Acquisio Bing Ads Promotion Ends Soon (7/31)

I’m a huge fan of diversification. Whether we’re talking about investments, digital marketing, or life in general, it’s all about diversifying away risk. Are you newer to digital marketing? Do you allocate all of your digital marketing budget to Google AdWords? This is how most people start, and makes total sense. However, as your business grows (or even if you’re in a happy steady state and are looking to lower risk), you may want to consider branching out beyond Google. The best place to start, in my opinion: Bing Ads, the platform that powers Yahoo! and Bing.

Today, I want to feature a special promotion from my good friends at Acquisio, a leading performance marketing platform. I have been great friends with the Acquisio team for a number of years. They are amazing and offer one of the best digital marketing technologies around. Acquisio is leveraged by advanced marketing operations, and is the platform of choice for digital marketing agencies. Also, they offer client services from industry experts. Combining a solid technology platform plus seasoned digital marketing client services support is the winning combination for success in today’s complex online marketing landscape.

Like yours truly, Acquisio believes in the power of diversification. They are confident that Bing Ads is a great opportunity for digital marketers. In fact, they are so confident that they are offering up to $2,500 Bing Ads free advertising. Make sure to head on over to Acqusio to learn more and, if interested, move quickly. This particular opportunity ends July 31, 2014 at 11:59 PM EST.

Here’s why I’m such a fan of this particular promotion:

Bing Ads works! I have been a long-time advertiser on Bing Ads and its predecessors (such as Microsoft adCenter, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Overture) since the early 2000s.
In many verticals, Bing Ads tends to be less competitive than Google. (True, search volume is lower on Bing Ads, however the lower level of competition makes it easy to drive high quality traffic to your business.)
Just like Google, Bing Ads offers world-class technology and support. They have a great desktop editor application, cutting-edge features, and a super support team (powered by Yahoo!).
Acquisio is an amazing technology platform and company. I have learned so much from them over the years (via their speaking at industry conferences, personal friendships, and their industry-leading whitepapers and eBooks). Aside from the free money, this is simply a great opportunity to work with very smart people in building your Bing strategy. The value you extract from this opportunity should far exceed the simple monetary benefit.
Have you been considering Acquisio as the platform of choice to power your digital marketing operations? This is a great time to audition their platform while taking advantage of a sweet deal.
Every dollar helps. I’m a very frugal digital marketer. I drive the best possible results with the lowest possible spend. I’m scrappy. I have found that the scrappy, frugal approach works wonders for any business. I very rarely pass by free money, and here’s your opportunity to get some free money. You have to spend money to get the free credit (check out Acquisio for more info on the details), but free money is free money. And, if you wanted to test Bing anyways, why not get free money and special support from an incredibly successful platform and client services team?
It’s all about testing and diversification. If you’re not on Bing Ads, you really should be, in my opinion. Leverage this opportunity to diversify your digital marketing mix.

Thanks, Acquisio, for sharing such a special deal!

This promotion is being run by Acquisio. Restrictions may apply. Please make sure you check out Acquisio’s website (and contact them) to learn the full details.
Image in this post © Acquisio

Kenshoo Social: Facebook Performance Skyrockets

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Aug 29 0

Long time search engine marketing professionals have a huge amount of respect for Kenshoo, one of the most amazing digital marketing platforms in existence. Kenshoo Search is in an elite category of platforms and consistently impresses me (and all other digital marketing professionals). In addition to Kenshoo Search, Kenshoo also offers an amazing social platform, aptly named Kenshoo Social. If you’re a digital marketing professional that runs campaigns on Facebook and other social networks, you absolutely must audition Kenshoo Social. Kenshoo Social is not just for social media professionals, it’s for performance-driven digital marketers running huge campaigns on social networks.

Today, I wanted to share a new infographic from Kenshoo Social. In their Facebook Ad Trends Infographic, Kenshoo Social shows just how quickly Facebook is improving from a direct-response standpoint. Comparing Q2, 2013 vs. Q1, 2013, it’s absolutely staggering how quickly Facebook is improving on metrics such as CTR, CPC, clicks, conversions, and revenue. I highly recommend checking out this infographic as a way to benchmark your own direct response campaigns on Facebook. Are you experiencing rapid improvement in your performance? Many advertisers are. As a side takeaway: Always keep testing! Something that may have not worked for you just a few quarters ago could now be one of your best channels.

In addition to overall Facebook trends improving at rapid pace, Kenshoo Social also finds that Real Time Dynamic FBX Creative Outperforms Static Creative. This makes perfect sense – get as granular and targeted as possible. Your prospective customers will appreciate the customized experience and respond to your FBX ads. One thing is for sure: If you’re a big advertiser on Facebook, make sure to reach out to Kenshoo Social to see how their platform can help your program scale.

Kenshoo Social: Click Image to See Full Infographic

Image in this post © Kenshoo Social

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

Fun Times At The InsideVault Office

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 23 1

This has been one exciting week for PPC Ian! It all started out with my exclusive Sean Marshall interview. Then, I had the honor of guest posting on AdMedia’s blog about Enhanced Campaigns. I had an absolute blast at the Marin Software Cocktail Party. Of course, I worked amazingly hard during all of this great stuff. Today’s post rounds up the week and highlights my fun visit to the InsideVault office earlier this week!

You may recall, I wrote a post a while back Introducing InsideVault. These guys are amazing! I’m personal friends with several employees at InsideVault, and I am here to say they are brilliant people and have built an amazing SEM platform!

On Tuesday night, after wrapping up an exciting and productive day at work, I drove over to the InsideVault San Carlos office. I met with Chaitanya Chandrasekar (CEO & Co-Founder), Brian Bird (Co-Founder & Head of Business Development), and Guillermo Cockrum (Business Development). I got a demo of the platform and it’s quite impressive. I was especially thrilled to see:

The overall speed of the platform. InsideVault is really fast. These guys are big data experts and built the platform for amazing speed.
InsideVault fully supports Google product listing ads. If you’re in the product shopping space, this feature is sure to help you out.
The platform offers an amazing level of detail. I’m talking about going beyond the keyword level: keyword + slot + network + match type + device + more! InsideVault really allows search marketers to drill down.
InsideVault offers reporting at the ad extension level, plus an easy interface for sitelink management.
So much more!

After an exciting demo, hanging out with friends, and taking pictures (see below), my good friend Guillermo and I went over to The Office for dinner. If you have not been there, I recommend it – the burgers are great. Are you in the market for an SEM automation platform? Want to take your SEM program to the next level? I highly recommend checking out InsideVault. Ask for my friend Guillermo and he can arrange a demo for you!

insidevault-and-ppc-ian

Image of PPC Ian and InsideVault © PPCIan.com

Marin Software IPO and Cocktail Party

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 21 1

I’m a huge fan of Marin Software. I’ve covered Marin Software here on PPC Ian for years! I’m really happy and excited for all my friends at Marin, just last week they filed for IPO. Marin has built so much momentum over the years, and is a truly amazing platform and company. When it comes to SEM automation platforms like Marin, I’m the biggest proponent around. Marin’s pending IPO truly puts our industry and SEM automation on the map. Want to learn more? Check out the official IPO Press Release.

Tonight, I really enjoyed Marin Software’s cocktail party at Waterbar San Francisco. This party provided a great opportunity to catch up with my friends from Marin Software while networking with other online advertisers. Check out the picture below from the party, the venue was unbeatable! Marin Software truly builds lasting relationships with their clients and partners. Thanks, Marin for an awesome time and congrats on your pending IPO!

Marin Software Waterbar

Image in this post © PPCIan.com

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

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!

I’m Honored To Be A Marin Software Celebrity

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Sep 13 5

Today truly was my day! It all started when my good friend Matt Lawson, VP of Marketing at Marin Software, sent me an email this morning. He asked me to check out the brand new Marin Software homepage. So, I headed on over to Marin and could not believe what I saw! I really couldn’t!

So, what did I see? There’s a big picture of me right in the middle of the Marin homepage, with a link to my Marin Software video testimonial. Head on over to Marin and check it out for yourself. Also, you can see a screenshot below (click it to see the full-sized version). I’m so honored. Marin Software is one of the best SEM automation platforms around. I personally leverage their platform each and every day to optimize and manage large scale SEM campaigns. I’ve been a Marin Software power user for years and cannot say enough great stuff about Marin, their technology, and their team. Thanks so much, Marin, this is a true honor! And, congratulations on your new homepage, it rocks.

Charge Up Your Paid Search With Acquisio

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Sep 4 0

I’m a huge fan of Acquisio. Not only do they offer one of the best Online Marketing Platforms around, but they are also a really great group of professionals. I always have fun running into Marc Poirier and his team at the search engine marketing conferences.

Over the years, I have gotten to know the Acquisio team really well and have nothing but good things to say about them. Back in December (I can’t believe it was that long ago), I had the honor of writing my first guest post on Acquisio’s blog. I shared tips on getting the most out of your new online advertising platform. I write a lot about SEM automation here and Acquisio is one of the best in that industry so I thought the topic would be perfect.

Recently, Acquisio invited me to do another guest post and it went live today! Today’s guest post features 5 Quick Ways To Recharge Your Paid Search Program. Many of the campaign managers leveraging tools such as Acquisio are in charge of huge online marketing programs. It’s always great to add some fuel to your program from time to time, so I wanted to offer some tips to challenge the status quo and charge forward. I hope you enjoy the post and recommend heading on over to Acquisio’s blog to read it. After you’re done, make sure to audition Acquisio, an amazing way to charge up your paid search program. Thanks Acquisio for the opportunity to guest post!

I’m a Kenshoo Celebrity

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jul 24 2

Back at SMX Advanced, I had a blast catching up with my good friends Geoff, Chad, and Claudia from Kenshoo. What is Kenshoo? It’s one of the best Digital Marketing Software platforms around. In addition to offering search marketers an invaluable suite of tools, Kenshoo has one of the most amazing marketing teams around. Their new “How Do You Kenshoo” campaign rocks. Recently, Kenshoo revamped their Facebook fan page and I’m honored to be featured in their main profile picture. Check it out below and then don’t forget to visit and like the new Kenshoo Facebook Page. Thanks, Kenshoo, it’s a true honor!