Another helpful ppc blog posting from Payperclickhelpers.com
Are you thinking about signing up with Efficient Frontier? Did you know:
1. Efficient Frontier has 50% Churn Rate
2. Locks you into contracts that you cannot escape
3. Overwrites URLS in your accounts
4. Does not let you into your adwords account that they manage for you.
Be cautious before you sign up with them. I have been dealing with lots of clients coming off of the churn recently.
Cap N' Click
Another helpful ppc blog posting from Payperclickhelpers.com
Do Not Buy The Permutator. I found this free tool online for creating keywords. It works great and its free.
http://www.highdots.com/ppc-keyword-generator/
It is a permutator - has some good output, similar to the PPC Rex tool, and the tool known as the Permutator Bur... Its Free, as it should be.
PPCFreelance.com is up and running. A partner site of payperclickhelpers.com. The site will list PPC account managers who are willing to work on a freelance basis for clients. In some cases the actual freelance will be listed as an alias so he/she is not discovered by current employer. Rates and styles vary between freelancers but the information is accessible to the PPC help seeker. Check it out. If you are a PPC freelancer and want to get listed on PPC freelance. Send an email to info@payperclickhelpers.com with you contact info, rates, and level of experience.
Saw the world famous ShoeMoney as well as the world famous Danny Sullivan. Ran into my good Buddy Will Handsfield and his Search Diva Anne at Search Ad Network. Bumped into Brian Shrader of Jumpstart and his Partner Jackie from Jumpstart. Upon check in ran into Mary O' Brien of the PPC Summit Sessions. Mary is one of the founders of Telic Media and hired me 4 Years ago giving me my start in this industry. I visited with many of my friends at the various Engines including Greyson Menetti over at Looksmart, searched all over for Ryan Argento of Ask.com. I visited some search management tool vendors to see what was new. Introduced myself as a product manager for a new application and we talked the talk. Some were more tight lipped then others, but for the most part very open to hearing what we were doing. I missed out on the Google dance but had a great client Dinner at the Arcadia Restaurant in the Marriot. On a whole at the conference there were many booths that were not up my alley, still seems we have a large group of unsophisticated attendees, but slowly people are catching on to this stuff. I found the sessions to be ok, but nothing jumped out at me. I did like the Images session. A panel member suggested using flicker for SEO purposes - seemed like a great idea. I think I will start to work on my Search engine optimization helpers blog at some point as the SEO stuff is once again becoming interesting to me. Oh the girls... There was some search hotties out there. I did not speak to many of them, but certainly lots of cuties. I think next year I will do girls of SES blog.
Semphonic is a very complex system of analyzing PPC accounts. It is a low level dive into your ads, adgroups, campaigns, keywords, position analysis, landing page analysis, and pretty much anything else you can think of. It relies very heavily on statistics, and so it does not work well on short term analysis or low volume analysis.
One problem that we run into is that the data can be interpreted a variety of different ways, with the "right" interpretation being observed only through post analysis of results. An example of this is the position analysis. This analysis could tell you that position 1 converts better for your account, when in reality this is not the case for the overall account. Most of the keywords in position one for most accounts would be more obscure, longer tail keywords that have less competition and are by definition more targeted, so they drive a higher conversion rate as customers typing in a specific search query are further along in the buying cycle and are prepared to purchase. This has nothing to do with they position and everything to do with the keyword, but this analysis could make you push all listings into position one, only to find that they are not performing better and are just spending more money.
There are other examples of this, such as a landing page appearing to convert better because it is the page for a specific keyword with a unique tracking tag on it, while that url on the whole does not convert well, it is just targeted to that one specific keyword.
I guess the bottom line is that while the semphonic report does give you a great insight into accounts by only running one report and having it analyze them, other analysis can be done manually that may garner a more actionable plan with verifiable results. We do use it sporadically here as it is useful for looking at the account as a whole, but we do not use it on a day by day basis.
AdWords advertisers whose ads are on the cusp of earning the top spot on Google's search results pages may soon find it easier to break through, in some circumstances. Google is planning on rolling out a change in the way it calculates the ad placement for a given keyword.
Currently, ads are scored based on their "Quality Score" and the actual cost-per-click (CPC) an advertiser pays as a result of auction pressure from other advertisers. This process, which was updated in February, calculates an ad's quality based on the historical performance of a given keyword, relevance of keyword to ad text, landing page quality, and other factors.
According to Nicholas Fox, group business product manager for ad quality at Google, the Quality Score will continue to be weighted more heavily in the calculation, but the change will come in the CPC Google uses in the formula. Instead of using the auction-driven CPC, Google will soon begin to use the advertiser's maximum bid CPC to determine which ad will be shown in the top spot.
The motivation behind this is to allow Google to consider more ads for the top spot, and at the same time be more restrictive in which ad will end up there. It will also give advertisers more control and predictability, he said.
The change will be most noticeable with ads on the cusp of the top spot, with the same or similar Quality Score as the top ad. It will especially impact ads on less competitive keywords that don't create enough auction pressure to drive the actual CPC up enough to allow the second-place ad to overtake the top spot. Advertisers will be charged the minimum CPC required to displace the top ad, up to their maximum bid, Fox said.
The change will not allow sites that Google determines to be of low quality to take the top spot, Fox said. "For some ads with a low Quality Score, there will be no level of bid that will allow them to get the top spot," he said.
Fox advises advertisers not to make changes until the changes roll out in the next few weeks, and they see what the effects are on their ads. He suggests advertisers make sure their bid reflects the maximum amount they are willing to pay, and that they keep an eye on the metrics in their AdWords interface. Once the effects are clear, advertisers can experiment with raising or lowering their bids, he said.
