Yesterday was the culmination of the first ever formal PPC training I conducted. For 2 Saturday afternoons, the training covered the introduction to PPC campaign management.

On the first session, we covered the elements of a PPc campaign. The trainess where shown the process of setting up a PPC campaign starting with keyword research and competitor analysis down to the creation of ad copies. The subjects discussed included landing page copywriting as well as checking relevance of keyowrds and ad copies.

On the second session, we discussed how to setup tracking URLs especially with non-Google Adwords campaigns, that would be tracked in Google Analytics. This time we covered the essence of conversion tracking and optimization. The trainees were taught how to optimize campaigns and what to look for in an existing campagin. They were the taught how to setup goals in google Analytics as well as setting up custom reports and advanced segments using both the old and new Google Analytics.

Below are my 5 personal favorites.

Rimm-Kaufman Group, RKG Blog – This blog provides facts about PPC backed up by nifty graphs and analytics data. A very informative PPC blog.

Click Equations Blog – Another blog that discusses PPC strategies and very understable explanations on the basin basic and advanced PPC strategies.

PPC Blog – The name speaks for itself. The sister/brother blog of the SEO Book, one of the SEO world’s finest. No reason why their PPC should not be, eh?

Clix Marketing Blog – Blog by David Szetela, one of the most popular names in the PPC industry, and company. Like all the other PPC blogs I follow, detailed discussion on PPC strategies are addressed here.

PPC Hero – Do you like read detailed steps in setting up and maintaining a PPC campaign? This blog’s for you to read and follow. This is maintiained by the PPC geeks at Hanapin Marketing

So there you go. If you have something to add, please do so in the comments.

DIY -  The Pros. Nobody knows your business better than you do. That’s your advantage if you want to do the campaign management by your self. You know what will work and what will not for your business. The Cons. You may not have the experience in managing a PPC campaign yet. Though you may know your business very well, setting up and optimizing a PPC campaign is not as easy as you might think it is. Seasoned PPC managers have years of experience in managing campaigns.

Outsourcing – The Pros. You will have somebody working for you, who have been in the search engine marketing business for years. His/her experience would be a very invaluable asset to your business. You don’t have to do the trial-and-error process, wasting your money along the way. The Cons. You might get services from somebody who just pretends to know PPC campaign management, but actually have no idea on how to do it. You need to be very careful in choosing an individual or an agency to manage your campaigns.

The choice is always yours. You have the option to do-it-yourself or hire a PPC manager. Should you decide to hire one, click here contact a PPC manager.

For example, on a campaign that I inherited from somebody, a minor tweak in the landing page increased conversion rate from 7% to 15%. That’s more than 100% increase! The minor tweak I mentioned was just adding dynamic headlines, so that when the ad copy says “selling apple”, the landing page headline should say “selling apple” instead of just using a generic headline for all landing pages.

If you want to do some tests on your landing pages, here are some really good stuff on conversion optimization on landing pages:

Conversion Heroes Part 7: Landing Page Optimization
Your Landing Page Sucks!

I have the privilege, yes I call it a privilege, of managing accounts ranging from $1,000 to $500,000 per month, from small business accounts to the big corporate ones. From health products, to online gambling, to book publishing, and more business niches. I have campaigns running on Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft Adcenter, Facebook, Adknowledge, Clicksor, Miva, and many more.

Yet I still feel there’s a lot more to learn. Everyday, the playing field changes. What’s applicable and going great today, may not work for the clients tomorrow. Every day is a brand new challenge. Companies merge, businesses acquired by other businesses, these things makes things more complicated especially in the search engine marketing field.

But this is my passion. I thrive in these daily challenges and I’m always looking forward to what tomorrow brings.

Statistics are looking good so far. 5.8% CTR and 36.67% conversion rate. This is a lead generation campaign and so far so good. Lead cost is @ $3.45, still 40% below target which means more room for improvements and adjusment is the campaigns.

Hopefully we can bump up the traffic while maintaining costs and conversions.

Now instead of setting up notifications and alerts on a per account basis, you can set it all up using your MCC account. Sweet!

Please click the link below for the details of this new Adwords MCC feature:

New My Client Center features: email notifications and custom alerts – Inside AdWords.

Below are the highlights of the meeting:

Q - Will we be able to have separate campaigns, one for Yahoo and another one for Bing?
A - No. It will be a unified campaign. There’s no way of doing that right now and in the near future.

Q - One of our main concerns is taking control of the Yahoo Search/Syndication Partners. They are a very different type of audience compared to those coming from Yahoo search. Can we build a separate campaign for the YSP?
A - Yes, certainly. There would still be 2 networks, search and content/display.

A couple of months ago, our rep sent us a powerpoint slide explaining the “alliance” process. This triggered questions more than answering some. After last night’s meeting, our team now has a clearer vision of where to go come 1st week of September.

As described in this article, advertising on Google’s content network is a different ball game. I’ve been doing this for more than 3 years now and the first few months have had its ups and downs. You have to watch the keywords triggered and the websites showing your ads. Whether they are converting or not, and if they are what’s the ROI?

The above-mentioned article would be a good read to those who are planning to start a campaign in Google content network and for those who are already doing it whether successfully or not.

This is more helpful especially when you run a campaign on Conversion Optimizer. The reason why it is not advisable to run CPA bids on new campaigns. Adwords’ conversion optimizer feature bases the recommended bid on your account’s performance. Thus the longer your “good” historical data is, the lower would be the recommended bids.

Also, Google being able to determine the relevancy of your keywords to your landing pages and ad copies through historical data would be very helpful. Does your account have good CTR? What about CTR to conversion rates?

In my 4 years of experience in Paid Search Campaign management, the items in the above article are all true. To quote George’s closing statement: “Anytime resources are constrained—and resources are almost always constrained—misusing those resources means incurring opportunity costs. Now, it may very well be the case that appeasing all the internal constituencies interested in (if not knowledgeable about) paid search is worth the cost of hiring enough bandwidth to cover the basics and the extras as well, but if staffing isn’t adequate, be careful not to make room for desert by jettisoning the main course.”

This is true, especially where I am located. There’s not enough resources to cover the grounds, so using it wisely is a must.

Then came the broad match modifier. The description in the article below looks very promising for this match type. This is a “soon to see” thing though since it’s pretty early to tell if this works out some magic.

See the article below from the official Google Adwords blog:

New keyword targeting feature rolling out globally – Inside AdWords.

Here’s the link from Google Adwords’ official blog:

Improved keyword diagnosis — no appointments necessary – Inside AdWords.

Here’s a blog post that lists these triggers for your PPC ads:

12 Physiological Triggers ~ PPC Blog.

Time to do some tweaking now. You can read the article below:

Do you know about Gmail\’s Funbox? : The ROI Revolution Blog.