Some Advertisers like bidding on their competitors’ names as keywords.  We don’t bid on them for search, because we’ve never been able to convert them efficiently.  But then, that’s for search; what about buying tangential keywords, like competitors’ names, for content advertising?

Try Bidding on Competitors’ Names for Content

Many consumers research vendors before buying, especially for high dollar purchases.  It’s not uncommon for a buyer to refer to review sites, blogs, and forums, as well as social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, to research a company.  Whether the information about your competitor is positiive or negative, we believe it often makes sense to show ads alongside such content.

Conclusion - Bidding on Competitor Names

We’ve yet to find an instance where it has been efficient for any Advertiser to bid on their competitors’ names as keywords.  However, for advertisers selling high dollar items, it may make sense to bid on competitor names for content, and we often recommend doing so.

I find the statistics about search migrating from PC’s to phones to be particularly compelling.  That is, according to wikipedia, there are 850 million personal computers in use, and 3.3 billion mobile telephones (as of November 2007).  

Although 24% of those phones are web enabled, only about 3% can access the web with a browser.  Phones are replaced every 18 months, so within the next several years, it’s likely that the number of phones with internet connections will come to outnumber today’s phones, which are used primarily for voice & text messaging.

G1 versus Iphone versus Blackberry

Indeed, one of the best performing companies in the US market this year is Apple Computer, and much of Apple’s growth is being driven by the success of its iphone.  Google obviously believes that the future of search will be enhanced significantly by the mobile phone, or they wouldn’t have invested in Android (officially developed collaboratively under the Open Handset Alliance).  Upon launch Google was flogging the G1 phone with a text link on their home page.  Research in Motion is also scheduled to debut its newest browser-based phone.

Adwords Phone Ads are Dead

We recently spoke with our Google Agency representative about the future of phone ads.  It was interesting to hear his lackluster support for them.  Upon further reflection, it should come as no surprise, given his bullishness on the migration to browser based phones.  Phones like G1, iPhone, and future Blackberry phones are going to make phone ads even less relevant, not more relevant.  So, unless you live in Japan (the world leader in internet enabled phones which don’t access the internet with a browser), seems like phone ads may be a dirt road for most advertisers.

Implications of Mobile Browsers

Regarding migration to G1 and iphone browser capable phones, there are other important ramifications for advertisers.  Consider the G1’s ability to scan a bar code, and give a shopper alternative price quotes.  This is going to drive purchases of not just high end goods, but any item worth it’s weight in UPS shipping towards online internet shops.  Of course this means more online shops are coming in 2009 and 2010.

The implications are also significant, for other forms of retail.  What impact might this have on modern shopping malls for example?  Mall shops could become display showrooms, a place where shoppers demo but seldom buy premium quality, overpriced products.  You’ll find as early as 2009, fearful shop owners will begin placing olympic strength stickers over product bar codes and revert to 1970’s style little handwritten garage sale type price stickers on all their high-end products.  

Mobile Browsing - Zero Marginal Cost

Why hasn’t this happened yet?  Because until now, the cost and effectiveness of phone search was relatively expensive.  However, once you can access a web browser with a phone for zero marginal cost (all plans for the G1 phone and iPhone include unlimited internet access), then we will come to find that the average Joe using a phone bar scanner in Safeway on a 48 pack of size 4 diapers.  When this happens, shopping will migrate significantly towards the discount retailers.  Discount retailers like WalMart and Target will not only broaden their product offerings to carry higher quality items at discounted prices, but will also begin pumping staples out of their super stores in ever increasing volumes.

Mobile Browsing, the Bottom Line

• Advertisers:  Search gets a powerful second surge, become an even more compelling adverting channel.
• Pay Per Click Ad Agencies, like Denver PPC:  Hire & train more SEM Professionals.
• Shopping Malls:  Mall owners, sell the mall; Watch shop owners & handbag shop owners: sell the shop.
• Price Sensitive Shoppers:  Buy a G1 Phone today!
• Investors:  Buy UPS, WMT, GOOG; sell DDS, EBHI, BGP.

Your Adwords CPC prices are set by auction.  What if the economy were slowing?  If 2 of 15 advertisers were to withdraw from your ad space, or slow their ads, then why shouldn’t the results of that be felt in your actual average CPC?  Maybe it can be.  When is the last time you tried DECREASING your Adwords bids?   

Bargain Hunting? Decrease your CPC Bids!

This is not a trivial point.  In our experience, ROAS almost always increases when we decrease bids / ad positions.  If you haven’t tried it lately, you should.

This doesn’t work for all accounts (certainly not for any account which is starved for traffic or disengaged!!!).  Advertisers with accounts in bargain hunting mode (accounts which are spending their daily budgets and displaying ads for a fraction of their potential impressions), can generally improve performance substantially by decreasing bids.

Marginal Advertisers - Below the Fold

If you are a marginal advertiser (struggling to make the economics of Adwords work for you) above the fold, try dropping to the bottom of the first page of the paid search results - a lower CPC will almost certainly improve your economic performance.

Run Bargain & Free Offers Below the Fold

If you are an Advertiser offering bargain basement prices or something free, then try decreasing your bids and dropping below the fold, because shoppers searching for a bargain don’t mind scrolling!

Step, Two, Three, Four

Just imagine if everyone in your ad space were to attempt to advertise below the fold and decresase bids in-step, together!  The bids in your ad space might go into free fall, especially for local advertisers.  If you like this idea, then just send the competitors in your ad space a link to this webpage!!  Maybe they’ll get the hint.

Good Luck.

High Traffic keywords deserve special treatment!  If you have  a keyword which represents more than 5% to 10% of your impressions, clicks, or ad spending, and are not giving it special treatment, then you’re dropping the ball.

Special Treatment for High Traffic Keywords

We usually place a high traffic keyword into a stand-alone ad group so we can write ads specifically focused on the single keyword. This generally serves to enhance the performance of the keyword.

We often place the ad group in its own “High Traffic” campaign in order to throttle (maybe stop!) spending on it, so as to avoid crowding out traffic to our long-tail keywords. Unless segregated, one keyword can swallow your ad budget by 9am, so that your long-tail keywords earn no impressions for the rest of the day.

Bright Lights, or Leper Colony?

High Traffic campaigns consist of core keywords. Core keywords are usually short. Short keywords, by definition, are not long-tail. We love long-tail keywords, and have a healthy bias against high traffic keywords, because they generally convert poorly. However, this is just our opinion, and sometimes it’s just not popular.  No worries, after all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

So when you see “High Traffic,” in one of our campaign names, we’ll leave it to you to determine whether that designates the keyword as a superstar . . .  or leper.

The success of a new Adwords account depends significantly on decisions about keyword selection. Choosing the right keywords and negative keywords, understanding the traffic potential of the keywords you select, and making the right choices, during the selection process, about ad groups and campaigns are all critical factors for the successful launch of any pay per click advertising campaign.

Especially for new SEM Analysts, I’m often asked about how to develop keyword lists. This post is for you.

We’ve written a lot about How to Setup an Adwords account, and have also written a separate posting about the criteria for choosing keywords, but this posting discusses exactly how we go about developing a keyword list from scratch for a new client.

The Process of Choosing Keywords

The process is somewhat iterative. It goes like this:

1. Study the website to identify potential landing pages (as well as opportunities for improvement).
2. Get the keywords seeds; in the process start to sketch out some preliminary ad groups.
3. Run the keywords in some tool to generate more keyword ideas; in the process identify negatives.
4. Calculate the traffic potential & preliminary bids for keywords; refine keyword groupings.
5. Check your work & concatenate shorter keywords with likely relevant modifiers.

Step 1: Study Website

Studying a client’s website is too often overlooked as the first step in an effective keyword selection process. Your keywords might generate plenty of traffic, and you can draft compelling relevant ads to gain a great click through rate, but if you don’t have a related landing page to convert those clicks, then we would classify such keywords as orphans.  For such keywords, the clicks and your compelling ad text will all add up to bounces. Better never to have purchased the keywords in the first place!

So if you don’t have an appropriate landing page to convert the keywords, and unless you’re absolutely certain that the Advertiser is going to spring for new landing pages before your launch, then go ahead and make a recommendation about the landing pages, but in the mean time give the orphan keywords a miss.

Step 2: Keyword Seeds

If you’ve harvested your keyword seeds from the website, then you can generate derivatives of those with perfect confidence that your keywords are relevant to Advertiser’s web offers.

Don’t start generating new keywords from the seeds until you’ve sorted them into some preliminary ad groups. At this point, you’ve probably got only 100 to 200 keyword candidates and it won’t take you so long to sort them, but if you wait to sort them until you’ve turned the seeds into thousands of keywords, then it’s going to take you literally hours to sort them.

Efficiency Hint: Sometimes clients or client’s SEO consultants give us the keyword seeds or a preliminary list which is significantly longer than 100 keywords. When we have a lot of keywords to sort into ad groups, we use the editor for this. We upload all the keywords into the editor under a single “Test” ad group. Then scan the keywords until we find a likely candidate for an ad group name, type it into the search bar at the top of the desktop editor, cut and paste the results into excel. Then we rename the ad group name on the excel sheet. We keep doing this until there are no keywords remaining in the Test ad group, then delete Test, and paste our excel results back into the editor to create our new ad groups.

Super Efficiency Hint: Furthermore, if the keyword list includes traffic numbers, then we upload the traffic number as the keyword bid value, and sort the keywords high to low by bid. This provides a convenient basis for validating ad group names.

At this point, be sure the keywords are sorted firstly, precisely according to landing pages, and secondly, within common textual phrases within those groups. Typically, (aside from an online store) a single landing page will have two to four ad groups each. So if you’re targeting 5 separate landing pages, you might expect your keywords to be grouped into about 15 ad groups.

Caution: The number one mistake in setting up new accounts is in ad group selection–the temptation is to sort the keywords according to their meanings instead of sorting them according to common textual themes. If you are going to tailor ads to include keywords in the ad text, then to do so, the keywords must contain common terms which can be included in the ad text.

One thing you can do to resist falling into the trap of selecting ad groups on the basis of meaning instead of text is to name the ad group according to the common textual element of the individual keywords. This textual element is that part of the keyword phrase which distinguishes it from other ad groups. Then make sure you don’t include any keyword term in that ad group which doesn’t include the ad group name. Often a keyword will qualify for more than one ad group. At this preliminary stage, just put it into whichever one seems to best represent it (think of relationship of search query to ad text), and move on.

At this point, we have the keywords in the desktop editor, organized into preliminary ad groups under a temporary campaign.

Early on, we prefer to err in favor of having too many ad groups, rather than not enough, because it’s often easier to combine ad groups, than divide them. Don’t fall in love with these ad groups now, since you don’t yet know the search values which can be generated from the keyword seeds.

Our goal at this point is to upload the preliminary ad groups into the actual Adwords account. To do this, we have to buff the settings out so the editor will accept the posting. Set the campaign settings to a daily budget amount which is likely to exceed your max keyword bid, say $20 / day, PAUSE THE CAMPAIGN, set Google Search Only, and set geo targets to the final destinations. Next write a dummy ad, which might plausibly work for the site as a whole, and propagate this dummy ad across every ad group. Then set the ad group default setting to some plausibly reasonable highish number, like $4.11, and set all the keyword match types to our default phrase match setting.

Voila!! Upload the seeds and preliminary settings into Advertiser’s Adwords account (or a dummy account if necessary), and you’re ready to get down to the real business of keyword discovery!

Step 3: From Seeds to List of Long-tail keywords

From the online Adwords interface, open each ad group and use the keyword tool to select relevant phrases with terms common to your ad group name. In the process of doing so, you might identify other groups of phrases for an alternative ad group name, and it’s also at this point that you will create your first list of negative keywords, so remain alert and keep an open mind in this part of the process.

In this step of the selection process, you’re sorting every keyword suggested by Google according to four possibilities:

1. the keyword is highly relevant to advertiser’s web offers, and includes text associated with the ad group name (select it!!).
2. the keyword is relevant to advertiser’s web offers, but does not include text associated with ad group name (don’t select it, but copy it into a “other” notepad for now).
3. the keyword is not relevant, and you wouldn’t want somebody to see your ad if one were to use it in a search query (don’t select it, but copy it into a “negatives” notepad for now).
4. the keyword is not highly relevant or is too vague; someone using it in a search query may or may not be looking for Advertiser’s web offer (ignore it).

Aside from naive errors in judgment, the most common mistake made in this step of the process is failing to identify negative keywords as you develop the keyword list. However, if you’ve followed the sorting procedures above, you will have a nice list of negatives. Generally, we try to use campaign level negatives where possible. Copy the negatives from your notepad into the online interface at the campaign level, reconcile any remnants from your “other” notepad, and we’re ready to move on to the next step.

Step 4: Traffic, Bids & Final Ad Groups

Ad groups are never final. We improve them continuously, but in this step, you have to settle on the ad groups which will be used for launch, and you can’t do so without understanding the aggregate traffic potential of each proposed keyword group. You can use Google’s traffic estimator for this. In the process, you can also come up with some preliminary bids for ad groups. If you find that some of your proposed ad groups do not generate significant traffic, then fold them into the most closely associated ad group. We subscribe to an online service to generate keyword traffic numbers.

If you find that a few keywords are accounting for a significant amount of traffic, then you might consider busting one of your preliminary ad groups in two. Also, if you find that some of your core keywords will generate 10% or more of your traffic, then you should immediately place them into a High Traffic campaign and stand alone ad group. So keep your eyes open for this situation, while you are finalizing your ad groupings.

Step 5: Checking and Concatenating Short Keywords

It’s easy to make mistakes throughout the process of keyword generation. While a mistake or two in a long keyword isn’t likely to affect the account (if a word is misspelled in an improbable manner, the keyword simply won’t attract impressions), a mistake in a short keyword can have a devastating effect on an account.
So I check my keywords by sorting them short to long. Do this by downloading them from excel via the desktop editor. Use “=len()” function; sort ascending. Your most critical mistakes will pop right out on the top of the list (check for the keyword, “keyword,” which, with the advent of the desktop editor, has become one of the most commonly purchased keywords).

Generally, we are highly suspicious of any keyword which is shorter than 10 characters, and all less than 15 to 20 characters should be carefully scrutinized. It doesn’t mean we never bid on them, just that we are bias against them. When in doubt, apply a term as a search query and study the results;ask yourself a couple questions: “Is this really the Advertiser’s ad space?” and “What risks exist for tangential searches?” If you identify tangential searches, then sometimes they can be mitigated by adding some negative keywords, but more often than not, you will maximize ROAS by simply sacrificing the term.

Once you’ve eliminated any garbage, then consider concatenating terms by applying likely modifiers against relatively short keywords [hint: "=concatenate("irs", b3)]. This relates not just to place names (which are special modifiers), but also to other adjectives. If you’re bidding on “tax attorney,” for example, then try words like: irs, top, and best. Often the best clues for modifiers already exist throughout your keyword list.

All gargantuan keyword lists are developed through concatenation, and there is no limit to the possibilities. So while you should use your imagination, you must stay within the realm of plausibility or you will risk looking ridiculous to the Advertiser. Aside from that, you must also follow our guidelines for keyword length.

One final word about concatenation: keywords which don’t earn impressions are not free. They will tax you forever, on every account download, every page load, every report generated. So while we love long-tail keywords, even long-tail keywords must earn their keep: minimum average one impression per month, or we delete them.

Ready for Launch!

Once you complete this final step, you probably think you have a final keyword list, but you don’t. You may be ready for launch, but remember:

Keyword lists are never final - Kaizen PPC.

Improve them . . . forever!

Yesterday we met with an advertising company in Denver and discussed the role of pay per click in the context of an Advertiser’s broader marketing plans. The meeting began with a great presentation by Heather Lutze (if you haven’t seen her show, then you’re missing out). Following the presentation, several of us fielded questions. One related to the proper steps of commencing a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) effort and whether it pays to delay the process with pay per click (PPC). My reply was that pay per click, if managed properly, by definition results in a measurable positive return on ad spending. Of course that’s great for any Advertiser, but many marketing managers overlook the other potential benefits of using pay per click advertising to methodically test keyword lists, website content, and website design, in advance of any on-page SEO design, or SEO link building efforts.

In this sense, advertising agencies and marketing managers should think of pay per click advertising as a form of self-funding marketing research.

Your Newest Emergency . . .

When did you last get a quote for a new website, or an SEO overhaul? For a company of any size, it’ll cost thousands of dollars, will be projected to take months to complete, and in reality will end up taking closer to a year. Once it’s done, you’ll be stuck with, or enjoy, the results for years. The point is, getting a new website, or paying a consultant to launch your site on search engines, is an important investment. Still, I’m always amazed at how little planning and research is typically invested in advance for site development and SEO structure. You don’t have time for testing? We say, you can’t afford not to take time for testing!

What’s up with the typical emergency fire drill which seems to be associated with every SEO or website development effort. Why is it that ad agencies and marketing managers fail to understand that rushing into fires unprepared has cost truckloads of marketing bright spots their jobs? Today’s little barn blaze becomes tomorrow’s thousand acre forest fire. So if you’re an ad agency or marketing manager looking to develop a new online presence, consider adding several months into the process for testing. We guarantee that in the process you’ll not only get smarter about Search Engine Marketing (SEM), but will also come to learn some important facts about your online target market, which can even be applied to an Advertiser’s brick and mortar business.

We propose in advance of any major site development or SEO effort to apply PPC for testing: 1) keywords lists; 2) website content; 3) alternative page design; and 4) conversion funnels.

Kaizen PPC

Getting smarter about your pay per click marketing will make you smarter about your company’s overall market. Our system of Kaizen PPC management is designed to generate and track statistics, which provide a basis for continuously improving Return on Ad Spending (ROAS). So in addition to providing an attractive and potentially ever-improving return on ad spending, our methods also emphasize structuring accounts in a manner to efficiently generate usable data. If managed correctly then, pay per click advertising truly is self-funding marketing research.

Here are some examples of ways in which PPC can be used for market research:

• Find yourself debating whether a warranty / guarantee program will be beneficial? Don’t debate; run a ppc campaign advertising the concept. In a month, you’ll have your answer, along with statistics to back up your decision.
• Find yourself debating which website theme will convert best? Don’t debate; create two competing landing pages advertising each theme. Point your PPC ads to the competing landing pages; in a month, compare the bounce rates and conversion rates of both alternatives, and you’ll have your answer, along with statistics to back up your decision.
• Find yourself debating colors used in a final screen shot? Don’t debate; create two competing landing pages using both color combinations. Run competing ads targeting both pages. In a month, compare the bounce rates and conversion rates, and you’ll have your answer, along with statistics to back up your decision.
• Find yourself debating pricing and feature combinations? Don’t debate; offer competing prices on separate landing pages (with no index no follow tags). Run competing ad campaigns for the separate pricing / feature combinations for a couple months, compare the profitability of both after advertising costs, and you’ll have your answer, along with statistics to back up your decision.

Test Alternative Marketing Concepts

The point is, there is no need to debate marketing alternatives. Simply test alternatives. There is no more efficient means of doing so than with pay per click ads. Pay per click ads allow you as a marketing manager to declare with statistical certainty which alternative will generate more profit for your company. No more betting your career on decisions made on a wing and a prayer. And since Pay Per Click campaigns, used for research, are self-funding, the opportunities for testing alternatives are limited only by your imagination.

Don’t rely on your shoot-from-the-hip web designers or SEO consultants for testing. Including Denver PPC in the process independently will give you another voice on which to depend, and is more likely to decrease your consultant fees than increase them. Denver PPC specializes in Pay per click advertising, and works with Advertising Agencies, Web design firms, and SEO firms to create Kaizen PPC programs designed to generate positive ROAS, as well as useful statistics to support all types of marketing efforts.

Want to learn more about how Pay Per Click advertising can be applied to test your new website development or SEO efforts? Contact us first by filling out our confidential form, or phone Hanna today at 303 975 2810.

One of the things I love about Yahoo is that they aren’t afraid to trash the reputation of their search engine by turning their organic search results into spicy jambalaya. Yahoo Paid Inclusion (also called Yahoo Search Submit, and Yahoo Search Submit Pro) allow almost anyone to purchase listings in Yahoo organic search results.

Pay Per Click . . . by any other name

With Yahoo Paid Inclusion, you get to advertise in search results, without having to actually write your ad text, or manage your CPC bids. It’s sort of like going to the supermarket and handing your wallet to the lad at the checkout, “Just fill my cart, please.”

Of course, if you want to write your own organic search descriptions, that’s allowed too. If not, then Yahoo does all this for you, and then mixes your ads in with their organic search engine results based on relevancy . . . ahem . . . combined with a boost for those who have paid to be a little more relevant than the average Joe, of course.

Regardless of whether you qualify just for Yahoo Search Submit Basic, or Yahoo Search Submit Pro (typically requires a minimum budget of $5,000 per month), you’ll have to meet Yahoo’s Search Submit Content Guidelines (not a big deal for most commercial advertisers).

Desperate for Yahoo Organic Listings?

If you’ve tried every SEO technique, and just don’t seem to be able to achieve any success with Yahoo Organic listings, then Yahoo Search Submit or Search Submit Pro may represent an alternative. If you are a major advertiser with a huge monthly budget, and have some horrible aversion to allocating a portion of it to an SEO firm to get you listed in Yahoo Organic Listings, then Yahoo Search Submit Pro may be the next best solution for getting listed in Yahoo organic search results (would be a rather ironic choice for any major SEO firm, yes?).

How Much Will You Pay?

For Search Submit Basic, you pay $49 per URL, plus a per click fee. For the per click fees, seems you’ll pay whatever Yahoo thinks a click is worth; it used to be $0.15 or $0.30, but Yahoo no longer publishes a comprehensive list of their per click fees, so this may have changed. Pricing regarding Paid Search Inclusion is generally opaque. Consider using your Yahoo CPC for related terms as a benchmark sort of preliminary estimate. Once your listings are accepted, Yahoo will inform you of the CPC for your search space, and send you a monthly report informing you of what you’ve spent.

What are the Terms?

Sign on for a year–same as the Yellow Pages. With Yahoo Paid Inclusion, there is no need to rethink advertising budgets and mediums between annual budget meetings. Yahoo Paid Inclusion is great for chimpanzees.

Will somebody please buy this company and fire the bright spot who developed Yahoo Paid Inclusion?

Yesterday I was involved in another debate about whether Amazon should be buying hot keywords, like its own name, and the word, “books.”

Buying Your Name

Your business name is highly relevant, very essential, and extremely specific. On that basis, in terms of our Framework for Selecting Keywords, it would be considered an obvious pay per click buy. Many paid search Advertisers buy their own names, on the basis that one’s name is most often associated with the highest conversion rates.

Conversely, many an SEO Guru would advise a client to drop keywords for PPC, once such client registers its keywords for organic search, and this generally would includes one’s name. Should you buy your name or not, and why am I so reticent to categorically pick a side in such a debate?

It’s not that I don’t have an opinion on the matter, but rather that I don’t believe the question deserves a simple yes or no answer. My opinion is that, “It depends” (such opinions are never popular in straw votes). If you dominate your search results the way Amazon does, then the left SER are more compelling than if you occupied only SER position 3, for example. That notwithstanding, any Advertiser can resolve the matter algebraically as follows:

For [Name} if the following is true, then buy [Name]:

(Actual acquisition cost for [Name]) < (Targeted Acquisition Cost - ((probability R clicker clicks on L) x (targeted acquisition costs))

A Right Clicker is someone who has the tendency to click on ads, regardless of organic search results.  Say one out of six people are Right Clickers.  It varies by company.  You can find your ratio of right clickers by looking in your analytics.

This brings me to a final point of caution on the matter. If you’re taking over the management of a PPC budget and decide to cull keywords which include the client’s name, even though these keywords are converting at 4x the rate of all other keywords, then you must be prepared to defend your inferior results three months hence, when your ROAS results don’t stack up against those of the previous manager.

Your name may be the closest you’ll find to a sure thing. Should you buy your company name? Do the ROAS math, then decide.

Purchasing High Traffic General Keywords

Should Amazon buy the keyword, “books?” In fact, I find Amazon first in the paid search results for that term today. Amazon is one of the kings of internet retailing, so the fact that they are buying “books” supports the notion of purchasing general relevant search phrases, right?

Well, that depends. If you’re Amazon, then I agree. By all means, buy the word “books.” If Amazon can’t convert that term, then who can? However, if you’re “Bob’s Books,” then you may not have the ad budget to go head to head against Amazon for the word. Even if you have the ad budget, if you can’t convert the keyword at the same rate that Amazon converts it, then you’ll find that while the term may meet Amazon’s ROAS hurdle, it can never meet yours.

If you’re Bob Books, and you’re purchasing only 14% of impressions for relevant keyword phrases, then you are a bargain hunter, in which case you want to allocate your limited budget towards those keywords offering the highest return on your ad spending. Most often those are long-tail lower traffic keywords, not what for you would be an absurdly general keyword, like “books.”

Go, Amazon (don’t do it Bob).

Warn Investors!

Somebody should call Alan Eustace of Morgan Stanley and inform him of the development. I’m sure it’ll interest his investors since PPC revenues accounted for over $3 billion of the nearly $5 billion in revenues earned by Google in the fourth quarter of 2007.

PPC Revenues Double!!

Looking at Google’s quarter on quarter results, PPC revenues have doubled in just 5 quarters. Our revenues have also doubled even more recently (admittedly from a smaller base:), if that’s further evidence.

If PPC is going in the dumper, then this is certainly going to have a bigger effect on investors and consumers than the death of betamax.

Here’s Your Sign!!!

PPC is the Betamax of SEO?? That’s one of the lamest remarks of the year . . . so far.

If you’re an SEO company which dabbles in Pay Per Click, then this post is for you.

Reason 1:  Trained Professionals

We have 8 active Adwords exam passes.  Compare this to many SEO Consulting firms, where the receptionist manages client Adwords accounts.  Trying to hire PPC professionals?  They are tough to find.  That’s why we don’t even search for them.   Instead, we hire smart college grads with good writing and anlytical skills, and then train them into pros.  You have want ads.  We have our own internal school!

If you are an SEO firm which does not have a team dedicated  to manage pay per click, then it would seem obvious that outsourcing to specialists would improve your level of client service.

Reason 2:  Management Systems

We apply rigorous systems for managing client PPC accounts.  Read our blog to learn more about those.  If your systems don’t stack up, then you have to ask yourself how you are going to offer your clients continuously improving results.

Reason 3:  Custom Reports

Last week, one of our SEO clients stated that she doesn’t believe most clients understand our custom reports.  They are rather technical, and include a lot of details.  I’m not sure all clients appreciate them, but that’s not really the point.  Creating monthly custom reports for each client provides accountability and control at the account manager level.  It’s through reporting that we hold our own professionals accountable for improving performance of ppc accounts, and force them to rack their brains to think of improvements each month.

If you don’t create custom monthly reports for your clients, then it’s unlikely that you are managing them in a proactive manner.  If you want an example, outsource just one account to us and let us show you how it is done.

Reason 4:  Competitive Pricing

Our prices are wholesale, not retail.  It’s our goal to ensure that our SEO clients make money on every job we perform on their behalf.  Ask us for a quote on a single account.  Included in our quote will be the ten things we would do differently, if the account were assigned to us.

Reason 5:  Dependability

If you’re having trouble delivering, then assign a couple accounts to us to relieve the work load.  Scared of outsourcing because you believe we will let you down?  Ask us for references.  Phone our customers.  If you do, they’ll tell you the we meet our deadlines, and provide quality service.

Reason 6:  Control

Our clients retain control of client relationships and MCC accounts.  Our contracts with SEO companies are month to month, meaning we can be fired from any client, or all clients, at any time.

Reason 7:  Management

Outsource your Pay Per Click to Denver PPC because we have talented management.  If you can’t afford to hire managers in-house to manage and control your pay per click activities, then choose Denver PPC to do that on your behalf.  For more about our management, please see:  Denver PPC Management.