The Changing PPC Landscape and Challenges for the Search Marketer

One could argue that there are three main PPC players right now: Google, Yahoo and MSN. Ask.com has a smaller market share, around 7% (Comscore 2006) while Google commands around 50% of all the searches. 2nd tier search engines, like Kanoodle, Dogpile and Mamma, niche business search engines like Business.com, or even PPC networks such as Quigo, give us as search marketers many options for our paid search advertising.

However, along with all these options come challenges:

• Data Management and Integration - how do you capture and act on all this data?
• Targeting Options - Google offers geotargeting, time and day parting, with Yahoo hot on their heels with a similar set of options in their upcoming fall 2006 release. MSN even offers lifestyle targeting and demographic data on their searcher data. How do you properly configure these parameters?
• Competition - How do you see what your competitors are doing? How much they are bidding?

PPC Optimization Levers

Short vs. Long Term Optimization Levers
Short Term - Done every couple days - examples: adjust CPC bids, monitor/adjust coverage monitor 3rd party PPC tool settings, adjusting budget to adjust coverage
Long Term - This takes more planning and analysis - biweekly or monthly - examples: new text ad creative/offers, study/adapt to competitor ads/creative ideas, adding new keywords, changing overall bidding strategy

Campaign Structure

Having a well organized PPC campaign can help you in several ways:

• Easier to manage your budgets, targeting and ad positioning settings (Google, MSN)
• Allows you to quickly see what is going on with your PPC campaigns at the campaign level, before you jump in and get lost right away at a more granular level
• Organized campaigns lead to better organized ad groups/categories and thus more relevant keywords and higher response rates

Be Careful Who You Associate With

Page links are critical when you’re attempting to elevate your natural search engine rankings. You may already know this, but did you know that changes in search engine algorithms have made who you link with more important than how many links you have?
Put simply, Google and the other big search engines are making it harder to manipulate your ranking just by adding inbound links.

When you do link building for your web site, you should focus on your “linking neighborhood” and who you are associating with. What many shortsighted search engine marketers view as a hassle can become a great asset to your company if you follow a few simple optimization techniques.

Search Engines Are More Sophisticated

In theory, the search engines are becoming more sophisticated in their analysis of your site’s inbound linking map. As you probably know, Google’s PageRank algorithm, as originally set out, uses a democratic approach to analyzing the value/authority of a page. Each link to a page is a “vote” for that page - the more votes a page has the higher its importance. Combining PageRank with content analysis of the page, Google ranks pages and displays them in the results. However, this connectivity approach to calculating a page’s importance was, at first anyway, easy to manipulate, resulting in less relevant search results.

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Search Engine Marketing Tips for the Online marketer

SEO and Information Architecture - SEO is based around information architecture and marketing communications. You cannot separate SEO from the organization and classification of labels, categories of content, site design or simple marketing communications. SEO is basically designing/architecting your site information so that an information retrieval system (a search engine) can properly retrieve, index and understand your content. SEO is also part of good site usability - the two are intertwined - since SEO involves content changes, site navigation changes, labeling systems and categorization of information - its pretty hard to do SEO without doing web design and usability analysis as well!

Query Dependent and Independent Factors - Although no one really knows how search engine algorithms work, exactly (unless you work at Google or Yahoo I suppose), we can probably safely say that there are at least two main components:

• Query Dependent factors - “on page factors”
• Query Independent factors - “off page factors”

Query dependent factors are things like: text on your page, Meta content, page titles.
Query independent factors are: inbound links to your site, link popularity (CTR), URL structure, freshness of your content, page authority, etc. This is where the infamous “PageRank” comes in.

Link Building- Link building needs to now be more comprehensive. Google is more sophisticated in their link analysis. The hilltop article and the Historical Analysis Patent article show that Google is now looking at many factors in your linking structure to ensure the most spam free search engine results. The point is to try to build your site such that people will want to link to it (create “link bait”)!

Paid Search Advertising - Campaign Structure Tips and Ideas

• How you organize your campaign can affect your performance and make for easier reporting
• Breaking out relevant keywords into ad groups allows you to focus your ads and have the ability to organize marketing by product lines, seasonality, keyword cost, or searcher behavior
• Google and MSN allow you to have more than one campaign and you can adjust budget, geotargeting and time/day parting
• Yahoo is limited, right now, to one campaign per account and there is no built in geotargeting feature

PPC Text Ads

• Use direct marketing idea of a good call to action
• The standard practice is to put the keyword in the title and/or description of the ad
• Think about SEO-ing your text ad like a mini-web page - achieve maximum keyword density without compromising the readability of the ad
• Try to use A/B split when running ads - use one ad as your control ad – otherwise you will have no way to scientifically determine what worked

PPC Keyword Matching and Bidding

Google and Yahoo have slightly different approaches to this.

• Google: broad/phase/exact defaults to broad
• Yahoo: advanced/standard defaults to advanced
• Broad match w/negatives seems to work well to start out, then you can fine tune by studying your analytics and adding negative keywords to eliminate wasted impressions
• Use broad match for phrases that are already specific, like business birthday greeting cards - no reason to put this in phrase or exact matching - it’s already pretty specific
• Use exact or phrase for shorter phrases that could trigger irrelevant impressions, like greeting cards
• If your budget and bidding is not right you will not have 100% coverage throughout the day (your ads will be turned off during the day)
• If you are running a yahoo PPC campaign, you can use a bid mgmt tool to automate your bidding strategy such as bid jamming, gap surfing, day and time parting, etc

Data Feeds

Feeds can help you in several ways:

• Get your pages included in SE indices if there is some hindering technology on your site preventing your pages from getting properly crawled
• Allows you to easily market your products to comparison shopping engines or partner affiliate sites
• Feed your business profile information to local search engines

Keyword/SEO Research Tools

The number of search marketing tools seems to keep growing and improving all the time. Here are just a few to check out:

• www.wordtracker.com
• www.keyworddiscovery.com
• www.kwmap.net
• labs.google.com/sets
• www.thesaurus.com
• Link Harvester tool
• www.optilinksoftware.com
• Yahoo site explorer

Spidering/Crawability Tools

Use these tools to figure out how ’search engine friendly’ your site is.

• Xenu - tells you if you have problems with links
• Poodle - Google crawability test - see how your site looks to a search engine spider/crawler!

Competitive Analysis Tools

• www.golexa.com - massive amount of data to look at!
• www.urltrends.com
• www.adgooroo.com – Cool PPC competitive landscape tool
• Custom API tools - build your own application to automate some of those manual queries you do and to help with your SEO/PPC keyword research and analysis

As a supplement, here is a powerpoint presentation that you can take a look at which may give you a little different view of the search marketing arena!  Search Engine Marketing Basics 101