Are you a business that spends a great deal of time, energy and money on your pay per click advertising campaigns wondering why they just don’t return like you would hope for? There are many different factors you should be looking at but once very important factor that is probably the most important is your ad copy.

Ad copy should be unique and compelling. You cannot just slap the same ad copy across every ad group and except to have stellar results. It doesn’t work that way. You should always be writing custom ads with attributes centered around where ever you are sending your visitor. If you are sending them to a page with 50% off blenders than your ad should demonstrate that clearly. Your ads are the gateway to your sales so it is important to take your time and right compelling ads. With a down economy the last thing you want to be doing right now is sending unqualified traffic to your website and burning through your daily media budget with nothing to show for it at the end of the day. In today’s market place all online advertisers need to be 100% confident with how they spend every single dollar they have.

On June 8th-9th MarketingProfs is holding a 2 day business conference for business owners and decision makers to come and sharpen their online marketing skills. If you are an individual who either helps run an online business or is even looking to start one the MarketingProfs Business-to-Business Forum 2009 is an excellent value for any online marketeer. Whether you are a pay per click manager looking to learn more of what surrounds internet marketing or you are an individual that runs all aspects of an online business you can walk away with valuable information that could tighten your online marketing game. Strengthen your pay per click advertising and search engine marketing skills by learning how to integrate social media marketing and SEO into your daily web marketing tasks.

Each registrant will receive a complimentary copy of MarketingProfs latest research report “B2B Marketing 2009: Trends in Strategies and Spending”. Conference registrants will also receive a free premium plus membership allowing them access to unlimited and free archives of case studies, research reports and online seminars. Conference attendees also have an opportunity to have one on one time with an industry expert about topics likes SEO, social media, email marketing and much more to help with any issues that person might be having in this area. There will also be an unlimited amount of networking opportunities for attendees to either secure some new business relationships or expand on already existing ones. Aside from having free meals through this conference attendees will be listening to keynote presentations by industry leaders authors like Steve Berlin Johnson and Barry Schwartz.

MarketingProfs Business-to-Business Forum 2009 is a great place for all online marketeers to learn more than they already knew and strengthen their skills. The internet is always evolving and changing and conferences like these help key decision makers make the right decisions. There will be classes on everything from economic impact on B2B marketing practices to how to efficiently pull your outsourced online marketing efforts in house. The MarketingProfs Business-to-Business 2009 Forum is a great place to really take your online efforts to a whole new level.

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Online marketing comes in many different life forms. With competition so fierce it is truly important to be able to utilize every platform and tool available to you online. Online consumers now more than ever really need to build their trust before they whip out their credit card and make a purchase. With the economy down people are also spending less and less right now so it is even more important to bring your A-game when marketing yourself or your business online. Local pay per click advertising can often times compliment you SEO efforts for search results.

Branding your business online right now is very important to make conversions on your website. If you have a handful of keywords or phrases you are targeting online and you are rank organically somewhere in the first two pages for a keyword and a person sees your organic listing and also your pay per click listing you have increased your chances for that person to find your website and come visit it. They might be more likely to click on one of your listings than someone with just one listing. Sometimes depending on the keyword a local PPC or pay per click advertising campaign could cost a fraction of what might think it costs. Growing an online business in today’s market place requires a strong branding approach. People need to see you in multiple areas before you start seeing sales happen or the phone ringing. People want trust and the only way that is built up is through repetition.

Many people always ask themselves if they should launch a pay per click advertising campaign even though they are already in the organic search results. There are a few things you need to take a look at. First, do you have the budget? If you are extremely tight on budget it might not be the wisest choice to launch a PPC campaign if you are already ranking in the organic search results. This also depends on which keywords or phrases you are ranking for.

You might not necessarily be ranking for all your keywords. Some companies do this from a branding standpoint. If you have a listing in the organic search results and you also have a PPC ad running a person shopping might be more inclined to either click on your organic listing or your PPC because you just instilled confidence in that shopper by building your brand. Confidence is something that online shoppers really need to have these days in order to pull out their credit card or pick up the phone to call you. Too many people get burned each and everyday shopping online and building up your brand online will be important for someone to choose you. Launching a PPC campaign while you have high search engine rankings will not double your business for the most part but it is an additional area of improvement and visibility for yourself or your business.

Do you wonder why your pay per click campaign might not be working as well as you want it to be? Do you spend money every month with very little activity occurring on your site? Setting up a pay per click campaign on the fly and dropping money into the account will not necessarily create sales or get the phone ringing on your website. You need to seriously analyze your landing pages and make sure clicks are not going wasted by being dumped onto a page that does not share attributes of what that visitor is looking for.

Your landing pages should be a direct reflection of the copy used in your ad. Picking one generic page of your website to spit everyone out on is not the right approach. If your ad screams discount and sale your visitor should be landing on a page that offers discount and sale because that is the mindset of your visitor. Having that visitor land on the home page of your site is not the most effective place for that visitor to land on. You always want to have a targeted landing page to send your PPC clicks. Not only do you want attributes from your ad but it is very important to have some sort of call to action items on your landing page. If you want this person to call you don’t assume that they will know to do this. Make the phone number stand out as much as possible in multiple areas of the landing page. If you want them to submit their information make sure to have a nice big lead form for that person to fill out and if they are looking for a specific type of product don’t send them to the home page, send them to that specific product page. Put yourself in the shoes of the person clicking your ad and anticipate where you would like to land. Finally, double check and triple check to make sure link is not broken on your ad. You don’t know how many times I click on a PPC ad and it is connected with a dead link that goes no where. This is a very easy way to burn through your budget.

Mother’s Day is just around the corner. Have you started your advertising campaign yet? Have you started planning it?

When it comes to holidays, there is perhaps none so endearing as Mother’s Day. For retailers and e-tailers the key is getting people to your storefront, whether online or off line, and turning them into customers. That is, converting traffic to sale. It all starts with your advertising.

Pay per click advertising’s effectiveness boils down to two things:

1. Optimization
2. Effective Calls to Action

On both parts, you’ve got to be successful with your ad copy and your landing page content. The question is, do you create special content for Mother’s Day or use something more generic? The answer is, it depends on your business and its goals but I’d hazard to guess that for most businesses you should lean toward a special landing page just for Mother’s Day. And along with that, you should tailor your ad content for Mother’s Day as well.

Research your keywords, see what the competition is doing, match the right keywords for your landing page, and write killer ad content to get the click through. You can close Mother’s Day sales with good optimization and a call to action. Go do it.

I thiought I had written about this topic earlier, but I decided instead to cover another topic. But for the record, I agree with Amber at PPC Hero. Yahoo! IS giving bad advice.

Specifically, the advice has to do with putting your phone number in your PPC ads. Why wouldn’t you? If you can get a searcher to call you instead of clicking on your ad then you’ll save yourself some money in the end. Get their business and it’s even better. That’s just common sense, right?

I do disagree with Amber on one point.

I don’t believe a user wouldn’t click on your PPC ad just because you have a phone number listed.

I do believe they will. And that’s precisely why you should do it. I also believe Yahoo! believes a searcher will call you instead of clicking on your ad and that’s precisely why they don’t want you to do it. They’ll lose revenue.

Bottom line: You should do what makes sense for your business. Spend less, make more. That equates to using a phone number in your ads and taking the call instead of getting the click. Should every ad have your phone number in it? No. But that’s a different story.

A schema is a concept that is entrenched in the minds of your audience. Say a word and immediately people think of a concept. “Drive”, for instance. Everyone who hears it will automatically think of automobile. But use the word in a different context and you can still play off the old familiar concept effectively: ie. “Drive it home”. Get the picture?

It’s easy to do. Just think of a concept that people in your niche would know and associate with popularly. Use that concept to drive (get it?) traffic to your website using killer PPC ad content.

Suppose you want people to click the link in your ad and download a new software that you’ve developed. Would it be more effective to tell them “download my software” or to say “watch your profits soar!” What is soar and what does it have to do with software? Well, it doesn’t have anything to do with software. Birds soar. Computers don’t. But you want your readers to associate flying high with your software and their profits. So you tie their profits to your software by using the word “soar” in a different context. Believe me, it works.

Ad agencies that serve clients by managing their online advertising campaigns are strongly being encouraged to move to a performance-based model by Coca Cola Co. The question is, Will it work?

There are pros and cons, of course, Agencies that fail to provide results won’t get paid for their efforts. That means no losses for the company, but it does mean a loss in revenue for the ad agency. It may also mean a loss of business. What company is going to continue letting an ad agency run ad campaigns that produce no results, even if they don’t have to pay for it? The idea, after all, is to get clicks to the company’s website and convert the traffic. Any ad agency that can’t do that shouldn’t be paid.

At least, that’s the way Coca Cola executives see it. The up side to the agency is a successful campaign could earn them more money. Coca Cola is talking about 30% commissions for successful campaigns. That’s well above the average. See here:

Coca-Cola Co. is trying to start an industrywide movement toward a “value-based” compensation model like one it’s adopted that promises agencies nothing more than recouped costs if they don’t perform — but profit margins as high as 30% if their work hits top targets.

Will performance-based PPC work? Is it a model that the industry should consider? In the end, if that’s what advertising consumers demand, ad agencies may not have a choice. If they want to remain competitive they will have to adapt. Maybe that’s what Coca Cola is shooting for.

Staying organized is the key to being successful with pay per click advertising, especially if you run several PPC ads across several different channels or niches. How do you keep track of it all?

Generally, you have three tiers of organizational structure for your PPC ads:

• Campaign Level
• Ad Groups
• Individual Ads

We will discuss here how to organize your campaigns if you run ad groups within the same niche and how to do it if you operate in several niches. First, within the same niche.

Let’s say your niche is widget sales. You have three campaigns running in widget sales and within each campaign you have three add groups. Within each ad group you have three separate ads. There are several ways you can organize your campaigns. Here is one way that we’ve found helpful.

Take your broad keyword categories for widgets and make those your campaign names. For instance, let’s say you sell automatic widgets, semi-automatic widgets, and manual widgets. Those could be your campaign names. Within each campaign you’ll have your ad groups. Break down your ad groups into phrase matched keyword groups. For instance, for automatic widgets it might look like this:

• Double-barrel widgets
• Single-barrel widgets
• Cannon-nose widgets

Under each of these phrases you could have a variety of options to narrow down your widgets into more specific categories. Don’t do that at the ad group level. Use the phrase match as an organizational element for your ad groups. For each individual ad, you could narrow it down further into the specific key phrase that you are targeting and that key phrase could be a broad match phrase, phrase match, or exact match. It could look something like this:

Ad Group Name = Cannon-Nose Widgets

• Ad #1 Keyword Phrase: Cannon-Nose Widget
• Ad #2 Keyword Phrase: “Cannon-Nose Widget”
• Ad #3 Keyword Phrase: [Cannon-Nose Widget]

Notice that in each case you are using the same keyword phrase but you narrow your focus in each individual ad by focusing on a match type of that phrase. You could have several such ads for the individual keywords that relate to the phrase match within that ad group. In other words, if that ad group focuses tightly on 5 separate keyword phrases related to Cannon-Nose Widget, you could potentially have 15 individual ads - 3 for each keyword, breaking them all down into a broad match, phrase match, and exact match ad units.

Now let’s examine an organizational structure for campaigns in non-related niches:

If you are involved in several niches such as Internet marketing, business franchising, and widget sales then you’ll want to separate your niches into campaigns by themselves. Within each campaign you’ll have a variety of ad groups related to that campaign. Those ad groups should be named according to some convention related to your broad match and/or phrase match keywords for that niche. For instance, sticking with widget sales again you could name your ad groups:

• Double-barrel widgets
• Single-barrel widgets
• Cannon-nose widgets

sticking with the phrase-match keyword phrases as above. Your individual ad units would then follow the same protocol as above for targeting a specific key phrase by broad, phrase, and exact match.

That’s it. Pretty simple. There are of course other ways to organize your campaigns. This is just one way that it can be done. What ideas do you have for organizing your pay per click campaigns?

Andy Beal wrote a guest column at WebProNews about click fraud. It seems there has been a drop in click fraud cases from last quarter until now. Beal asks the question, “is this drop a blip or a trend?”

Good question. I guess we won’t know until the next quarter so that we can see if there is still a continued downward trend in click fraud or if it goes back up to its normative 15%=17% range.

It would be nice to see less pay per click click fraud. That would be a big plus to the industry and a big plus to advertisers. Andy asked the question and I’ll ask it too. Are you see a decline in your click fraud statistics?

If you are running several ad groups or pay per click campaigns simultaneously and using the same keyword in those ad groups, you should seriously reconsider. It could be hurting your ad groups.

Yahoo! Search Marketing’s blog tells you why:

For example, if you want to test Advanced and Standard match types by running both concurrently in identical ad groups, your keywords will compete against each other and drive up your cost-per-click. We’ve also seen advertisers duplicate keywords with multiple landing pages. The duplicated keywords can result in a lower quality index score and a higher cost-per-click.

I can’t think of any better reasons than these to stop duplicating your keywords. Higher CPCs, lower quality scores, and duplicate keywords that get deleted. Wouldn’t want any of that to happen to me.

And Yahoo! isn’t the only search engine with these policies. You could run into the same problems at other pay per click providers like Google and MSN adCenter. To be most effective, run tight ad groups with specific ad content and landing pages that don’t overlap. There is no sense in competing against yourself.

PPC advertising is all about the looks. An attractive ad will get more click throughs than some staid, boring text ad with no call to action. I’m not just talking about great sales text. I’m talking about visual elements that you can ad to your text ad to make it more appealing. The bottom line is to make your ad stick out in a sea of advertisers. Here are a few ways to do that better:

• Bold Text - Bold text can make your ad stand out. But don’t bold the entire ad. Use bold in a limited fashion by using it to draw attention to a very important word or phrase. That word will stick out and so will your ad.
• Capitalize Letters - Or even whole words. NOT the entire ad. You don’t want to come across like you are shouting ad the searcher. You just want to draw emphasis to a certain word or perhaps one line by capitalizing the first letter of each word. Use this in moderation, but use it to great effect.
• Exclamation Marks - Done once it can be very effective. Done twice or more and it has a detrimental effect. Like capital letters, it can seem like you are shouting. So don’t! Just go easy and use it when you need it.
• Ampersand - The little ampersand does more than save space. It sticks out like a sore thumb & draws attention to itself. You may not want to use it every time in lieu of the longer ‘and’, but it can help make your ad more visible.
• Other Special Characters - Use whatever you can to make your ad stand out. Numbers. Symbols. Whatever. Just stand out.

Is your PPC ad visual? It should be.

Traditional marketers know that a person has to see an offer seven times before they act on it. So what happens when someone clicks on a pay per click ad for the first time?

Typical pay per click traffic is ready to buy right now. That’s why they search and that’s why they click. But if that were 100% true then everyone who clicks on a PPC ad would buy. Right? Well, there are many reasons why clickers on your PPC ads don’t buy.

• It could be a competitor scoping out your marketing plan
• Perhaps the click was an accident
• The clicker arrived on your landing page and found something they didn’t expect to see
• Not ready to buy right now
• Searcher changed their mind about buying right now
• Still in research mode

The list could go on. But the question is, can you convert those clickers on subsequent PPC ads? And the answer is yes.

It boils down to understanding who your audience is. There may be a segment of your audience that is more cautious when it comes to online transactions. Or it could be that your offering doesn’t sell itself on the landing page that you are using. This is the perfect opportunity for some testing. Run an A/B test on the elements of your landing page and see if it converts more traffic. If so then you could end up converting traffic that bounced before.

Advertising is about testing. Always. Even pay per click advertising. Make sure you are in constant test mode.

When Google announced its search-based keyword tool we were there to let you know. Of course, we liked it then and like it now. But it’s just gotten better.

It isn’t better, per say, as much as it is more available. Or available in more place. Such as:

• Australia
• Canada
• China
• Japan
• New Zealand

In addition to being available in more places, Google has added two new features (which makes it a better tool, I guess). You can now get language and country specific results and filter your searches by ad share and by search share.

I highly recommend the search-based keyword tool for advanced searches, especially for pay per click usage.