Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

So you’ve taken Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter as far as you want to take them. Where do you turn next? What other pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program can you use? Which other search engine marketing platform can you take advantage of to drive incremental sales volume for your business? If you are primarily a business to business (B2B) company, then you certainly should take a look at the Pay Per Click program that Business.com is offering.

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.

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If you’ve logged into your Google AdWords account lately, you might have noticed a new link in the upper right corner, New Interface (Beta). If you click on it, you’re treated to a whole new way of looking at your Google AdWords account. Not every Google AdWords customer has this beta option, but Google is slowly rolling the new AdWords User Interface out to more and more customers.

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.

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Free Branding and New Sales Opportunities in PPC Advertising 

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.

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