A note about why you might not want to only use Google Analytics to report revenue: Google Analytics attributes a conversion to “last touch” while Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Search attribute it to “first touch.” What that means is if someone came to your website on a Monday through a paid ad, and didn’t buy anything, then returned a week later (either through a bookmark and manually typing in your URL) and bought something, Google Analytics would count that conversion as a Direct referral (the last way they came to your site), while AdWords and Sponsored Search would attribute it to PPC (the first way they came to your site).

It’s not a big deal when the vast majority of your visitors order on their first visit, but becomes a big deal when a large percentage of them don’t. I have several clients where over 50% of their visitors don’t buy on that first visit, which makes PPC look like it doesn’t perform that well. Once you factor in those “first touch” conversions, PPC certainly is a much more important piece of the marketing puzzle.

So back to how you track revenue in Yahoo Sponsored Search… I have to give Yahoo credit – they beat Google on this by including revenue right in the normal screens you use to manage your Yahoo Sponsored Search campaigns. Google only reports revenue on their actual reports, which makes it more of a pain to manage; Not impossible, just not as easy to analyze and then make quick changes.

To track Yahoo Sponsored Search revenue, you’ll just need to add one more tiny bit of code to your conversion tracking. Replace where I have ORDER.SUBTOTAL with your dynamically generated Order Subtotal field into this line of your Yahoo Sponsored Search Analytics code (You can also do Order Total, but I recommend doing the Subtotal which excludes tax and shipping, for a more accurate picture of your revenue.):

window.ysm_customData.conversion = “transId=,currency=,amount=ORDER.SUBTOTAL“;

That’s it. Pretty simple and pretty powerful. Now you can actually see what kind of revenue your Yahoo Sponsored Search campaigns are actually generating, and then make better informed decisions about where your PPC advertising dollars should be spent.

A note on this: I attempted to do it for a client that uses a Volusion cart and processes credit cards offline (meaning they don’t actually process the credit card at the time of order, but do it manually at a later time), but this won’t work for them. I’m guessing that this will hold true for any shopping cart; if you don’t process credit cards in real-time, it won’t work. In fact, for this client, it also prevented the number of conversions from tracking.

One last note: Unfortunately, MSN AdCenter does not have the same functionality. Here’s hoping they get that solved before they take over supplying Yahoo’s paid ads.

If you need help getting Yahoo Sponsored Search Revenue Tracking implemented and/or analyzed, contact a reputable PPC management company for assistance.

That has all changed. And that is great news for many e-commerce sites that sell branded items. If you are a reseller of goods that have a trademarked brand and if your landing pages give significant focus to the trademarked term, then most Google AdWords ads within the United States will now be approved to run on Google. Also, make sure the trademarked term is used in a text format on your website, as opposed to only flash, so Google can recognize the use of the trademarked term on your page.

The approval process for ads the contain trademarked terms is a separate process at Google AdWords. The ads are first approved to run for all other Google policies, and then they are checked so the use of the trademark and the landing page are in alignment with Google’s new trademark policy guidelines. This approval process may take a bit longer than the normal time you may have seen in the past for non-trademarked ads, so you will need to give Google AdWords ads containing trademarks a bit more time to show up on Google.

Also, you might notice that these trademark ads may show a status of “approved-limited.” This means that Google recognizes that the ad contains a trademarked term and that the advertiser was not given direct permission from the owner of the trademark to actually use it in Google pay per click ad copy. This does NOT mean that the ad will only show for a limited time or in limited regions, but it does mean that Google will check this ad continually to make sure it aligns with the new trademark policy. The content of your landing page will be constantly assessed by Google to make sure the trademark is still featured prominently, so be careful of any changes you make to your landing pages, especially after your trademark ads have been approved and are receiving click traffic.

This change is a real plus for anyone doing PPC management because we all know that if someone is searching for branded items, it certainly is nice to have that trademarked brand name in your ad. If I’m looking for Lexmark ink, I’m certainly more inclined to click an ad that has the Lexmark trademarked term in the ad, than on a generic ad that does not.

More about Jack

I’ll have to admit that this is something relatively new to me (and a thank you to Michael Whitaker at Monitus for telling me it was possible). A search through Google AdWords help files comes up with nothing, nor did my Google reps ever explain that it could be done – they always pointed to Analytics as the tool to track revenue. And the answer is really simple – when you add conversion tracking to your thank you page, you can alter the code slightly to capture the revenue generated by an order.

You’ll need to change the YOUR-ORDER$ to be the field name of your order subtotal which can differ by shopping cart.

One note on this: I attempted to do it for a client that uses a Volusion cart and processes credit cards offline (meaning they don’t actually process the credit card at the time of order, but do it manually at a later time), but this won’t work for them. I’m guessing that this will hold true for any shopping cart; if you don’t process credit cards in real-time, it won’t work. In fact, for my client above, it also prevented conversions from tracking.

One more thing to know about tracking Google AdWords revenue: you can’t see results within the Google AdWords interface, you have to run a report to actually get the data. You’ll need to select the field “Sales Conv. Value (many-per-click)” in order to add that data to a report, and then you’ll be able to see revenue by Account, Campaign, AdGroup and even keyword by keyword, and learn how profitable your PPC campaigns really are. If you need help getting Google AdWords Revenue Tracking implemented and/ or analyzed, contact a reputable PPC management company for assistance.

More about Nikki

The confidentiality of our clients is important so I am not revealing any names here, but I would like to share some actual numbers that we have seen here at JumpFly as a result of our efforts. I looked at some PPC advertising data samples from the first quarter of 2008 and compared them to the first quarter of 2009. Sure, I can make these numbers up, but it’s just much easier to show you the real numbers as they truthfully exist.

JumpFly Client #1

1st Quarter 2008 – 139 conversions at $351.55 each with a total spend of approx. $49,000.
1st Quarter 2009 – 295 conversions at $125.51 each with a total spend of approx. $37,000.

Yes, they spent about $12,000 dollars LESS but more than DOUBLED their number of conversions. True story.

JumpFly Client #2

1st Quarter 2008 – 205 conversions at $62.82 each with a total spend of approx. $21,000.
1st Quarter 2009 – 301 conversions at $32.47 each with a total spend of approx. $10,000.

Yes, they spent about $11,000 dollars LESS but increased conversions by nearly 100 more. True story.

JumpFly Client #3

1st Quarter 2008 – 252 conversions at $9.87 each with a total spend of approx. $2,500.
1st Quarter 2009 – 1,859 conversions at $5.91 each with a total spend of approx. $11,000.

Yes, the spend is greatly increased as we took their business to a whole new level, while bringing their conversion costs down. Huge sales growth with conversions growing over 1,500 compared to the same time period a year earlier. True story.

JumpFly Client #4

1st Quarter 2008 – 4,027 conversions at $9.04 each with a total spend of approx. $36,000.
1st Quarter 2009 – 5,204 conversions at $6.36 each with a total spend of approx. $33,000.

Yes, they spent about $3,000 LESS while growing conversions over 1,000 at a lower cost. True story.

And the numbers above don’t take into the account the time and worry these business owners took off their shoulders by outsourcing their PPC management.

I’m not saying that professional PPC management will produce the same results for every company, but very positive results certainly can come from having a professional pay per click management company like JumpFly assisting you along the way. During these tight economic times, can you afford not to?

More about Jack

We all know about Google’s Keyword Tool which provides traffic information for your terms but a limitation on the Keyword Tool data is that it is either global or country based (the column labeled “local” now, means U.S. or whatever country was selected at the top of the page). 

This traffic data is good if you are running a national campaign – but not as useful for geographically targeted campaigns.  It can be used to determine relative traffic between keywords (i.e., what gets more traffic? Car dealer or Auto dealer?), but it falls short if you are trying to figure out what to expect when you when you are running campaigns in just Dallas or Los Angeles.

So, what I use for local traffic data is the Google Traffic Estimator.  You enter your keywords (however many you want) and a specific region – anywhere from a country, to a state, to a city or even a zip code with a radius.  If you like, you may also enter your desired daily budget and your CPC. 

The results? The traffic you can expect in one day for each keyword in the region you selected!  Now, keep in mind, there are the same limitations to this data as there are with the Google Keyword Tool – I find the traffic data to be more accurate than the estimated CPC. But it’s a good starting point.

The Google AdWords Traffic Estimator provides extremely powerful data for your Google AdWords campaign efforts. You should use this data to decide where to spend the majority of your time.  Any reputable PPC management firm would always suggest the majority of your time should be spent on keywords that can drive the most targeted traffic to your site.  Don’t waste your valuable time on terms that don’t deliver direct benefit (because they just aren’t searched on very often). That doesn’t mean don’t have them in your account, just don’t spend the majority of your time on them. Focus your attention on the top terms.  Yes, you would have seen this data yourself once your campaign was running for awhile, but this gives you the boost to focus on the right terms from the very beginning. 

Google Analytics provides great information, but one issue that can arise is when Google Analytics transaction numbers and the Google AdWords conversion tracking numbers don’t jive. I know that different packages are not going to track exactly the same, but most of the time, they are close enough that it’s not a big deal. However, a big issue arises when you have an e-commerce site and a decent percentage of people don’t order on their first visit, but come back and order at a later date.

Here’s the problem: Google AdWords tracks “first touch” – if someone searches on a term, clicks on your ad and comes to your site, does not order at that moment, but comes back a week later, AdWords will log the conversion back that first date and attribute the sale to AdWords. Analytics on the other hand tracks “last touch.” In our same scenario, if someone were to search, click an ad, visit the site and leave, then come back a week later, Analytics would attribute that search to organic or other, unless they did a search and clicked on an ad again. Not a big deal if a majority of visitors order on the first visit, but if you have a large amount of people who order at a later date, this can be present a huge problem.

I have two clients who have this issue. For one of them, 40% of visitors don’t order on their first visit, and the other is 50%. And you guessed it, there’s a 40% and 50% difference in AdWords conversions and Analytics transactions. They can’t get a true picture of their PPC ROI with Google Analytics because they only see the revenue for anyone who ordered the first time they visited the site.

The big question is why is that? You would think that, both being Google products, they would track the same way, or at least have an option to track that way, but they don’t. Frustrating for both me and my clients!

But, I’ll explain how to get around this dilemma in my next Blog.

More about Nikki

Here at JumpFly, we’ve been a bit hesitant to use Business.com because of some poor results in the past, coupled with the fact that they didn’t have their own simple-to-use conversion tracking system. I’m happy to report that situation has now changed on both fronts. I am currently working with a client who is now advertising on Business.com and we are seeing both a good volume of traffic as well as good quality traffic. Conversions are coming in on a daily basis, with a cost per conversion very similar to the results we are seeing from Google. All in all, it’s working well and we will definitely continue utilizing their PPC program. Their new conversion tracking is just as easy to implement as Google’s — just copy the code they provide and paste into the appropriate “thanks for your order” or “thanks for contacting us” confirmation page. That’s it. Then you’re off to the races.

Another feature that I absolutely love about Business.com’s PPC program is the way they have structured their ads. You can use up to 60 characters in title and 150 keywords in the description. Sure, short is sweet, but sometimes you really do want those extra words in there to really punch up your message. Another cool feature is the ability to use their Multilink functionality. You can use these other links to drive traffic deeper into your site. For example, let’s say you are a printing company and you are bidding on the keyword “printing company”. You can use the main link in the ad to drive traffic to your home page, but your ad can also display a sublink to your magazine printing page, your brochure printing page, and to your postcard printing page. That way, one ad can possibly drive traffic to five different pages on your site depending on the needs of your new potential customer. It is very cool.

If interested in learning more, contact a professional PPC management firm to assist you.

Learn more about Jack

When Google initially introduced the new beta version of the AdWords User Interface (UI), I played around with it a few times in my few client accounts that had the option, but it looks like last week the new AdWords User Interface rolled out to a much wider audience and I decided I better get myself familiar with it. I’m not going to review every new part of the Adwords UI, but I will highlight a few new features that I’ve noticed in the past few days.

The Pros of the New Google AdWords Interface:

• The “Tree” Based Visuals: I can get to any campaign or AdGroup using the tree interface, instead of going back out to the campaign summary or AdGroup summary.
• Nice Graphical Representation: in each campaign and AdGroup you can view a graph based on criteria like CTR, Conversions, Impressions, CPC and more, for whatever time period you prefer. I love looking at graphs for trends – is CTR dropping or CPC rising, etc. I used to use this a lot on the account dashboard, but this is even better, and I can choose to hide the graph if I want.
• Query Report Built Into the Keyword Tab: Another new AdWords User Interface feature that I like is the “Show Query Report” button within the keyword tab. I can select a few broad and/or phrase match terms, then hit the Show Query Report button and it will give me a list of the search queries that were triggered by the keywords I selected.One caveat is that it appears you have to have quite a few impressions before it will show you data. A lot of the terms I tested kept giving me the error “Not enough data to show particular queries.” It still seems a bit “buggy”, because a number of times the report would generate partially, but without the search queries, and trying to refresh would cause a bright red error bar to come up. This one is also a Con because once you’ve generated the list, it’s a bit kludge to put the actual terms into the AdGroup, but I’m hoping that will approve.
• One last pro: you can still switch back to the original interface if the new UI gets a bit confusing.

And now on to my new Google AdWords User Interface Con List:

• Ads Showing in the UI May Not Be Active: this one is a big problem for me, because I almost lost a client last week because of it. When you are in the keyword tab of an AdGroup in the new AdWords User Interface, one ad will be showing on the top left, just like in the original UI. Unfortunately, that ad may not be an active ad (in fact, I have YET to see where the ad that shows is going to an Active ad, unless only active ads are in that AdGroup – it almost seems to default to a Paused ad which is terribly annoying). I had a client who went into the new interface and was clicking around. He clicked the ad that was showing and was stunned to see it was going to a dead page of his site. He went through a bunch of the AdGroups and saw the same thing, and then called us, completely irate, because this was a change that had happened in January, and that I had told him was taken care of. He demanded a refund of several thousand dollars and was very close to quitting before I got him calmed down enough to understand what was happening and explain to him that the changes were made, and the only ad that was actually active in those AdGroups were all going to a live page in his site.
• Quick Add Tool is Missing: one of my favorite tools in the original interface is on the keyword tab and it’s the Quick Add link. Click it and Google lets you manually enter your keywords, AND generates a very specific list of keywords that you are missing that are all based around the existing keywords in that AdGroup. I use it a lot to see what keywords I might be missing in an AdGroup AND what negatives I should include. The Keyword Tool just generates too much “noise” to be used effectively in this same manner. And now it’s missing in the new AdWords User Interface, and the Show Query Report is not an effective substitute.
• Show Query Report: it’s on my pro list too, but most of the time it either doesn’t give results because it doesn’t have enough data or it keeps having errors.
• The MCC Drop-Down List is Not Alphabetical: this is a con for PPC management agencies like ourselves who use an MCC to manage our clients – the Drop-Down Client list isn’t alphabetical, so it can be hard to find a client in the list.
• The Next/Previous Links on the AdGroup Level Are Gone: in the original interface, I could sort my AdGroups by some criteria, like Cost or Impressions, and go into the first one, then hit the next link to move to the next one. That link is gone, so I have to keep going back to the Campaign level to see what the next AdGroup is that I need to go into.

Now this certainly isn’t a comprehensive list of Pros and Cons but just the first ones that have come to me over the last four or five days of continually using the new AdWords User interface. I’m sure I’ll have plenty more in the days and weeks to come. There’s no set switch date that I could find when they are moving from Beta to the new UI permanently, but I recommend getting used to it now, when you still have the ability to switch back and forth between the beta and original Google AdWords User Interface.

More about Nikki

Wouldn’t it be great if you could put your company name or logo in front of thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people and not have to pay much for it, if anything at all? Wouldn’t it be great if you could splash your company name or company logo across dozens, hundreds, even thousands of different websites? Wouldn’t it be great if you could build brand/business awareness and announce your existence to a broad spectrum of people who might very well be interesting in learning more about your company?

I’m hoping you are answering yes.

Wouldn’t it also be great if you could put the power of Google to work for you doing just this?

Still saying yes?

Okay, then it’s time for you to implement Image Ads in your Google AdWords campaigns. Using Image Ads on Google’s vast content network, you can literally put your company’s name, your company’s logo, visual images of the products you are selling in front of hundreds of thousands of eyeballs. And the beauty of running a CPC Image Ad campaign on Google AdWords is that all these hundreds of thousands of impressions won’t cost you a dime unless someone actually clicks on your ad. Here at JumpFly, we have seen many clients experience impressive results with Google Image Ads.

Another plus is that your low click-thru rate on Google’s content network won’t negatively impact your regular search traffic quality scores, so if you do get hundreds of thousands of impressions and very few clicks it won’t work against you.

Of course, you certainly want to get some clicks and sales out of these Image Ads, too. The good news is that conversion tracking does work with Image Ads, so you can track profitability as well as use this is a powerful branding mechanism.

More about Jack

Difference 1: Their Names: Yahoo calls their keyword exclusion tool ”excluded words” and Google calls it “negative keywords.”

Difference 2: Where They Are Put in the Account: Yahoo lets you put excluded words on the account level and/or the AdGroup level, while Google allows you to put negative keywords on the Campaign and/or AdGroup (note to Yahoo – Campaign level excluded terms are a must!).

Difference 3: How they actually work: The way the excluded/negative terms work is vastly different at Google and Yahoo, and can be a bit confusing.

First Google: you can enter negative keywords as broad, phrase and/or exact match. Adding a negative keyword as broad match prevents your ad from showing when that term is used anywhere in a search phrase, and exact match negative keywords will prevent that specific term from displaying your ad. Example: the broad negative keyword is bouquet – your ad will not show for any search with the word bouquet in it. For a phrase match example, if the negative keyword is the phrase “balloon bouquet” then your ad will not show for a search for balloon bouquet delivery, or cheap balloon bouquet; and if the negative keyword is [balloon], your ad will not show on any search for just the word balloon, but will show for the search balloons.

Now Yahoo, on the other hand, works very differently. If I was to exclude the word balloon, my ads would not show if someone were to search on just the term balloon or even balloons, UNLESS I was also advertising on the term balloon. If I exclude the term balloon, but advertise on the term helium balloon, my ad WILL show. Another example, if I exclude the term bouquet and am not advertising on any term that has bouquet in it, and someone were to search on balloon bouquet, the PPC ads would not show.

Powerful tools with fundamental differences can trip you up if you don’t know how they work. Using these tools incorrectly can cost you clicks, visitors & sales. Having a PPC management company like JumpFly who understands when to use these tools and how they can impact your account for good or bad is important.

View more JumpFly articles about Negative Match.

More about Nikki

Hello all,

Instead of asking for help this time, I hope that I can provide some.  If you are managing or responsible for pay per click (PPC) advertising accounts, you may be able to relate to my experience or be interested in feedback about different ways in which to manage PPC.  If so, read on.

In the past 5 years, I have tried numerous solutions for managing the Google, MSN and Yahoo Pay Per Click accounts we use as part of our online marketing strategy.  While all of the solutions have sufficed during the time period they were used, I think the one that I currently have is what we will stick with for a while.  As the market has become more competitive, new options have developed and I have tried a few.

To review the history, I started with a one person consulting firm who managed the pay per click accounts.  She did fairly well setting them up but after setup, was really only changing the bids rather than actively managing the accounts.  She had another job and this was a part time gig for her.  I was happy with her work at the time (she was used for 2.5 years), but changes in my company required that I cut costs and I had to learn the task of managing the pay per click accounts myself.  I managed the pay per click advertising accounts for about 2 years and because it was only one of many responsibilities I had, I am sure that I did not do it very well.  I learned enough to be informed, but not enough to be really good.  Maybe just enough to be able to hire someone else to do it.

In the middle of last year I started looking for a technology solution for my pay per click management.  There are many, many pay per click technology solutions out there and I checked into a few of them.  One was a firm called “Efficient Frontier”.  These folks use the same concepts used in portfolio management to find the most efficient spend for your pay per click dollars.  Although I have not used them, I received good feedback regarding their service during my research.  Problem is, you really need to be spending over $30 – $50K per month to even consider this and at last check they do take a big piece of the spend (10% – 15%).  They are well suited for large organizations that spend millions of dollars per month or year on pay per click but not really for small guys like my company.  The other issue with efficient frontier for my firm is that we do not have any conversions online, all of our sales are offline.  This is more challenging for a company like Efficient Frontier, but I am sure they have made strides in meeting this market need (offline conversions) since I evaluated them a year ago.

Because we did not manage enough monthly spend to use Efficient Frontier, I moved on to two smaller firms that work somewhat similarly to Efficient Frontier in that they have developed pay per click optimization technology.  The firms are Yodle and Reach Local.  The difference between these firms and Efficient Frontier is that they are able to work with smaller firms that manage less spend AND they use “reverse proxy” technology to link a phone call to a specific keyword search (using time of day, IP address matching and other proprietary tools).  In this way they have developed a way to better optimize pay per click spend for service companies like my own whose sales occur offline.  What was important to us with these companies was that their systems “learn” which keywords were driving the most calls and in this way bid higher for those keywords and lower for others that were not driving calls.

Unfortunately, my test pilot program for Yodle and Reach Local failed in both cases.  In both cases, I hired them to manage one small portion of our pay per click program (about 10% of monthly spend) to determine if they could succeed with it and from there add more spend to their management if they succeeded.  In both cases, the quality of service and communication were huge issues.  I was not able to speak directly to those persons that were managing the accounts day to day and for this reason, it seems that there was a lot lost in translation.  Some of the ads that were being used did not represent our brand well and that was not being communicated well by the intermediaries (sales folks).  In other cases, it did not seem that the sales team clearly communicated which keywords would be part of the program as the persons managing the account were bidding on keywords that were not in the contract and competed with our own current PPC bids.  The assurances that had been made before singing a contract about how much expertise the individuals who were managing the accounts had did not live up to expectations.  In other words, I was being told that I would have a PPC manager that had worked for companies in my industry and would therefore know many of the best practices for getting high conversion rates so that their technology systems did not have to work as hard to optimize our campaigns.  Things would happen more quickly for us in other words and lead to a quicker ROI.  None of the promises came true and I ended up cancelling both of these programs before they really got into the swing of things because of the host of problems that occurred in the three month contract periods.  This is not to say that either one of these companies does not have a viable (or valuable) model for managing pay per click.  It just didn’t work for me and what I needed.

This brings me to my current solution.  I am not even sure how I found JumpFly, Inc. but when I did, it struck me that they did not use any technology to manage their campaigns – they used real people.  Real people that I could talk to and e-mail.  I also started the month-tom-month contract with this company using only 10% of our monthly spend.  Within 1 month, I could tell that they were succeeding in vastly improving my ROI for PPC and I gave them all accounts (total of between $20K and $25K per month).  Prior to their management of the Google PPC account, I was paying approximately $16 for a conversion where a conversion was measured as the user reaching the “Contact Us” page where they can view our office locations.  This last month, the conversion cost was down to about $11.  During this time, the number of conversions has actually increased.  So, we are spending about 25% less than we were before, but getting just as many or more conversions.  Having started around $16K in spend per month for Google, we are now down to about $11K or $12K, and their service fees are much less than the associated cost savings.  I am very happy with this actively managed solution and wanted to recommend JumpFly, Inc. to any others in the Anderson network that are struggling with how to manage their pay per click advertising accounts. Finally, I sent out an e-mail last fall to the alumni group and one other alumnus had used them and gave them good marks as well. Check them out if PPC management has been a thorn in your side, like it was for me for five years.

Call me at 310-373-5000 if you would like to talk further about Jumpfly or PPC management.

Regards,
————————————-
Kevin DiCerbo
Celibre
23211 Hawthorne Blvd.
2nd Floor
Torrance, CA 90505
Office: (310) 373-5000
Fax: (310) 373-5012
www.celibre.com

After evaluating each entrant on customer satisfaction, depth of knowledge, reporting methods, internal principles and competitive advantages, a winner is chosen. According to TopSEOs’ spokesperson Jeev Trika, “These firms have been scrutinized over an entire year. Winning firms understand and excel within their field, have great unique advantages and practice what they preach.”

JumpFly’s only focus isPPC Management. They believe the fast paced, constantly changing PPC marketplace is too important to each client’s bottom line to try and provide a “One Stop Shop” for Internet marketing services. After starting many years ago as PPC pioneers, JumpFly’s dedication to managing the Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter platforms earns their team unmatched experience and industry relationships. Mike Tatge, JumpFly Managing Partner, said “This recognition is special. We won based on a thorough evaluation of our clients’ satisfaction and results. We are very proud of this. It’s why we do what we do.”

The JumpFly team has a great reputation earned to date, and looks forward to many more years of providing the best PPC management available. JumpFly is a Google Qualified Company, Yahoo Search Marketing Ambassador and Microsoft adExcellence Member. JumpFly was also invited to participate on Yahoo’s Traffic Quality Council, receives office visits from Google and has never received any complaints according to the Better Business Bureau. Furthermore, JumpFly works month to month and offers a money back guarantee, again demonstrating their commitment to value and relentless drive to provide clients the best results possible.

View TopSEOs’ Press Release

1. Enhanced Geo-targeting: you now have the ability to pick more than one geo-targeting option. You can pick different geo-targets by AdGroup or campaign, as well as mix-and-match options. You can also chose to do premium bidding for one target area. For example, you advertise to the entire state of California, but you know you do really well in the LA area. You can choose to bid higher (by percentage or dollar amount) in the LA area.
2. Day-Parting (Ad Scheduling): something we’ve been requesting here at JumpFly for awhile is the ability for Yahoo to automatically turn on and off your campaigns based on time of day. This works particularly well for those who receive many phone calls and want to make sure that they have someone available to answer those calls, or to make sure you don’t run out of budget when your target audience is online and searching. Yahoo took it a step further and allows you to schedule your ads based on your account’s time zone OR the searcher’s time zone (which works well for scenario two above). Another nice feature is that you can schedule this on the campaign or AdGroup level. Unfortunately, they chose to do it by the hour level only, so no half or quarter hours, but it’s a start!
3. Demographic Targeting: you can now target your desired audience, whether by age or gender, and premium bid to them. Something to know is that it does not allow you to exclude any demographic audience, except for those 17 and under. But if you know your best target is a female you can premium bid to females, or if you know that the age target is 25 to 29, you can premium bid to them. Keep in mind if your best target is a female age 25 to 29, it will combine the premium bids; if you set your premium bid at $.50 for a female, and $.50 for ages 25 to 29, it will actually bid $1.00 more for a female age 25 to 29.
4. Better Reporting: Yahoo also is rolling out better reporting options so you can run reports on demographics, dayparting and geo-targeting.

It will be great to see how these improvements pan out over the next few weeks, but I’m encouraged by the changes Yahoo has made and hope they continue to improve.

More about Nikki

Then Google gave us the ability to restrict the placement on certain sites where we knew we did not what to show our ads.  Better, but . . .

Last year Google improved the process with a huge leap called AdWords Placement Targeting and we are now able to place ads very specifically on content sites based on our analysis of the Placement Report.  Remember, from my previous articles that the placement report will give you information on where your ad is performing at its best.  You can decide based on CTR and Conversion Rate whether a particular placement is profitable for you and adjust your campaign accordingly.

Now, Google AdWords just announced a beta test of a new way to place your ads – Interest-based Advertising.  According to their announcement, if you are a Google Interest-based advertising beta test participant, you will now be able to target visitors based on their interests beyond what they are reading right now.  This can be HUGE for advertisers – if it works.

Visitor interests will be tracked based on the types of sites they visit and their general activity on the Internet (much like Engage Media envisioned about 10 years ago, prior to their demise).  Users will also have the option of updating their interests directly with Google with the new Google Ad Preferences tool.  Google is also addressing privacy concerns by allowing web users to opt out of this new interest-based ad-serving feature using the same preferences tool.

One benefit to being a JumpFly PPC Client is that we are able to get our clients into beta tests fairly easily through our Google Agency Support team.  We will also be able to quickly assess whether a new program like this has promise and relay that information to our clients.

Check out more information on the Interest-based Advertising on the Google Blog.

Or find out how to apply for beta testing in the Interest-based Advertising Announcement by Google.

More about Kristie

Can your domain name (your website address or URL) impact your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising? You’ve probably heard that your domain is important when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and your natural or organic rankings, but it can affect your pay per click advertising too.

There’s a couple of reasons why:

• Your domain name tells people what you do and what you are about: Consider the following two (made-up) domains: www.BuyBlueWidgets.com or www.BuyBWOnline.com. If you were an ecommerce site that sold blue widgets, which would be the better domain? You probably guessed it, it’s the first one. If someone sees this domain name, they know that they can purchase blue widgets. Do you get that from the second? You know you can buy something, but not what that something is.
• It makes good use of the limited ad real estate that you get: You get a very limited amount of space to get your point across, and your Display URL, if it makes sense based on your keywords, can be an added line to use.
• It can be “bolded” in an ad: if you use your main keyword in your domain, and someone uses it in a search term (i.e. – your domain is www.BuyBlueWidgets.com, and someone searches on “Blue Widgets Sale”), than the words that they used in the search will be “bolded” in your Display URL. The display URL for our above example would look like www.BuyBlueWidgets.com, making it stand out more.

One thing that you do need to keep in mind, when choosing a domain name, is to beware of trademark infringement. If someone owned the trademark to Blue Widgets, and you own the URL www.BlueWidgets.com, it’s very likely that the trademark owner will be able to legally acquire that domain from you. I’m not a trademark attorney, but I’ve seen several instances of clients who have had to give up domains that they’ve owned for years and years to the trademark owner.

Domains are important in how they affect your identity, so think carefully about them. When in doubt, buy several variations and test them out. Domains can be bought for under $10 now, so it’s not a hardship on the pocketbook. When creating your online identity, there are many critical things to consider, but don’t overlook the importance of choosing a domain name that is going to best represent and benefit your business.

More about Nikki