Imagine a time when all online ecommerce retailers had an in-house marketing person assigned exclusively to manage ppc campaigns. The person would manually enter keywords, set up ad groups, create ad copy, and then put in the appropriate destination URL’s. If you were lucky as a business owner, the marketing person would have an analytics program tied to the paid search campaign to optimize the campaigns.

Most Business Have had a Poor Experience with Paid Search

Small businesses don’t have the dedicated resources to manage the online advertising. For those that do, they may not have search engines Pay per click advertisements displaying up as frequently or positioned as well as you’d like when your keywords and phrases are utilized? Does it appear like you are spending a premium for cost-per-click (CPC) rates for bids and have very little or nothing at all to show for it? If so, odds are that your Google AdWords Quality Score is sorely deficient. If only you had one of the best PPC tools on the market.

In advance of you can work on bettering it, it helps to have a fundamental comprehension of how Quality Score is calculated.

FAQ: Why is our Adwords quality score so poor?

Wise people would point out that you can’t fix a problem until you know the root cause. Taking stabs in the dark to improve your low Quality Score with AdWords can be frustrating—and a big waste of time. Instead, you should familiarize yourself with how Google calculates this important score.

It’s not exactly a secret. Google explains it quite simply within its AdWords section. Here’s how it works: An AdWords Quality Score is calculated based on keyword relevance, click-through rates, landing-page quality, and ad relevance. You need to keep all of these factors in mind when investigating a low Quality Score. A tool that coordinates all of these factors can be a very valuable resource.

KEY TO A SUCCESSFUL PAID SEARCH CAMPAIGN

1. Finding the right keywords

2. Making Niche Ad Groups:
Identifying groups of PPC keywords that are relevant to your business allows you to create a strong account structure for your pay-per-click campaign at inception. This will save you time and money by delivering more relevant ads, which in turn improves your Quality Score, which drives both greater impression share and lower Cost-Per-Click (CPC).

3. Creating Great relevant ad copy

4. Building a great landing page

Tools to help you do this better:

Our company used to build campaigns first with a spreadsheet.
However, to be more productive it makes sense to utilize some tools and software that are designed to save you time.

The key is to be able to import a keyword list and create additional keyword phrases.

The second thing is to group the keywords into small targeted ad groups. The reason is that each ad group can have its own ads, with specific language tied to the set of keywords. Keyword grouping and organization can be a real time sink. A good PPC tool is designed to automate and expedite all facets of managing keywords, so you’re more efficient and more effective.

* Keep you relevant – Having the right keywords in place helps you connect with your search audience. Using a keyword search tool makes this process simple. By being more relevant with keywords, you’ll be pulling in more qualified traffic and raising your keywords Quality Score.

* Add more value – The key is making your PPC ad copy and landing pages optimized and keyword-specific, so you lower your AdWords ad spend. SpeedPPC works with SEO too by helping you author more targeted text around your keywords, so your pages rank higher and your message is exposed to more searchers. Can your free keyword tool and Excel spreadsheets do all that?

SPEEDPPC SOFTWARE REVIEW

SpeedPPC is available in  two packages ; SpeedPPC and SpeedPPC Affiliate Pro.  SpeedPPC takes your list of keyphrases (Google calls them keywords) and enables you to multiply them into additional combinations, e.t.c.  SpeedPPC dramatically shortens the time it takes to get a pay per click campaign up and running.  How much time would you have to spend in order to create 436 ad group with 1,744 ads to target every major city in the United States, plus make a targeted landing page for 8,720 keywords?  With SpeedPPC, you have the tools to quickly build, optimize, upload, and track PPC campaigns that deliver great Quality Scores and help you catch the longtail.  In simple terms, by doubling your Quality Score, you may be able to reduce your advertising costs by as much as 50%.

The issue is, it took us a very long time, far too lengthy to even consider scaling it up or setting up similar campaigns in Yahoo or Bing. Evenmore, our mediocre performance just mired our paid search activities as a money losing activity.

It is nice to see a tool to help leverage our time. Whereas this degree of tight coupling between adgroup, ad, keyword, and landing web page enable the marketer to create probably the most tightly focused advert and receive Google’s lowest CPC, customizing an advert campaign at that level is so time consuming that it’s impractical on any worthwhile scale.

In summary,  you need a system and tools that cover all aspects from keyword research to paid search campaign creation and organization. But as critical as it is, grouping and organizing your keywords is just one aspect of an effective search marketing strategy. To succeed in the long term, you need to keep performing  keyword discovery and expansion, keyword analysis and refinement, negative keywords discovery, and content production and prioritization. Keyword management solutions, like SpeedPPC, are time savers, scalable platforms designed to help search marketers manage large-scale search marketing efforts effectively and cost-efficiently.

Users are Pleased with the Software

Other users of SpeedPPC personally love the fact that Speed PPC is compatible with Yahoo Search, MSN Adcenter, and a ton of second tier search PPC engines. That really was the key feature for me. Since Speed PPC is compatible with more search engines and comes with a lot more keyword expansion lists, it seems a better value than other ppc campaign management software tools on the market.  I think this is important. Even though you may not be running campaigns on other search engines, there is no reason not to have a quick way to activate an advertising campaign when a decision to expand a successful paid search campaign beyond Google. Other users that have publicly recommend SpeedPPC include Jonathan Volk and Jim Banks.

The ability to set up a PPC campaign with keywords, ads, ad groups, and landing pages and then upload this package into all the different ad networks expands your coverage and even more importantly leverages your time.

Buy SpeedPPC

Popularity: 2% [?]

A recent blog covered the surprise effectiveness of simple orange colored copy paper to market an women’s tennis event. Princeton athletics had spent money on billboards, radio ads, and commercials, but really had no analytic methods in place to measure the performance of that marketing efforts.

Earlier this week, the Princeton Athletic marketing department saw something a little different. It was a small piece of orange copy paper, with simple printing on it. The orange color copy paper was an invitation to come see the Princeton women’s tennis team play in its two matches, and it included a reference to free bagels and coffee. Princeton University Women’s tennis coach Megan Bradley had put one in each of the boxes in the mailroom.

So when you are debating the options for marketing your next event,  do not overlook the obvious. As the blog mentioned, in this era of the highest speed, highest sophistication, multiple platform ways of communicating (think twitter, facebook, and even sms texting), there is a place for something  simple, like an invitation on a small piece of orange copier paper.

As the parade of people watching the tennis balls get pounded at the tennis match that morning proved, sometimes simple marketing sells best of all.

Popularity: 24% [?]

The genesis of this post is from an article* written by Michael Port that I have kept around for awhile. After attending Affiliate Summit West, and exploring the sales process as a consumer, merchant, and affiliate, I felt the points were worthwhile to share with my audience.

Michael Port is one of many proponents to changing the way we sell. Traditional sales tactics are not very good, whether in an auto dealership lot, store aisle, or online. Customers detest them, although canned sales techniques are still taught in classes by corporate trainers and you can see new trainees trying them on customers. The good news is this gives you an opportunity to differentiate yourself from the other affiliate marketers attempting to sell to that customer. This will also help you if you represent Avon, MaryKay, ACN,  work in inside sales at an established firm, or work as an independent financial advisor.

People want to express their values. They do so with the products and services they buy.  Do they spend money on continuing education, wealth management, and health clubs, or bar tabs and fast food? If you look at their spending, you will see fingerprints of their values.

How do you find this information?

Before the answer is revealed, remember that people don’t buy from you because you want them to, or the landing page you just sent them to, or even something clever you mentioned in a conversation or an email blast.

• You need to be willing to learn, adapt, and listen to your customers

• When you do this, you will never have to use a canned marketing campaign from the merchant

• You can then connect with the values that your customers want to express

So, your selling methods will need to incorporate some of the following traits:

• Become a masterful permission marketer – this allows you to defuse their defense mechanism to sales pitches

• Listen while your customers tell you what they want – Create higher level pages that funnel the prospect to the conversion page. If they are interested, they will keep reading the next page. This interest level, and the pages they follow, will provide you information about their values and needs

• Only make relevant sales offers proportionate to the trust you have earned. Don’t make the “pitch of the day”

• Use the velvet rope policy. Do not assume you are meant to work with everyone

When you keep your focus, maintain your integrity, you will never be put into the same category as smooth talking fly by night operations ready to take advantage of people just to take home a commission. This also allows you to build a personal brand. Branding is very important in affiliate marketing. Brands are built upon reputation and a reputation of integrity selling is more valuable than gold.

*This blog post was based on a recent article in Entrepreneur Magazine, August 2009, written by Michael Port.

Popularity: 21% [?]