$50 to Someone Who Can Get a Higher CTR!

I love seeing a good CTR, a nice high CTR that I know I can live off of and decrease bids around.  Well… I can finally retire a happy man.  I am happy to announce a CTR that is … well…  just plain out of this world.

Curious?

Check this screen shot out!

Crazy CTR

Yup - you read that right…  92,233,720,369,547,776.00% CTR.    How do you get that you ask?  Simple… one click and zero impressions.  Kinda makes pii look like a chump doesn’t it?

*I really don’t have 50 bucks… I have to pay my taxes first!

Google Keyword Search Volume Released

I got all excited when I read some ppc blog posts showing new search volume numbers that had been released in Google’s Keyword tool. I hurried to my bookmark bar, opened up Adwords, clicked on the Google Keyword tool and…. wait for it… nothing. Booo. I was dissapointed like a kid who wanted a toy bb gun for Christmas and got a one piece pink bunny pj suit complete with fuzzy feet (2 points for those who got the Christmas movie reference there).

BUT

Today, I loged into my internet marketing campaigns and say a message in my MCC saying that the tool was available and the keyword data was there!

“You can now see statistics on the approximate number of search queries
matching your keywords. This data allows you to better plan your budget
and pick keywords most likely to return quality leads, which in turn
can help improve your ROI. Learn more|Dismiss this message“

WHOOO HOOOO

Here’s an interesting question… what happens to tools like Wordze.com, Keyword Discovery and others?

Was it just a freak coincidence that I got this email today from Wordze with a special $4 promotion?


“I hope everyone is enjoying July. As I had talked
about to some of you, I have something really special for July that is going to
help you nock the socks off of your affiliate earnings.

Until July 14th you can send your readers to the
Url below, and they will be able to get access to Wordze for ALL of July for
only $4.

Sign Up Here

Other than that… Enjoy the rest of the month, and best of
luck!

Levi

Wordz

Tracking EXACT PPC Keywords with Google Analytics

First, my apologies for not posting. There was a death in my family and the majority of my time was spent with loved ones as well as trying to stay on top of client work. January and February have been particularly busy with new contracts and clients over at my Toronto internet marketing firm, Spark Internet Marketing.

For those using Google Analytics and wanting to get an edge on your PPC competition, this filter and script is a must. This filter and java script file allows you to pull in the EXACT keyword string used by people coming to your website through PPC ads. As you might now, you are able to see this data from Organic searches but PPC traffic was another story. If you were advertising using broad match for the term Barbados resort but a user typed in beach resort in Barbados you ad would show. In Google Analytics, you would see a visitor attributed to the term Barbados resort in your PPC traffic stats. This filter pulls that data in and displays it in the user defined field.

I was using an old filter posted by a great PPC resource, and newly named Semvironment, but unfortunately it seemed to stop reporting data on January 15th. I then came across a similar tool over at ROI Revolution. The only drawback was it didn’t work with the new version of Google Analytics. Thanks to Michael and his team, they just posted a new version of their filter and script that works with Google’s new code.

In the coming days, I will post how I use this filter to help optimize my accounts.

Microsoft Buying Yahoo…? Fine… But PLEASE Support Your Product!

What a day it has been for us people in search engine marketing. If you partied way to much last night and were passed out for most of the day, you may have missed this - Microsoft Makes $45 Billion Offer for Yahoo!

I can’t say this was a suprise and to be honest, it is long overdue. Given that Yahoo! has been struggling latley, laying off jobs, stock tanking and all… well, they were ripe for the taking.

There is mixed results in the search community and the jurry is still out if this is good for us or not. Strictly from a PPC perspective, here is the latest blog chatter - PPC Book is sceptical, PPC Advice is sitting on the fence but seems optimistic, the rest of the PPC blogs out there haven’t posted an opinion yet.

My thoughts? Well, I am happy this has happened and expect we won’t see any PPC impact for a while. My hope is that Microsoft migrates their system INTO Yahoo’s Search Marketing platform. Though I have never been a huge fan of either, Yahoo’s platform is slightly better to work with than Microsoft’s. Will that happen? Probably not, as a friend of mine said - “Microsoft’s ego will get in the way of making the right decision.”

What was my biggest laugh of the day? Microsoft’s platform was down this afternoon! Timing behind this outage was…well… delicious.

Adcenter Crashes

Guess I should probably take that advertisement for MSN off my blog!

Tearing a Page from MSN - Google Introduces Demographic Targeting.

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.

Great PPC posts from 2007 - The SEMMY’S!

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!

It’s about time I post!

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 interent. 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!