Here is some interesting coverage from the Advanced Paid Search Tactics panel. This is interesting not only because it has some good information but particularly because I know how stingy ppc account managers are with their true “tactics”, not many of us like to give them out. While there is nothing ground breaking here, I will try to find more coverage on this panel. View Panel summary at SERoundTable

Here’s another session talking about the conflicts of internal PPC problems. It’s not too interesting to me but those at the agency level may want to check it out at SERoundtable.com

With the ever growing competition it is more important than ever to make sure your accounts are lean mean ROI machines. I’ve seen a lot of accounts that make very common mistakes that you just can’t get away with anymore.

Content Network management – I know I’ve beat the dead horse about my dislike for the Google content network but its the truth. It is one of the first things that I disable because without the proper attention, it is one of the biggest bloats to an accounts ROI. If you insist on using the content network than proper management is required. One of the first things you should do is modify your bids, by default content network bids are the same as your search network bids when in actuality the impressions can be had for a fraction of the cost. Lower the bid to the threshold where you don’t see any loss of clickthroughs and are paying a fraction of your initial bid. Another necessary management move is to selectively choose which sites your ads will show up on. This will help you avoid click fraud from splogs and unethical Adsense sites.

Failure to implement tracking – Google Analytics is free, use it! PS- the conversion tracking is excellent.

Not Utilizing a USP – Every company should have a USP, unique selling proposition, it helps you stand out among your competition. Whether it is Free Shipping, Easy Returns, or something else, conveying this in your paid search ads is ridiculously important.

Untargeted Keywords – When paid search first started it was pretty common thinking that you want to bid on as many words as possible and I saw tons of accounts that were bidding on completely irrelevant words. Well, that doesn’t fly anymore unless you don’t care about ROI. You need to be bidding very relevant words and the less broad you are, the more likely you will have a better ROI. I’m sure in your industry there are some broad terms that are highly relevant, I would bid on these with discretion. They are important but if not managed properly they can eat through your budget quickly.

Not Using Keyword Rich Ad-Text – Whether you want use keyword insertion or highly targeted adgroups/keywords/ad-texts, you will see far better CTRs with keyword rich ad-texts. Your ads will have bold text which will catch the users attention but it will also include relevant keywords which helps to build a trust with the user that your ad will deliver what they are looking for.

Not using proper landing pages – One of the biggest and most common faux paus possible is directing all of your ads to your home page. If you don’t have paid search specific landing pages, use internal pages that are relevant to your ad copy and the words you are bidding on.

One Campaign, One Adgroup – You wouldn’t organize all of your wardrobe by putting your clothes into one drawer, so why put all of your keywords into one campaign and ad group? Campaigns let you control your budget more precisely and multiple ad groups let you target your ads better to your keywords. Group similar keywords into specific groups and create ads that tailor to those keywords.

No Keyword Negatives – there is without a doubt at least one keyword variation of your broadest term that is completely irrelevant to your account and it wastes your money. For example, lets say you sell sport nets (Basketball goal nets, soccer goal nets etc), you probably don’t want to show up for people searching for the NBA team the New Jersey Nets. In this case you should include -New Jersey and maybe -New Jersey Nets into your negative keyword list. This will prevent your ad from showing on these irrelevant searches and save your budget.

The point of this post was to help you eliminate some of the common mistakes so easily overlooked by people new to PPC and Paid Search professionals.

While I was at the AlwaysOn Media conference I kept running across the question: “how will advertising live on mobile phones?”

Now, I maybe naive but I have a hard time believing that ads will be welcome on cell phones and other mobile devices. From a users perspective, data plans for cell phones are already extremely expensive and not very practical. Most data plans require a monthly fee plus additional fees for the data downloaded and I don’t see many people wanting to pay additional fees to download ads.

Eventually, these fees will come down in price or be free all together. The mobile Internet is the next frontier in Internet usage and where there are consumers, you bet their will be ads, so I have come up with the solution. An ad supported phone. Thats where Google comes in. They already offer a world of services that are ad supported which gives them another outlet for their advertisers. It’s a long shot but it really isn’t too far away from their core competencies . I haven’t done the math on it but I’m pretty sure Google could buy up a mobile phone company, charge people a nominal price for voice service, offer free data plans and still make big money.

Yea, its a rough concept but I don’t think its that far off. In fact I’m sure the Googlers are whipping up some evil plan right now.

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With all the changes coming to the Search Engine systems and their tools, I’m starting a list of Tools that PPC people and other paid search managers find useful, since we can’t rely on the engines anymore.

Yesterday I talked about the Yahoo Keyword Selector changes and Paul commented that we can still see bid prices with this tool http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/
While it still has the bid prices, its not as helpful as the original keyword tool for research purposes and I’m sure its only a matter of time before its nixed as well.

Owner of thePPC Keyword Tool happens to be one of the 2 people that comments on this blog so I thought I could give him a plug. I checked out his tool and it is pretty useful for configuring variations of keywords. A friend of mine, pointed me to an alternative tool that does the same thing here.

AdLabs – MSN gave us adLabs with a plethora of cool tools that seem to be ever advancing, and with more data they will be really helpful. I like the Search Funnel and the Forecasting Search Volume Seasonality but there are other useful tools as well.

If you have any others to add to this list, please let us know by leaving them in the comments and I will update this list as we get more.