3 Gift Ideas To Give Your PPC Agency

If you celebrate Christmas, you've probably at least started your shopping by now. If you're looking for a gift to give your PPC agency, here are some ideas for you. Best of all, they're all free!

Tell them everything.

Your agency will have tremendous difficulty running a successful PPC campaign if you don't tell them what your business goals are. We've been surprised many times by our clients when they tell us that their #1 goal is something we're not even touching with PPC campaigns. While not everything is easy to promote in PPC, nothing is easy if you don't know what you're promoting.

Along the same lines, tell your agency when you make changes to your website. It's not uncommon for PPC managers to discover that the landing pages they're using for paid traffic all of a sudden don't exist anymore. Remember, you're paying for this traffic. If you're not going to keep your PPC agency in the loop, you may as well use your money to buy lottery tickets instead.

Take their recommendations.

You probably hired a PPC agency because of their knowledge and expertise in the field. You realized that they're experts in PPC, and you're not - so you've decided to pay them to put their expertise to work for you.

Ignoring your agency's recommendations is like ignoring doctor's orders. Sure, no one's holding a gun to your head to make sure you follow directions, but if you don't, things aren't going to get better. Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So if your PPC agency recommends changes to your campaign or landing pages, you'd be "insane" not to listen to them!

This doesn't mean you have to blindly do everything your agency says. But at least have a conversation about it. Talking things through and compromising is better than just blowing things off.

Respond to their communications.

Any PPC manager can tell you about the one client who never responds. Emails and reports go unread; voice mail messages go unreturned. We PPC managers are pretty good at keeping things rolling along with little direction - again, that's probably why you hired us. We pride ourselves on being able to manage your campaigns without needing daily direction from you.

All that said, we're not contacting you to chit-chat, and we're not spending hours producing reports to clog your inbox. The most successful PPC campaigns are born out of collaboration - back and forth conversations between agency and client. So if I've called you 4 times and you don't respond, or I send emails that never get a reply, it's hard for me to get the best results for your campaign.

Trust me - we PPC managers don't want to add to your workload. We understand that you hired us to take the burden off your shoulders. But success in PPC (or any marketing effort, for that matter) comes from collaboration and communication.

So take the time to share and respond to your PPC manager. Your bottom line will thank you.

Using AdWords Segments To Increase PPC ROI

Most of you are aware of the recent improvements to the Google AdWords user interface (UI), including the ability to run reports in the Campaigns tab. These are great time-savers for PPC managers. However, there's another new and little-known feature called "Segments" that can really take your campaign performance to the next level.

The Segment option allows you to review your campaign performance data in a number of ways:

* Network: Google Search, Search Partners, and Content.
* Click type: URL clicks or Click to Call.
* Device: Computer or mobile device.
* Experiment: Campaign Experiment results.
* Day: Performance by day.
* Week: Performance by week.
* Month: Performance by month.
* Quarter: Performance by quarter.
* Year: Performance by year.
* Day of week: Performance by day of week (Sunday through Monday), regardless of date.

All data is displayed for the date range selected in the AdWords UI. For example, if you've selected "Last 30 days" as the date range, segment data will display for that time period.

You'll find the Segment option just under the Campaign Management tabs (Ad Group, Ads, Keyword, etc.):


So, how do you make the leap from "interesting" to "actionable" when it comes to segment data?

Focus on Underperforming Campaigns, Ad Groups, or Keywords

Sure, you could slice and dice every possible data point in your account, but most of us don't have that kind of time. Instead, start at a high level.

Do you have one campaign in your account that's performing worse than the rest? Is one ad group falling behind the curve? Is there a keyword or set of keywords that are highly relevant, yet aren't converting? Start the segmenting process here.

Use Time-related Segment Data to Spot Trends

Let's say performance for one of your top ad groups has declined recently, but you're not sure when the decline began. Start with the "last 30 days" date range, and then segment the data by week. You may be able to pinpoint the week when things went south. You may even be able to associate a particular event that coincided with the decrease.

For example, one of our clients' PPC campaign results fell off the map over Labor Day weekend. We were able to use segmentation data to discover that performance was steady until Labor Day, when it fell off the map.

We then looked at segmented data for Labor Day 2009, and saw that performance fell off during that week last year, too. Based on this, we recommended staying the course with PPC, rather than making huge changes to ads and keywords.

Sure enough, performance rebounded a week later. Without segmentation, we might have made changes that we'd regret later.

Regularly Review Network and Device Performance to Find Under- and Overachievers

For some of our clients, the Search Partner Network performs better than Google Search. For others, it performs much worse. With the Segment feature, we can find this out in seconds.

The same thing goes for performance on computers versus mobile devices. Some of our clients get great results from mobile; for others, it's a waste of money. Again, we know in seconds which clients fall into which category.

Side note: It's a PPC best practice to use separate campaigns for computers and mobile devices. That said, serving ads on all devices for a short time acts as a test bed to determine whether it's worthwhile to set up a separate mobile campaign.

Review Day-of-Week Data to Find Under- and Overachievers

It takes a little more time to analyze day-of-week data, but it can pay off in a big way. Segmenting performance data by day of week can yield some shocking insight.

It's common for B2B advertisers to discover that weekends are a complete waste of PPC budget. Not only do the hottest prospects do most of their searching during the week, but most B2B customer service departments work normal business hours. So even if a hot prospect is searching over the weekend and finds your ads, they won't hear back from you for a couple days -- or, they may wait until Monday morning, do another search, and click on your ad again (doubling your cost per conversion in the process). If you're a B2B advertiser, look long and hard at the weekends to make sure you're getting your money's worth.

The same thing goes for B2C advertisers -- although the weekends may not be your problem. One of our clients advertises apartment rentals. Their worst day is Wednesday. It makes sense, if you think about it: people go look at apartments over the weekend, and follow up online Monday or Tuesday. Or, they start looking on Thursday and Friday for apartments to visit over the weekend. Wednesday is no-man's land -- and doesn't convert as well for the client.

Armed with this segment data, you can use Ad Scheduling to turn off your ads on days that don't convert well for your business.

If you haven't already tried the Segment feature, go do it now -- and watch your ROI increase!

This post originally appeared on Search Engine Watch on September 30, 2010.

Top 5 Free PPC Tools

It's December, and around the world the holidays are upon us. For many, the holidays bring a spirit of giving. In keeping with that spirit, I thought I'd list my top 5 favorite free PPC tools. Think of it as my PPC gift to you. (wink)

#1: Adwords Editor

Without a doubt, Adwords Editor is #1 on my list. All the other tools are, well, not useless, but much more difficult to put into practice without Adwords Editor. When I train new Fluency Media PPC staff, the first thing I have them do is "download Adwords Editor."

If you're new to PPC, or are a PPC Luddite, Adwords Editor is a downloadable application that lets you edit your Adwords campaigns offline. So if you're without an internet connection, you can still work on your campaigns, and then post the changes the next time you're connected.

Adwords Editor is also great for creating campaigns, copying campaigns, ad groups, or keywords, moving keywords or ads from one ad group to another, and making changes in bulk. It was originally developed as a tool for Adwords staff and was built off the Excel platform, so it has many of the features we all know and love from Excel, including find & replace, sorting, filtering, appending, copying….. You get the picture. I literally could not do my job effectively without this tool.

#2: Google Keyword Tool

While the Google Keyword Tool has undergone several recent changes, and is notoriously inaccurate at times, it's still my go-to tool for finding keywords. I like to start with the "website" feature, entering a URL and letting the tool tell me what keywords it thinks are relevant. Not only does this give you a lot of keyword ideas for your PPC campaigns, it alerts you to potential issues with the page that could negatively affect your PPC and SEO results. In other words, if you think the page is about one thing, but the keyword website tool tells you it's about another, you've got a problem - and you'll need to address it if you want to earn the best Quality Score and organic rankings.

#3: Acquisio Modified Broad Match Tool

I just discovered the Acquisio Modified Broad Match tool about 2 weeks ago, although it's been around since July. The guys at Acquisio are awesome - I consider Marc Poirer, their co-founder, to be a great friend in the SEM industry - and this tool is simply incredible.

Earlier this year, Google introduced Modified Broad Match and SEMs all said, "Finally!" It's long overdue, and is easy to implement if you're only modifying a couple of keyword or keyphrases. However, applying modified broad match to a long list of keywords is daunting. Excel's Concatenate function won't do it, Adwords Editor won't do it, and the thought of typing that "+" sign over and over is enough to make my stomach hurt.

Enter the Acquisio tool. Just copy and paste your keywords into the box, indicate whether you want all words modified or only specific words, and click "generate." Voila! It's that simple. I recently created a huge holiday campaign with several hundred modified broad match keywords in a fraction of the time it would have taken me otherwise, just by utilizing this tool.

#4: SplitTester and SuperSplitTester

If you're running ad copy tests (and you should be), you'll need a tool to tell you whether your test results are statistically significant or not. There are several good tools out there that fit the bill, but I like SplitTester and SuperSplitTester.

If you're just looking at one metric, i.e. CTR, conversion rate, or whatever, use SplitTester. Enter the number of clicks (for CTR) or conversions (for conversion rate) and the CTR or conversion rate percentage, and it tells you whether the results are significant, and at what confidence level.

SuperSplitTester takes it a step further and incorporates CTR, conversion rate, and cost per impression. It runs all those metrics through its super-secret algorithm, and tells you which variation will make you the most profit over time. We use this free tool for almost all of our clients' PPC tests, and the results speak for themselves.

#5: Twitter

Twitter? Yes, indeed - Twitter is one of my favorite PPC tools. It's not a tool like the other 4 I've listed, in that it doesn't take in data and spit out a result. Nonetheless, Twitter is my go-to place when I'm having a PPC problem that I can't solve, or when I want to get quick feedback on something. It's also become my news reader: I get breaking PPC news from Twitter before I see it anywhere else, and it aggregates everything into one place. Not only is it a great way to keep up with friends in the industry, it's really become a valuable PPC tool.

Bonus Tip:

Since I'm feeling especially generous, here is a bonus tip: My good friend Alex Cohen from ClickEquations wrote an article for Search Engine Watch not long ago on 43 Paid Search Tools. It's long, but as always, highly educational. Check it out!