PPC 101
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
