This week SEOmoz Global Associate, Tom Critchlow, brings a little PPC funk to our normally organic party. If you've ever thought, "why don't they ever do anything on paid search," here you go: a rapid-fire, 10 minute rundown of some basic PPC strategies everyone should know before they wander the woods of paid clicks.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-PPC Basics with Tom Critchlow from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
A couple of tools Tom mentions in the video:
Distilled PPC Toolbox
Vertster CTR Validity Checker
By: Scott Willoughby
Whiteboard Friday - PPC Basics
Whiteboard Friday
The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
New drinking game. Watch the video. Every time Tom says "OK" down a shot. You will be hammered by the end of the video.
But when said with a British accent . . . it makes it all 'okay'!
thumbed down for inaccurate. You would actually be dead.
Genius! TC hammer time as Sean calls it.
Sorry for saying OK all the time - I'll try and not do that next time. Ok?
OK
LOL!
Tom, how many cases of Red bull did you have before you did this ;) Those Limey's sure do talk fast.
Good job mate, about time we had someone with a proper accent on here.
I was thinking the same about red bull haha. Great video Tom, really helpful for me because I am a PPC noob.
Hope you managed to keep up mate! It's quite nervwracking being in front of camera and I think that's why I talked fast.. I shot another one while I was out there so hopefully in the coming weeks we'll hear more of the good old british isles on here :-)
I have to disagree with some of the methodologies in this video. You talk about the 80/20 rule in the 2nd part of the video but in the first part you tell people to just take every keyword they think might drive traffic and put it in the campaign. This is my advice to newbies.
If you have a newbie jump into PPC using hundreds or thousands of keywords they will likely fail unless they are in a virgin niche. By starting small and working the way up, they learn proper testing and campaign structure techniques.
If you can't make a profit off of the head, then you probably need to find another niche (if doing aff marketing) or get professional help (if the niche is your core business).
I agree with most of your advice however I don't think a PPC newbie should bother with Yahoo and MSN until they've some what mastered Google.
The amount of traffic through Yahoo and especially Microsoft is that small in comparison and whilst it can provide better value then AdWords I think the time is best spent on Google.
Yes but a click is a click no? The question is, do Y! and MSN offer cheaper CPCs than google?
While that is true Jaamit the problem is that the Yahoo and MSN interfaces are so arcane and difficult to use that a beginner would probably end up bidding on the wrong phrases and blowing their budget!
I would echo Matthew's comment - leave MSN/Yahoo until you've mastered Google.
I'll second that, last time I launched campaigns for the sites I run on Y! and MSN I was getting ready to throw my PC out the window by the end...
In particular Adcentre is a nightmare (thought Microsoft continually claim to be updating it), it's like wading through treacle trying to get anything done. Plus you can use the offline editor with Adwords which is a pretty useful alternative to the online interface. Last time I spoke to Y! they were 'planning on developing something similar' but that was last year...
It's true that Yahoo! and MSN can provide better CPA (the important metric to measure) then Google Adwords because there is usually less competition. Then again, if you really want to chase after the lowest CPA then you should really bypass all first tier PPC programs and deal with companies like Yandex, Baidu, Miva and Looksmart.
Why don't most people use these PPC channels?
Whether people like it or not, the gold standard in PPC is Google AdWords. I advertise with those PPC companies listed above but that is because I've already exploited most of AdWords reach (including the content network and PPA).
Why don't I recommend a PPC newbie use these PPC companies? Because you're trying to achieve a good ROI on your advertising. With there bad interface, lack of features and small traffic amounts you're not effectively using your time. Whilst you may be getting a better CPA (probably not because all of these PPC programs have little quirks you need to adjust to) you're going to investing too much time on something that doesn't provide the returns.
Thanks for your comment Jeremy - some good points in there though I don't agree with all of it. I think to some extent it depends what kind of business/site you're doing PPC for though so we may both be right :-)
I think the thing I disagree with most is the bit about lots of keyphrases vs small no of keyphrases. I agree that a lot of the work should go into the head keyphrases and you absolutely need to get these profitable but often getting these phrases profitable is a long, slow and arduous process whereas the long-tail is often a quick win since it's cheaper and converts better.
Being a noobie with PPC, this video has helped me not be so overwhelmed by the entire thing. Your additional advice for us noobies also helps a lot (A LOT).
What's the etiquette with giving thumbs up to your own video? To hell with it - I thumbed it up :-)
Thanks for all the positive feedback guys, sorry for talking so fast! Can't believe it came in at like 11 mins. I thought it was like 4 mins tops. Thanks to Scott for putting it together and putting up with me saying OK like EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE...! Sheesh.
I will respond to your questions and points when I can but Will, Duncan and I are all offline for the weekend as Duncan's getting married so might take us a few days :-)
Pipe down Critchlow! You're ruining my beer buzz - compliments of Stephen T's suggestion.
Beer pong is so yesterday. "TC Hammer Time" is the new drinking game of choice.
TC hammer time. Beautiful. I've changed my profile page accordingly.
Great roundup - basic but in a sense very in depth. I'm an SEO that does PPC at the same time, and I was wondering if there are others out there?
As for what is missing, I only think you should have talked about conversion tracking, because it is very important in the management process, and so easy to implement (if the client helps out, of course).
Thanks.
I tried to handle the in house PPC for my companies (Im the Director of Web, IT and SO Marketing) for them.. but it became way too much to handle, with SEO, web development and IT coordination.
Needless to say I was stretching myself way too thin, and not focusing my efforts. I contracted it out and has made my life much easier for business development from the tech side. I was also understaffed, so that didn't help any...
Do you find it time consuming when managing the PPC campaigns?
Sure Rob, managing is extremely time consuming. Fortunately we're in the process of having someone else manage PPC around here, while I still might be doing tha campaigns from the ground up.
I do both, and I'm sure there are plenty more of us.
Conversion tracking is very very important (as I mentioned at the beginning - have a goal and be able to track it). I didn't have time to get into the specifics of how to set it up - again, not enough time!
Great job Tom. It's nice to hear some great tips for those SEOs who just hate even touching PPC. These are solid ideas for anyone starting and maintaining a PPC campaign anywhere. And so funny to hear it explained with British words :)
Another great power of PPC is quickly split testing new landing pages, and then applying the knowledge from PPC to converting organic pages. This probably falls under the 80/20 rule. If you can change a small percentage of your page designs and test them via PPC, you can then apply their increases to the rest of your site.
To some extent that works but you also need to be aware of differences in PPC vs organic traffic.
In a perfect world they would ideally act the same but unlike with PPC you can't always direct an organic user to the page you want for them or that they may be in a different stage of the buying cycle.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
So, when creating these "landing pages" for the search terms that are optimizing for, do you tell your robot.txt file (Google and others) to "not crawl" these pages to avoid a duplicate content penalty?
Yes, I add PPC landing pages to a robots.txt file to also ensure (as much as possible) accurate tracking numbers. I don't want non-PPC traffic affecting those numbers.
I suggest reading how Michael Gray uses robots.txt on his landing pages to avoid duplicate content.
Personally, I'd love to see more on PPC. I think any good search marketing campaign needs to incorporate both SEO & PPC - particularly early on while you're trying to get your customer's organic rankings up.
Successful PPC campaigns / conversions also provide some immediate relief to keep the wolves at bay since your SEO efforts take a bit more time to kick in. Any SEO's ever had an impatient customer? ;)
Nice job Tom.
Thanks, Tom!
My boss happened by while I was watching, and I think I clinched a continuing SEOmoz Pro membership budget with your very first point.
As a SEO/PPC noob, I loved the solid summary of the basics, and I'm looking forward to reading/hearing more on PPC in the future here. It seems like such powerful stuff. How come Rand doesn't like it?
Like Stuart, I had a question about the "if it's not converting delete it" statement. Does it actually do harm to leave it in, or is it just a matter of keeping your account neat and current?
Do the keywords have "poor" quality scores?
https://www.ewhisper.net/blog/low-quality-keywords-can-lower-other-keywords-quality-scores/
I suck at linking on SEOmoz but the above is from Brad Geddes' blog and explains that underperforming keywords can effect your high performing keywords.
If I comment without any type of sensical patterns, it must be Friday afternoon.
HEY LOOK! A PRETTY BIRD.
oh yeah, PPC... I agreed with pretty much everything here. Good Vid. I think other than the mention of min. bids, I'd also keep in mind the level you set your budget to.
I know it can be a scary number to play with, but if you find that you're spending under your daily budget, nudge it up and see how it effects your # of impressions.
Oh, and another tip that will have a positive impact on the green in your wallet. USE THE MV TESTING TOOL FOR YOUR LANDING PAGES. Granted, you'll want to read up on what to test first, but its worth it. In conversions, impressions, and what you'll learn about your audiences tendancies.
Have a killer weekend ya'll.
I like how your systematic Tom. I prefer this over any form of teaching.
I made a nice checklist from this and I think your advice is going to be tremendously valuable to my PPC efforts.
Jolly good Flying Monkeys, glad you're liking it :-)
Checklists FTW!
Great vid :)
And to take it further, if you're interested in the advanced side of things, take a look at https://searchlightdigital.com/advanced-ppc-multivariate-testing-through-applying-pareto-to-orthogonal-arrays/
Great article!. Please, ¿could you speak slowlier? Some active visitors of SEOMoz are spanish and sometimes its hardly to understand you.
Im starting at PPC, any book, manual, video recommended?
Very thanks,
Keep going! You are making great stuff!
The best resource when you're first starting out in PPC is to study Google's (I assume you're using AdWords) learning center.
https://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/
That will give you a starting block. I think the most important factors in PPC are:
1) Trackability (is that a word?) - Like Tom said, you need to be able to track everything otherwise you don't know whats working and what isn't. Just because one keyword gets 100 clicks a day whilst another gets 1 click a day - the latter may be getting a conversion with each click.
2) Campaign/AdGroup Structure - Again, like Tom said (he did a great job) - split content and search and make sure your adgroups are tightly focussed on a theme.
3) Keywords - I wont mention match type because I think it works differently for everyone but you do need to think "what does someone looking for my product search for?" and include those terms. As you go along you'll find terms you missed and terms that just don't work. Don't forget negative keywords!
4) Quality score!!!! - This is the most important part of an ongoing campaign in my mind. A number of different factors make up quality score (do a google search for a full list) but a "great" QS vs a "poor" QS is the difference between paying 5 cents per click or $5 per click and also affects the position of your ad.
5) Ad Copy - My recommendation is a maximum of 4 ads per adgroup but I think that varies between people. Start broadly (like Tom said) and figure out what works. You'll be suprised how small things can increase your CTR and conversion rate. Once you have enough data you can cull the underperforming ones and start testing new variants.
I'm starting to ramble on though. If you read and study all the Google Learning Center and follow Tom's advice you'll be 80% more educated then most people running PPC out there. It's ultimately a learning experience as well. There are foundations that everyone follows but things that work for others won't work for you and vice versa.
Thanks for the info! Im will start reading it today!
Are you suggesting essentially duplicating each ad group and designating one search and one content? (And perhaps making the content ad group include more broad match kws?)
You could do that however the best way to setup content is described in this article from Search Engine Land.
It's a different approach then the search network.
Sorry for speaking so fast - I was a little nervous! I'll try and speak slower and clearer next time (and not say OK so much!)
This is great! Thank you.
One question:
Which report should I run to get the key frases my broad matches are actually returning?
Thank you
Google at least (and I've never even ATTEMPTED in the others) doesn't have a report that does this well. There is something like it in there, but I personally use an inhouse tool that tells me the full referring URL from every conversion. So My tracker tells me when they filled out our form, when they first showed up, the barcode (tells me what keyphrase google served the ad from), and the referring URL which most times has the exact term they used.
I just glance through that to get negative keywords. You can do the same through many analytics programs.
Yes, I was trying through Google's Search Query reports but I just get a "9 other unique queries" message... Would love to find out which other 9....
Thank you Kate (Mary Anne)
Would be great to have more info about how you track this inhouse (if it wouldnt mean giving too much away!). I too get frustrated by the "# other unique queries" in Adwords' Search Query Report, which can make the thing almost useless...
Are you running your Search Query Reports on a campaign level or ad group level jammit?
I generally run it on a campaign level... so if I ran it at an ad group level I wouldn't get those '# other unique queries' results in the report?
Interesting Kate - would be interested to read more about this, perhaps on a youmoz?!
One problem with that method though is you only filter out the search phrases which convert into contact request, you can't filter out searches which came and then left (which are usually the ones you want to filter out)
true ... hmm, gonna have to think about that one ;)
Hey Tom.
Great summary, I was interested to hear, "If it's not converting delete it"
What kind of time frame do you allow to make that decision?
Sometimes things dont convert or have low conversion rates and I feel like just keeping it on for the advertising value. After all it is advertising.
Gmail is a good example of that. Often high impression, low CTR / Conversion. But I still want my clients to be advertising on Gmail.
See my post below about underperforming keywords having an affect on the ad group as a whole.
As for how long to let it run before making a decision? It depends - if your keyword gets 1000 clicks/day and doesn't convert then it might be two weeks before you cull it. If it gets 10 clicks/day you might need a few months to decide.
Then you have other factors like your budget. How long can you afford to keep it running? If you've got a $100/month campaign budget your answer is different then someone with a $100,000/month campaign.
My advice (and Tom touched on it) is if a keyword or keywords are underperforming in an account, split them out into another adgroup and do some testing with them. By splitting them out you aren't affecting the performing keywords and like you said - it leaves you covered.
It helps to know your cost per acquisition. If your CPA is $30 and keyword A converts 10% of the time then you can afford to bid $3/click where as if keyword B only converts 1% of the time then you can only bid $0.30/click.
I wrote about this on the Distilled blog with a silly title - but a handy lookup table.
Stuart,
The key with deleting anything in PPC is to make sure that you have statistical signifincance before you delete. I use SplitTester.com for this for ad CTR and Conversion testing. You just input a few numbers and the site will crunch them to tell you how certain you can be that one will continue to outperform the other over the long term.
Excellent video. Every friday I love to signon to see the very informative Whiteboard Friday!
nice tutorial thanks for that. i was wondering if you could talk just a little slower though if possible :) i know you had time constraints though! dont worry about the "ok", it's better than jamie's "yeah?"
Thanks Gronk - once again, apologies for speaking so fast, it was my first solo WBF and they're quite nervewrecking!
nah all good mate top work you did well. did you notice you started off with Rand's "howdy seomozzers" and the wave? i thought that was cute :)
No mention of minimum bids and how they relate to Quality Score and on-page SEO factors of the landing page . . . otherwise quite thorough.
Brent
Maybe a good idea would be a Whiteboard Friday on Quality Score and it's many factors :) Page Load time and all :)
Totally - that would be a Killer whiteboard Friday! Rand, do you think you can make it happen? I know you can :)
I agreee with Brent, but adding that creating the individual landing pages will help conversion rates on lcick throughs - would also (I assume if your goign to build the page - you would try to best optimize it) for natural search quallity.
Great job! Hey does SEOmoz handle client PPC? If so, I want to talk!
Thx. Rob
It was already 11 mins Brent - had to cut some things out!
I agree though - a WBF on quality score would be pretty cool. Maybe I could fly back out to Seattle and shoot another one.... :-)
;) Or maybe set up a whiteboard at Distilled HQ and post the tapes over to Scott for editing...
Bringing the PPC Love to the moz! TY
Thanks Tom for the explanation! I'm a total newbie so you being very systematic about it helped a lot. And don't let the repetative comments get you down - The good thing about talking fast is the fact that we can always rewind and hear it again. And, the more we hear it, the easier it will be to remember it!I didn't quite get "Before You Go Live" point #6: Thematically (sp?) grouping. Why would it be more beneficial to put keyphrase "B" in it's own group, separate from keyphrase "D"?I was also a little lost with "PPC Maintenance" point #9: Review analytics. If anything, I got how a high bounce rate is bad, but what/how do I make sure it's in line with the rest of my site?
Great explanation on the set-up and or how to style for a good ppc campaign!
Thank you Tom. I really welcome a bit of PPC (just a bit mind!) on SEOmoz and this is very timely for me as I'm trying to get my head around it as we start to offer more PPC management at our agency.
Questions I have for future posts / videos:
Cheers!
I'll try to answer your questions.
If you're interested in quality score, check out https://searchlightdigital.com/who-else-wants-kick-ass-adwords-quality-score/
If you've got any questions, please leave a comment!
I learn a lot
Insightful and concise as usual Tom - although I would definitely advise adding a ruled whiteboard to the SEOmoz budget before you're let loose on it again!
Very well covered. I want to know, is there any connection b/w landing page tunning and ad quality score?
Hi there Pulkiet,
It absolutely does have an effect. If you want a quick overview of what you can do site-side to help increase QS, have a look at https://searchlightdigital.com/who-else-wants-kick-ass-adwords-quality-score/
I liked the video but thought you missed a couple of minor points in the article. Thanks for the info.
Us Limeys Rock - especially Devon and Cornwall area OK????
David
Charlotte, NC
Thank very much for your infor Im a chinese seoer, i WANT to learn seo OF Foreign