In fact, the size of the Google Adwords program creates a number of challenges for “small-time” webmasters. The service’s immense popularity has resulted in extreme competition, driving up keyword bid prices and lowering ad placements for sites running on smaller budgets.

If you’ve been struggling to gain traction on this highly competitive network, take a look at the following PPC alternatives for generating paid traffic.

Alternative #1 – Facebook Paid Ads

Advertising on Facebook’s Paid Ads platform (whose “Sponsored Stories” typically appear in user profile sidebars) can be a mixed bag.

On the one hand, Facebook’s Paid Ads program provides much better targeting features than Google Adwords, enabling merchants to target users according to a number of different criteria, including age, gender, hobbies, geographic areas and more.

However, user engagement on the site is notoriously low. While some marketers speculate that the limited number of characters granted to advertisers account for these limitations, a much more likely explanation for the universally low clickthrough rates seen on the site is ad burnout.

Because Facebook users have been trained to gloss over advertisement sections on the site, your message must be truly captivating in order to draw clicks. Take a look at my article 3 Steps To Combat Image Fatigue In Facebook for more information on this.

If you do decide to pursue advertising opportunities on this site, remember that it’s nearly all about the image you position alongside your ad text. To stand out from the blur of other features on the site, select the most eye-catching graphic possible – even if it isn’t entirely related to your ad text.

For more information on this, take a look at my article called 3 Types of Image Ads That Work. In addition, choose your targeting options carefully to ensure that your promotions are seen only by the audience members to whom they’re most relevant.

Alternative #2 – LinkedIn DirectAds

Overall, LinkedIn’s DirectAds platform functions more like Facebook’s Paid Ads than Google’s Adwords, in that this PPC alternative also allows you to target the specific users who will see your advertisements within the LinkedIn website, based on their stated criteria.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn’s advertising program isn’t for the faint of heart – or the small of budget. Clicks through DirectAds promotions cost a minimum of $2/click, and although advertisers can set minimum daily budgets of $10/day, language contained in the site’s Terms of Service allows LinkedIn to exceed set limits by as much as 20%, depending on ad performance. Left unchecked, these overages could easily total thousands of dollars a month.

Given these financial ramifications, use caution when enrolling in the LinkedIn DirectAds program. Take the time to analyze LinkedIn’s core demographics to determine whether the site’s users are a good match for your ads.

In addition, because the DirectAds program provides very little information on how or when your promotions are displayed, you may also find it necessary to invest in a third-party bid measurement program to maintain a positive ROI in relation to the site’s high bid prices.

Alternative #3 – Kontera

In general, Kontera is best known for its in-text advertisements, which appear as linked content within Internet articles, blog posts and more. But besides these contextual link ads, the company also offers social media promotion services, editorial advertisements and mobile solutions, though few objective reviews are available on the efficacy of these newer service offerings.

When considering this PPC alternative, be aware that many users seriously dislike the way in-text Kontera ads display on their favorite websites. In fact, a Google search for the company’s brand name turns up as many results asking, “How do I get rid of Kontera ads?” as it does news articles praising the company’s traffic-generation services.

In addition, reviews of Kontera’s in-text ad service by industry figures aren’t that promising when it comes to ad relevancy. Consider the following ad placement that prominent Internet marketing blogger Chris Guthrie received while testing Kontera on one of his sites:

As an advertiser, it’s imperative that you know your promotions are being displayed to the best possible candidates. But for now, my verdict is to stay away from Kontera. Despite the site’s wide reach and generally low click charges, the quality of its placements simply isn’t high enough to justify its savings over other PPC alternatives.

Alternative #4 – StumbleUpon Paid Discovery

One final alternative PPC program that deserves mention is StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery program, which is unique from the other options discussed here in that it does not require users to click on an advertisement in order to participate.

To understand Paid Discovery, we must first understand how StumbleUpon’s traditional service works. Essentially, users who are interested in discovering new Web content install the StumbleUpon browser toolbar, which randomly serves up pages designed to match their stated interests and past preferences. Paid Discovery allows advertisers to “cut in line,” introducing their content into the StumbleUpon stream ahead of other recommended pages.

But is it worth it? In many cases, no. StumbleUpon traffic performance is often quite poor when it comes to conversions; because users are simply being served pages instead of actively clicking chosen ads, their motivation to engage further with an advertiser’s site is often limited.

On the other hand, the service does have some interesting potential when it comes to link building, brand awareness expansion and social media marketing.

If you have established metrics in these areas through which you can measure the impact of StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery service on your website’s success, the program could be worth a try.

Of course, these are only a few of the different PPC alternative sites available today. If you’ve had particular success with another option, share your results in the comment section below.

1.  Keywords! Keywords!

Sherlock Holmes exclaimed, “Data! Data! …I can’t make bricks without clay.” And likewise, keywords are the backbone, heart and soul of all search engine marketing, paid or organic. There’s a whole mess of keywords work and reports done for organic search optimization that paid search marketers can and should utilize.

On the most basic level, marketers can leverage organic search reports to mine for keyword ideas for paid search. Bear in mind not all organic keywords are a good fit, some may be too general and expensive to meet ROI goals, but they are fantastic suggestions to look at.

Natural search reports are also a great suggestion tool for looking at higher funnel general keywords or lower funnel very specific keywords, which are often harder to uncover easily in online keyword suggestion tools.

A more sophisticated tactic is using natural search landing page data to provide ideas for landing page testing and optimization on similar paid keywords. What pages are converting best?

Measuring the holistic view of paid and natural results combined can indicate keyword areas where there is great synergy and fantastic combined performance or areas where perhaps organic is so strong and paid search so expensive and/or weak in performance that paid search keywords are simply not adding value and should be optimized out.

2.  The Importance Of Landing Page Content

High quality, unique website content has long been considered the keystone of good SEO. And no surprise that what is good for a consumer looking at natural search is likewise a good tactic to leverage for paid keyword landing pages.

Deep linking to specific website pages about a product or category of products is often higher-converting than a more general page that might explain more about the website or company, but less actionable on the specific search keywords of the visitor.

Conversely, paid keyword links to a product search results page on a website, or another page of dry or less nicely presented, but very relevant content, may not convert as well as a page with similar relevant content and richer explanatory text or nicer presentation layers surrounding the meat of the page content.

See below for a contrasting example of possible landing page types.

A not too shabby search results page...

But this is a much nicer paid search landing page!

If good pages don’t currently exist, building specific content pages that make sense for paid search linking will also benefit SEO by increasing the unique, high quality page content of a website, so it’s a win for everyone in search!

3.  Quality & Relevance

The third, and arguably most important, lesson from SEO is the overwhelming need to focus on quality and relevance. In keyword selection, ad text copy, landing page URLs, pretty much everything touched in paid search, quality and relevance should be at the forefront of any paid search manager’s thoughts. Just because you can buy a keyword doesn’t mean you should.

A relentless focus on monitoring quality scores is essential, and a willingness to let go of keywords that you may want to own as head terms but are too general to sustain a reasonable quality level.

Likewise, from an overall brand and marketing strategy you may love certain marketing messages, but they may not resonate well in a targeted paid search context and a more direct action or search query based ad text will present a higher quality and relevance choice. Pursuing quality and relevance over style or branding strategy is sometimes necessary, and often a hard sacrifice to make for better paid search results.

Golden Tablets

I’m not talking about Joseph Smith’s discovery, I’m talking about Apple’s. The traffic from iPads is more valuable than traffic from desktops for many in the eCommerce sector.

Our data suggests the traffic from tablets as a class to be worth ~15% more than traffic from desktops. Traffic from the Kindle Fire seems to be less valuable, but that makes up a pretty small fraction of the total, therefore doesn’t degrade the overall value of the traffic significantly.

Different Demographics

Quite likely, the differences above are in part demographic. Folks with iPads are early adopters of technology with significantly higher than average household incomes.

The disparity with Kindle Fire may represent how ads are displayed on a generally smaller screen, but also, perhaps a function of the price point attracting a less affluent user.

Different Usage Pattern

People use tablets differently than desktop computers. I have heard from folks in the know that something like 80% of tablet traffic takes place between 6PM and 9PM in the tablet’s time zone.

More than 95% of tablet traffic happens over a wireless signal rather than a cell tower connection. Tablets are not, by and large, mobile devices. The tablet should be seen as a couch companion. People mostly use their online functionality while watching TV.

More Valuable & Less Expensive

Not only is the traffic on tablets more valuable than average, it is also less expensive by volume than desktop search. That is to say: the same bids on tablets put you “higher” on the page than they do on desktop. This is a function of the fact that few search managers are separating campaigns by device at all, and many of the ones who do have left tablets bucketed with smartphones.

In either case, the blended average traffic value is leaving opportunity on the table, and splitting tablets into a single “mobile” bucket with phones may be worse than doing nothing at all. Grouping tablet traffic with desktops may be an acceptable compromise for busy SEMs.

These facts should send online marketing directors for major brands scrambling to figure out whether and how tablets are being split out from traffic from other channels.

Also, those brand advertisers who spend significant money on television ads might consider whether the look and feel of the normal ad landing pages is consistent with the messaging in the commercials. Might there be an opportunity for a separate set of landing pages tied to the themes of the commercials running at the moment?

The Smartphone Conundrum

Your mileage may vary a great deal, but for many advertisers, particularly those with a wide range of products and services to offer, the online conversion rate for smartphones is a small fraction of that of desktop devices.

We have heard that this will all change with better, easier online payment types, and that NFC will make our phones the offline shopping credit card of choice. Perhaps. It’s also quite likely that it’s really hard to sort through lots and lots of different items on a tiny screen. That problem won’t be resolved until human eyesight improves and fingers get pointier.

We know that something like one third of all smartphone searches carry local intent, that is: the user is trying to find a physical location. For businesses that are online only these users are the wrong group on which to spend advertising dollars.

To advertisers with a wide brick and mortar footprint the online conversion metrics may not tell the whole story. Perhaps these folks are converting offline instead and the value of the traffic is materially understated?

It is worth testing with POS coupons to get a sense of this, but in the meantime, you might at the least restrict the degree to which that online to offline assumption is being spent within a reasonable geographic proximity to your bricks. Spending beyond online ROI metrics on smartphone traffic 100 miles from the nearest physical location is likely unwise.

Context Is Coming

If marketing hasn’t become sufficiently complex yet, might we think differently about our bids and even ad creative to smartphone users whose device is motionless vs moving 2 mph vs moving 30 mph vs moving 60 mph?

We must crawl before we walk and run before we fly, but SEM isn’t getting any easier any time soon.

None of these refinements will make much difference unless and until the mobile experience we offer our users improves. The average quality of mobile user experiences is low, and it is likely that there are heavy penalties coming soon for brands with poorly optimized mobile user experiences. There are rumors floating around that the penalty for high bounce-rates for organic listings in mobile and mobile QS in ads is about to be increased.

Conclusion

The big picture of all this is simply that we must not expect all users to be equally valuable to our business regardless of the device they’re using and the context in which they’re using it.

We need to market to them smarter, now, and build better experiences for all users in the near future. The growth rate of searches from devices other than desktops and laptops suggests that the penalties for ignoring these differences will only get bigger as the year progresses.

Normally, when you hear about a company doing a PPC audit, it’s a consultant or an agency auditing an advertiser or occasionally a consultant auditing an agency.

However, even if you are in-house managing your account internally, an audit can give you insight that’s easy to miss because one of the points of an audit is to step away from the small nuances of an account to see larger trends and feature usage.

In today’s column, I’ll tell you why you should regularly perform an audit. In the next column, I’ll give tips for performing an audit.

How Often Should You Perform An Audit?

If you are running accounts in-house, then doing both a quarterly and year-end analysis is a good idea. The quarterly analysis can help you plan out your activities for the next quarter so you are no just maintaining your account, but growing it as well.

If you are an agency, it can be useful to always perform an audit when you are first taking on a client as it can help set your engagement strategy and understand how the account functions. Some agencies require an account go through an audit before they will ever give pricing information to the client so that everyone understands the scope of work.

Once an agency has a client, doing a quarterly analysis might seem like overkill as your job is to stay on top of everything within the account.

However, doing quarterly audits followed by deep planning sessions with the client can help strengthen the account and client relationship. Some of the most common complaints advertisers have about their agency are:

1. Too slow
2. Not enough results
3. Poor communication

A quarterly audit can help with points 2 and 3.

Even if you decide not to perform a quarterly audit, you should do an audit before a peak season (Christmas, holidays, summer vacations, etc.) for the account and on an annual basis; which is often when the contract is up for renewal.

An audit should quickly spot areas where your budgets are not in alignment with your overall goals – this is especially useful when heading into peak seasons where you need to ensure your budgets are not constraining your sales.

Who Should Perform The Audit?

Anyone with a high degree of competency within the company can perform an audit. However, the person who does the day-to-day management should not do the audit.

In the world of development, you should never let your developers QA their own code or work. A designer should not be in its own user testing group. The person who does the day-to-day management should not do their own audit.

The reason is perspective.

A day-to-day PPC manager knows how the account is supposed to function and why decisions were made.

An audit should look at the big picture and trends. An audit should examine both data and best practices. An audit should challenge why decisions were made.

Should You Hire A Consultant?

You don’t need to hire a consultant to do an audit. If you are an agency, then your PPC managers can audit each other’s accounts.

If you are in-house with a large team, often you will have different people managing different accounts. In that case, just switch accounts and have each other audit each others account.

As with all decisions, there are pros and cons of using your own team.

The pros are:

• No additional costs.
• Data doesn’t leave the company.
• No lost time in training a 3rd party about your company or business model.

The cons are:

• Easy to push off the due date because of other priorities.
• Don’t have an outsider’s perspective.
• Might not make suggestions because the auditor may feel the work won’t be done.
• Personal connections between employees can make it so the audit isn’t as honest as it should be.

Of course, there are also pros and cons of using a 3rd party to audit your account.

The pros are:

• Is not clouded by personal connections, internal politics, or other internal issues.
• Has an outside perspective. Looks at what can be done, not what the company could actually do.
  • This is a very common reason to hire a consultant if you are trying to win an argument with your superiors. You will use the consultant’s data/findings to make an argument to your boss about budgets for mobile sites, display campaigns, etc.
• Can bring in more expertise than many companies have in-house.
• Doesn’t take your employees away from their regular job duties.

The cons are:

• Consultants cost money beyond your normal payroll.
• You must train them in your company’s business model, account, etc.
• Hiring competent consults is hard. You must do some due diligence, so it takes you more work than handing off the audit internally.
• A good consultant will often give you more work that you want – you must be prepared to execute.

An audit should spot ad copy trends across the entire account to help give ad copy testing a direction across the account. By being further away from the data, a 3rd party audit should give you an analytical view of the data that is free from preconceived notions of the industry or company.

What Should You Receive From The Audit?

First and foremost you want recommendations from the audit.

The audit will generally be many pages of analysis and best practices. However, all the pretty charts and graphs spread throughout the audit are really only supporting evidence for what you really want: wins (also known as recommendations).

The audit should not just give you a chart of how you are doing. It should contain information and direction for how to make the account better.

If you can’t take the information and do something with it, then it was not a good audit.

So, before sending a current staff member or hiring a consultant to do an audit for you – make sure that they will not just analyze the account,  but that you will have a to-do list of items once the audit has been completed.

Wrap-up

If you run your own account; then you are too close to the data and corporate politics to see the big picture.

Your job is the day-to-day management of the account. You make sure the account maintains it current profits and hopefully has a nice and steady growth.

You aren’t looking to take big risks, or often suggest big risks to upper management – that’s not your job. Your job is to maintain and grow at an acceptable pace.

Having someone else, a colleague, analyst, or consultant do an audit is necessary. They can suggest the big items, take the big risks, and most importantly – view the account free from preconceived notions of how it should be, and they can focus on what it could be.

Regardless if you are in-house, an agency, or just someone who got stuck managing the account – you can benefit from having your account audited on a regular basis. Just make sure you receive actionable data so that once the audit is complete, you have a path to making the account even more profitable.

Here, I’ll focus on several effective landing pages elements and provide examples.

1.  Credibility Indicators

On landing pages, try including credibility indicators such as testimonials, reviews, awards, social media information (i.e. Facebook likes, number of tweets, etc.) and seller ratings.

Here are some specific ideas related to credibility indicators:

• Use specific testimonials for specific products/services – these tend to convert best.
• Use testimonials to reiterate your company’s core value propositions.
• Couple a longer, extremely compelling testimonial at the top of a page with a couple of shorter ones (see nuts.com example below). Whether the top one is from CNN or NYT, or a particularly eloquent customer, depends of course on your business, track record, etc.

2.  Add Elements To Your Existing Buttons

To improve conversions, add some extra pop to your existing buttons.

For example, instead of a simple “buy now” button, try dual buttons with options like “quick view” or “order now”.

If your online strategy is linked up to Facebook, try testing combinations of conversion buttons and “sign in with Facebook” buttons. Take a look at the following example:

3.  Remove Page Elements

We usually try to add elements to pages. Instead, try removing elements that can decrease the chance of a conversion (you should always focus on your primary conversion event first).

Here are several examples of items you can remove:

• Secondary and tertiary conversion events like newsletter sign-ups
• Extra links on a page
• The navigation bar
• Reduce the number of words on a page (using bullet points can help with this)

In general, cleaner pages with less clutter tend to convert better than overly designed ones with a lot of images and text.

4.  Calls To Action

I know, I know. This one is cliché and is often touted by many. But it’s not always the best strategy from a conversion standpoint to go right for the sale.

Is it possible to breakdown your sales process by collecting a little information at the original point of contact and ask for additional information in subsequent interactions?

Here are some examples of this:

• Add to cart, then ask for personal user info.
• Follow up with a phone call and ask for more information via form.
• If requesting contact info (a lead), ask for the minimum amount of variables possible on the original lead form page and request more variables on the thank you page. Offer an incentive on the thank you page for people to give you additional details.

5.  Try Different Wording

Different words evoke different kinds of emotions. Try different wording to try to improve conversion rates.

In both of the examples below, the companies use words other than “order now” to “ask for the sale”.

37 signals uses “see plans and pricing”

Crazyegg.com uses “show me my heat map” (as opposed to order now):

What are some effective landing page tactics you’ve employed for better conversions?

-    Jean de La Fontaine, 1668

It seems that every initial conversation with a prospect, or a new client, seems to start out as follows:

Me: “What are your business goals?” Client: “I want more {clicks, actions, conversions} at a lower cost”.

Well, of course, this barely even needs articulation, everyone wants those things. Actually, those “goals” are really a means to an end, not the end itself – marketing goals if you will, not business goals. These goals are universally focused on of course; the trick is in how one goes about it.

However, of all three (clicks, actions, and conversions) if your strategy is to optimize for clicks or actions, your primary goal should be to move towards the third metric: tracking conversions.

The Natural Progression Of Sophistication

There is a progression in online marketing in terms of sophistication of tracking business goals (the “ends” as opposed to the “means”), depending on what you can track and tie back to your marketing efforts.

In Paid Search or its cousin Display Advertising, the progression of “ends” and “means” usually falls along these lines:

Click to enlarge

Flying Blind

If you’re doing paid search and are optimizing keywords to a cost-per-click basis, I have news for you; the key question you should be asking is not “should I invest in a bid optimization platform so I can take my campaigns to the next level?”.

The correct question is instead: “why am I flying blind in a bunch of fog?”

Perhaps you should invest in an altimeter prior to installing a jet engine!

What Can You Reasonably Do If You’re Only Optimizing CPC?

If you’re optimizing to a CPC standpoint, then the following is all you can reasonably do from an optimization standpoint:

1. Make sure you have done thorough keyword research
2. Structure your campaigns well
3. Set your bids based on what you can afford
4. Do some creative testing, and
5. Make sure you put negatives in place that make sense to you based on your knowledge of the business and the output of your search query reports.

Ultimately, you will still have no idea which keywords are really working for you other than using your intuition and knowledge of the business.

Benefits Of Shifting To Optimize For Actions Or Conversions

By all means, spend some time on the basics, but taking your tracking to the next level should be at the top of your list.

It could be, for instance, that one keyword has a very high conversion rate and should be bid way up over your average CPC, while others that convert poorly should be bid way down because they’re really not worth that much to you. You will never know this if you don’t get proper tracking in place.

Plus, knowing which keywords are converting well will guide keyword expansion efforts, isolation of top performers into their own ad groups, and so on. There are many things you can do to take your campaigns to the next level, but all of them require actually measuring results in order to have data-driven improvements.

Tracking Is Boring & Hard, But Is The Key To Success

Tracking is: difficult, annoying, technical, easy to mess up, boring, and very uninteresting to the brain of a marketer. However, having your tracking properly set up and aligning your tracking with your business goals, is the most critical success factor for paid search campaign improvement.

I don’t have sophisticated study I can quote to you to prove this, but I have seen this over – and over  - and over – and over, so take my experience as anecdotal or “clinical” evidence (others with supporting or contrary experience, please comment).

Most Web developers and marketers are not adept at setting up tracking. If you sell products through an e-commerce platform that you’ve integrated with, ask your e-commerce platform vendor for some help on tracking – it may be as simple as paying them for a few consulting hours. If you have Web developers on staff, have them slog through all the available documentation from Google, they can probably figure it out.

Some marketers use Adwords tracking pixels, some use Google Analytics tracking pixels, some use both (one credits conversions to the last click, the other credits conversions to the first click).  There are advantages and disadvantages to both – see the following help guide for a comparison.

Whatever you do, pick at least one approach and implement it, and start tracking either actions or conversions (i.e. track and optimize *at least* on a Cost-per-Action basis).

Tracking “Actions” Instead Of “Conversions”

If you can’t track product sales, but are tracking signups, registrations, or downloads, then you’ll have to put a value on each type of action.

You might analyze your funnel for instance and determine that 3 out of 100 signups result in a conversion. Well, you could for instance, value those signups at 3/100 of the average value of a conversion. It’s not an exact science, but it’s a start.

Think of actions as being fractional conversions. In fact, if you’re selling products on an e-commerce basis but also have signups occurring, you can track both actual conversions and fractional conversions for the other types of actions.

This way, you can ensure that you’re giving some attention to keywords earlier in your sales funnel, rather than spending only on final converters.

Taking Your Game To The Next Level

If you can, try to track actual dollar amounts of sales being driven by each keyword; then you can optimize your paid search keywords to a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) goal.

If you can break out the dollar amounts of each sale by product, then you can actually tie it back to net margin dollars earned and understand that certain keywords drive more net margin than others.

This may be challenging, in that you have to get tweak your e-commerce cart solution to pass the sale amount as part of the tracking, but the effort is well worth it.

The Ultimate In Sophistication

Don’t forget that the advertiser with the highest lifetime value per customer ultimately sets the CPCs in the auction.

If one advertiser is shooting for a one-product sale, while another is taking into account that they are acquiring customers who will later buy associated products, or will make in-app purchases, or will renew a subscription again in another 12 months with a certain probability, the advertiser taking more into account will typically be able to “afford” a keyword more than the less sophisticated one.

Are your competitors involved in a subscription-based business, where your business model is a one-time sale? Are your competitors selling higher-ASP or luxury products, where your products are lower end?

If all of your competitors are using Paid Search advertising, and the keywords are just “too expensive” for you, the problem is one of the following:

1. Whoever did your paid search campaign did not know what they are doing
2. Your competitors have a different business model (for instance, subsidizing one business with leads from another, such as airlines selling vacations in order to drive plane utilization up)
3. Your business’ cost structure or product pricing is misaligned with your competitors
4. Your competitors are thinking in terms of net margin dollars or LTV and you are not

I can tell you this – if all of your competitors are bidding on a keyword and you find it too expensive, it’s not that your competitors are idiots – there is some disconnect you need to ferret out.

More sophisticated marketers could be driving you out of the market for certain keywords that you could otherwise afford, if you only truly knew how valuable they really are to you.

Also, if you are relying on a trusted partner doing your paid search for you, all on a pure CPC basis, who is not suggesting you take your game to the next level but is simply happy to continue spending money on your behalf …you need to have a conversation with them about tracking cost-per-action or cost-per-conversion, or find another partner.

You can’t attain any ends without employing the right means, so consider the end and get moving!

Yesterday, in their annual homage to the April 1^st prankster’s holiday, Google announced the miracle of a new ad technology, the AdWords Click-to-Teleport Ad Extensions which enables searchers to transport themselves across time and space and “shortens the online-offline conversion funnel.”  They pretended this was an April Fool’s joke, but I know what Google is capable of, and so I’ve put a call into my rep to get in on the beta.

Today, tomorrow and every working day that follows, (a.k.a. every day) PPC managers struggle to make miracles happen inside their PPC campaigns – to find the perfect keyword, to write the perfect ad, or to implement a new ad targeting feature that beat all previous campaign performance records.

In reality, of course, the ‘miracles’ we wring out of mature campaigns day by day are much more mundane. The gains we make are usually more of the “three yards and a cloud of dust” variety, born of hard work, cleverness and meticulous attention to details.

So, in the true spirit of praying for miracles while we rely on more probable and practical solutions, we’ll take a look at a few tips that can help almost any campaign gain yardage this week.

Yes, Use Ad Sitelinks

Implementing Sitelinks ad extensions is as close to a sure thing as you will find to a minor miracle in paid search campaign optimization. They are easy to implement and almost always going to improve your click-through rates.

Take a look at the very clever way that Scott’s uses Sitelinks. First, notice how they use the links in ads for their brand term, Miracle Gro®. These ads add much more depth and breadth to the basic ad text, which makes the ad more interesting to more people.

Notice, too, how much real estate this one ad covers at the top of the SERP. How could their click-through rate not be better on these ads?

Excellent use of Sitelinks - Scotts Miracle Gro®

Sitelinks work very well for non-brand terms, too. Take a look at how Scott’s uses different types of sitelinks for the non-branded search query “best grass seed”:

Slight, but effective change in Sitelinks for the query, 'best grass seed'

In this case, Scott’s includes clear and unambiguous links to landing pages with Tips, Videos & Articles, which is what information hungry consumers are probably looking for.

In the regular part of their text ad, Scott’s effectively promotes their brand authority and brand recall by using the word Scott’s four times in the ad.

Sitelinks can perform minor miracles on your CTRs, but they can still suffer from a surprising case of under-engineering which we hope some upcoming AdWords releases will address (speaking of minor miracles).

While Sitelinks can be a powerful CTR stimulant, there’s no way to know exactly what is working and why, since Sitelinks are disconnected from most of the keyword and ad-level tracking and reporting you’ve come to rely on. Another glaring Sitelinks need is to have it available at the ad group level, not the campaign level where it is now controlled.

Add Punctuation, Fix Capitalization

Here’s a simple and proven miracle cure for your existing ads on any network. Take a good look at how your ads actually look online and fix them! You will be amazed at how many opportunities you’ve got sitting right in front of you.

For example, since last February, Google has been presenting longer ad headlines for ads in the top positions by either inserting your display URL or your first line of ad copy. Not as many advertisers as you would expect are taking advantage of this feature, even though this can dramatically alter the CTR performance of the ads.

One simple change to your ad text – adding a period at the end of ad description line 1, gives you control how your ad actually displays in the top spots.

When Google detects a period or exclamation mark at the end of your first description line, they will insert that first description line into the headline of your ad. In some cases, Google will insert the first description line even without punctuation, but the only way to ensure you have control is to include the proper punctuation yourself.

To see what your ads look like top positions, look at the Edit Ads screen within the AdWords online interface. This feature is currently only available in the online AdWords system, not in AdWords Editor.

Here’s how it works. Without proper punctuation, your ad will have probably have a standard headline when it appear in the top positions as shown below:

Without punctuation, top postion ad uses only ad headline

However, if you simply add a period (or exclamation mark, though that won’t show in the ad) at the end of the first copy line, your ad will display a longer headline, which will stand out more and probably grabs more clicks.

Ad with proper punctuation displays longer headline

Once you’ve fixed the punctuation issue, you may see some additional optimization tests to run.

For example, you may consider swapping description line 2 with description line 1 to give a free shipping offer more prominence.

This is an additional ad copy test that you wouldn’t have even imagined unless you first took notice of the differences between top and side position ad displays. Best of all, you don’t have to write any new copy – just make the copy you have work more effectively with a simple bit of punctuation.

Take advantage of top ad position to test offers.

Update Your Microsoft adCenter Campaigns

Many advertisers who ported their campaigns over to adCenter a few years ago directly from AdWords had to deal with trade-offs in handling ad copy, negative keywords and keyword match type differences when they first launched their adCenter campaigns.

Since that time, however, Microsoft has made many significant changes to the way that ads and keywords fundamentally operate. If you have not been keeping up with these changes, then taking time to revisit your adCenter campaigns now is likely to have a very positive, and possibly miraculous, impact on your adCenter campaign performance.

For example, adCenter now allows 71 characters in text ads, which makes it possible to import in AdWords ads which use all 70 characters – without revision.

Microsoft has also modified the way it handles negative keywords and other match types, which makes it possible to use more advanced matching logic structures inside your campaigns. They have also announced that they are working on a broad match modifier implementation that will allow your broad match modifier keywords to be ported in directly from AdWords.

Microsoft has been rolling out adCenter enhancements at an impressive and accelerating pace and now is the time to take a fresh look at your adCenter ‘classic’ campaigns. We’ll cover a more comprehensive analysis what’s changed in adCenter in an upcoming column.

Best practices are called such because in most cases they work. In the PPC world, they are a set of processes or layouts for which conventional wisdom has concluded they are the best method for creating or managing accounts and landing pages.

Conventional wisdom is an idea that is widely accepted because it is usually true.

Just because it is usually true does not mean its correct for you. You should question conventional wisdom to see if it holds true for your situation.

In today’s article, I will examine some cases where conventional wisdom was inaccurate so you can start to judge your own accounts outside of the standards of conventional wisdom.

Never Force Account Creation Before Shopping Cart Checkout

In the vast majority of cases, forcing account creation lowers conversion rates. The goal for an ecommerce site is to put as few barriers as possible between viewing a product and processing a credit card. I’ve seen companies increase revenue as much as 40% by just removing the account creation process from before checkout to after checkout.

Then there was the time that decision was unwise.

I was working with an etailer and when we removed the forced account creation; the conversion rate did go up as expected. However, the lifetime revenue of the customer declined. When a user had an account and could save credit card, address, wishlists and other information within their account, users were more likely to buy a second and third time on the site.

After doing some testing and a lot of math, we realized that the total revenue was higher when users were forced to create account even though the initial conversion rates were lower.

Forced account creation was put into place on purpose.

Always Put Calls To Action Above The Fold

There are numerous studies showing how the most valuable real estate on a page is above the fold. That just by changing the call to action or moving a checkout button to the top of the page can have a dramatic effect on conversion rates.

And then there are the exceptions.

For a lead generation site we had a nice tight form with benefit statements alongside and it was doing quite well. The design team had created lots of media for some offline promotions and really wanted to showcase some of their design on the landing pages. After some debate, the media was added to a test page which forced the conversion actions to below the fold.

The conversion rates went up.

Next, the media above the fold was shrunk to move the calls to action above the fold. The conversion rates went down. After over a dozen rounds of testing, a very clear pattern emerged: conversion rates were higher when the call to action was below the fold.

No one could believe the findings. So another dozen rounds of tests were implemented. The results did not change. I haven’t seen this often; but I have seen a few cases where conversion rates are better when the main call to action is below the fold.

Never Send All Traffic To The Homepage

This is usually PPC 101. Find the page that answers the searcher’s question and send the traffic there. If you can show geography or industry (or both) information on the landing page the conversion rates will be even higher.

I have seen this overall concept fail a few times.

The first time was for a site buying a lot of paid search. They had a geographic aspect so we created lots of landing pages that showed the city skyline, actually product examples from that city, etc on the landing pages.

They did wonderful for the display network.

They totally failed for the search network.

After many tests, the company could not beat their homepage for search. All their search traffic goes to the homepage. All their display traffic goes to pages created for an easy conversion funnel.

This concept is sometimes echoed in lead gen sites where even though there are queries (such as Chicago insurance) the landing page chooses to ignore the geographic data and asks a simple ‘zip code’ question on the landing page.

Often, this works because it gives someone a very easy first step to try and get them invested in the process of moving through the form fills on a site.

Other times, that does not work and geographic pages work best. In either case, test them out for yourself.

Broad Match Will Not Convert Better Than Exact Match

So technically this is always a true statement. However, in reality it does not always work so smoothly.

If you have several low volume terms that you add as exact match and then receive the warning ‘these terms are not being displayed due to low search volume’; then you need to keep a phrase or modified broad match of a similar keyword in the account to catch these terms.

I was working with a medical company where the misspellings outnumber the correct spelling for many of their keywords. Few of the misspellings had enough volume to be displayed. Google was not matching the modified broad match far enough to capture all of the misspellings. It’s amazing how many ways even common words can be spelled, let alone medical jargon terms.

Therefore, the only way to capture all of the misspellings was to include broad match terms. The misspellings had higher conversion rates than the proper spellings. In the end, the broad match variation of the word had a higher conversion rate than the exact match.

The broad match is now in its own ad group with a plethora of negative keywords, including the negative exact match, yet with a higher CPC than the exact match version of the same word.

Conclusion

There are many more examples of best practices failing:

• Pages with no calls to action performing better than pages with calls to action
• Ads for expired holidays outperforming other ad tests (yes, there are still Valentine’s day and Black Friday ads running on purpose)
• Autoplay video working in a B2B environment
• 15 minute YouTube videos with lower CPAs than 3-5 minute videos
• And the list goes on…

When you are first starting, following best practices or conventional wisdom is a smart move: Learn from the mistakes of others.

However, once you understand not only what the best practices are, but why they are best practices – then you can test and judge these assumptions for your own account.

It’s only through testing everything for yourself that you can move beyond the conventional wisdom of others to relying on your own set of best practices.

Ad #1

In this ad, I wouldn’t have focused on the company’s brand in the headline especially as it’s not a brand that’s well known. In this case, I would have let bigger names highlight their brand and focused my ad on the additional reasons to do business with my company like fast implementation, 24/7 phone support, etc.

For extra conversion bang, I’d ensure my ad benefits are reiterated in bullet point form on the landing page. Personally, I like 3-5 bullet points that are 4 to 7 words long. At least one of the benefits should be unique to your company/product/service (unique selling proposition).

Ad #2

It’s important to focus on the features and benefits that resonate the most with your target audience. In this ad above, the company (Disney) encourages people to share baby pictures online. Many of the other ads for the same phrase (baby clothes) focus on discount offers, shipping options, etc. While it’s true people want to share pictures of their babies, they are probably not looking to paid search ads to do just that.

PPC’s sweet spot is toward the end of the buy cycle when shoppers are about to pull the trigger and buy. The offer in the ad above is geared towards the beginning of the buy cycle when stores are maybe trying to engage/establish trust with buyers. The folks at Disney should use this channel effectively and attempt brand advertising elsewhere.

Here are some quick ways to figure out if your company is targeting the right features/benefits:

• Talk to people closest to your customers (i.e. salespeople, call center folks, etc.) and figure out what the biggest customer concerns/pain points are. Is it price? Quality? Selection? Brand? The ability to interact and share pictures? Test the variables in different combinations in your ads.

• For example, after testing many variables, you may find that a fast shipping offer and selection is what people are looking for when purchasing your product and is what gets you the best bang for your PPC buck.

• If above is not applicable, conduct a focus group and ask what your groups biggest concerns/issues/pain points are when it comes to purchasing baby clothing. Focus groups can be done intermittently with as few as 5-10 people to get basic insight and some initial testing points.

Ad #3

In this case, the advertiser is trying appeal to many groups of buyers with generic ad copy. I typed in baby clothes and an ad for a company that “specializes in custom made graphics, clothing, unique gift ideas” came up in the PPC search results.

In general, ad copy that is specific to products and/or specific groups of buyers tends to convert better than generic ad copy. And the more specific, the better ads tend to convert. A big reason for this is that it’s easier to hone in on relevant keyword terms and include them in ad copy headlines and descriptions.

A good tip is to structure your ads along the same lines as your sites navigation and/or category or product pages.

Here’s a possible example of how http://www.zazzle.com/ktvfashion could have gone about their PPC advertising.

Keyword terms (within a single ad group):

Baby sweaters, Baby sweater, etc.

Note: emphasize phrase, exact and modified broad match terms and include negative terms in the account.

Optimized Ad Copy

Get baby sweaters today

Many baby sweater styles & colors.

Fast & free shipping. Order now!

http://www.zazzle.com/ktvfashion

Now, do the same that we’ve done for baby sweaters above for all the products your company sells online.

Optimized Landing Pages

It should go without saying, information and images on the landing pages should be baby sweaters specific. In my next article, I’ll tackle some landing page flops. Stay tuned!

Thankfully, SMX West was out in San Jose last week, so I got the best of both worlds. Though SJ is not exactly tropical this time of year, going out doesn’t involve five minutes of layering with hat, gloves and boots.

During the week, I picked up some just-off-the-presses PPC updates as well as a slew of new tools to help optimize and manage PPC accounts, recommended by from PPC  colleagues at SMX.  Here are just a few I’d like to share today.

Microsoft Pushes Ahead With New adCenter Features

Microsoft, who started slowly a few years ago with their adCenter platform development, continued their forward momentum with a slew of new AdCenter features announced last week, including:

Mobile Device Targeting

You can now target smartphones and other devices including Android, Blackberry, iPhones and Windows Phone, and iOS, Android, and RIM operating systems. Device targeting can be done at either ad group or campaign level, giving you more flexibility than your AdWords device targeting settings.

Local Ad Extensions

As the name implies you can add contact details for your local businesses and the ads present like this:

AdCenter now offers extensions for local ads

More information about implementing local extensions within adCenter can be found at the  adCenter blog.

Bidding, Budgeting Suggestions

Great new feature to help you discover areas of your adCenter campaign where you can improve performance by adjusting bids and openingup your budgets.

Impression Share Report

You can now get impression share reports at  both the ad group and campaign levels within AdCenter.

Power Tools For Paid Search

There was an interesting SMX session on power tools for paid search professionals that highlighted some interesting and not widely-known tools to help with various aspects of campaign management and optimization. Here are a few interesting tools mentioned at that session that are worth exploring:

James Zolman, (@jameszol) of Quality Scores,Inc mentioned a tool that can help you get more quickly identify sources of poor quality traffic in your display campaigns. ReverseInternet.com has a competitive analysis tool that lets you identify sites owned by, or closely-related to, the low-quality traffic sites you’ve identified in your Google Analytics and Google AdWords network reports.

We all know that owners of really crappy adsense sites tend to have more than one of them. This tool lets you identify more of the bad actors more quickly.

Fellow SearchEngineLand columnist, Brad Geddes (@Ck_org) of Certified Knowledge, observed that a surprising number of PPC account managers are still not using the free, well-known vendor-supplied tools like AdWords Editor and adCenter Desktop Editor, but then mentioned a few of his own favorite free or nearly-free tools: Google AdWords Modified Broad Match Keyword Tool. This simple, free utility from Acquisio quickly converts your broad match keyword lists into broad match modified lists.

Brad also mentioned another free tool, the AdSense Sandbox, that allows you to find competitor’s text and display ads running on adsense network sites by typing in a keyword and an geographic region.

Adsense Sandbox allows you to find text and display ads for keyword interest areas

David Rodnitzky (@PPCAssociates) of PPC Associates, had a few more good tools to help advertisers with their display ad campaigns. He mentioned two great tools for uncovering competitors in the display advertising space,  recommending the free tools from Moat.com and MixRank .

Finding the time and creativity to develop your own display ads is always a challenge. David recommends the free and nearly free tools and services from a company called, 4Mads which can help you reduce the cost of developing mobile and other online ad formats.

Chad Summerhill (@ChadSummerhill) at ABF U-Pack Moving, recommended a few great tools for Adwords account management. High on his list is a free tool from Gazel, a company he is also associated with, that allows you to creating AdWords dashboards in Excel.

Developing and maintaining KPI dashboards can be mind-numbing. Gazel offers a free AdWords campaign performance template for Excel that accesses APIs, to help automate the creation of som really slick and really useful performance dashboards.

Another free tool Chad has developed is an Ad Relevance Checker to help you adhere to best practices for ad copy development and testing. This free ad relevance tool is available at Chad’s blog.

These are just a few of the news  items I took note of during my escape from winter trip to SMX West last week, and I look forward to getting more breaking news, tools and tips at the upcoming SMX shows in the coming months. If you haven’t already, reserve your spot at SMX Advanced in Seattle on June 5-6th and at SMX Toronto on April 25-26th.  See you there!