With a PPC text ad, 4 lines are all you get to make your impression. Yet most people give little thought to the display URL, which is 25% of your ad’s real estate. The display URL should be a major concern when writing your ad. I would venture to say that it’s more important that your description even.

Buy a new domain:
This is one place not to cheap out and try to save a few bucks by using a bad domain name. Go ahead and register a new one, or even multiple new ones to test a new offer. Using an old domain that you had lying around, that kind of fits the offer is a recipe for failure. Besides, 1 conversion could recoup the domain cost for a year.

Buy a good domain:
For some reason I don’t have any trouble finding good domains. I never buy .NETs or .ORGs, only .COMS. I hardly ever use hyphens or weird punctuation either. Remember, you are buying the domain to instill confidence in the searcher, not for SEO purposes. Obviously, the shorter the better, but multiple related words are better than punctuation I find.

Test display URLs

I like to run multiple ad copies in Google with the only difference being the display URLs. I have seen big changes in CTR from various URLs tested. Once you find the best converting URL you can switch everything over to that URL.

There is a lot of buzz out there about Google’s new PPA (Pay-Per-Action) ads which are currently in beta. I will post my views of the service after I have had a few more weeks to see the real world results, but until then, here is a step by step guide of how to set up a PPA advertising campaign on Google. There are 14 steps and screenshots in total.

1. First step is to create your action and setup conversion tracking. By going into the conversion tracking section and choosing “Create New Action”.

(Click images to see full size)

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I definitely have issues with Google’s quality score and the constant battle to keep campaigns running on their network, but one thing I can’t fault them for is their interface. It is simply the best out there, hands down. When you are handling large scale campaigns, their offline adwords editor is a huge time saver. Here are a some tips you may or may not know about in the editor.

Tip #1 Using the editor to build campaigns for other networks

With the Adwords editor, it is very quick and easy to build campaigns with multiple adgroups, ad copy, and keywords. I have found that it’s the fastest way to build up a campaign and get it into CSV form so you can work with it on other PPC networks.

Just build the campaign in “draft mode” then go to File > Export to CSV > Export Current Campaign. Now you have a campaign in spreadsheet format that with a little massaging, you can upload into other engines like MSN or Yahoo.

Tip #2 Copying text ads to other adgroups

If you do a lot of ad copy testing (which you should!), you often want to move ads from one group to another. Or rather than writing a whole new ad, copy an ad from on place to another, then tweak it. In the Adwords Editor this is a piece of cake.

Just click on the adgroup that contains the ad on the left panel, then click the text ads tab on the top. Now highlight the ad in this view and do a control –c. Now navigate to the new adgroup and do a control –v. The ad will now be ready under the text ads tab to run or edit with your changes for A/B testing.

Tip #3 Whole campaign inactive keyword bid edits

This is probably my favorite feature. With Adwords, keywords are constantly going “inactive for search” and you may need to up edit your bid amounts to activate them again. If you have a campaign with 200 adgroups, it would be a tough task to check each one and then go in and edit each keyword with a new bid. With this technique, it’s a 30 second task no matter how many adgroups you have.

In the Adwords Editor click on the main top level campaign on the left panel (not an adgroup). Now click on the keywords tab. Then click the status bar (usually twice) to sort by inactive words. Now you will see all the inactive keywords in all of your adgroups. To change the bid amount you scroll down to find the last inactive word, do control-shift-home to select only the inactives, change the bid, and bam, you are done. When you look at your adgroup list now, you will see the change icon in all the adgroups where keywords were changed. That would have taken hours on a large campaign with the web interface.

Just a note to any PPC networks like Yahoo, MSN, Miva, Looksmart etc. who might be reading this. If you really want to increase your network usage and spends by your advertisers, build an offline editor! The easier it is for people to run their campaigns, the more money they will spend with you.

Things change so fast in the PPC and affiliate world. What’s true one day is not the next. Case in point, my comments on the content network. I wrote somewhere before that I never use it. That was true up until a few weeks ago. I decided to give it another shot for 1 of my campaigns. To my surprise, I actually started making a profit off of it. I applied super tight adgroups and with targeted keywords, and although my CTR is not great, the clicks I do get are actually converting! I plan to expand the content network testing to some other campaigns now to see if I can get similar results.

If you are thinking of testing out the content network, make sure you create a separate campaign and run only content on it. Don’t just turn on the content network in your search campaign. It will be much easier to track your stats and see exactly what is going on that way.

One of the stats I have been tracking recently is how ad positioning (Slots 1-8) affects overall ROI. An interesting trend that has come out of the data is that there is a definite “dead zone” in positions 3-6. Of course slots 1-2 are going to be great for ROI, that is expected. But it was a little suprising to me that slots 7-8 were better than 3-6. When you consider how people look at a page of information though it does make sense. They tend to look at the top and bottom, while glazing over the middle sections.

Click to enlarge

So what does this mean for the PPC advertiser? Personally, I try to either up my bids or lower my bids to get into these prime positions. Lower bids to get a better return, what a concept! Positions 1 and 2 will alwaysbe the best, but if they are out of your reach, shoot for the bottom. Just don’t too low, or you’ll be out in the weeds on the second page.

(Another lesson to learn: notice the guy in 4th position? Don’t use dynamic keywords if you don’t understand how they work!)

This is an update to the first Pay Per Click Network challenge of a few weeks ago. There is new data, new PPC networks included, and a new scoring system based on everyone’s input from the last one. Hopefully it will be even more helpful now.

To review:

These networks were all tested running the same PPC campaign (meaning the keywords and the ad texts were the same) to an affiliate offer with the exact same landing page.

Scoring system:

I threw out the interface rating as many people thought it skewed the results of bad performing networks that had a good interface. I agree that performance is king and if something converts well I can live with a bad interface (MSN, cough, cough). Now the scoring is based on 3 factors with 2 being double weighted. This should more accurately show the total performance of a PPC network.

• Traffic Volume (Highest volume = 10 out of possible 10)
• Conversion Rate (Best conversion rate = 10 out of possible 10)
• Click Pricing (Lowest pricing = 5 out of possible 5)

For a possible total score of 30

The Results:

Traffic Volume Winner:

As always Google is king of traffic volume. The only thing that keeps it from the overall leader is its stiff click pricing.

Conversion Rate Winner:

MSN is the tops for conversions. Too bad their volume isn’t up to Google or Yahoo’s levels.

Recommended:
• MSN
• Yahoo
• Google
• Searchfeed
• Looksmart
• Miva

Stay Away!
• Adbrite
• 7Search
• Enhance
• Kanoodle
• Search 123
• Bidvertiser

Remember these results are based on my campaign and niche, your results may vary wildly.

I have found it really hard to find objective information about different Pay Per Click (PPC) networks, especially second tier networks. If you pose the question in a forum, the response will usually be something like “XYZ sucks”, which isn’t too helpful as far as hard data is concerned. So I decided to run my own, somewhat scientific test of PPC networks. Here is what happened.

About the test

I chose a set of ads and keywords that were proven to do well on Google Adwords for these tests. I won’t say the niche (competition is tough enough already), but it’s about a mid-range set of keywords as far as monthly impressions and click pricing. The minimum spent at each PPC network was $50, with most of the test running in the $100-$300 range. If it was clear the traffic was not going to convert, I cut the test short, but if it showed some promise I let it run for a while.

After examining the results, I assigned a score between 1 and 5, with 5 being the highest, to each of these 5 categories:

• Traffic Volume (Highest volume = 5)
• Conversion Rate (Best conversion rate = 5)
• Click Pricing (Lowest pricing = 5)
• Keyword Competition (Lowest competition = 5)
• Interface ease of use (Easiest to use = 5)

After totaling up the scores, each PPC network was given a final score. Winners for each category and an overall winner were chosen, based on the scores.

The 10 networks tested

• Google Adwords
• Yahoo Search Marketing (Panama system)
• MSN Adcenter
• Adbrite
• Miva
• Searchfeed
• Kanoodle
• Enhance
• Looksmart
• Search123

The Results

Category Winners

Traffic Volume:

Not a big surprise here, the king of Traffic is Google by a long shot.

Conversion Rate:

MSN takes the prize for the best conversion rate. Adcenter’s traffic converted about 10% better than the closest competitor.

Click Pricing:

The lower traffic networks are always going to have the cheapest clicks, so we have a 5 way tie here between MSN, Miva, Adbrite, Enhance, and Kanoodle.

Keyword Competition:

Keywords were easy to buy with little to no competition on Enhance, Kanoodle, and Search 123.

Interface ease of use:

Google reigns supreme again in the interface department. Their continually improving web interface along with its offline Adwords editor make it tough to beat. Although the new Yahoo Panama system is a close second and gaining quickly.

Overall Winner:

The winner of the smackdown is MSN. Their strong placing for conversions and click pricing, coupled with a decent traffic volume puts them in the number one spot. A surprisingly strong second place tie goes to Searchfeed and Looksmart. Their low click pricing, and low competition helped them edge out some of the Tier 1 heavyweights in the field.

Although the undisputed kings of volume, Google and Yahoo were hit hard by their higher pricing and extreme keyword competition.

Keep in mind these results were for one specific niche and keyword group, your results may vary wildly.

I got an email from a friend of mine getting into PPC asking me what’s best tip I can give him.  There are so many different directions I could have gone in my answer, but it always come back to segmentation of your campaign.   Segmentation is just another way of saying “breaking your campaign up into small chunks”.  The initial work you do in setting up numerous adgroups with highly targeted keywords and ads will pay off many times in the long run.  It’s tempting to just throw everything in 1 campaign to get something running, but laying the ground work is the key to a campaign’s success. 

For a real world example, I recently worked with a client to improve their Adwords campaign.  They had about 1,000 keywords in 3 adgroups.  I examined their keywords list and was able to break out 45 different adgroups from their original 3.  I then wrote more targeted ads for each group of keywords.  Sure it was a ton of work, but their total average CTR increased by 70% within a week.  That’s before even touching the keyword list or match types.  Just goes the show the power of good campaign structure.

So I talked to a source at Adcenter today and heard they are finally about to release a decent upload tool.  If you have ever tried to upload a campaign with multiple orders you have found out that you can’t.  You have to first create the order, then upload the ad, then upload the keywords.  If you have a campaign with 50 orders, it’s an all day effort. So this change will be greatly welcomed.  This should be the final piece of the puzzle to make Adcenter really usable.

Last week posted some initial thoughts about the new Yahoo PPC interface. After spending about a week playing around with it, I can definitely now give it the thumbs up. They have improved it about 1000% from their old version. The reporting and graphing system is awesome. Hands down the best of any PPC network. It is super quick to get a snapshot of the performance for all your adgroups or keywords. So the big question is what PPC interface is the best out of the big 3 now?

I’d have to say Yahoo and Google are now tied. In fact the new Yahoo system kind of makes Adwords show its age a bit. The only big advantage Adwords has is it’s offline editor. I almost exclusively use the offline editor in Adwords. Yahoo if you are listening, how about starting work on your own offline editor? That might push you into my #1 slot. Oh ya, I guess that puts MSN in third