PPC Associates Must-Have 2013 Facebook Ads Guide

I’m a huge fan of PPC Associates Digital Marketing Agency. I’m personal friends with their co-founder and CEO, David Rodnitzky. I’m also great friends with their several other team members at PPC Associates including Hillary Read, their Director of Marketing. I truly appreciate their breadth of experience across all channels of digital marketing. I also truly appreciate the fact that they know how to market their own agency, the sign of a truly passionate marketing team. As just one example: PPC Associates runs one of the greatest digital marketing blogs on the Internet.

Today, I wanted to share with you the brand new PPC Associates 2013 Guide To Facebook Advertising. I thought it would make perfect sense given that Facebook just announced their second quarter earnings and beat estimates handsomely (thanks to digital marketing professionals like you and me). Right now is the time to advertise on Facebook, and PPC Associates is there to guide you every step of the way with their free tutorial.

I really like this guide, and here’s why:

It’s jam-packed with 24 pages of free insights.
It talks about all the possible objectives of advertising on Facebook. Facebook is a lot different than traditional search marketing. Perhaps you’re looking to drive brand awareness. Perhaps you’re looking to generate likes. Perhaps you’re looking to drive direct response conversions. PPC Associates covers all of these objectives, and discusses the different types of ads and how they relate to each objective.
PPC Associates goes into incredible detail to educate the reader about all types of Facebook ads. I’m talking about marketplace ads (marketplace standard ad, marketplace event ad, marketplace like ad, and marketplace application ad), sponsored stories (page likes, check-ins, and page posts), mobile advertisements (mobile sponsored stories, mobile promoted posts, mobile page posts, and mobile app install ads), premium ads (photo, video, question, status, event, link, app ad, video app ad, standard ad, and video standard ad), sponsored search results, and Facebook Exchange Ads (FBX). Wow, that was a looooong list! I wanted to list it all out, however, to show you the comprehensiveness of this great resource.
This guide also dives into a ton of other topics: targeting options, custom audiences, metrics, and more.
It’s written in a logical, easy-to-follow format. It’s a true reference that you can share with your entire team.

When it comes to digital marketing, I really enjoy learning from agencies. They get to see so much, across so many different verticals. PPC Associates’ amazing wealth of knowledge comes through in their guide and I highly recommend downloading your free copy.

Image in this post © PPCAssociates.com

Empower Your Team & Help Build Careers

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jul 19 3

It’s a ton of fun to empower and help others! Whether you directly manage a team and/or indirectly manage others on large-scale projects, you are in a great position to empower and build careers. By doing so, you are not only helping out but also optimizing results for your entire organization. A happy team is a learning, growing, productive, and powerful team. Following are a few great tips for empowering and building a world-class team! These tips not only apply to digital marketing but really any team.

Building Careers

Treat your team like family. Plan a lot of fun team-building events. The results from a team are truly greater than the sum of the team’s members. By fostering an amazing team environment, the results are even more amplified. I’m particularly impressed with InsideVault SEM Platform as a case study. Check out their Facebook Fan Page. These guys have incredibly clever and fun team building events regularly. Some recent examples: Beer tasting, team lunches, Jamba Juice day, outdoor movie night, birthday celebrations, team BBQ, movie day (team offsite to local movie theater), and so much more. InsideVault is a true family and that culture has yielded staggering results. They have built one of the most amazing digital marketing platforms around.
Truly care about your team and others. People can tell when you care. People appreciate when you care. At the end of the day, a team’s success is driven by passion and energy. You will energize your team when you truly care and are there to help and grow careers. This tip comes down to values. When it comes to having amazing values, there are few teams like the Rocket Clicks SEM Agency team. My good friend Steve Kroll along with other senior leaders at Rocket Clicks have fostered a truly inspiring environment of values-driven business. Focus on that core value of helping others (both at your company and externally) and you will build an amazing organization with flourishing careers!
Delegate like crazy! In a fast-paced field like digital marketing, everyone needs to scale and grow, rapidly. Keep empowering your team by delegating challenging, new work. This is a super way to grow careers by stretching everyone to learn new, exciting things. Similarly, embrace new work! Proactively look for new and exciting opportunities for yourself and your team. It’s an ever moving continuum and when the conveyer belt stops, the empowerment can leave. Keep things exciting and interesting by stretching yourself and your team members on a daily basis.
Share everything you know. Be a sponge for information. I’m talking about high level company strategy, industry trends, and overall technology news. Foster an environment of sharing. The more knowledge we share, the quicker our team grows.
Celebrate Success on your team. Be your team’s greatest cheerleader. There are many ways to celebrate success, just don’t forget to do so.
Foster a high-performing team. Is your team a team that works really hard, delivers results, and gets a ton of respect from your overall company? If not, get out thre and make a change! It’s incredibly motivating to work for a highly-visible team.

I like to track career progression on my team as a barometer for my team’s success and contribution. Everything is aligned. When those on your team are achieving career success and progression, you know that your team is delivering results for your organization and that you have an empowered and high-performing team!

Image of Building Careers © iStockPhoto – donskarpo

Lunch With Top SEO Agency AdLift

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jul 16 0

In the world of digital marketing, it’s all about networking. Your network is important for so many reasons. Just a few: finding opportunities, hiring great marketers for your team, collaborating/learning new things, and hiring a world-class agency. In addition to all of this great stuff, your network will allow you to find ways to collaborate and give back to the industry.

I’m a real fan of attending search marketing conferences for the purpose of networking. Recently, I attended Search Insider Summit where I met the amazing AdLift team – Prashant (CEO) and Johnny (Director of Business Development). AdLift is a top SEO Agency. I’m super impressed with them and so are their clients such as Comcast, PayPal, and at&t interactive.

Today, I had a blast having lunch with Prashant and Johnny at Chef Chu’s in Los Altos. We talked all about digital marketing, SEO, and life. I picked up some great insights into the SEO industry from the true experts. I also enjoyed sharing some insights about the paid side of things. AdLift, thanks so much for the great lunch. PPC Ian readers: Get out there and network! And, if you’re looking for an SEO agency, check out AdLift. Their resume is truly impressive, and they are absolute experts at enterprise-level SEO.

Image of AdLift Lunch © PPCIan.com

My Favorite PPC Landing Page Tips

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jul 13 4

I’m a huge fan of PPC landing pages! Landing pages are the “on-page” side of pay per click marketing. In the world of SEO, there have always existed both on-page and off-page strategies. Savvy SEO marketers invest a ton of time, both on-page and off-page. PPC, historically speaking, has been more focused on off-page elements (managing campaigns in Google AdWords and Bing Ads). However, I’m here to challenge the norm! I personally recommend that PPC marketers focus a significant amount of time on on-page optimization (landing page optimization). Following are some of my favorite PPC landing page tips.

Landing Pages

Invest in a landing page platform, such as ion interactive. It’s so much easier to build, test, and manage landing pages with a cutting edge platform like ion. Think about the parallels with SEM bid management platforms and how difficult the bidding process is in Excel versus a cutting edge platform. Same goes for landing pages! An added benefit for agencies: Have your client place a landing page platform on their site. This will give the agency control over both campaigns and customer experience! It’s a huge challenge for agencies to have influence over on-site user experience. Landing page platforms bridge that gap.
Stay consistent with your company’s brand guidelines. If brand guidelines don’t exist, develop them yourself by interviewing influential members of your organization. I’m a huge fan of consistency. You want to go big and test big, however you want to also stay very true to your company’s overall brand image. The user experience should never be jarring to the consumer. Even though you manage landing pages and your PM team manages your website, it should all flow the same.
Consider dynamic elements on your landing pages. It’s all about personal customization. Maybe have prices/offers relevant to the geography of the visitor. Perhaps you know a bit about the customer from their past browsing behavior on your site and you present a custom offer/package. Maybe it’s as simple as analyzing the search query in real time and offering up a landing page relevant to that specific search query. The opportunities are endless. A well designed SEM account will always have granular, tightly-themed adgroups. Make sure your landing page strategy follows accordingly.
Consider going beyond a simple landing page, and create a landing page minisite. SEM landing pages are focused. It’s all about making it easy for the consumer. Minisites are awesome because they allow you to get all of that additional information in there without distracting the core flow.
Landing pages don’t just have to be one page. In addition to minisites (see last tip), consider taking more of the flow under your control. If your site offers an API or another means of deep integration, consider hosting/managing the first few pages of the flow as part of your landing page experience optimization. The deeper you can go in the funnel, the more opportunity you have to test and improve conversion rate. Important tip: Make sure you work closely with your PM team and are on the same page.
Building upon the last part of the last tip, share your success stories across your company. Your learnings from PPC landing page optimization have direct impact on other areas of your organization. Offer up your channel as a testing ground. I love digital advertising because you can learn so much so fast. Make sure the landing page part of your program is treated the same, it’s a testing ground for quick learnings across your organization.
Don’t forget retargeting. Make sure your retargeting pixels are placed on your PPC landing pages (and across your entire website). I’m particularly a fan of retargeting PPC traffic because PPC tends to be one of the highest converting and most valuable sources of traffic.

How are you leveraging landing pages in your digital marketing program?

Image of guy looking at landing pages © iStockPhoto – Silent47

Acquisio Innovates With Their Bid & Budget Algos

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jul 7 0

I’m such a fan of Acquisio. These guys have built one of the most amazing performance marketing platforms in existence, one of the most popular for both agencies and direct advertisers. Back in April, I attended ad:tech SF and met with the Acquisio team. It’s there that I first learned about their new bid and budget management algorithms. Since then, they have fully released this new functionality, along with some amazing public case studies. Today, I wanted to take a quick moment to share their new enhancements, and then encourage you to head on over to Acquisio and arrange a demo!

With their new bid and budget management enhancements, Acquisio is upping the game when it comes to digital advertising. The three biggest highlights in my opinion:

Bids are now updated every half hour! Most bid management platforms these days update bids daily. Imagine how much more efficiency is possible when you’re updating bids every half hour, based on intra-day data! The BBM algorithm is the brainchild of Acquisio’s Science Ops acquisition, an algo company that was working with NASA.
Budgets are updated throughout the day based on intra-day performance. Great performing campaigns have an opportunity to scale and spend more money, low performing campaigns get throttled down. Budgets are shared across your suite of campaigns.
Acquiso BBM is fully compatible with all other bid management platforms, and is technology that sits outside of the core Acquisio platform. Therefore, even if you are in contract with another automation platform and are not able to move over to Acquisio, you can still leverage the BBM technology.

Already, Acquisio BBM has driven incredible results. I encourage you to check out the Strathcom Media case study. Strathcom experienced twice as many clicks after implementing BBM in most cases, and experienced tremendous improvements in budget management.

I’m personal friends with Acquisio EVP and Co-Founder Marc Poirier. I’m really thrilled with their new BBM technology, and feel that it’s a major innovation in our industry (one of the biggest of 2013). Way to lead us forward, Acquisio!

Image in this post © Acquisio

My Long Weekend Musings, 4th of July Style

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jul 4 1

Happy 4th of July to all my US-based readers! Happy Friday/weekend to everyone else! I wanted to take a moment here to share some fun musings, an idea originally inspired by my good friend Morgan Linton, domainer, entrepreneur, and awesome blogger who inspired me with the weekend musings idea. Let’s jump into this long weekend’s musings…

4th of July Fireworks

Search marketing swag is awesome! I have accumulated a ton of swag over the years, and have started a fun new experiment on Facebook and Google+ where I share my “Search Engine Swag” of the day. Make sure to follow PPC Ian on Facebook and Google+. My first Search Engine Swag is my cool Yahoo! basketball. Honestly, Yahoo! has some of the best account management in existence and our AM team always thinks of us. When I’m pondering big new ideas, you can often find me bouncing my Yahoo! basketball. I’m not going to add new swag every single day but you’ll find me posting cool new items every few days. Do you have a favorite piece of Search Engine Swag?

I’m so excited for the long weekend. I have a long four-day weekend here and I’m totally thrilled. I’m taking time to really enjoy the weekend with my amazing wife, Nicole. We both work super hard and are thrilled for some time off. I know the folks on my team and pretty much everyone I know in the digital marketing industry works incredibly hard (that’s you). Make sure to take it easy this long weekend! And, make sure to say thanks to everyone who has made our country so special, we are truly fortunate.

Make sure to thank great people in the digital marketing industry. Do you have a partner or vendor who treats you well? Take a few minutes to write thank you emails. Maybe call them out on Twitter. Make sure the thank you emails and words of praise go to your day-to-day rep and also the senior leaders. Call out success and make others look good. If you pause and take time to celebrate the success of others, you will make someone’s day each and every day. What’s better than that?

I’ve been in the digital marketing game since 2004, loving every step of the way. I was discussing with a co-worker on Friday that I’ve now been doing digital marketing for longer than I was in college and high school combined. That’s almost unbelievable, it’s gone by so fast. Digital marketing is intense, never forget that this is your life. Take it all seriously, but never forget to have fun each and every day. Never forget to force everyone on your team to have fun each and every day. As a leader at your organization, you have the opportunity to add great value and impact not only to careers but lives as well.

Treat your team at work like family. You are there to empower and uplift others. Likewise, look to your team for strength and motivation. The power of a team is so much greater than the sum of the parts. Find ways to build an incredible presence of strength, confidence, and results as a team. Digital marketing, at an enterprise level, is definitely not a solo sport.

That’s all for today everyone. Wishing you a fun, happy, and safe 4th of July. I truly appreciate your support!

Image of 4th of July Fireworks © iStockPhoto – triggermouse

13 Lessons Learned As A Blogger

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jun 30 7

I can’t believe it! I’ve been blogging here at PPC Ian since October, 2009 – that’s a long time. I truly enjoy blogging. It has been quite the amazing journey, and I have learned so much over the years. I originally got into blogging to empower and educate others. However, I also always had the sub-goal of learning all about this wonderful medium and rounding out my own portfolio of skills as a digital marketer. Following are some of the lessons I have learned over the years as a blogger.

Blog Lessons

Get out there and do it, it’s totally worth it! You can learn so much by creating your own blog. It’s not the same reading and attending conferences. When you get out there and invest in your own blog, you learn so much. I can’t believe how much this blog has taught me over the years… I have learned lessons first hand from PPC Ian readers, lessons about SEO, and so many lessons about the technicalities of WordPress.
Try not to multitask while blogging. I cannot tell you how many posts here on PPC Ian I have written while watching TV. It always takes twice or three times as long to write and review a post that way. Focus is so important when writing quality content, and optimizing your own time. Sit down to write your blog posts. Then, go watch TV later. You will enjoy both activities more. Note: I have had a great experience listening to music while blogging. Music is not distracting, but can be very helpful to your blogging experience.
Don’t always blog from the same location. Go to Starbucks, sit at your desk in your home office, sit outside on your patio – change it up! You can get so much inspiration by just moving around. This creates energy, new ideas, and better content.
When you’re on a roll, keep going. Today, for example, I just published a post but am now writing another. Tonight, I may write another. When you’re on a roll, you need to keep going. Great content comes in waves and it’s ok to write a backlog of posts and save them for the future.
Make the most of weekends. We work so amazingly hard as digital marketing professionals. Weekdays after work should be reserved for family, exercise, eating, and fun! I try to get up early on weekends and write a few posts in the morning. This is always a more powerful and positive experience.
Keep it going at all costs. This point almost contrast with the last one and separates the real leaders apart. Really, this comes down to work ethic. Blogging is a tremendous investment. Once your blog is going, your readers count on you. Don’t let them down. Keep going. Don’t have a post? You will need to stay up late or get up early to get that post out. However, I highly recommend the tips above to avoid this last minute type of situation.
Build amazing partnerships with your sponsors. Sponsors are the lifeblood of your blog. They help pay the bills, they can help with content ideas, they can help provide content (guest posts, eBooks, whitepapers, and more), and they can help motivate you to keep going (really it is all about the people, in my opinion). Take your sponsors seriously and give them the best partnership experience ever.
Invest in your top advocates. Over time, there are certain people who will frequently comment, like you in social media, email you ideas, and more. Invest in these key influencers. They are your best friend and can help you so much. I can’t thank my top readers/advocates enough, you guys are the best!
Blog because you are passionate and love what you do. Money comes second. It is not easy to make money blogging and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for the money. Of course, that can be a longer term goal and something to aspire towards, but always remember your passion and why you started (you need a higher value purpose than money).
Keep innovating. Just like paid search, blogging changes ever single day. The only constant is change. Don’t be stagnant. Stay on top of SEO, blogging, and social media trends. Incorporate all the great new stuff into your strategy.
Take your blogging education back to your company. Blogging will make you a well rounded marketer. You will learn so much that could help your company grow. Keep learning and share your lessons at work!
Set yourself up for a blogging vacation form time to time. Get a large backlog of posts, auto schedule them, and then kick back! Everyone deserves a break.
Let your personality come across. Blog about your personal life. Share pictures. Readers want to get to know you as a person, in addition to reading your analysis and insights.

Getting More Digital Marketing Budget

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jun 27 1

Do you run digital marketing programs in a corporate setting? Chances are you have a set budget for your campaigns. Typically, companies will allocate budget across different marketing channels and divisions. As digital marketing professionals, the trends are in our favor! Budgets tend to increase year after year for performance marketing channels such as PPC, display, and social media because these channels perform.

Today, I wanted to share a guest post I just wrote for the PPC Associates Blog. My guest post is all about Building Your Case For A Bigger Digital Marketing Budget. When you’re in the world of digital marketing, bigger budgets makes natural sense. However, in a competitive situation where all departments/divisions are competing for limited budgets, you need to provide a solid case for your channel(s). My guest post outlines some of my favorite strategies for doing so.

I have had a true blast writing guest posts on the PPC Associates Blog. After reading this one, you may want to also check out some of my other recent ones. I hope you enjoy!

Why PPC Is The Best Media Channel

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jun 22 1

As a corporate PPC leader, it’s your job to do what’s best for your company. In my opinion, that’s typically securing more budget for PPC and building enthusiasm for this amazing media channel. For many companies, PPC is going to be one of the best (if not the best) media channel. Of course, all of the below requires an incredibly talented and dedicated team because PPC is a 24/7, incredibly complex marketplace. We never sleep! So, make sure to hire the best and brightest in-house marketers and agencies. Here are some of my favorite reasons why PPC rules.

PPC Click

PPC drives results. By results, I’m talking about scale and also ROI. As compared to other media channels, PPC is one of the best performing, if not the best performing. It takes time to fully optimize, but a savvy search marketer and/or agency managing paid search for a great brand/product will be able to drive great ROI quicker (and of greater extent) than other channels.
PPC is instantaneous. No need to wait. Want to test a new concept? You can have results almost immediately. Why is PPC so instantaneous? Google AdWords and Bing Ads have created truly amazing self-serve platforms. With an amazing in-house marketer and/or an amazing agency (I recommend Rocket Clicks), you will get results nearly instantly.
PPC is a scalable platform for testing new concepts. You can test so much with paid search, quickly. I’m especially a fan of testing ad copy, landing pages, and new keywords. Because of the platform, you’re able to test in a very controlled and scalable (statistically significant way). I view PPC as the testing medium for the entire organization. Solicit input from all departments, leverage the power of PPC to prove/disprove hypothesis before rolling out to other channels/mediums.
PPC is incredibly measurable. Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and platforms such as Acquisio give you incredible, incredible measurement right at your fingertips. With that great measurement comes the opportunity for incredible optimization/refinement (again, right in these impressive search engines and platforms such as Acquisio).
PPC instantly expands your team. Invest and build a great program and Google, Yahoo!, and your automation platform will become part of your team. They will dedicate resources to your account. Your team instantly scales with help from some of the brightest minds in our industry.
PPC keeps improving and changing. I just wrote about Enhanced Campaigns and how I’m a fan. We have just scratched the surface of the potential in PPC. It keeps getting better and better.
PPC builds amazing careers. With the right dedication, skill, and perspective, there are not too many more rewarding career paths than the PPC track, in my opinion. Non only can you grow quickly, but it’s so challenging, rewarding, and fun.
PPC is a growing medium. Search engines rely on PPC revenue to drive their businesses forward. They are always thinking of new, inventive ways to make PPC better. More and more Internet users are getting savvy and interacting with paid ads. This is a great trend to count on for may years to come.
PPC drives results in other media channels. While the ROI is already great on a last click basis (after optimization from a very talented team/agency), that’s not the full picture. PPC assists and lifts other media channels including direct brand type-ins.
In my opinion, it’s all about team work. PPC puts you right in the center of it all. I cannot think of too many disciplines that are more interdisciplinary than PPC. What a great career when you get to collaborate with everyone in your company.

Are you a fan of PPC? What are some of your favorite reasons? Next time you are securing budget and resources for your team, make sure to stress why PPC is the best.

I’m a Fan of Enhanced Campaigns

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jun 20 2

I’m a big fan of Enhanced Campaigns. The more I learn and the more I experiment, the more I like Enhanced Campaigns. Sure, I was a bit skeptical at first, but I quickly became a believer. I wanted to write this quick post today to share my enthusiasm and a few of the top reasons why I’m a fan of Enhanced Campaigns. There are still a lot of skeptics in our industry. I wanted to write a post to try to change that! So here goes…

Change

Enhanced Campaigns make your life easier. No longer do you need separate campaigns for mobile and desktop/laptop. It’s all about a unified campaign structure. Campaign structures were getting too complex/messy before Enhanced Campaigns. It was nearly impossible to have complete parity across campaigns across devices at all times, especially with very large enterprise accounts. Enhanced Campaigns build in instant parity across desktop/laptop, tablet, and mobile smartphones.
Looking to grow your presence on mobile smartphones? You should! The mobile future is here. Organic search is less prominent on mobile smartphones, paid ads occupy most of the landscape. As such, you want your paid presence on mobile smartphones to be amazing. Enhanced Campaigns make this super easy. Due to the instant parity mentioned above, your mobile campaigns will likely be more built out than ever before.
Enjoy call extensions but have limited call center hours? Enhanced Campaigns make it easy to schedule ad extensions to your days/hours of operation. Ad extensions are becoming a very important component of any Google AdWords program. Enhanced Campaigns give you a lot more control over ad extensions.
If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you know I’m a tremendous fan of bidding automation. What’s the foundation of the most successful bidding programs around? Great data! Enhanced Campaigns offer some really neat, new ways of tracking and cross-device/cross-media type. One great example is call attribution. If a phone call lasts greater than a certain threshold (say 60 seconds), you can count it as a conversion!
The overall Enhanced Campaigns platform opens up doors for a multitude of new innovations. Google is hard at work taking advantage of their new platform and releasing a ton of new stuff. Enhanced Campaigns pave the way for very exciting second half of 2013 and 2014.
The “issues” with Enhanced Campaigns in my opinion, are not real issues. Moreover, Google is truly listening to advertisers and perfecting the platform. Issue 1: We now have less control over tablets. That said, I do not see this as a tremendous issue. Tablets used to be a novelty. More affluent customers had these new devices, and therefore their conversion rates used to be different from desktops/laptops. However, tablets are no so widespread that they likely convert the same as desktops/laptops for most advertisers. Issue 2: It’s a little difficult to get used to bid multipliers. Solution: The best SEM platforms around are making it easy. Partner with a great SEM platform that truly gets Enhanced Campaigns. Issue 3: Less granularity around mobile bidding. This used to be the case when bid multipliers were on a campaign level. Google listened to our feedback and placed bid multipliers on an adgroup level! Long story short, the “issues” you hear about Enhanced Campaigns are mostly non-issues in my opinion.

The only constant in our industry is change. As digital marketing professionals, it’s all about embracing change. Enhanced Campaigns are here and I highly recommend embracing them. In my opinion, this is just the beginning!