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SEMcast #12 - Search Marketing and Acquisitions is now unleashed on the world. If you are thinking about starting another company in your space to do more ppc or buying a competitive company, check this podcast out for some advice.

Also we’ve been poking around and noticed a site getting SEO benefit out of the AdWords ads on it. We cry unfair, not cool to take my AdWords work and give the credit to someone else’s site. AdWords advertisers beware! You can read more about our beef: Google & The Infinite SEO-PPC Loop.

Tip of My Hat, Wag of My Finger adsense ads, adwords seo, ppc adsense ads, search marketing buying a company

Posted over on searchengineland in the in-house column is my latest article - a practical guide to the new AdWords interface. Enjoy, and feel free to leave comments with your tips and tricks for the new AdWords interface in the comments here or at searchengineland.

Tip of My Hat new adwords interface

I’m now a columnist on one of my favorite sites about search engine marketing, search engine land. Check out my first article on the pros and cons of bid management solutions. In short, I debate the pros and cons of using an automated bid management solution. I won’t spoil it by telling you if I am more pro or con, read the article! I’ll have articles appearing about once a month as part of the In-House column.

SearchEngineWatch responded with a critical blog post on me “dissing” bid management, but I think they missed a lot of my point and I wrote a very polite comment saying so to further the discussion, which they have yet to post. So much for a community dialog! For shame.

Also, check out SEMcast #11, now live on geekcast.fm, also on the topic of bid management.

Lastly, have I mentioned lately that I’m on twitter? I am. For random life updates and some search commentary follow kellpickles.

Tip of My Hat bid management, bid management solutions

If you live under a rock you might not be aware, but more than likely you have heard that Microsoft and Yahoo have come to terms on a ten year search deal. The most relevant points for paid search engine marketing managers are these:

• Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic/paid search platform for Yahoo.
• Yahoo will be the exclusive seller of both companies’ premium advertisers while self-serve advertising will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter.
• The latest timeline I’ve seen suggests that paid Microsoft/Bing results will being appearing on Yahoo in early 2011 in major markets with the goal of all results by early 2012.

While it might be tempting to forget all about Yahoo’s switch to Microsoft paid search results, after all you have until early 2011 (that’s like a year away!), I would definitely encourage search engine marketers to start laying the groundwork now to manage risk in the switchover and get ahead of the competition.

1. Start a MSN AdCenter account. If you haven’t already, get your ppc campaigns up and running on Bing/Microsoft. They are garnering more search query share (~9% in July 2009) so search engine marketers should be advertising on Bing just to get the incremental revenue from another search engine anyway at this point. And eventually, you’re going to need an account there when Yahoo stops showing your ppc ads. If there’s any hiccups in transferring over Yahoo campaigns when the switch is made, it won’t matter to you as you’ll already have all those campaigns running on MSN. Bonus, you’ll have historical MSN data to compare to before the switchover, that plus your historical Yahoo data will tell you what your new MSN with Yahoo performance should be if all is working well after the switch.
2. Start getting regular reports out of Yahoo. Data is one of the most valuable assets a search engine marketer can have and who knows what will happen to yours when Yahoo ceases to operate their sponsored search platform. Pull regular monthly reports and store them if you haven’t been doing regular reports. When the switchover occurs, you’ll be armed with historical data to compare how well your Microsoft listings on Yahoo are performing versus your old Yahoo listings. You can also identify any year over year losses or softness and focus on improving those areas. This is all about mitigating risk and keeping your paid search engine marketing campaign performance as good as ever.
3. Get familiar with MSN’s interface and reports. I am sure in the coming year changes and enhancements will be made, but MSN’s AdCenter is a different beast than Yahoo or Google’s paid search platforms. Spend some time learning how it works, you’ll have an advantage over everyone scrambling to learn when the switchover is made.
4. Try to get an account manager at MSN. If your spend is in the thousands, try to get an account manager at MSN. Sometimes there’s no substitute for a real person when issues arise. If you start now, by 2011 you will have built a rapport with your account contact and they’ll be ready to help with any transition issues that arise when Yahoo changes over.
5. Don’t procrastinate. I know, I know, 2011 seems like ages from now. But think about how busy you are with just day to day search engine marketing tasks and if you spend just a little time each week pulling some Yahoo reports and getting your account up on MSN, you’ll be happy you had a year to get it all done. Trust me, its going to suck if you wait until the last minute.

Do you have other suggestions on preparing for the Yahoo-MSN switchover? I’d love to hear them, leave a comment!

Industry microhoo, microsoft paid search, microsoft yahoo merger, yahoo paid search

Quality Score can be confusing. There’s a bunch of factors, some seemingly mysterious, that can, at the end of they day, seriously damage (or improve) the ROI of a paid search campaign. My bottom line message: pick only relevant keywords and write a good ad that links to a good page. Write lots of good ads and test them to get the strongest one. Let that be your guide and ye cannot fail.

Don’t just take my advice. Google has now released a very simple and useful Quality Score guide. Check it out and go forth to pare out those irrelevant keywords and improve click-through rates.

I know some search engine marketers hate Quality Score, but I love it. Why? Because we pay a much lower cost per click than our competitors for a much better position. Quality score is a reward for running a well managed paid search campaign. When Quality Score becomes your friend instead of your enemy you’ll see what I mean.

Tip of My Hat google quality score, paid search engine marketing, quality score guide

SEMcast #9 is now online, all about tips and tricks for new Google AdWords interface. Enjoy!

Also I have a crazy travel schedule for the remainder of the month, so I doubt I will be posting much before August. So get out from behind the computer and enjoy summer!

Uncategorized new adwords interface, search engine marketing podcast, semcast 9

I’ve been a podcasting fool lately, check out the latest SEMcast on Google’s trademark policy change and 5 things I learned at SMX Advanced. Then I also special guest starred in two podcasts for Affiliate ABC’s with Deborah Loxly. One is on creatives for promoting travel and the other discusses the recent Amazon and eBay changes in their direct to merchant ppc rules.

As a reminder you can send me questions via twitter, a blog comment or a youtube video and I’ll answer them in a future podcast. I also accept questions via telegram (singing only) or carrier pigeon.

Tip of My Hat affiliate marketing podcast, search engine marketing podcast

I was at SMX Advanced last week and spent some time reviewing my notes and take aways from the sessions in the hopes of formulating some sort of coherent to-do list for myself. I noticed a couple of things I learned, so I thought I would share:

1. Google’s search query report just got more useful. Many less “other unique queries” and more actual queries exposed. I checked this one out myself, and its true, so thanks Google for making that better!

2. Only 5% of internet users time is spent searching, the other 95% is spent doing other things on the web. Fascinating. See, I told you content targeting was a good idea.

3. No one seems excited about bid management tools. One session has presenters explicitly talked about ways to calculate for yourself what your ideal bid should be and most people I talked to either weren’t using a system or didn’t think it was worth the money. Also with quality score’s ability to enormously impact bids, most marketers thought that was more important to optimize quality score than finely monitoring the bid itself.

4. Quality score is super important. There was a whole session on quality score and how important it is at the account, ad, keyword and landing page levels. Also general advice was given that if you have keywords with a score below 5, you should consider removing them or at least moving them to alleviate possible tainting. I knew it was important, but this really made me think much more about it.

5. Mobile is still early days. The mobile session presenters were great, but my big takeaway was that unless you’ve got a super perfect for mobile product (like a ringtone, or iphone app), then its still really early days for you to gain mobile adopters. The volume isn’t there yet.

Thanks to everyone who gave their time and expertise to making the sessions and roundtable discussions so worthwhile! I had a great time speaking and meeting lots of other search engine marketers.

Industry, Speaking Engagements search engine marketing education, smx advanced

Check out the official word on the Google Adwords trademark policy change here.

Basically if a site sells a brand name, or has information on it, its fair game to use the trademark in the ad text. This is a pretty huge change that I am sure many trademark protective brands, especially ones that sell through multiple online distribution channels, will not like. For example, its now fair game for a hotel aggregator like Expedia to bid on and display in their ad text a brand name, like Hilton hotels.

I think it is a smart move for Google to get out of arbitrating trademark issues as much as possible. Though big brand advertisers will be irritated with them, they’ve washed their hands of being the middle man. Now all those brands will have to hash out agreements with their distribution channels, which they probably should have done anyway. And of course their lawyers will have many threatening letters to send. And its likely Google will increase revenues with this move, CTRs for ads that now can use the brand name are sure to rise.

It never made sense that an advertiser could bid on a brand name keyword, but couldn’t display it in the ad text. How exactly can you say you offer Segway tours without using the word Segway? In some cases like that one, its just impossible.

Industry brand names in search, google trademark policy change

I spend more waking hours on a weekday with Excel than I do my husband. Seriously. Eight or nine hours a day, compared to five-ish. I’ve had dreams about Excel. Which is all just to say, I use Excel a lot. Excel is a super useful tool to help manage paid search accounts, so I thought I’d share my favorite Excel ppc tips.

Math. This is basic, but you can do math in Excel. You should never have Excel and a calculator program open at the same time. You can straight up just type formulas into the cell (ie, 4*5) or refer to cells (A1*B2).
VLOOKUP. A super handy Excel formula. Let’s say you have a list of keywords you can add to your account, but you don’t want to add ones you already have. If you download your account keywords into Excel you can VLOOKUP keywords to add in your account keywords list to see if they are there and if they are (for the formula, return a value of the keyword if its in the list), you can skip them. Also good for marrying up separate reports with a shared element. For example, you might have a report of adgroups with clicks and costs and another report of adgroups with revenue and transactions. Since they both have adgroups, you can VLOOKUP the adgroup name and return the values for revenue and transactions in the click/cost report, making one nice report.
CONCATENATE. Another handy formula. Let’s say you have a list of keywords and you want to add the word “discount” to all of them to add to your account. CONCATENATE “discount” + a space + the cell of the keyword and magically you get “discount keyword”. Just drag the formula down and the list is created. Or likewise if you have brand names + product types permutations you can work through all those quickly with concatenate.
Filtering. Sometimes you have a huge list of keywords that you want to prioritize, maybe adding ones about cruises are higher value for you. Using the filters in Excel you can filter a list of keywords to show any that “contain” cruise. Also handy for answering questions like, how many keywords about Sony do we have?

I know its hard to grasp how to use these formulas by just reading this, definitely check out Excel help for more information! Also practice really helps. These tips and more are covered in SEMcast #7, now available on geekcast.fm.

Tip of My Hat excel ppc tips, excel sem, managing search engine marketing with excel