his duties in the fields of paid search and analytics, he is an avid fan of soccer and cigars (albeit he highly discourages smoking cigars while playing soccer).

Kiko Correa

PPC Strategist / a.k.a. Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge

Kiko came to Portent last year and has worked with paid search accounts for the past five years.  He is our go-to reference for using Excel to analyze click and conversion data.  He specializes in B2B paid search strategy, along with Facebook advertising.  Much like his character counterpart, he digs deep into numbers and formulas to get a full understanding of what’s happening with any account he works on.  He is, without a doubt, one of the best additions Portent has made since the formation of the PPC team years ago.

His Excel wizardry and ability to diagnose any problem in AdWords makes Geordi La Forge a perfect fit in our Star Trek hierarchy, although his glasses do not have the capability to analyze his surroundings in different light and energy spectrums.  In addition to his work at Portent, Kiko is an avid fan of alternative rock music.

Chad Kearns

PPC Essentials Program Manager / a.k.a. Lieutenant Worf

Chad started at Portent as an intern while still attending college.  After graduating, he was hired on full-time and was charged to develop a brand new program to manage small business AdWords accounts.  He quickly put together an ambitious plan to retain and manage large numbers of small business accounts in what is now Portent’s PPC Essentials program.

As you might have guessed, Chad’s specialty is small business PPC: accounts which have limited budgets and desire highly-specific targeting methods to ensure every dollar spent is worth as much as possible.

Chad’s reputation for not taking any nonsense makes Worf a more-than-adequate fit in our hierarchy, although he admittedly has not mastered the use of the bat’leth sword.  In addition to making small businesses very happy, Chad maintains his athletic prowess playing pick-up soccer.

Tim Johnson

PPC Strategist / a.k.a. Ensign Wesley Crusher

Tim was recently hired on full-time at Portent after spending months as a PPC intern.  Even though he’s not the intern anymore, Tim is still “the new guy” – relatively speaking.  His youthful ambition and the fact that we used to make him do a lot of grunt work makes Wil Wheaton’s character of Wesley Crusher a perfect fit for him.  Unlike Wil Wheaton, however, Tim does not wear a horse head mask while rooting for the LA Kings.*

*Seriously, look up Wil Wheaton’s Twitter account – this is a thing.

In addition to being Portent’s newest PPC strategist, Tim enjoys almost anything to do with Seattle sports teams.  And, unlike Michael, he fully endorses smoking cigars while playing soccer.

Ryan Moothart

PPC Strategist / a.k.a. Lieutenant Commander Data

That’s me – I’ve been a PPC strategist at Portent for almost three years and, like Chad and Tim, started as intern out of college.   I have experience in all types of paid search accounts (B2C, B2B, e-commerce, traffic generation, etc.) and am also certified in Google Analytics.  Much like my character counterpart, I’ve been told I have knack for spotting patterns quickly when working with data (no pun intended).  When Elizabeth and Michael are out of the office, I “have the bridge,” thus making Data a near-perfect fit for me in our awesome hierarchy.

In my free time, I’m an avid Seattle Sounders fan (yes – there is a soccer trend on our team as well, as much as Elizabeth makes fun of us for it).  I enjoy studying matters of politics and culture, having spent the past year researching and writing a personal project pertaining to such matters in the Pacific Northwest (or Cascadia, to use the region’s proper name).  And I’m a firm believer that U2 is better than the Beatles.*

*Deal with it.

We, ladies and gentlemen, are the PPC team here at Portent.  We’re nerds, we’re damn good at PPC, and we’re giant fans of Star Trek.  Well, most us are giant fans of Star Trek.*

*Chad is lame. Tim is also lame.

Thanks for taking the time to learn about us. Now, go form your own team hierarchies based on awesome TV shows.

The post Meet the PPC Team (Star Trek: TNG Style) appeared first on Portent.

In charge of building your first PPC account? Don’t have a lot of time or money to spend within AdWords? Well you came to the right place. Over the course of the next six weeks, Portent PPC Strategists Chad Kearns and Tim Johnson will be laying down the knowledge in a six-part blog series detailing best practices for setting yourself up for PPC success. Follow along to pick up tips on how to build your first PPC account like a PPC superstar.

Understanding how to setup the structure of your account is vital to PPC success. The account structure is the back bone of your account. Creating a layout with your initial campaigns and ad groups will not only keep your work organized and efficient, but will also help you balance your budget along the way.

Determining your Campaigns

First – a note on terminology. Google defines a campaign as “a set of ad groups that share a budget, location targeting, and other settings.”

Campaigns act as an overarching theme for a collection of ad groups; the makeup of your website’s navigation is a good place to look when building an initial campaign list.

Below is an example of a site navigation which lays out the breakdown of a site’s structure by the category of its products:

Using the red navigation example on the left, we want to breakdown our AdWords account into five separate campaigns – Steaks, Specialties, Gift Boxes, Gift Certificates, and Steak Spice.

Now that we have our list of campaigns mapped out, it’s time to determine the ad groups which will make up a campaign.

Shaping your Ad Groups

An ad group is a set of ads, keywords, and keyword bids grouped together under a common, more specific theme. Like campaigns, these ad group themes act as smaller subsets of our overarching campaign.

For the purposes of this blog series, we will continue to use our example from an online, mail-order steakhouse.

When traversing through the on-site navigation, visitors are provided a number of options to better direct themselves through the site. The following subset is displayed as you hover over the ‘Specialties’ section:

These individual products with distinct landing pages break down your list of ad groups. This same tactic can be used throughout the sites navigation to build out a complete list of ad groups.

Below is a quick chart displaying the overall look of your account structure after breaking down your list of campaigns and ad groups:

Once a structural plan is in place, it’s time to get to work and build your campaigns, ad groups, keyword lists, and ads.

Watch out next Friday for our next post on best practices for building your first PPC Account!

And feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments.

The post Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Account Structure appeared first on Portent.

I hate doing things twice. I also hate doing things by hand. When it comes to PPC reporting, there is nothing quite as cumbersome as recreating reports from scratch month after month.

Thankfully we have the tools available to us to make easy and effective automated reports a cinch. Assuming you have Excel, you’re pretty much set. Rather than duplicate our work every month, we’ll do the work once, and leave ourselves in the best position possible to simply update the data and get on to the analysis.

These principles can apply to any type of reporting, but we’ll be focusing on a Facebook report.

Step 1 – Create your reports

One of the keys to reporting with ease is using reports in their rawest, most standard form. Trimming data adds unnecessary manual labor that our computers can easily do for us.

For our example report we want to give our client an idea of the amount of traffic, Likes, and a couple of specific actions they’re generating on Facebook and how much they’re costing them. Since Facebook’s standard Advertising Performance report only gives you a sum of all actions together and we want data about specific actions, we’re actually going to be pulling two reports. If you want to save yourself some time and can afford to report on actions in general, you can actually avoid pulling a second report.

The first report to pull is the standard Advertising Performance report. We’re going to whip up some year-to-date numbers for the client. Set your time summary to monthly. You can go as deep or as shallow as you want with how you summarize your data – for our purposes, we’ll stick with the campaign level. And don’t worry: your hands won’t be tied if you decide to report by account later on.

Since we want to report on some specific actions, we’ll pull a second report, the Actions by Impression Time report. Same set up as before, monthly with a year-to-date timeline.

Export your reports and we’ll be ready to get started in Excel.

Step 2 – Create tables

The first key to getting our reports set up for easy updating is to put our data in tables. It’s really important to note that you don’t simply use manual filtering or naming ranges here, but an actual table. This is going to be key later on as we add data to our table and it automatically recognizes it as part of the table.

Go ahead and fix the ridiculous way Facebook formats the word “Date” and then make the table. As with everything in Excel, you have two options: I prefer either clicking the “New” button under the Tables ribbon, or simply selecting one of the table styles under the ribbon.

Now that we’ve made our table, let’s name it for good measure. Select a cell inside the table, go to the Tables section of the ribbon and click rename, and rename it something useful to you. I usually go with FBDATA. Remember no spaces and no numbers.

Repeat those last steps for your Actions by Impression Time table (I named this table ACTIONDATA) and we’ll be done making tables. You should end up with something along the lines of this:

Step 3 – Pivot away

We’re going to turn these two tables into three pivot tables that will seamlessly provide our customer with the data he needs.

Go into your FBDATA table, navigate to the Tables section of the ribbon and click “Summarize with Pivot Table.” Your data range should automatically populate, but if it doesn’t just type in FBDATA and you’ll be good to go. Put this pivot table on the report tab.

Before we go any further, make another pivot table using your FBDATA table and put it on the same sheet just to the right of the table. We’ll be back for that one later.

Let’s go to the Report tab and populate our first pivot table. Our client wants to see numbers on Clicks, Impressions, Page Likes, Page Post Likes, Page Post Shares, Spend, CTR, CPC, and CPL. Let’s make it for him.

For our rows we want to summarize first by Date, and secondarily by Campaign. If you want to report at the account level, include Date only. For our values first we’re going to drag Clicks, Impressions and Spend. Don’t forget to format your fields correctly as Sum and give them the correct number type (numbers, currency or percentages).

Now that you have those three, let’s work on the fields that deal with percentages and averages. You can’t get CPC or CTR numbers directly from your table because it will either sum them into a total, or it’s going to find the average of all your CPCs and give you an inaccurate number.

Next, select “Formulas” then “Calculated Fields” under the pivot table section of the ribbon:

Give your new field a name; I tend towards names like “Actual CTR” or something similar. In the formula bar we’ll actually input the fields we want the pivot table to go through.

Continue the process until you’ve got fields for CTR, CPC, and CPL. Even though it’s available here, we’re not going to include numbers on total page likes in this table; we’ll save those figures for the Actions table. Speaking of…

Lets make our next pivot table. Repeat your previous steps and populate the data from your ACTIONDATA table into its pivot table. We’re going to take a little bit of a different approach to building this one. It starts out the same with Campaign and Date as our rows. We are going to place “Action Type” as our column and “Sum of Actions” as our value. Since this gives us more info than we need, we’re going to filter our columns to only include Page Likes, Page Post Likes, and Page Post Shares.

Step 4 – Make it pretty

So that’s great – I gave you two discombobulated pivot tables and I said I was gonna give you a PPC report. We’re almost there.

First things first: let’s go back to that second pivot table you made from FBDATA. Select “Date” as your rows and “Clicks” and “Page Likes” as your values.

Click any cell inside the pivot table, go to the chart portion of the ribbon and select a column chart. You just created a chart that will automatically update stats as your pivot table updates. Move the chart onto the “Reports” tab and let’s start beautifying this lovely pile of pivot. You should be looking at something like this:

First, let’s make sure our two tables match up line for line. Do you have months with no action data? You may have to do some one-time manual labor. If you find you have any missing months, you’ll need to go to your ACTIONDATA table and input columns for each action you want to track for any month that is missing.

Make sure you input your date in the same format as the rest or you’ll end up with an extra entry. Copy and paste if you can. Add one column for each of your tracked actions (in this case three) and put as the total number of actions. This will give your pivot table something to latch on to. After you’re done, your pivot tables should match up exactly. That’s going to be important in a minute.

In my opinion, pivot tables look a little hokey in their native form. The nice thing is that there are a ton of options for sprucing them up. Choose a style that looks clean and professional and if applicable fits with the rest of your reporting. Lets also get rid of some of the extraneous formatting. We don’t want totals for columns, we don’t want triangles, and we don’t want headers.

After you’ve done that, take some time to go through your pivot table fields and rename them. I tend to replace “Sum of” with “Total” or “Average.” Don’t forget to do this on your chart’s pivot table too. I also decided that since my client only has one campaign, it would be redundant to include the campaign name and date. So I’m going to remove “Campaign” from my rows. So fresh and so clean.

This is purely a personal preference but on my chart I like to track page likes as a line rather than columns, and I like to track it on a secondary axis. I think it looks pretty so I’m gonna do it.

If you also want to do this, it’s pretty simple. I start by selecting “Total Likes” in the legend and then selecting the line chart type. Then I select the line, right click, and choose “Format Data Series.” Under the axis menu pick the option for secondary axis. Looking good.

It’s totally a personal preference thing for me, but I like having my chart up at the top with the client info; it gives them a clear picture right away. If you need to move your pivot table to make room, it’s really easy. Just highlight everything (including the blank filter bar at the top), and drag it with the hand cursor down to where you want it. You can also use the “Move” command on the pivot table section of the ribbon.

You’re so close to being done. Line up your two pivot tables so that the rows match and simply hide the space between them and the Date and Campaign names on your second pivot table.

How’s about that? You just made a year-to-date report with two sheets of data.

Hide those data tabs and send it off.

Step 5 – Update update update

Now this would kind of be a waste if this were a one-off report. But the beauty is that you just did the leg work for (roughly) the rest of your life.

Next month when reporting time comes again, pull those same reports. Copy and paste the data into your two tables (update the actions if you need). Now go to one of your pivot tables, go into the pivot table section of the ribbon, click “Refresh” and “Refresh All” and you’re done.

Seriously.

It probably took you longer to read that than it will take you to do it.

Enjoy.

Strange there seems to be a 30 year gap in my data…

The post An Easy Way to Automate Your Facebook Reporting Using Pivot Tables appeared first on Portent.

We’ve discussed it, talked about it, webinar-ed, convened around the water cooler, blogged and tweeted. Opinions are hot, high, frequent and mixed. One thing is for sure, it’s not going away.

Each time it seems as if the proverbial dust has settled, more about EC is announced.

Each week a Google webinar reveals a few more nuggets of information to be absorbed, processed and disseminated to teams, clients and execs through a J.J. Abrams-like lens flare blast of Google sunshine and rainbows. (I consider PPC marketers lucky to have a community with so many intelligent folks who can read between the lines, follow their investigative instincts, and take screenshots like there’s no tomorrow.)

But, as I said during the PPC Hero Webinar on Enhanced Campaigns:

It’s going to be OK.

It’s not pretty, but you know why there’s so much fuss, so many blog posts and tweets?

Because PPC marketers CARE

Genuinely, control-freakily care.

Not merely because Google has just made a ton more work for us all (which they did), but because overnight, they dropped a mega announcement that affects what many of us have spent anywhere from a few months to many years on – tweaking, optimizing and obsessing over paid search accounts.

Hours have been spent reporting, analyzing and discussing with clients and in house: preparing for seasonal highs and lows while searching for unique methods and tools to build ROI and lower CPAs.

It is this same pride that most PPC marketers take in their work, their fierceness to defend their clients against evil defaults and wasteful spend, that makes them the wonderful control freak, analytical, creative people that they are.

And you know what?

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

A PPC marketer that has that much passion, curiosity, skepticism, and conviction can manage my accounts any day.

I have a Carl Sagan quote hanging in my office for occasions such as this:

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas.

The rest of the quote follows.

Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.

On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.

Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future. And it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science.

And the same goes for PPC

Question the $40 billion dollar machine. They’re not fragile human beings or out to save the world. They’re a business – a for-profit, private business. They have a legal team, a board of directors and ridiculous resources. You won’t hurt them.

Test it. Try it. Make it work for you. Break it. Rave about it. Rant about it.

Repeat.

(Thanks, Dr. Sagan.)

The post Confessions of a PPC Control Freak on Enhanced Campaigns appeared first on Portent.

The Facebook Ads service got a lot more advanced these last few months with the introduction of a fancy new feature, Facebook Exchange (FBx), that expands the reach and custom targeting of their ads. FBx allows you to run real-time bidding and remarketing Facebook ads through one of their partner companies (AdRoll, AppNexus, Brandscreen, and Triggit to name a few).

A new spin on remarketing

Remarketing is nothing new. It’s a very useful marketing tool used to follow up with potential customers who didn’t make a desired action the first time they visited a site. By placing a snippet of code across your website, you can build up a list of users who visited your site and display ads to them later down the road.

The ability to remarket on Facebook is a game changer. The ads appear the same as normal Facebook ads but FBx allows you to create copy and creative targeted specifically at users who made an action outside of Facebook (i.e. a user visiting your certain page on your site).

I have been testing out FBx for the past few weeks using Portent as a guinea pig.

Consolidating remarketing campaigns with AdRoll

We were already using AdRoll to remarket for our PPC Essentials package so we used them for our Facebook remarketing as well. Having all of our remarketing campaigns in one place proved to be very efficient and allowed me to make a clear side-by-side comparison of Facebook vs. traditional remarketing.

AdRoll released a brand new UI in early February that allows advertisers to manage their FBx ads and user segments (target audience) with relative ease. AdRoll does charge a set-up fee but you can get a free trial by visiting their site.

My experience with AdRoll has been a good one. Their UI is highly functional and we have seen some promising numbers from our advertising efforts using FBx. The one drawback to AdRoll is that you have to contact a representative to make some in-depth changes to settings like ad frequency. This is only a mild setback, though, as it is very easy to reach their support staff via their onsite live chat service or by email.

Our FBx campaign is nearly identical to our general remarketing campaign that is showing ads all across the web. I have compared the success of these two campaigns and FBx comes away with a few solid wins.

Mainly, the FBx campaign has a CPC that is half that of the other campaign (roughly $2.32 as compared to the general campaign’s $4.30). The general remarketing campaign is winning on CTR by a small margin. Total click volume is very similar from campaign to campaign. The big win for FBx though is a conversion rate of 3.12%, 74% higher than the general campaign.

Is Facebook Exchange worth it?

Facebook has definitely hit the nail on the head with FBx. This is an amazing tool that gives advertisers the ability to reach a very specific target audience in a place with over 150 million unique visitors a month and 1 billion plus total users. If you are interested in seeing some more statistics for FBx, specifically through AdRoll, check out AdRoll’s blog and infographic with their analysis of the service (it is fairly biased but numbers don’t lie).

I highly suggest you give it a try and see how you can use it to your advantage. Remarketing is a great tool and remarketing through Facebook just makes sense.

The post How Facebook Exchange Worked for Us and Why It Could Work for You appeared first on Portent.

With all the talk about enhanced campaigns results in the last week—on PPC Hero, most notably—we were curious to see how they would fly with a well-known brand, both from a smartphone and tablet perspective.

A quick enhanced campaigns case study

The methodology:

• Chose 1 brand campaign, 1 non-brand campaign
• Established baseline of performance for 2 days with legacy device-specific versions of those 2 campaigns
• Migrated to enhanced campaigns for 2 days
• Used Google’s suggested mobile bid modifier
• Used same keyword lists for enhanced and legacy
• Set same keyword-level bids for enhanced and legacy
• Wrote same ad texts for both enhanced and legacy

The results:

Smartphones

• Brand smartphone CPCs fell by 11%—Good.
• Non-branded smartphone CPCs fell by 16%—Nice!

Tablets

• Brand tablet CPCs rose by 39%—ZOMGWTFBBQ?!
• Non-branded tablet CPCs rose by 9%—I can live with that.

Chart time!

Boom!

Caveats:

• This is just one vertical—competition varies by industry, so that may have factored in.
• I didn’t increase the budget in my non-brand enhanced campaign—this client allows us to spend unlimited amounts on brand, but has CPA expectations for non-brand that we couldn’t risk upsetting.
• Because of how recently this was announced, I didn’t have time to do same days of the week for this test, but that probably would’ve affected CTR more than CPC, if anything.

Early impressions of AdWords enhanced campaigns

Enhanced campaigns will legitimately help folks interested in running ads on smartphones, even with Google’s out-of-the-box recommendations for the bid modifier.

That’ll make it really, really easy for small businesses to adopt a mobile advertising strategy.

But, this appears to really ream all of us who got great performance with tablet-specific campaigns.

The big brands and power users will really feel this tablet CPC increase both over time and in the short term with literally no average ad position benefit that I could see.

So, tell me: Are you guys seeing the same thing?

The post Testing AdWords Enhanced Campaigns: Tablet CPCs Suffering Thus Far appeared first on Portent.