Recently I receive the Yahoo PPC Guide Smart Start it is 82 pages with plenty of pictures and simple instructions. I would feel comfortable showing it to a client who wanted to know more about buying online advertising, I would not recommend it for a beginner trying to learn how to use the system. A definite win for this pamphlet is the troubleshooting guide. It is a good reference — I tore those pages out (77 -82) and put them by my desk.

For something a little more in depth about starting in pay per click advertising I suggest Google’s Guide (warning PDF download). This guide goes through the current tools that Google offers, short exercise that let you try it out, and an extensive glossary of terms. Again I think that the reference aspect of the glossary (page 138 – 154) is the most valuable part.

In both cases I think that anyone who is really looking to start should be reading the study materials from the Yahoo Ambassador test or Google AdWords Professional test. Going through the respective Official User documents will familiarize you with the systems much better.

Also on the theme of getting started — the Seattle Start Up Weekend was this weekend I am looking forward to see what they came up with. Start Up Weekends concept seems interesting, put a bunch of people in a room for a weekend to crush-out the details of a venture. I am not sure if this is a formula for good results. The short time seems a good push for creativity but the rest of the strangers in a room seems like it could fulfill the adage: none of us is as dumb as all of us. I haven’t attended an event so I don’t know how well their process works.

Apparently the result this time is SkillBit with the tagline “Your Teams Potential, Now!” Good luck to everyone involved

Do you optimize your ads for pay-per-click manually? You should.

Both AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing offer a convenient option to “Optimize” ads.

Yahoo! :

Google:

It is tempting to use these option if you are new to the system, but they do not have your best interest in mind. Both systems will skew the ads they serve based on your click through rate (CTR). While raw traffic data is an adequate measure it is unlikely to serve your real ends — conversions (sales or leads). A well written ad can have a high CTR without having a positive return on investment.

In general the goal PPC advertising is some type of conversion. To this end you should manually pick which ad is working best for you. The simplest way to accomplish this is to divide your impressions (number of ads served) by your conversions to get what I call True Conversions (TC).

Impressions / Conversions = TC

Using TC allows you to compensate for variations in impressions across campaigns, ad groups, and ads to see where you are deriving value. If you really do not have time to test ads manually you can use True Conversions to spot check if the automated systems are making the correct decisions.

Micheal Martinez is an interesting fellow. He writes expansively. Most days he puts out more written content than I put out in a week, and today is no exception. I actually have a little trouble reading his entries because of the small type and compact organization — but that is beside the point. Today he postulates on what SEO metrics are, it is long but if you make all the way through I think he has a good answer.

Traffic

Simple right? The answer to what Search Optimization is all about is traffic. I am a bit of an ego surfer, so is Micheal. I have no illusions — my favorite phrases are essentially worthless — no quantity of number one ranks is going to make me money. I have dozens of strange phrases that I rank on the first page for that bring a significant portion of my traffic (~10%) that have nothing to do with me, but eyeballs are good right?

What you should be looking for at the end of every campaign is roughly this:

Traffic Over Time - Compare total visits for 30 days vs the 30 days before you started. Raw visitor count is the bottom line for many projects.

New vs Returning Visitors – Are you retaining your visitors? Unless you have a explosive growth you want the end result to have stable, or growing, percentage of returning visitors. The repeats are more valuable, in general, than 1st time users. If you have a declining return user base you are likely failing at your primary objective, or you have executed a campaign that targets the wrong people.

Volume of Traffic from Search - A well executed campaign will result in a growth of all entry method if your content is valuable, but a search campaign has little control over the other sources, so you should focus on the trend of search referrals. Your actions points are when you see a plateau or decrease in search volume.

User Demographic by Page – This is the microscope. What pages are significantly different from average? Where did you win? Where did you loose? Use your best and worst performing pages to learn what you need to implement in your next campaign.

Referral Traffic

Backlinks are great, they are like search terms, if they send traffic. You shouldn’t really care who the link is from — if it send traffic. Every eye that sees you is one more chance for someone else to learn that you exist. Most of my referral traffic comes from 5 sites, but I still love every one of the other sites that sends 1 or 2 visits per day. Search is only one means of driving traffic and it should be treated as such, one piece.

If it makes you feel better check your links at Yahoo! or Webmaster Tools but the time that you spend there is not actually productive. Knowing where you have backlinks is not going to tell you why you have backlinks. Looking at individual pages that amass links can help you understand what content is strong and useful to visitors.

Conversions

What is your money maker? A white paper, a product, or a request for information. You may see an increase in your conversion rate by targeting the right terms, relevant terms, but it is unlikely. Traffic is not the same as customers. The Internet is largely, still, a place for browsers. If you are only focusing on building traffic through search optimization you are leaving money on the table. Being #1 for the perfect term won’t make your site easier to use or your offer more valuable.

Once you have traffic — or if you already have traffic — you should change your focus to fulfilling the needs of your visitors. If you have a 2% conversion rate that means that 98% of your increased traffic doesn’t create value for you or your business. Certainly we would all love to have thousands of unique visitors per day, but you are in for a long road if you use that as your platform for success. Organic Search and PPC are a means to an end. Both are only a first step toward that end once you have collected your metrics on where and how your visitors use your site you should focus on leading them to your goal. This means crafting a site that people will return to or send to their friends, focusing obsessively on search will leave you very dependent on thing that you can not control.

In PPC Competition Part 1 we covered how to eyeball the level of competition for ad space. In PPC Competition Part 2 we covered how to assess how much your competitors are bidding on your pay per click phrases, and potential hidden competitors. In this installment we will look at another of the tools that Google provides and put all of our findings together.

Here is what the AdWords Keyword Tool reports as the exact match search volume and competition for July:

Remember from part two that “vespa” ranged from 18-32 cents for top3 positions and “vespa scooter” ranged from 31-50 cents. According to Google’s tool there is a similar amount of competition for the two phrases. This may seem surprising at first, but take a moment and consider the type of product that we are discussing. A large fairly expensive item that is likely expensive to transport. So this is likely the result of geo-targeting — and we did see some evidence of it during the initial search. If you are looking to do a localized campaign you know from the first search that there is not much space competition for the keyword, so it is likely a good word to target. However if you are doing a national campaign you are in need for further research.

If you need to find out the amount of advertiser competition that you will find running a national campaign in a highly localized business vertical you need to do several dozen searches using your intended keyword in conjunction with major metropolitan areas to see how the landscape changes. You can expect that you will find bulk bidders pushed out in the particularly competitive markets.

In spite of Google’s surprising reports on advertiser competition I would still classify “vespa” as a soft term that can be taken advantage of in the near future.

Earlier I talked about how to start your research on PPC competition by looking at the results in Google. We found that there is not a great deal of competition for the 10 spaces on the first page of results. Today I will cover how to make some checks on price competition.

First the AdWords Traffic Estimator Tool:

Vespa surprisingly is the cheapest cost range and the highest volume. The estimated cost per click is what Google thinks will keep your ads in the top three 85% of the time. So at 25 cents it is likely that you can be in the top three for “vespa” and “vespa granturismo 200″ most of the time based on the competition we saw — there were only 2 competitive ads. “Vespa scooter” will need a bid over 45 cents. So we can expect that there are many potential clicks for “vespa,” let’s see.

So “vespa scooter” is not only the most expensive but also not terrificly high volume. “Vespa,” on the other hand, had no retailer competition only bulk bidders — like eBay. Unless you have checked the results at several times during a day and throughout the week don’t take for granted that you saw an accurate cross-section.

There are no phenomenal places to find data on number of competitors — but here are some options.

• SpyFu — Data here varies widely. On the plus side SpyFu publish the date that they take their snapshot of results. So it is a good comparison to the data you see and makes an estimate of average click cost.
• KeyCompete — Some free information, more for pay. What you can get here are realistic numbers on total competitors in the space.

These two return interesting data.

• Vespa: 7 – 15 competitors, 407 clicks/day, average cost 19 cents. KeyCompete assess the top five as strong for the term.
• Vespa Scooter: 13 – 106 competitors, 8 clicks/day, average cost 28 cents. KeyCompete assess the top five slightly weaker than for vespa.
• Vespa Granturismo 200: Neither returns data. We know that there is at least one competitor here but it reiterates that there is little traffic.

In the next installment I will put it all together using “vespa” as example.

Engine Ready put out an intriguing article.

Our goal in the PPC battlefield is to trick our competition into believing that we have opted not to enter into battle with him for prime visibility of popular keyword phrases. If our competitor does not see us on the battlefield for those keywords, he will likely alter his combat strategy into a more passive mode.

Engine Ready advocates a creative use of geo-targeting in Google Adwords to hide yourself from your competitors. Literally playing lame in a campaign that only targets your competitor’s building. It seems interesting at first but it feels fishy. Why would an agency give this kind of information. I think they are employing Sun Tzu’s tactics on their competitors.

Go to Google AdWords Help Center and look up ISP

Keep in mind that Google identifies a user’s geographic location by looking at the computer’s Internet Protocol (IP) address, which is assigned by a user’s Internet Service Provider (ISP).

If you really want to stymie your competition you would need to geo-target their IP-server, but if you were to do that you would be showing low quality ads to everyone who is being served an IP from a server in that area. In an urban area that could be tens of thousand of people. I pity any overzealous PPC manager who implemented this strategy already.

If you are interested in hiding from your competitors you are going to need to find out what their IP address is, and exclude them by IP. Google has systems in place that let you powerfully control your delivery. Rather than duct tapping together a shoddy delivery method look for a simple route to accomplish your goals. Finding your competitor’s IP is not that difficult.

What Engine Ready has done is advocate that the readers of their newsletter use a rock to pound gum into a screw hole. What you should be doing is finding the screw and using a screw driver to put it in place — trust me your campaigns will hold up better.

As the landscape of search changes it becomes increasingly necessary for a robust traffic portfolio to include pay per click visitors. But how can you tell when you are looking at a “soft phrase” ripe to be exploited qualified visitors?

I am a fan of Vespa scooters — especially the Granturismo. So I am going to use several terms from my life to show you how to determine the competition of your PPC phrases.

Let’s begin with a general phrase, Vespa.

The phrase returns high relevance organic results so I usually expect to see more results in the paid links. I admit this is a slightly anomalous result, but is is a good example. Both results here are the same — large volume buyers who are employing keyword insertion in both title and description. This suggests that there is little competition.

Next, Vespa Scooter.

These results are more diverse but you can see that result #1, 2 and 5 are the same kind of mass media buyer with template test and keyword insertion. #1 is of special concern. MeetUp has a particularly broadly worded ad and apparently is bidding on “scooter” as a broad term. I have done this search several times and MeetUp is always the top. Here is our first indication of what the price competition may be. Since 3 of the top 5 results are mass media buyers we may find that either: This term is a being bid particularly high for the amount of ad competition or the more specialized companies are not bidding high at all.

The two ads that are showing from retailers both feature a state name, suggesting that they are Geo-Targeted.

Last “Vespa Granturismo 200”

Based on these results it looks like this space has little, if any, use of exact phrases and few competing companies. None of the searches that I ran went beyond 10 paid results.

At first glance this looks like a soft group of terms. Next time I will cover the some quick ways to bring search volume and click cost into your assessment of PPC competition.