Be Familiar with These PPC Terms

After 1 week training, my PPC trainee asked me what is CTR, what is CPC and Quality Score. Then only I remembered that I forgot to explain her these terms. Ok. Here I am explaining some of the common acronyms associated with pay per click advertising. Before starting your PPC advertising, you should understand these terms thoroughly. Otherwise, you might make a conclusion based on an incorrect guess.

CTR – Click Through Rate. This is the number of times that viewers of your ad click to go through to your website. We can calculate CTR by this formula-

CTR=Clicks/Impressions * 100

CPC – Cost Per Click. This is how much you are paying for clicks on your ads. It is usually expressed as an average because most of the time you will not be paying the same amount. The actual cost per click varies depending on many factors like competition and some other factors, but it is always within the range of your pre-set values.

CPC= Costs/Clicks

CPM – Cost-per-thousand Impressions – This is how much you are paying for each 1000 impressions of your ads. That means, for every 1000 views of your ads, you have to set a budget and pay that.

Misspelled and Competitor Adgroups

Include misspelled and competitor adgroups in your campaign. If you are waiting for people correctly knowing the spelling of the keywords or people searching for your company only, your ad is not going to work well in search engines. Try to include maximum misspelled keywords in your misspelled adgroup and top competitors in your competitor adgroup. If someone searching for your competitor gets attracted by your adcopy and apply for your service. Why should we spoil one lead? Suppose your company ad is coming in local radio and someone hearing this ad trying to locate your website. It is not sure that whether he knows the spelling of your company or the product he’s searching for. Our wristband campaign is getting many clicks and conversions for “ristbands”, “wristbands”, “wristbands” etc. So bidding on misspellings is an intelligent way to increase the efficiency of your PPC advertising. Try this now itself if you haven’t experiment this before.

Top 10 Pay per Click Search Engines

Google AdWords – https://adwords.google.com/select/Login

Yahoo! Search Marketing – http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/onlinemarketing.php

Microsoft adCenter – http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-advertising

ABC Search – http://www.abcsearch.com/advertisers.php

SearchFeed – http://home.searchfeed.com/rd/index.jsp

7Search – http://7search.com/advertise/

MIVA – http://www.miva.com/us/content/advertiser/overview.asp

Enhance Interactive – http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-1465425-9777481

Findology – http://home.findology.com/business/advertisers.html

Ask.com – http://sponsoredlistings.ask.com

What about adding negatives to your AdGroups?

It is seen that people are adding all broad-matching keywords without negatives. Broad match can create thousands of search results and majority of them will not be relevant to your ads. So its a powerful way to include negatives. You can include -ves either in campaign level or in adgroup level. That will help to stop your ads from showing for irrelevant searches. So find maximum negatives for your keywords.

Targeting homepage only?

It is not advisable to send all your traffic to your home page. Suppose you are a florist and running an online floral ordering site. It will not convert much if you are dropping people who are searching for “orchid” in your homepage which contains details about hundreds of flowers. It is better to drop them in a page which contains details about most wanted orchid species like Anguloa, Cattleya, Cymbidium, Laelia etc. Give website user the opportunity to find their result at first click. A messy home page will tempt them to close that site and go back for a new search. Remember you have to pay for each click. Better send the visitors to the page they asked for in the first click itself.

Webmaster reports decrease in Adcenter conversion.

A webmaster world member reports that he sees decrease in conversion rate in Adcenter advertising.

“Well, i’m just about over my excitement for adcenter. I have campaigns that are product relevance targeted and pushing a specific deal. For example keyword “widget brand model” “buy now at #*$!x”
I’ve received over 200 clicks and not a single conversion on adcenter.
Yahoo its a 2.2% conversion rate – break even. Adsense is 3.9% conversion rate – break even. (higher cost) Adcenter is a 0.0% conversion rate.
Adcenter = darn near 100% bounce rate and less than 30 second visitor rate
Yahoo and Adsense both had very LOW bounce rates and often more navigation pages – view TOS/Warranty/Refund policies and such.
Yahoo had a 100% first day purchase (thus far) Google had a 60% first day purchase, 10% second day purchase and 30% > 3 day from first visit purchase.
So with that said, yahoo seems more spontaneous, google users like to shop around and dig around the site more and adcenter doesn’t appear to be human visitors for my targeted electronics/technology/home audio/video/gaming/entertainment spectrum 🙂
adcenter did work “ok” before – it was a low enough cost but i’m wondering if that was just random traffic from a now defunct traffic partner or incentive adcenter may have had. “

webmasterworld.com/msn_adcenter/3596353.htm

adCenter and Free Credit 75$ for running ads

A forum member is willing to help with any MSFT adCenter related questions in SEO chat forums. If you want to see his website visit adcenterweb.blogspot.com

His post

“
I am a little disappointed to see the lack of interest in the adCenter threads. I am wondering if this is because of lack of experience with it, or if some have had bad experiences. I have been working with MSFT and adCenter to assist anyone who would like to start using adCenter, but has questions or concerns. Feel free to PM or respond to this thread, and I will be happy to assist you in any way I can. Both good and bad experiences with this program are welcome. For those not familiar with adCenter, it is Microsoft’s pay per click program, similar to Google adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing. While it has been true that it may not bring you the volume of traffic that these other programs can, but we have found consistently that adCenter brings more targeted traffic, and has lead to a better conversion rate. With adCenters cost per click running MUCH lower in many areas, this means that you can have more sales with less money spent on advertising!I also have a $75 Free adCenter Coupon at adcenterweb.blogspot.com that anyone is free to use. Unlike some who choose to spam forums with their free credit links and run away, I will gladly stay around to answer any questions or help out however I can. If I don’t know the answer right away, I will ask my MSFT contacts and get your answer. Right now, this offer is open new account holders in the US, and there is a $5.00 charge to activate the account. After setting up your new account and making the payment, your $75 credit should show up in your account within a couple of days (most times, it is there in a few hours).”

MSN adcenter exam like adwords professional or yahoo ambassador

MSN adcenter has a similar program like yahoo ambassador or Google advertising professional. Its the adexcellence exam. Please check out the link here www.adexcellence.com . All materials are free to read. Minimum requirement is to hold a MSN adcenter account for atleast 30 days before taking exam you can take exam as many times you like.

Yahoo recently closed their Ambassador program more news here . I hope MSN doesnt do it that way before they are upto it take your exams and qualify as a adcenter professional.

adCenter spring upgrade – New cool features

Adcenter recently upgraded some of the key features in their PPC programme, you can read more about here

Adcenter community blog reads

“This past weekend the adCenter team upgraded the user interface to add some features to make it easier for customers to manage their adCenter campaigns. In our last post, we covered campaign management changes; today I wanted to share changes to the reporting section of adCenter.
When you visit the Report Center, you’ll see a list of your most recent 20 reports along with an auto-updated status column so you can keep tabs as reports are created and know as soon as they’re ready.
We’ve simplified the report creation process to make it easier to create and customize reports to help you keep a close eye on your performance and adjust your campaigns as needed. We’ve also made changes to available date range changes to include:
New options, including “today”, as requested by customers.
The date range now defaults to “last month”, or choose a different time period from the drop-down.

The report display page includes 2 enhancements to help you when viewing your data:
Mouse over column headings in your report tables to view additional information.
Longer bits of text-such as destination URLs-are now abbreviated in the display to allow for easier scanning. To view the full text, mouse over the text.”

Quality Score Factors answer by Adcenter REP

When I was going through webmaster world forum I saw an interesting question being raised,

Great White Shark asks

Can anyone please verify that if you have even one keyword or ad with a bad
quality score your account quality score can be damaged? Apparently, this info
came from someone that works at Microsoft.

Now we have a Adcenter Representive for solving problems and answering questions about Microsoft Adcenter PPC program,

adCenterRep Replies

” Today, we do not have a quality score that is available to customers in
the UI. However, we do evaluate the quality of queries to ads to landing pages.
Advertisers should work to ensure that there is an overall high-quality
experience, even at the keyword level. Poor query-ad-landing page is also a
measure of poor relevance that will inhibit ads from showing up higher in the
listings. “