Archives for 2012

Cross Channel Marketing eBook By Acquisio

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!

Image of cross channel marketing eBook © Acquisio

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!

Image of PPC Ian and InsideVault © PPCIan.com

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!

Image of On Air © iStockPhoto – DSGpro

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:

Image in this post © PPC Associates

LinkedIn Skill Endorsements & Your PPC Career

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Oct 9 4

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!

Image of Full Potential © iStockPhoto – iqoncept

Social Media: Kenshoo’s Exciting New Whitepaper

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Sep 30 2

I’m a huge fan of SEM platforms and you’ll often find me blogging about them. One of my absolute favorite platforms, Kenshoo, has been publishing some seriously amazing whitepapers. A while back, I reviewed their Best Practices For Bid Management whitepaper, one of my all time favorites. If you haven’t read that one, I highly recommend it Today, I’m thrilled to review Kenshoo’s new FREE whitepaper: 2012 Social Media Advertising Global Games.

With the IPO of Facebook, more companies than ever are thinking about how they can best advertise on Facebook and other social engines. If you operate a global marketing program, the questions become especially complex. You may be asking yourself, “In which country should I start?” Perhaps you’re wondering, “Where can I get the best results for the lowest cost?”

Kenshoo’s brand new whitepaper answers these questions and so many more. It’s a really fun whitepaper that compares Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States across a variety of “games”. The specific games include:

Event 1 – Marathon – CPM
Event 2 – 100 Meters – Average CPC
Event 3 – 200 Meters – Average CTR
Event 4 – Archery – Frequency
Event 5 – Football – Exposure Rate
Event 6 – BMX – Maximum Recommended Bid

For each event, Kenshoo’s whitepaper shows the gold, silver, and bronze medalists, in addition to providing insights and helpful charts/graphs. At the end of the whitepaper is a neat “Closing Ceremony” that shows the overall winners. I particularly like the closing ceremony because it outlines the best global opportunities for Facebook advertisers. Whether you’re a large global advertiser, a single-country advertiser, or an affiliate marketer, Kenshoo’s whitepaper is truly invaluable and will help you prioritize your efforts and understand what to expect. Thanks, Kenshoo, for another amazing whitepaper!

Marin Masters San Francisco Rocked

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Sep 27 1

Today, I attended Marin Masters San Francisco 2012 conference, hosted by SEM platform Marin Software. The conference was amazing, the can’t miss San Francisco SEM event of 2012. Today, I’m thrilled to share my recap of Marin Masters.

PPC Ian and Peter From Marin Software

Some quick background… I attended Marin Masters two years ago. I had an outstanding time, but last year I unfortunately missed the conference (I had a big presentation/event at work that day). I was really sorry that I missed it so this time I was sure to save the date months in advance. I am sure happy I was able to attend this year! It was an action-packed conference, one of the best ever.

Hosted at the W Hotel in San Francisco, the venue was amazing. Marin went all out. They reserved a huge room and the attendance was really impressive (it was packed). It makes perfect sense: San Francisco is the online marketing capital of the world and $4 billion worth of online marketing spend is managed via Marin. Marin has a huge family and a world of supporters, power users, and enthusiasts (including me)! This was the place to be. They had free drinks there and truly did an outstanding job from all aspects. They even raffled off a free Xbox Kinect.

After arriving, I networked with the other attendees and friends from Marin Software. It’s such a small world, I ran into so many good friends. What a great industry! After networking a bit, the conference started. Both Marin Software employees and clients spoke. My friend Matt Lawson, VP of Marketing at Marin, introduced the event. He even gave a shout out to me, PPC Ian, and people started cheering. What an honor and fun experience! (Check it out, I’m On The Marin Homepage.)

During the presentations, I listened very closely. I was especially impressed by the Experian presentation. Experian’s head of online marketing spoke all about mobile marketing and had some true insights about campaign structure, landing pages, and going after new opportunities. Yahoo! sponsored the event and also had an amazing speaker. Marin’s head of product management spoke all about the latest and greatest features, focusing on ways to save time each and every day. All of the speakers were truly great, they really went all out. In just three hours, I learned invaluable paid search tips/insights and also strategies for leveraging Marin to the next level.

After the conference, I enjoyed several hours of cocktails and appetizers. The drinks and food were amazing. The company was even better. I had so much fun chatting with friends, both new and old. If you’re running big online marketing campaigns, I highly recommend auditioning Marin. They are truly amazing. Thanks Marin for the great Marin Masters conference, I can’t wait until the next one!

An Introduction To Remarketing

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Sep 26 5

I recently reviewed an awesome PPC Associates eBook about going after the Wide Tail of SEM (I highly recommend reading it). One of the themes of the wide tail is going after all channels within online marketing. One exciting channel, display, has a really cool tactic known as remarketing, also called retargeting. Today, I will give a quick introduction to remarketing and how you can get involved in this exciting marketing channel.

What Is Remarketing?

Target Market

The concept is quite simple. Let’s say a customer comes to your website. They look around a bit (and maybe even place some items in their shopping cart). However, they leave without buying anything. This is a highly qualified customer. They were so close to making a purchase, but weren’t quite ready. Perhaps they wanted to do more research. Perhaps they didn’t have their credit card on them. Perhaps they were just not ready to buy.

Before the invention of remarketing, you had no easy way to reach out this customer, unless they had created and account on your site (entering their email address). This is quite unfortunate because marketing costs money. You paid to get that customer to your site, but they left without making a purchase. Remarketing changes all of this. All you have to do is place remarketing pixels on your website. Then, you can target those customers who visited your site without converting, via display advertisements across the Internet. Let’s say someone who visited your site without converting is browsing the Yahoo! homepage or perhaps CNN. Your remarketing banner could show up, entice them to click through back to your site, and then convert!

Remarketing Is Getting More Sophisticated

A few years back, remarketing was relatively simple. You didn’t have a ton of options. However, these days things are evolving quickly. Because of the quick evolution, I recommend working with a company such as AdMedia that can help you with strategy (make sure to check out their Remarketing Advertising Solutions). How is remarketing getting more sophisticated? I see a few trends.

First, more and more platform options exist. There are a sea of remarketing platforms. I recommend auditioning them all and then choosing the one that meets your needs the best.
Second, people are now leveraging more inventory sources than ever before. I’m talking about RTBs, directly negotiated inventory, and big display networks such as the Google Display Network (GDN). More remarketing sources means more inventory and more options to connect with your customer.
Third, I see the creatives getting more complex and more dynamic.
Fourth, I see remarketing platforms embrace sophisticated bidding algorithms. This is right up the alley of the PPC pro who is used to a platform like Marin Software, Kenshoo, or Acquisio.

When you get into remarketing, make sure to take your time to pick the right vendor and craft a comprehensive strategy. Really think it through.

A Cost Effective Strategy

Results really differ by company. However, from auditing the industry and speaking with those who run remarketing campaigns, I generally hear good things about this marketing strategy. One word of caution: Don’t measure the results of your display and remarketing campaigns based on “view through” conversions. It’s always better to use click through conversions. If remarketing works on a CPA basis for you on a click through basis, you have a brand new marketing channel that will help raise your site’s conversion rate. You will target those customers you already paid to attract to your site, via marketing dollars. Remarketing is your tool to get the most out of your overall marketing dollars. Have you tried remarketing yet?