PPC Whiz

I’m a big fan of Firefox. At first it was because I am anti Microsoft (Bill is sending out the hired goons as I type) and wanted to “rebel against the man” but now Firefox offers so many great extensions that can really help the average PPC or SEO manager. I thought I would share a few of my favourites.

1. SEO for Firefox – Aaron Wall is a brain when it comes to SEO…and yes, he wrote the book on SEO, aptly titled “SEO Book.” He also released this extremely handy SEO tool for firefox which gives you a quick glimpse into all kinds of useful internet marketing data such as: domain age, back links, whois, delicious bookmarks and more. While this tool is more helpful for SEO related work, I happen to have it installed because I help out with some seo work with this toronto internet marketing company. Here is a screen capture using a firefox tool below of what the data looks like.

2. Global Firefox Extension – This tool is fantastic and was made by a company who really know their stuff. If you are running a PPC campaign in a different country or region within your country, you can use this tool to check the display results of your ads. Here are some other handy features.

• View paid and organic search results as they appear in different cities.
• View paid and organic search results as they appear in different regions.
• Open all results from countries, cities and regions in multiple tabs for easy comparison.
• View paid and organic search results from a specific IP address.
• View paid and organic search results from any US ZIP code.
• View paid and organic search results from different language results pages

There is a great set of screenshots on the Red Fly Marketing blog which will help explain how to use the tool.

3. Fireshot – This is a new tool to my browser which I am still playing with. I liked it so much it has made the list. I like having a built in screen capture program into my browser because it saves me time and this particular program has some great functionality. In addition to sporting all of the usual crop, draw, write etc… Fireshot also uploads the image to its server for quick linking. All to often a client will want to have a quick answer that isn’t easily explained in words… presto! take a screen grab and you’ve saved yourself a lot of hot air and a couple of aspirin. You will notice the “Matt Cuts” screen grab above was created and hosted using Fireshot.

4. Split Screen – I love this little extension! Normally I have my laptop screen and side monitor when I am sitting at my desk. I seem to have this nasty habit of having 10 different programs open at the same time, not to mention 50 different browser tabs in Firefox. This tool can separate any browser screen into multiple sections, allowing me to see 2, 3, 4 or more browser sessions at once. It is very handy when working with a PPC campaign, clients website and competitions site all at once.

5. Google Analytics Checker – I just downloaded this today but like the quick reference to see if Google Analytics is installed on a site. This extension sits in the footer of the browser, beside SEO for Firefox. If the graph is in colour – Bob’s your uncle – Google Analytics is installed. If it is in black and white, your out of luck.

Google announced today the ability to demographically target AdWords campaigns, much the same way MSN… well… sort of. First, this feature is in beta mode and will only be available to marketers in the US and UK over the “next few weeks”

Demographic bidding will be available to contextually targeted and placement-targeted campaigns on the content network. How does it work? Here is the direct quote from the Inside AdWords blog:

Some publishers in our network, such as social networking sites, know the gender and age of their users because their users sign in with that information when they create a profile or fill out registration or subscription forms. Participating publishers anonymize this user reported demographic data and then send it to Google in aggregate form, allowing us to adjust which ads are shown to members of specific demographic groups. (To protect user privacy, AdWords receives this data only from publishers that have permission from users to share their data according to the site’s terms and conditions. Users are never identified personally, but only as anonymous aggregated data in the demographic reports. And to protect the privacy of minors, users under 18 can’t be targeted demographically.)

I don’t have a lot of experience working with MSN’s demographic targeting, to be honest a lot of my clients just don’t lend themselves to that granular level of detail. Plus… I’m sceptical of how it works.

Regardless with Google’s beta test you will be able to modify your bids for a particular age bracket AND ask that your ads not be shown to a certain demographic groups if they aren’t meeting your ROI goals. This begs the question if at some point a cost-per-action system will be included in this.

This system is also supposed to help you determine which demographic converts best for you by giving you access to run a Demographic Reports from the report centre showing you a breakdown of your performance metrics based on demographic segmentation.

As a Canadian advertiser… I would like to test this out… but Google has always and will always continue to ignore us Canucks in the north shivering away in our igloos and the beta test is only available to US and UK advertisers. If you sign up for a test (which can be done here), let me know how it goes.

I think this concept is great. Who knows… 2008 may see a semmy nomination on this blog?!?

The Semmy’s are awards given to the years best posts in Search Engine Marketing. The nominations for the PPC catagory do provide some excellent tips for managing PPC campaigns. Shoemoney’s post about creating an “arrow” within your PPC ad is particularly interesting, something I may try in the future!

I’ve wanted to create a blog for a while now… and yes I am aware that my humble little blog will be the “bajilionth” blog on the internet. So why create another? Simple, I wanted to create a great resource for pay-per-click marketing. My goal is to have this site become a destination resource for great ppc tips, tricks, news and more. I will endeavor to keep the content interesting, topical and useful to those who have a basic level on knowledge to those who are waist deep, managing 40 campaigns and probably know a heck of a lot more than I do!