Archives for October 2012

Happy Third Birthday To PPC Ian

It’s hard to believe, PPC Ian is officially three years old! Back on October 29, 2009, I launched PPC Ian with a post about my Passion For PPC and SEM. Since then, it’s been three amazing, action-packed years of blogging all about paid search, especially careers in PPC. Today, I wanted to take a few moments to summarize the past few years and especially some recent highlights. Also, I wanted to take this moment to sincerely thank you, my readers!

Some Fun Statistics

Happy Third Birthday PPC Ian

Last year I started my blog anniversary post with some fun statistics. This year, I thought it would be fun to do the same. Following are some fun facts about PPC Ian over the past year:

293 posts (including this one) – Super excited that I’m posting more than ever before, one of my 2012 Goals
2.35 posts/week during the past year – My best pace to-date, I plan to keep a strong pace over the next year
2,311 comments – I cannot thank you guys enough for the valued questions, comments, and feedback
My top keywords: ppc interview questions, sem software, lending club strategy – I was especially surprised that my Lending Club posts gained so much traction and interest
My most-visited post: Quality Score Tips For PPC Landing Pages
A fun statistic in my personal career: I reached my lifelong goal of getting promoted to Vice President in March

Thanks To My Amazing Readers/Friends

PPC Ian has been an amazing vehicle to build long-lasting connections and friendships with my readers. Whether you are an occasional reader, and regular commentator, or the biggest PPC Ian fan around, I cannot thank you enough. I view the connections, networking, and friendships as one of the best byproducts of blogging. Some fun examples:

One of my top commentators became a personal friend. I was able to connect him with an SEM agency that was the perfect fit. My friend now works at that agency.
I developed friendships with a variety of SEM professionals shopping for the perfect SEM platform and/or the perfect SEM agency. I was able to provide sound advice and perspective to help fellow professionals make great decisions. At the same time, I got to learn all about a variety of different businesses and form long-lasting friendships. It’s a two way street!
Just in the last year, I spoke at Harrison Metal Capital, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and SV Forum’s CXO Forum. My blog has helped secure such opportunities by furthering my network.
PPC Ian helped me recently re-connect with some old friends who started an amazing SEM software company called InsideVault. Now, I have reconnected with my friends and they have decided to sponsor PPC Ian.
Friendships with big time domain name experts including Nima and Morgan Linton have given me strong expertise in the domain name industry. This has helped round out my online marketing toolkit.

Thanks To My Amazing Sponsors

I’m in a truly fortunate position with PPC Ian. I have personally hand-picked my sponsors and only work with companies I truly believe in. Whether we’re talking about one of my old-time sponsors like Kenshoo (one of the most amazing SEM platforms around) or one of my newer sponsors like AdMedia (your one-stop shop for all your online advertising needs), I have had the great fortune to work with truly amazing companies. These guys help pay for the costs of running PPC Ian and have provided a ton of the great content you find here.

I want to once again thank you! I truly appreciate your support and please don’t hesitate to reach out if I can ever be of assistance. If you have emailed me and I have not responded, please try again (sometimes I get super busy).

Want to learn more about the evolution of PPC Ian? Make sure to check out my first and second birthday posts.

Image of Happy Birthday © iStockPhoto – stuartbur
PPC Ian logo portion of image © PPCIan.com

The Power of Search and Display Advertising

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 28 0

Have you heard of Acquisio? They’re the performance marketing platform of choice for agencies. I’m a huge fan of Acquisio because they have an amazing platform and also because they truly “get it” when it comes to both search and display advertising. Their CMO, Marc Poirier, has been a search marketing conference speaker for as long as I can remember. And, he always has amazing presentations about display advertising (from which I’m constantly learning new strategies).

I’m a big fan of display advertising and view it as the natural extension of search engine marketing. Display has evolved tremendously over the years. It’s more measurable, more performance driven, and more like search than ever before. More than anything, display and search run in parallel help reinforce each other.

Today, I’m thrilled to share with you Acquisio’s brand new FREE eBook: Selling Display To Search Clients. If you work at an agency, this is a must-read eBook. I have worked with many agencies over the years and I always appreciate those agencies that understand both search and display advertising. However, even if you’re a direct advertiser, Acquisio’s eBook has equally valuable lessons. It will help you understand the value of display and implement a successful display program for your company. The situation of running both search and display is a true win-win for your company and your online marketing career!

Following are just a few of the exciting topics that are covered in Acquisio’s free eBook:

Display’s outstanding growth rate and it’s impact on search, with some really helpful statistics.
The current state of display advertising technology and metrics, the evolution of display into more of a search-type channel.
How you can achieve a lower CPA by combining your search and display efforts.
How to get started with both site and search retargeting, very cost effective advertising channels.
How display advertising (via branding) can generate incremental demand for your business.

Image in this post © Acquisio

Become A Search Engine Marketing Career Mentor

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 27 1

I’m a huge fan of the search engine marketing career path. My career in this great field has been so exciting that I decided to create this blog to empower professionals all over the world and share the excitement! One of my favorite parts of this career is giving back. I have benefited from great mentors over the years and feel strongly about the power of mentoring. Following are a few quick tips on how you can give back and help build SEM careers.

Which Way

Tip 1: Become a people manager. SEM is a fast-paced career path. It’s possible to get promoted and become a people manager quicker than many other careers, if you’re really great at what you do. The best managers are those who truly mentor and give back to their team. Set your sights on people management, not only as a way to grow your career but also as a way to mentor and give back.
Tip 2: Offer your time to help others. We’re all so busy these days and it’s super easy to get wrapped up in your day-to-day campaign management. However, don’t forget to take a step back and offer your time and assistance to others. A perfect example: I spent one hour on the phone today with a good friend I met at SMX. The purpose of the call: Sharing actionable career advice and tips.
Tip 3: Set up a PPC internship program on your team. No matter how good we are at SEM automation, there always exists some level of manual work in paid search. The solution: Why not hire an intern to help out and give your team more leverage? This is a rough job economy for fresh college graduates. A PPC internship program for college students can truly help you pass on valuable skills and give your intern the job experience they need!
Tip 4: Schedule lunches with others. In the paid search career path, it’s important to remember to take a step back. Make sure to schedule lunches with others. I’m talking about people on your team, and also people on other teams. Make friends and see how you can give back and help out. Such lunches are always a two-way street. Leverage the opportunity to build your own knowledge as well.
Tip 5: Invest in informal presentations. This tip ties into the last one. Consider presenting your knowledge and areas of expertise via brown bag lunches. This will help build your public speaking skills while presenting valuable insights to others.

Image of Which Way © iStockPhoto – wildpixel

Thoughts On Intraday PPC Bid Management

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 22 2

How often do you update your PPC bids on Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and your 2nd tier search engines? Monthly, weekly, or daily? How about intraday? Today’s post covers some of my high level thoughts on intraday PPC bid management. If you’re already bidding intraday or if you’re thinking about it, I hope this post helps provide a framework and some points to think through in crafting your advanced bid strategy.

Why Consider Intraday Bidding?

Intraday Bidding

Before you even start biding intraday, I recommend determining precisely why you want to bid intraday. Of course it’s super cool to say your bids are getting updated all day, every single day. However, above and beyond the coolness factor, what is your true driving force behind your intraday strategy? I can think of a few great reasons why you would want to bid intraday:

You sell a product that has diminishing supply over time. If you have no more widgets to sell, you definitely want to lower your bids (or even turn off certain keywords).
Your business experiences very strong intraday seasonality. A good example is a business that does a ton of sales via phone. If your call center is not running 24/7, you will most likely want to adjust bids down when your call center is closed.
You’re in a super competitive market and drive a massive volume of clicks. You have so much data that the predicted value of each keyword actually changes during the course of the day.

Intraday Bidding On A Keyword Level Requires Lots of Data

There are two really popular intraday bidding models. The first involves blanket level bid adjustments across all keywords. We’ll get into some of those tactics later. The second involves getting super granular and making keyword-by-keyword bid adjustments on an intraday level. This tactic makes a lot of sense when you do a huge volume and it involves an enormous amount of data. Why? Bidding decisions need to be based on statistically significant data. If you make bid adjustments based on limited, non-statistical data, you’re setting yourself up for poor bidding decisions. If you’re making intraday bid adjustments on a keyword-by-keyword level, make sure you have tons of data.

Also, consider bucketing your keywords. Perhaps you only adjust bids intraday on your highest volume keywords, while the other keywords fall into your daily or even weekly buckets. As a bonus tip: Consider layering both strategies mentioned here. Make keyword level adjustments where you have tons of data and layer on account level strategies to all keywords.

Consider Advanced Dayparting For A Higher Level Approach

Let’s say you have account-wide intraday trends that you want to capitalize on. Perhaps your conversion rates tank when your call center is closed? I highly recommend taking advantage of advanced dayparting as a simple strategy to adjust bids up (as a function of the base) depending on time of day. The important caveat here is to make sure the data you’re looking at is the same time zone as your search engine account. Another tip: Make sure the conversion data you’re looking at is not lagged. You want to tie the conversions back to when they started for this exercise.

Take Latency In Search Engine APIs Into Account

Intraday strategies can become quite complex. Let’s say you’re looking at keyword level data and are trying to forecast keyword level conversion rates or even keyword level margin. Such calculations require click and cost data from the search engines. However, APIs can be delayed. If you’re making intraday decisions, make sure you are looking at the right click and cost data. Build safety checks into your algorithm in case the data becomes delayed.

Integrate SEM Bidding Into Your Back Office Systems

If you’re selling products that sell out, you can take your intraday bid management to the next level by looping it into your back office inventory systems. Just imagine: Inventory is getting low and you communicate this information to your bidding platform. Then, you bid down accordingly (or even pause certain keywords). You definitely do not want to pay for traffic to a product that you cannot sell. This framework works for both physical products and also digital products (such as leads). For example: You sell leads and your clients have daily caps in place.

SEM Automation Platforms and Intraday Bidding

As a closing thought, the right SEM automation platform can make a tremendous impact on your intraday bidding strategy. If you’re serious about intraday bidding and it’s a critical part of your overall strategy, make sure to ask the search platforms all about it. InsideVault, for example, takes intraday bidding quite seriously and can educate you all about the topic and how their platform optimizes intraday bids. I’m the biggest fan of SEM automation around and it becomes super important when you get to this fine level of optimization.

Image of bid button © iStockPhoto – head-off

Google AdWords Launches Compare Dates Feature

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 19 1

Google AdWords now offers a new compare dates feature. Check out the screenshot to the right. Whether you are on the keywords tab, campaigns tab, or any other tab for that matter, you should now see the compare dates functionality. Today’s post offers some quick tips on getting the most out of the compare dates feature.

Using compare dates is quite easy. All you have to do is pull down the date selection menu and then opt into the compare dates by turning in from “off” to “on”. Next, you need to select how you want to compare dates. There are three options:

Previous Period – Looks at the number of days in your base date range and then selects the same number of days immediately prior to your base date range. Does not match up days of week. Just looks at raw number of days.
Same Period Last Year – Looks at the same calendar days from the prior year. Does not match up days of week, but compares the base range to the comparison range based on calendar days.
Custom – Compares your base range to any custom comparison range you choose.

Once you enter the comparison option, remember to click “go”. At that time, your graph/chart will update to include both your base range and your comparison range. When you mouse over the chart, you can see the data behind both date ranges.

Personally, I find the most value in the custom comparison. It’s really difficult in online marketing to compare two periods unless the days of the week match up. Why? Otherwise intra-week seasonality may skew the comparison. If you’re looking at much longer time periods (such as full months or quarters), you can look at calendar days. However, most of the time, I’m comparing same days of the week. As such, it’s all about the custom comparison. Check out the screenshot above. I’m comparing the same days of the week for 2012 versus 2011 leveraging the custom comparison.

To the best of my understanding, the custom comparison just updates the graph/chart at this time. I hope in the future Google AdWords extends this comparison to the grid view as well. Google has been innovating like crazy and it’s great to see new features like this, great work Google!

Image in this post © Google AdWords

A Great Week of PPC Networking

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 17 4

I’m a huge fan of networking, PPC-style. Building your career within pay per click is all about driving results. However, it’s also all about networking and building solid relationships. Because of the career benefits and also because it’s so much fun, I’m always looking for ways to network. Just last week, I visited the offices of InsideVault and also went on The Free COO radio show. This week, I focused on lunches!

I had two really great lunches this week. One was with my team and our good friends from Yahoo. We work with such bright and amazing people at Yahoo, they are true business partners and personal friends. I could not imagine a better team. Yahoo certainly has an amazing strength in account management, way to go Yahoo! My other great lunch this week was with my friend John Rampton, owner and blogger at PPC.org. PPC.org is a great blog about, you guessed it, PPC. John and I had a true blast and chatted all about our favorite topic, PPC. Both lunches were in downtown Mountain View, a really happening downtown for anyone in the online marketing or tech industry. My advice for anyone looking to grow their PPC career: Get out there and network! It’s all about the people.

Lunch With Our Amazing Yahoo! Friends

Yahoo Lunch Mountain View

Great Lunch With John Rampton From PPC.org

PPC Ian and John Rampton

Images in this post © PPCIan.com

Cross Channel Marketing eBook By Acquisio

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 16 1

I’m always blogging about SEM automation and SEM platforms here on PPC Ian. In the corporate world of SEM, the right SEM platform can truly transform your program. How can you get even more out of your SEM platform and overall SEM program? Great data integration and a solid cross channel marketing strategy. I personally view cross channel marketing as one of the most fundamental strategies within online marketing in 2012 and beyond. Today, I’m thrilled to share a can’t-miss eBook from our friends at Acquisio called Cross Channel Marketing: A Primer For Search Agencies.

While Acquisio’s eBook is targeted towards agencies, this eBook is truly relevant for any online marketer developing (or improving) their cross channel marketing strategy. Some of my favorite parts of Acquisio’s 8-page eBook include:

Learn the difference between multi-channel and cross channel marketing. Learn how you can take your multi-channel strategy to a true cross channel marketing strategy.
As an agency, learn how to navigate across different marketing channels with different stakeholders.
I’m a huge fan of retargeting. Retargeting is taking our industry by storm this year. Learn how retargeting is evolving in a cross channel context.
Learn about attribution paths and how to assign value to different touch points in your funnel.
Learn about the automation of cross channel attribution and how Acquisio’s tracking and attribution technology can help

There’s a lot of great information in Acquisio’s free eBook and I highly recommend downloading and reading it today! Thanks, Acquisio, for providing such incredibly helpful whitepapers and eBooks. You rule!

Introducing InsideVault SEM Automation

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 14 4

PPC Ian’s 3-year blog anniversary is coming up at the end of October. It’s only fitting that I lead up to my blog anniversary with a post about SEM automation, perhaps my favorite topic in our exciting world of online marketing. I like to think that PPC Ian is one of the best resources online when it comes to choosing the right search marketing platform for your needs. When I first started blogging about SEM automation, I wrote a post about Four Amazing SEM Tools. Since then, the world of SEM platforms has expanded even more! There’s so much competition, both in the world of PPC platforms and also in the world of SEO platforms (a topic I have not covered yet but plan to in the future). With competition comes better choices for online advertisers like you and me! Today, I’m thrilled to highlight a brand new SEM platform called InsideVault. Before we get into the actual post, however, I wanted to share a fun picture of yours truly and the InsideVault team!

PPC Ian Hanging Out With The Amazing InsideVault Team (and Justin Bieber)

We actually took this picture last Wednesday night when I visited the InsideVault office (in San Carlos, CA) on the way home from work. San Carlos is an awesome little city and a very central location on the San Francisco Peninsula to start a new company. When I arrived, I was greeted by my old-time friends, Guillermo and Brian. I worked with these guys back in 2004-2006 at Nextag.

Guillermo and Brian gave me a tour of their awesome office and introduced me to the team. I ran into several familiar faces there. What a fun blast from the past! Right from the start, InsideVault recruited the best of the best. It’s all about the people!

After the office tour, we hopped into the conference room and actually sat at a conference room table that used to be in the old Nextag San Mateo office. How cool! I do believe the old school table will bring InsideVault good luck. (At the same time, these guys are so awesome that they really do not need too much good luck.) My hosts graciously ordered in some amazing pizza for dinner and then gave me a demo of their product.

Now, I’m not going to lie. Before I even went to their office, I was a tiny bit skeptical. SEM automation is probably one of the most saturated and competitive markets within Internet technology right now. The competition is fierce and the amount of funding is huge. I’m talking about over $100 million worth of funding across all of the SEM platforms, if I were to throw out a conservative estimate.

However, my skepticism dropped the minute the team started demoing the platform. In short: I was 110% blown away and am a major believer that InsideVault is going to be one of the hugely successful SEM platforms. What InsideVault has accomplished in the last 1.5 years is truly unbelievable. I was dazzled!

I asked Brian, “Why did you guys go into such a competitive market?” The answer was simple: No matter how competitive, we can do better! Based on my several hour demo of the platform, I can see exactly what Brian was saying. In terms of features, I believe that InsideVault has one of the most advanced SEM bidding systems around. I absolutely love the bidding, the InsideVault team really hit the nail on the head. I also believe their cross-search engine campaign management is one of the best. I’m not going to get into too much detail here because I’m not sure how much I’m able to say and how much I’m not. What I do want to say is make sure to reach out to InsideVault. Whether you’re in the market for a platform or whether you already have one, you owe it to yourself and your company to stay on top of the latest trends and advancements. We’re in the early days of search engine marketing and the platforms just keep getting better and better! Make sure to stay on top of the trends and make the best decisions for you and your company.

Over the coming months, I’m going to be blogging more about InsideVault. I’ve got some exciting projects in the pipeline with the InsideVault team and will be providing some great coverage of the platform here on PPC Ian. Stay tuned and make sure to check out InsideVault today!

Check Me Out On The Free COO

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 12 3

Yesterday, I Was Live On The Free COO, my friend Donald Landwirth’s radio show. The Free COO is an awesome radio show on Spreaker offering business advice for entrepreneurs and small businesses. If you have been reading PPC Ian for a while, you may recall that I was live on The Free COO a few months ago (you can check out that episode here). Things went so well that Don invited me back for the 2nd time. In fact, I’m the first guest to come back to The Free COO for two shows!

On Air

I had so much fun, the show flew by. I couldn’t believe it, the show lasted 1.5 hours, but it honestly felt like just 1/2 hour. We chatted about all kinds of online marketing topics, including:

Careers in online marketing. Why the online marketing career path is one of the best careers around.
My top 3 tips for advancing your career in the corporate world of online marketing.
Trends with search engines in 2012. Focus on Google instant search and ad extensions.
Online marketing technologies and SEM platforms (one of my favorite topics of all time).
So much more. 1.5 hours of awesome content!

I want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank Don and Spreaker for having me on the show, again. It was a true honor. I’m a huge fan of Spreaker and highly recommend checking it out. It’s super easy to leverage the Spreaker platform to broadcast your own radio show. Or, you can just listen to existing radio channels. They even have an app so you can listen to Spreaker radio shows (and broadcast) on the go! You can listen to The Free COO featuring PPC Ian here. Thanks for listening!

Turbocharge Your PPC Beta Testing Initiatives

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 10 0

I’m a huge fan of beta testing. If you’re a large spending advertiser on Google AdWords, Bing Ads, or both, you probably have had (or will have) opportunities to get involved in beta tests. What are beta tests? They offer the opportunity to help search engines by testing brand new features before they get released to the public.

I have developed an entire strategy around beta testing and am thrilled that my good friends over at PPC Associates ran my guest post today about Getting The Most Out of Beta Tests. This post covers the basics of why beta tests are great and then goes into six specific beta test tips. The tips cover beta testing strategy and how to achieve the best possible results (both in the short run and long run). Moreover, the post covers ways to give back to search engines so you continue to get invited to exciting beta tests. I highly recommend checking out the post, it’s one of my best guest posts (in my opinion).

I wanted to sincerely thank PPC Associates for running my post. Their blog is amazing and is part of my daily reading. Make sure to head on over there and bookmark their blog. If you’re looking for an SEM agency, PPC Associates is one of the best so you will certainly want to reach out and schedule a consultation. Also, you may want to check out my other recent guest posts on the PPC Associates blog: