Is PPC dead or on the death track?

Some suggest PPC is dead or heading towards to a lower trend there are other online marketing ideas taking over PPC. But is PPC really dead?

I don’t think PPC is dead at all, in fact I think that in a lot of industries it is about to blossom. There are a that a lot of companies have been throwing money at it, and needing a second or third purchase to return a profit, but many companies are pulling back on that now, as they can’t afford a loss leading marketing channel, so they’re focusing on a realistic CPA and account optimization, and in many cases I believe they are finding that they can generate a similar level of sales with a “clever” campaign, rather than a “money black hole” campaign.

I read an article on tech crunch that PPC traffic is flat in January or even less in February but I feel its mostly due to people’s spending power in this crisis period. We are still in global crisis and people are holding back their money. I am sure when things get back to normal people will start using PPC more.

PPC is far from dead there is still a lot more to go in PPC sometimes PPC is better than SEO and will be here for a long time.

Video units feature to be discontinued:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/sunsetting-video-units-feature.html

Google has discontinued its video unit feature. Google adsense video units feature allows you to show YouTube contents and videos as well as ads on your pages. According to Google adsense blog this didn’t work for them as they expected. This feature is ending end of April. Youtube can still be used by embedding videos on your site but you will not earn any adsense income from it. video ads may appear in your Adsense for content ad units if you’ve opted into image ads, and Adsense for video is still accepting applications from eligible publishers who produce video content.

We used to run video unit ads on few of our websites now we removed the code as per Google’s recommendation. Google adsense is no longer accepting sign up for video units.
Once video units are retired at the end of April, any remaining Leader board or Skyscraper video units on your pages will direct users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won’t generate earnings from them once this change occurs. If you have less than three ad units on your page, you may prefer to replace your video unit with a regular ad unit.

Ideas to learn affiliate marketing:

Affiliate marketing if done properly is one of the most successful strategies in online Business. If you hit the right way to do it I assure quality income from it.

Affiliate marketing is mostly trial and error. You need to try different types of affiliate marketing programs and select the one best suit you. There are 1000s of good affiliate programs available online and there are people making 10s of 1000s of dollars from being a good affiliate.

1. Learning to be an affiliate will not come in a day you need to keep updating yourself from various quality resources. A forum like webmaster world is a good start you can go through the affiliate programs thread. You can find tons of quality information from great affiliates in this forum.

2. EBooks’: Most eBooks’ are meant to be sold to the customer don’t get over excited about eBooks’ thought some eBooks’ provide some decent advise most of them are just sales copies.

3. Using Adwords and other PPC programs for affiliate marketing has been around for a long time. But now Adwords also penalizes site that are strictly affiliate so be careful and make a site valuable for your visitors.

4. Time and money is important: Be prepared to spend 2 to 5 hours per day (depending on how fast you read and learn), a minimum of 4 days a week, for at least two months to really know if this is something you want to become a profession at or if you want to peruse something else.

5. Attend WebMasterWorld conference or affiliate summit and network with other affiliates. This is a community I recommend for new affiliates, there’s a lot of noise there, but there’s also some real good people that will help you some, like this place as well, but there it’s all affiliate subject matter.

Some tips from an affiliate:

“I didn’t go looking for the highest paying offer or the latest fad or any of that.
I took a look at my life and the various systems I’ve developed for doing various things, and asked myself if there was anything I was doing that was relatively unique to *me* – maybe an uncommon way of performing a common task or need, and could I find a niche there?
Didn’t take long, because I have several such. I took the one I thought had the most ‘commercial’ appeal and went to see if the vendor for one of the products I use for this had an affiliate program, and lo and behold – they did! Not only that, I found a vendor for some accessory products as well.
Then I built out the site on a Word Press format, adding my own personal experiences with this system, why I thought it was better than the ‘standard’ way of doing things, and I’m now in the process of making some videos to demonstrate it, and adding various other enhancements.
It’s early yet, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be a success, because I’m not just tossing up a product feed and relying on the thing to sell itself; I’m adding my own personal experiences, my own methods, video demonstrations, related stories, tips, etc.
It’s also a pretty expandable topic, so if it takes off like I hope, there’s a lot more I can add to it, including guest posts, new products, recommendations, reviews, the possibilities are pretty endless.
THAT kind of affiliate site has no problem doing well with Adwords (and in fact, I have no quality score issues at all so far) It brings more value than just the product offer, and that makes it a lot easier to deliver a quality user experience.
The world doesn’t need more sites with outsourced content devoted to weight loss berries.”

Yahoo! adds video, images and custom links to search ads

With Yahoo!’s new Rich Ads in Search, they can see great new innovations. Yahoo! has been testing a new service that lets advertisers add video, images and custom search boxes to their search ads. The results are ads that can combine the relevance of search with the impact of rich media. A small group of advertisers tested it in the fourth quarter of 2008 and saw click-through rates rise by as much as 25 percent. They’ve also seen improved brand exposure and conversion rates.

What can rich ads do?
The Rich Ads in Search program is being shared with a small number of brand advertisers such as Pedigree and Esurance and agencies such as Razorfish. The program lets advertisers:

• Post images and video, which can increase the branding impact of search advertising. Pedigree has added video to its campaigns, for instance.
• Create deep links to relevant pages, which can help drive conversions directly from the Yahoo! search results page.
• Include boxes within the listing that lets users search for their desired product or a store location directly without additional navigation. Esurance’s listing lets users enter their ZIP codes from the results page for insurance quotes.
• Show their logo, which enhances user trust.

Rich Ads in Search is currently by invitation only to a small group of our brand advertisers, but we will update you as it opens up. In the meantime, start thinking of what your search ads could do for you.

Disadvantages of Quality score:

1. Quality score in Google Adwords works under a weird algorithm, some times great content sites, no rhyme or reason get slapped. Thinner sites get extremely low bids. So why does this happen fact only Google knows 1000% what’s the reason behind this.

2. In quality score you need to make sure you have the ad very much relevant to the landing page, landing page should be highly relevant to the Ads that you have. Even a small difference can make sure you have bad quality score. This is a definite disadvantage with Google Adwords quality score.

3. Bad ads can also result in lower quality score. Lower quality score will result in higher bid value since its all automated you need to be very sensitive when creating ads. This is not the case before few years in Adwords and you don’t have such a thing in Yahoo search marketing or MSN ad center.

4. Bad landing pages of a bad website can also affect quality score, you need to have contact pages, perfect privacy policy , good outgoing links to relevant or quality websites etc. There are lots of factors like this that will affect your quality score. I am sure not everyone will be aware of this so I feel this is a disadvantage.

Good keyword research tools for your PPC campaign:

Keyword research is one of the primary factor when it comes to effective SEO / PPC campaigns. Good keyword research before any PPC campaign will increase your ROI considerably. People tend to search more and more targeted phrases if they cant find for generic phrases. So its important to have a good list of keywords to get started with your PPC management campaign.
Today there are lots of keyword research tools, leading the market in keyword research tool is ofcourse Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool.

Google Adwords tool can be gauged more accurate since it comes directly from Google itself. Google can relied for their data because it tends to be more accurate. They use Adwords real time data to feed the keyword suggestion tool and this works out to be effective and reliable.

Word tracker: A traditional hit tool which has been online for more than 10 years long before Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool. This tool formerly used Google data to populate keyword suggestion. It seems to be the same case right now. Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client’s business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors. Marketers can also determine how many competing sites are using those keywords and can identify the phrases that have the greatest traffic potential.

Conversion optimizer increases conversion decreases CPA.

Google Adwords team claim conversion optimizer a feature in Google Adwords conversion tracking when used effectively will give better conversions with lower Cost per acquisition.
Conversion tracking is a feature of Adwords conversion tracking data to get more conversions for a lower price. With the Conversion Optimizer, you bid using a maximum CPA, which is the most you’re willing to pay for each conversion (such as a purchase or signup). Using historical information about your campaign, the Conversion Optimizer automatically finds the optimal equivalent cost-per-click (CPC) bid for your ad each time it’s eligible to appear. You still pay per click, but you no longer need to adjust your bids manually to reach your CPA goals and can benefit from improved ROI.

To calculate the optimal equivalent CPC bid, the Conversion Optimizer first calculates a predicted conversion rate for each auction. The Conversion Optimizer takes many factors into account, including your ad’s conversion history, the keyword’s broad match query, the user’s location, and the conversion rates of Google’s search and content partner sites. The feature then generates an ad rank by combining your CPA bid, quality score and predicted conversion rate.

According to Adwords blog:

“We’ve just completed a new analysis on the performance of campaigns which have adopted Conversion Optimizer. We found that on average, these campaigns achieved a 21% increase in conversions while at the same time decreasing their CPA by 14%.

The analysis compares the performance of Conversion Optimizer campaigns with a control set of campaigns and represents the average impact of Conversion Optimizer. The actual impact will vary from campaign to campaign (and a small number of advertisers could conceivably perform better without Conversion.

Making adwords difficult has been an increasingly difficult problem for a long time, there are lots of people who make a fortune from adwords and there are people who lost money. It all depends on how well you use the tactics and help provided to you by Google. Also personally acquired tactics is also an important way to grow in adwords.

1. Identifying the right keywords is the first yet an important factor in Adwords. If you can get the list of right keywords I am sure you are on the right track, Google uses exact matching as well as broad matching if you have the perfect list of keywords just enable exact matching and you will see great results.

2. Identifying your targeted audience is another important thing to do , this cannot be done in a day or two multiple days of active monitoring the tool as well tweaking it with users in mind is the best way to get optimized results. Also you need to vary your bids to change positions to see which position works best for you. For some advertisers it’s important to bid the maximum to get optimized results but for others it’s ok to get just on 1st page or even some advertisers get good returns advertising on 2nd page its good to test with different ad pricing to see which works best.

3. Writing a good advertising copy or quality ads is very important, good ads bring more click through which will result in better ROIs. When you have a combination of a good ad-copy with an optimized landing page I am sure your conversions will be great. Landing page should be exactly matching the way you describe in your ad-text if you can do it I am sure you can even reach conversions of 15 to 20%.

4. You need to constantly monitor your account progress. There are some good PPC management companies who are dedicated to doing this job. We at Search Engine Genie is one of the company that can handle your PPC management campaigns effectively our extensive knowledge in PPC management will help boost your PPC campaigns and will bring best ROI for your website. Your account needs to be properly organized and maintained. Good organized ad-groups, keywords; campaigns will help your Adwords campaign a lot.

5. Last but not the least your Adwords quality score is important for better positions and optimized running of your ads. Its important to get everything right to get high quality score we at Search Engine Genie maintain high quality scores for most of our clients which results in good traffic and conversions.

PPC rap – interesting:

This is fantastic; it’s now standard training material. “Special Sauce”?, why is it every SEM guru uses this Macdonald’s term? Very funny, keep it up. How about a rap on Content? This rap has more to it than sex, drugs, and swearing unlike the stereotype.

I always wondered why most online marketing acronyms rhymed, now I know. God has a plan for us after all. We need to take your message to the streets!

Adwords success secret from the mouth of a Google employee:

Adwords is a powerful advertising tool it has brought some great success for online Businesses but also there are people who have lost a lot of money in adwords. We have clients spending easily over 30,000$ a month without any proper ROI. They rarely track their ROI I have repeatedly told them that Adwords is not working for them as they expect it to be but still they continue to spend 1000s of dollars in adwords without the campaign working.
Some clients gets an addition towards Adwords they think it like an online gambling tool. The truth it is not only a good strategy and high knowledge will do the work for them. Rather than with limited knowledge they try tactics that never works for them and they fail miserably.

According to adwords advisor:
“* Advertisers who expect to very quickly set up their account and then forget about it – and who do not have either the time or interest to really learn how AdWords works – will almost certainly be disappointed with their success and with the AdWords program itself.

* Advertisers who make only a moderate effort will likely see a moderate success rate at best.

* Advertisers who take advertising with AdWords very seriously, who spend a substantial amount of time learning the nuances of how it works, and who spend a lot of time managing their account, experimenting, learning from the results of those experiments and then updating their account, tracking their Return on Investment (ROI) using the free tools available from AdWords, etc can find AdWords to be a very effective way to affordably send highly qualified potential customers to their site – and make a healthy profit doing it.

Tips for success

1. Identify your advertising goals.
2. Organize your account for maximum effectiveness.
3. Choose relevant keywords and placements.
4. Create straightforward, targeted ads.
5. Optimize your website for conversions.
6. Track your account performance.
7. Test and modify your campaigns to get the results you want.