Matt Lawson, Marin Software is up first.

Advanced PPC Panel at SES

Advanced PPC Panel at SES

He says take a wholistic approach to PPC: Budgeting, Optimization, Creative,

  • Don’t limit spend on top performers – sort by margin or ROAS to uncover. Uncap or extend caps to get more.
  • Get more with accelerated delivery. Studies they’ve done show that over time, this gets more impressions.
  • Optimize based on Day of Week – change bids based on day of week or time of day. They have seen as much as 14% lift in revenue, decrease in cost for their clients.
  • Use Headroom to Optimize Portfolios = Average Bid – Average CPC. Use this to bid up terms in lower positions.
  • Maintain Tight Ad Groups
  • Check for Groups without Active Creatives – and always be testing
  • Campaign Structure: Make sure you’re mirroring campaigns across channels
  • Pay particular attention to negative handling, esp on Microsoft.
  • Shape Traffic with Match Types, aka Match type Parity.  Create broad and phrase matches with exact matches to the same phrase in negatives, then an exact match for the actual phrase. Most valuable with high CPCs. (Ed. note)Look up his deck for this slide – it’s worth it.

McKeekin, Yahoo, is next.

In a recent Yahoo! study, they found that advertisers are relying too heavily on broad match, and that exact match consistently drives better performance and ranking.

Use search query performance reports to uncover these phrases and expand campaigns.

Review of basics on launching new keywords – too much here to write it all down, but it’s basics of PPC, like don’t launch new keywords in ad groups and campaigns that have high traffic but low QS (quality score).

Keyword “rememberance” – Ad Center won’t remember your keyword if it’s been in a different part of the structure like Google will – (Ed. note) Aka don’t restructure often.

Ad Serving Logic – three primary factors:

  • CTR threshold
  • Min Bid
  • Landing Page Relevance
    • Include the query frequently throughout the page
    • Include words that are prevalent in bing’s top 20 organic results
    • Don’t use flash
    • Only visible HTML text is crawled
    • Query and important related terms need to appear in close proximity
    • Query is included in the ad copy and destination URL

He offers an animated slide to present how keywords are affected in an ad group or campaign by poor performers.

Think like a search engine – what config will maximize clicks? (ed. Note) he talks a lot about training bid management tools… sometimes that’s not the smartest strategy. Bid mgmt tools are great, but they need humans to train them.

Minimize Kw and Ad combinations – 3-4 ads per ad group, 30-40 keywords if possible

He shows a slide with performance by placement. May want to download that one.

Talks a little about blocking domains in the partner network based on low CPCs, but CPAs are often higher or at least in line with other channels.

Matt Van Wagner, Find me Faster

Uses Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show as an example: the outcome of specific breeding is often ugly.

You may be creating genetic deformities in your Ad copy testing with all the A/B testing you’re doing.

Because if you just delete the losing ad, you’re forgetting that there is another subset of the population where your other ad resonated. You need to keep diversity of sales pitches!

Pitfalls of A/B Testing

  • Keywords do not equal queries
  • Ad impressions does not equal searchers
  • Ad rotation is not truly even

What happens if you keep two ads online?

93.75% of searchers will be exposed to both of your messages in as little as 4 searches.

This is tough to test, but it’s common sense and statistics that it will work.

Stomp out Stupid Ad Syndrome!

  • Learn how dynamic keyword insertion really works – it inserts the keyword, not the search query!
  • Improve your ads and CTRs
  • Improve your QS

(Ed. Note) I have to run to the Ask the Experts session now, but what a great session!