Archives for October 2012

LinkedIn Skill Endorsements & Your PPC Career

From a PPC career perspective, I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn. LinkedIn offers a great way to build your personal brand and obtain career opportunities. LinkedIn also offers a great way to give back and help out others! One of my original posts here on PPC Ian (and one of the really popular ones) is my post about Growing Your SEM Career With LinkedIn.

Today, I wanted to do a quick post about a brand new LinkedIn feature. LinkedIn now allows you to endorse skills. If you go down to the Skills & Expertise section of someone’s profile and click that little plus sign, you will endorse their skill. Check out the screenshot to the right, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. You may have already received a few emails about your friends and colleagues endorsing your skills!

I like this feature because it’s easy to use and fun. Personally, I think written endorsements are king. These are the original endorsements on LinkedIn that require a written statement/paragraph. They take a lot more effort to generate and mean a lot. However, as a way to supplement written endorsements, these skill endorsements are fun. I like to think of them as “micro endorsements”.

So, what’s my strategy when it comes to these skill endorsements. It’s really the same as my strategy for written endorsements: The more you give the more you receive. I try to help others by endorsing them for their best skills. In return, I have been organically getting quality skill endorsements. Really, LinkedIn is a great way to give back to the online marketing community. Get out there and use skill endorsements to thank others. Also, don’t forget to connect with me on LinkedIn!

Image of PPC Ian’s LinkedIn Skills Endorsement © LinkedIn and PPCIan.com (the PPC Ian logo)

Combining Ad Extensions For Optimal PPC Ads

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 7 3

A few years back, ad copy testing was all about optimizing your titles, description lines 1 and 2, and display URLs. If you were really savvy, you’d take things to the next level and write granular, custom ads for your account of tightly-themed ad groups. Today, however, ad copy testing has evolved. You still need to do all of the great stuff just mentioned, but now there’s a new dimension of complexity: ad extensions. Some of my personal favorite ad extensions: phone extensions, social extensions, and sitelinks.

Take a look at the awesome Nextag ad to the right. This ad appears when I search for their trademark, “Nextag”. I’m quite impressed to see three ad extensions showing up: sitelinks (six of them), seller/store ratings, and social extensions. The really key point here is all of the ad extensions are incremental. They do not cannibalize each other, but show up in parallel. This is what I call the “combined effect” of ad extensions and why they’re so critical to anyone’s paid search program. The more extensions you combine, the more presence you will have on the search results page. The net effect: higher click-through-rates, more traffic, and ultimately lower cost-per-clicks (since Google and Bing Ads reward those with high CTRs via lower CPCs). In 2012, ad copy testing involves all of the fundamentals but also a focus on combining multiple ad extensions for truly rich ad units.

Image © Google.com and Nextag

Click-Through Vs. View-Through Conversions

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 3 7

Running display campaigns and trying to understand their effectiveness? I’m betting there are two key performance indicators (KPIs) at the top of your list: click-through conversions and view-through conversions. Today’s post quickly defines the two and then offers some insights on understanding/valuing each.

Full Potential

Click-through conversions are king! They represent customers who actually clicked your display ad and then converted on your website. This is the exact same way most savvy marketers manager their pay per click campaigns on AdWords and Bing Ads. If your display ads perform from a click-through conversion standpoint (at or below your target CPA), you are golden. This is the way you should be measuring things because the ads inspired immediate action.

View-through conversions, by contrast, are a bit more fuzzy. These “conversions” mark customers who saw your display ad and did not click it directly, but navigated back to your site via another channel and ended up converting. One could argue that the display ad impression(s) helped inspire the eventual conversion. However, since there was no direct interaction with the ad unit, one could also argue that the conversions would have happened anyways.

So, how do you place a value on view-through conversions? First and foremost, try to drive click-through conversions and leverage that data as the primary reason to run your display campaign. However, let’s say you’re above your CPA target on a click-through perspective or simply want to help add more context around the value of your campaigns? I have two tips…

Tip one involves a little work. You will want to run two display ads 50/50. The first one is your normal ad. The second one should be a random public service announcement unrelated to your business. From a view-through perspective, which one performs better? If you can prove the first one (the ad for your business) drives more view-throughs, you have proven the power of view-through conversions for your business.

Tip two is a little easier. Sophisticated display advertising platforms allow you to look at view-through conversions by time elapsed since the display ad impression. Did the conversion happen one hour after the customer saw your ad? Or, did it happen seven days later? If you see that most view-throughs happen quickly after the customer sees your ad (versus after more time has elapsed), this helps prove the power of the view-through in assisting conversions.

Hope these quick tips help out and best of luck with your display advertising campaigns!