Yahoo! Rich Ads Are Back

If you were a big advertiser on Yahoo! back in the Panama days (before the Yahoo!/Microsoft Search Alliance), you may remember rich ads in search. What are rich ads? They are basically an awesome way to make your brand/trademark ads stand out. I’m talking about adding an image (or even video) to your brand keywords. I’m talking about including sitelinks in your ad. I’m talking about adding a zip code box to your ad so your users can start filling out your form right from the ad itself! When it comes to rich ads, it’s all about customization.

Rich Ads Are Now Powered By adCenter

When the Yahoo!/Microsoft Search Alliance came around, Yahoo! rich ads disappeared. It made sense. adCenter became the platform of choice and adCenter did not support rich ads at the time. Yahoo! Panama was the only platform in our industry offering this capability. However, both Yahoo! and Microsoft promised that rich ads would be back, and they now are!

Capitalize On Your Brand Name Traffic

Check out the screenshot below. You can see Rosetta Stone’s rich ad (screenshot taken today). In this particular rich ad, Rosetta Stone is leveraging an image and also sitelinks. There’s no doubt that they are enjoying a higher click through rate and increased brand awareness. Also, they are preventing other advertisers from showing up in the top yellow bar. Rich ads take up a lot of space so when rich ads deliver they will occupy the entire top bar.

Enjoy Rich Ads On Both Yahoo! and Bing

I’m super excited about rich ads (more so than ever before) because they now display on both Yahoo! and Bing thanks to the Search Alliance. Moreover, the process for uploading rich ads (and the overall bidding framework) is more simplistic and scalable than ever before. If you’re a large advertiser on adCenter, you just have to reach out to your Yahoo! reps about rich ads. You won’t be disappointed and it could turn out to be one of your big successes of 2012!

Want to learn more about the Yahoo!/Microsoft Search Alliance and my perspective on the transition from Panama? You’ll want to check out my Search Alliance Case Study which is now live on Yahoo!’s advertising portal.

Fun Times At The Pharcyde Concert

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Dec 17 4

Last night, Nicole and I enjoyed seeing The Pharcyde perform at Yoshi’s San Francisco. The Pharcyde is perhaps my favorite rap group of all time, with their album Bizarre Ride II being perhaps my favorite rap album of all time. Kanye West has also named Bizare Ride II as his favorite. If you’re interested in listening to Pharcyde tracks such as Drop, you’ve just got to check out their YouTube Channel.

DJ Equipment

If you’re been reading PPC Ian for a long time, you may also know that Rap Music Drives My Online Marketing. Pay per click search engine marketing is a lot like computer programming. When you’re managing large campaigns and making money online, you need to get in the zone. How do I get in the zone? I like to put on my headphones and listen to hip hop music. I like hip hop more than any other music genre for a few reasons. First, I can’t get enough of the beats and lyrics. I’m a walking encyclopedia of hip hop lyrics and facts. Second, I grew up listening to this stuff. Third, on a philosophical level I can relate to the relentless pursuit of money that comes across in many tracks.

Nicole took me to Yoshi’s San Francisco for my birthday earlier this year. We saw another one of my favorite rap groups, De La Soul. (Side Note: You’ve got to check out The Bizness Remix on YouTube, a true hidden gem.) Since then, we have kept a close eye on the Yoshi’s calendar for great hip hop and jazz artists (we also enjoy jazz music quite a bit). The food at Yoshi’s San Francisco is always top notch, and I must say The Pharcyde and De La Soul concerts were both amazing! I went away from both thoroughly inspired to see some of my personal heroes perform their best tracks. It’s always a great crowd and great time at Yoshi’s, I highly recommend it.

How do you get in the zone when you’re working on online marketing? Any other fans of rap music out there, especially 90s artists such as The Pharcyde and De La Soul?

Image of DJ Equipment © iStockPhoto – Roob

Check Out My Guest Post On Acquisio’s Blog

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Dec 14 5

I’m a huge fan of online marketing automation, with platforms like Acquisio at the top of my list. Have you heard of Acquisio? They offer the leading performance marketing platform for agencies.

Today, I wrote a guest post on Acquisio’s blog: 5 Ways To Get The Most Out of Your New Online Marketing Platform. I’m so excited and honored. Acquisio has a really amazing online marketing blog and I highly recommend checking it out. Since the entire online marketing world is in the process of moving from manual campaign management to leveraged campaign management via platforms such as Acquisio, I thought this would be the perfect topic.

After reading my guest post, I highly recommend checking out Acquisio’s whitepapers as well (they are really amazing). I have covered several of them here on PPC Ian including:

Want to learn even more about Acquisio? I had the honor of interviewing Acquisio’s CMO Marc Poirier right here on PPC Ian. Thanks for all your support and I hope you enjoy my guest post!

I Worked All Weekend

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Dec 11 3

When you’re in corporate online marketing, you have to work from home on the weekend from time to time. The projects line up and you just have to work form home to meet deadlines. (Side note: Always meet your deadlines, no matter what you need to do to get there.) It just so happens that I had an important deadline for my job. So, I worked from home all weekend this weekend. I’m really excited that I finished my project and feel quite energized for the upcoming week. If you’re in corporate online marketing, I’m certain you face this same situation from time to time! Following are a few of my favorite tips when it comes to working weekends.

Tip 1: Take It A Little Easier The Next Week

To Do List

First and foremost, we must recognize that the weekend exists for a reason. No matter how much you love online marketing (believe me, I can’t get enough of this stuff), you need to remember that balance is everything. It’s not about how many hours you put in, but how much you accomplish. After working the weekend, you need to take it a little easier the next week. I’m talking about getting to the office on time (versus early). I’m talking about leaving at the end of the day (as opposed to getting wrapped up in a project and staying late). It’s important to force the balance because career longevity is everything in online marketing.

Tip 2: Make Sure To Exercise

I tend to exercise quite a bit on weekends. When I work at home on weekends, I never compromise my workouts. It’s the balance of exercising and working that keeps my head clear. If you’re in a high power career like online marketing, I always recommend exercising. When the work piles up, always keep up the workouts. It’s amazing how they will help you generate new ideas and excel even more at work.

Tip 3: Don’t Work Every Weekend

I’m the number one proponent of corporate online marketing. When I’m not doing online marketing for my job, I’m blogging about it. It’s an addictive field. That said, it’s all about balance and longevity. Make sure to take time off to spend with your significant other and family. It will keep you balanced and in the game for the long term. While I worked all weekend this weekend, I’m going to strive to take the entire next one off.

Tip 4: Make Your Hard Work Known

In most high powered corporate careers, it’s expected that you work from home (nights and weekends) from time to time. Everyone does it. However, let’s say you go above and beyond. You’re putting in some serious hours on weekends and driving amazing numbers as a result. Let your manager know. You don’t want to go overboard, but subtly make your hard work known. This is something that will likely help you in your next performance review. Want to learn more SEM career tips? I recommend downloading my free eBook highlighting my Top 5 Online Marketing Career Tips.

Image of To Do List © iStockPhoto – CT757fan

Favicons Are Important For Online Marketing

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Dec 7 3

I just got a brand new favicon for PPC Ian and I’m quite excited about it. Check out the URL bar above. You can see that there’s a little 16×16 image with the mouse pointer clicking the target. My favicon also displays in the browser tab window and the toolbar bookmarks (check out the first screenshot below and you can see what I’m talking about). In short, favicons are a really cool graphical addition to any site and can add a lot of brand value.

Here’s where it gets really cool. Check out the second screenshot below, the Yahoo! paid search results for the brand name “Progressive”. As you can see, Progressive’s favicon shows up right in their paid ad. This is something Yahoo! has been doing for a while, and I really like it! If you’re running PPC campaigns on Yahoo! (via adCenter) and your brand name drives a lot of traffic, you definitely need a favicon. Right now, favicons only display on Yahoo! for brand searches, but they can really help your CTR if your brand name drives a lot of traffic.

I was able to get two favicons (for PPC Ian and IJL Productions) for $50, with multiple revisions. It was totally easy to outsource the project on Elance and get great quality work. Especially for your large websites, I recommend getting your own favicons today. Once they are ready, simply upload your favicon.ico file to your website’s root directory and you’re good to go.

Keeping Your PPC Accounts From Going Offline

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Dec 3 2

If you’ve been in pay per click for a while, you’ve probably experienced it. I’m talking about that horrible, horrible time when one or more of your PPC accounts goes offline. It’s always bad. You end up losing valuable conversions, profit, account history, and your competitive edge. It can set you back in your PPC career. Sometimes, you can even go dark during a critical period such as holiday shopping. Today, I’m going to share a few tips so you avoid going offline, can sleep better at night, and look like an absolute PPC rock star!

Tip 1: Remember A Backup Credit Card

Offline

One of my favorite features within Google AdWords is the ability to enter a backup credit card. At one time or another, it’s likely your primary card is going to fail. If you have a backup card, you have a great chance of staying online while avoiding downtime. Just remember to make sure your backup card is a completely different card (and credit card company) from your primary one. For example, if my primary card is American Express, I’ll make sure to have a Visa or MasterCard backup.

Also, remember to have a high credit limit on both your primary and backup card. A backup card is no good if it has a low credit limit and cannot handle large charges that may have failed on your primary card. Make sure to have enough credit to last at least a week in case the issues on your primary card take some time to figure out.

When it comes to adCenter, you cannot have a backup card go into affect automatically like Google AdWords. However, you can have a backup card ready to go. If your primary card fails, just manually switch over to your backup card.

Tip 2: Consider Pre-Pay Billing

If you’re a credit card advertiser, you may wish to consider pre-pay versus post-pay billing. Pre-pay means your credit card is charged before you spend the money. If you always make sure to have a large, positive balance in your search engine account, you will always stay online. However, this can have an impact on your cash flow if you’re spending tons of money. For that reason, I personally prefer post-pay with a backup card in place. Sometimes, since you can’t automatically switch over to a backup card in adCenter, I’ll consider pre-pay on adCenter but have a post-pay on AdWords with a backup card in place.

Tip 3: Consider Transitioning Over To Invoicing

If you’re a credit card advertiser, you are more at risk of going offline. Credit cards fail and billing systems can have issues. If you move over to invoicing, you’ll lose your valuable credit card rewards, but will pick up peace of mind. It’s much harder for an invoiced account to go offline due to billing issues. Moreover, you have a full 30 days from the end of the invoiced month (typically net 30 terms) to pay your bills. The downside? This option only works if you’re a larger advertiser and are able to negotiate a strong credit limit with the search engines.

Tip 4: Leverage Automated and Manual Monitoring

Work with your IT department to get a system in place that pings Google, Yahoo!, and Bing to make sure your ads are showing up. If you are not showing up for some reason, generate an alert. The best alerts are not only via email but involve an escalation path (with phone numbers). It’s easy to miss an email in the middle of the night, but you’ll be able to respond right away if you get a call.

Moreover, have your entire team (both your internal team and your search engine reps) check your ads constantly. I try to check my ads once per hour, 24/7 (except when I’m sleeping). This is part of my Six Essential PPC Campaign Checks. If there’s an issue, make sure a clear escalation path is in place. Also, make sure you have the cell phone numbers for your entire team and your search engine reps. There are times when I’ve gotten calls in the middle of the night and I always appreciate it if it’s going to prevent a major disaster. Best of luck in having 0% unintended downtime for your PPC campaigns!

Image of Offline © iStockPhoto – mattjeacock

I’m Answering Online Marketing Questions on Quora

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Dec 1 2

Have you heard of Quora? It’s a really cool continually improving collection of questions and answers. Founded by two former Facebook executives, Quora is one addictive site. I joined Quora a few weeks back and have already answered six questions about online marketing.

I’m really excited about Quora for two main reasons. First and foremost, it provides a great way to help others in the online marketing community. PPC Ian exists to educate and empower online marketing professionals. Quora gives me even more leverage in achieving this goal!

Second, Quora provides an amazing way to build my own career and network. It’s all about networking in the search marketing career path. You may wish to check out my post about Growing Your SEM Career With LinkedIn or my video about Landing Your PPC Dream Job. It’s all about knowing your stuff while also networking and marketing yourself. Quora now provides another way to achieve this goal.

Please make sure to check out my Quora Profile (where you can read all my answers). If you follow me, I will follow you back! I’m now regularly answering online marketing questions on Quora with many more answers to come.

Cyber Monday and Seasonal Bidding Strategies

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Nov 28 8

Cyber Monday is upon us! If you’re in the retail side of online marketing, you’ve been preparing for this day for the last few months. It’s not only one of the largest volume days (in terms of raw conversions) but it’s also one of the highest conversion rate days. Most businesses follow some sort of seasonal cycle. If you’re in retail, seasonably high conversions and conversion rates are upon us right now. If you’re in finance, high conversions and conversion rates are just around the corner and will take off in January. Today, I want to walk through a few PPC bidding tips to capitalize on seasonal trends.

Tip 1: Identify Seasonal Trends

Cyber Monday Gifts

PPC campaigns (and businesses in general) follow very similar trends each year. If you’ve been in business for a while, it’s critical to analyze data from past years. Pay special attention to seasonal peaks and lows. I’m talking about those months where conversion rate is high and those where it is low. Once you have identified these periods, you are armed with the information you need to make strategic bid changes, I’m talking about blanket bid increases and bid decreases to all keywords in your AdWords and adCenter accounts.

Why does this matter? It all comes down to profitability. Your margins in paid search are directly tied to conversion rates. The higher your conversion rate, the higher your percentage margin. The lower your conversion rate, the lower your percentage margin. This brings up into tip 2…

Tip 2: Bid Based On Seasonal Conversion Rates

If you’re headed into a seasonal period where conversion rates will be high (and you can afford to handle extra sales volume), I highly recommend bidding up. By doing so, you can reinvest some of your higher percentage margin into more sales volume which should ultimately drive more dollar margin. (Conversely, you may wish to lower bids and reduce costs during low conversion rate months.) Click through rate rises exponentially by position while the bid landscape is typically linear. You will capture a lot more volume by bidding up, so why not go for it during your best seasonal months?

Tip 3: Leverage Automated Platforms For Seasonal Bidding

If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you know I’m a huge fan of online marketing platforms such as Kenshoo, Acquisio, and Marin Software. I even wrote an SEM Automation Buyer’s Guide Whitepaper.

On a keyword level, I always recommend bidding based on conversion rate. Most SEM platforms offer this ability. They will forecast conversion rate on a keyword level and allow you to bid accordingly. However, today’s tip takes things to the next level. When it comes to seasonality, you’re not only bidding accurately on a keyword level based on conversion rate, but you’re now making blanket account level boosts when it makes sense.

My advice: Understand how much conversion rates will go up (or down). Then, boost all bids when the seasonal period starts. As time goes on, once you’re a few weeks into the seasonal period, start lowering your boost gradually since keyword level conversion rates (the projections from your automated system upon which keyword level bids are set) will start catching up. If you don’t lower your your overall boost, the seasonal increase will be double counted. You may not want to lower your boost all the way, but just remember that keyword level conversion rate projections will catch up and you’ll need to bring back your blanket boost increase at least a little.

Remember to do the exact same on the way down. If you know a low conversion rate period is coming up, make a blanket boost decrease. Then, after keyword level bids start catching up a few weeks in, make sure to gradually remove (or at least reduce) the negative boost.

I truly hope these seasonal bidding strategies help out. I know I’ll be looking for great deals tomorrow. If you’re in retail, best of luck with your Cyber Monday PPC campaigns!

Making Your Affiliate Marketing Business Legit

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Nov 20 10

Since today’s Sunday, I’m going to blog about affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is what I do on weekends and my limited spare time (via IJL Productions LLC) when I’m not enjoying the corporate world of online marketing. Today, I’m thrilled to share three tips on making your affiliate marketing business legit. I’m talking about getting a private mail box, setting up a toll free number, and forming a corporate entity. Once you have reached a little bit of scale (you’re making a few thousand dollars per year in profit), I would highly recommend making your business legit via these tips.

Affiliate Marketing Business Tip 1: Get A Private Mail Box

One of the best moves I made for my business is setting up a private mail box at my local UPS store. For only $275 per year (fees are different per UPS Store location), I get my own physical business address. You heard me right! Private mail boxes, unlike PO Boxes, are considered legitimate business addresses. While it’s just a mail box, it’s considered a physical street address. This is super important as every real business needs a physical location (especially if you want to share your address with customers and also set up a corporate entity). PO Boxes (while useful in their own right) just don’t cut it. Your home address won’t cut it because you want to separate your personal life from your business 100%. Private mail boxes are the affordable solution of choice in my opinion (although you may also want to look into renting co-worker space that offers a physical mail address, as that’s getting popular these days too).

In addition to being a real address for your business (separate from your residence), private mail boxes provide a number of other benefits. For starters, you can list it as your business address when you purchase domain names. I used to register my domain names privately because I did not want to use my home address. When you own hundreds of domain names, private registration can become quite expensive. I’m saving hundreds per year now that I can list my private mail box as my address.

Another major benefit: You can list your private mail box as your business address on your website, especially on your privacy policy, terms and conditions, and contact us. The rules around privacy policies and transparency are getting stricter over time. Personally, I think this is good because it’s making the Internet a better place and raising the bar. Why not stay ahead of the curve and offer your business address? In my opinion, this is a move that can also make you look more legit in the eyes of search engines (meaning better SEO ranking).

Also, the guys at the UPS store are awesome. They’re open long hours and 6 days/week. They will sign for packages that come in and then hold them for me. I even get an email when a package has arrived. It’s like having my own staff.

Affiliate Marketing Business Tip 2: Get A Toll Free Phone Number

This tip really goes together with the first one. These days, it’s super affordable to get your own toll free phone number. I’m paying $10 per month for my toll free phone number. There’s a lot of flexibility in how you set it up, but I’ve decided to just have my calls go to voicemail. Then, I have the voicemails delivered to me via email. A lot of the calls that come thru are junk, but some are not. Now, I have a great way for people to contact my business without giving away my personal cell phone or home phone. Of course, you get all of the benefits just mentioned above with the private mail box: separation from your personal life, a number you can list publicly in your domain name registration and on your website, and of course convenience.

Affiliate Marketing Business Tip 3: Create a Corporate Entity

Tip three is really a continuation of the first two. Now that you have a physical business location and dedicated phone number, you’re ready to completely separate your affiliate marketing business from yourself. Now, it’s time to form a corporate entity. There are many options, but I personally decided to go the LLC route. LLCs are great. They separate my business operations from my personal self. They are relatively affordable (only $800/year fee to own a California LLC and another $100 year to pay for a registered agent service). They are easy when it comes time for taxes (a single member LLC is disregarded as a corporate entity for tax purposes so income flows through to your individual tax return). If my business grows and I hire employees, I’ll need to rethink my strategy. However, from my current vantage point the LLC provides the perfect corporate entity for my situation.

After setting up your private mail box, toll free number, and LLC, you’re not quite done. At this time, don’t forget to open a business checking account and credit card in the name of your LLC. Use the tax id of your LLC when opening the accounts up. Leverage your private mail box and your toll free number as your contact info. The key thing to remember: Your business is no longer part of your self. It’s separate entity so it’s time to make it legit and go all out with this process. Once your business is fully separate from yourself, you have opened up an exciting world of possibilities. You’re now ready to embark on your next round of growth and hit the big leagues of super affiliates!

Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer nor tax advisor, before forming a corporate entity always make sure to consult with your own legal/tax counsel. The information I provide here is just my personal experience and is not legal nor tax advice.

Optimizing Search Partner Network Traffic In PPC

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Nov 14 2

Do you Advertise on Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter? I’m assuming “most likely” since you’re reading PPC Ian. Today, I want to share an old school PPC tip that still works to this day. I’m going to outline a simple, yet highly effective strategy for optimizing your search partner network traffic.

What Is Search Partner Traffic?

What is search partner traffic? Both Google AdWords and also Microsoft/Yahoo! partner with other search engines. In the case of Google, I’m talking about sites like AOL Search and Ask.com. In your AdWords campaign settings, you can choose to receive search traffic from just Google.com or Google.com AND search partners. There is no way within Google AdWords to select just search partner traffic, however you can do this in adCenter.

Search partners offer search-like experiences, they’re search engines. I’m calling this out because search partners are very different than content websites (now known as the “display network” in Google AdWords). Search partners are not AdSense publishers but are typically really large websites that are search-driven.

Understand Your Search Partner Conversion Rate

Before developing your optimization strategy, make sure to measure the conversion rate on your search partner traffic. Is it higher than Google.com (or Bing.com/Yahoo.com) proper, or lower? Most of the time, search partners have a lower conversion rate. Some of the time, however, they do convert higher.

Separate Campaigns For Search Partners

Now that you know what you’re dealing with, you’re ready to optimize. If search partners perform worse than Google.com (lower conversion rate), you will want to create separate campaigns for the two. There’s no way to opt out of Google.com, but that doesn’t much matter in this case. The Google.com-only campaigns will be bid higher so the Google.com + search partners campaigns will get mostly search partners traffic (since they are bid lower). This simple optimization will allow you to bid more effectively based on varying conversion rates between these two traffic sources.

Now, let’s say Google.com performs worse than search partners. Although this case is rare, it does happen. In this case, you really can’t do much. It’s best to have combined campaigns that are opted into both Google.com and partners in this case.

When it comes to adCenter, your optimization is quite easy in both of these cases. adCetner allows you to create Yahoo!/Bing-only campaigns and also search partners-only campaigns. As such, it’s always best to separate the two and bid accordingly. Most of the time (I should probably say all of the time), Yahoo!/Bing-only campaigns perform better. That said, search partners can add tons of incremental value, you just need to bid them lower to account for lower conversion rates. Bonus Tip: When it comes to adCenter, you’ll want to closely monitor the partners driving traffic and block the bad ones. adCenter makes it easy to block bad partners and this step is critical in making your campaign profitable.

So there you have it! While search partners are certainly smaller than they used to be, they still offer strong incremental traffic and conversions. If you create separate campaigns and bid based on conversion rate, you will expand your margins. The only caveat: These tips mostly make sense if you are a larger advertiser driving a lot of traffic in your PPC accounts. If you’re a smaller advertiser, it may be advantageous to employ a unified campaign strategy (ease of use and more data to leverage for optimization).