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.

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?

I forgot where I read it, but I saw a few days ago a statistic that leapt out to me like a frog in a mossy pond. Google reported that 24% of its search queries are first time or unique queries. That’s a lot higher than I expected. But it makes me ask, How does that relate to pay per click management?

For starters, pay per click ads appear on the SERPs for queries that use a specific keyword. What I think this statistic means is that there is an element of unpredictability with regard to PPC CTRs that is uncontrollable. If 24% of the search queries are first time queries then that means an equal percentage of PPC ads will appear for queries that were unintentional on the part of the advertiser. There may be a fudge factor in there somewhere, but I’d imagine that this number is at least 20%.

Let’s just say that 20% of your PPC ads show up for first time queries. They are search queries that you didn’t expect to happen and didn’t target your ad to. How many of those queries will result in click throughs and how many of those click throughs will never result in a sale due to unqualified click status?

Here’s the point: No matter how well you plan and manage your PPC campaigns, there will always be an element of unmanageability with regard to your click through rate resulting in a less-than-desirable ROI. It is best just to stick with the things that you can control and not worry or fret about those you can’t.

Pay per click advertising is all about keywords. You can’t run a successful campaign without them. But what is effective? How can you win with keywords? What should you do with them?

There are all kinds of answers to those questions, some right and some wrong. But I’d like to share the most important keyword trick of all. There is one keyword trick that is so important that, if you get everything else wrong, at least you’ll have this part right and your quality score should be muchly improved.

It’s not really accurate to call it a trick, but for lack of a better word, let’s call it a trick. You know what it is? It’s a tight ad group.

In essence, fewer keywords is better than a long list of keywords. Instead of putting hundreds of keywords together in one ad group, focus your ad group into a tight group of keywords that are related in relevancy. That’s the most important trick in the book and it leads to more success than just about anything else.

If you are trying to drive targeted traffic to your landing pages, do you think it’s better to do that from one source or multiple sources? If you answered multiple then you get an A in this class.

Pay per click advertising is a challenging proposition and the more limitations you place on yourself the more challenging the game. That’s why we always recommend using more than just one PPC provider. You may start your advertising at one provider and branch out from there. Test your landing pages and your ad content at that one provider. The great thing about pay per click ads is that you don’t get penalized for duplicate content. You can use the same ad multiple times as long as you aren’t duplicating the same ad run at the same time at the same provider (that goes without saying, doesn’t it?).

Landing pages are a different matter. You don’t want the same landing page content unless you are driving traffic to the exact same landing page (which is encouraged, although you might want separate landing pages for tracking and measurement purposes).

When it comes to driving targeted traffic, the more avenues of approach you give your clientele the more likely you are to get the sale.

One of the most important aspects of pay per click management is conversion tracking. But that entails more than just counting numbers of sales. If you truly want to know how your campaigns are working out and whether or not they are deliver ROI, you’ve got to measure more than how many widgets you’ve sold.

Whether you are measuring conversions through Google Analytics, MSN adCenter, Yahoo! Search Marketing, or a third party solution, you want to include some other statistics in your tracking results. Here are a few things to look at to see how well your advertising campaigns are working:

• Where your traffic is coming from (important to know your most effective conversion sources)
• Navigation patterns of your visitors (do they land on your sales page first or come to it from other pages on your site?)
• Demographic target
• Keywords that helped your visitors find your content
• CTR and conversion percentage

You may have special conversion information you want to track. For instance, does landing page A work better for demographic B or is landing page C a better fit for that market? Specialized reports can help you track the information that you need to track and get to the bottom of your advertising results much more quickly.

Branding is one of the most important concepts in business. Online, it takes an entirely different flavor as companies scramble to ensure that their names and brands aren’t massacred by unscrupulous competitors. One pay per click advertising controversy is the practice of bidding on competitor brands and redirecting traffic to one’s own website. So far, courts in the U.S. have not ruled this practice out as illegal. Many advertisers consider it immoral or unethical, but many more take just the opposite view. Until the law decides that the practice will not be tolerated, advertisers can use pay per click to destroy or pollute the brand of their competition. But can you save your brand’s reputation with PPC?

Yes, I believe so. It isn’t easy, but it can be done. You have to be willing to spend the money.

One of the most important ways to protect your brand using pay per click is to bid on your brand name. Find out if you have competitors already doing so. If not then you should bid on your brand name now while your click prices are lower. Another thing you should do is in your advertising copy use the copyright symbol in associations with your brand. If you own a trademark, try using the TM symbol, though I don’t think it’s proven that PPC providers will accept it. It’s worth a try, though.

Also, on your landing pages, make sure mentions of your brand name is accompanied by the appropriate TM or copyright symbol. Make sure you go through great pains to protect the ownership of your brand both in your ad copy and on your landing pages. If necessary, consult an attorney that specializes in intellectual property rights and be vigilant in protecting what you own.

You are testing, right?

You should constantly be testing your landing pages and your ad content. You should test them separately and against each other. And, to answer the question in the title, you should never stop testing.

Testing is the advertiser’s paradise. This is where you figure out where to make your money. Without testing you can’t measure what is working and what is not. You also can’t make important decisions about the effectiveness of your advertising. Testing is the one absolutely essential ingredient to every advertising campaign. You can’t do without it without damaging your entire campaign. Just be sure to proceed in your testing smartly.

Pay per click advertising budgets are on the decline and people are blaming the elusive economy. It’s understandable. In uncertain economic times people are more watchful of their money. As it should be. But don’t stop advertising altogether. Now, more than ever, you need to get the word out about how you are different than your competition. How should you spend your advertising dollars in a downward falling economy?

Here are a few tips to help you make the most your money in today’s advertising climate:

• Set a budget. Make sure you know where your money is going and be able to account for every dollar.
• Track and measure everything. Only online can you track every eyeball. Print advertising can’t do that. But you have the ability to see how many people are viewing your ads and responding. Take advantage of that knowledge.
• Maintain tight ad groups. Target, target, target. Make sure you are advertising to the right crowd.
• Quality, quality, quality. Write quality landing page content, quality ad content, and test, test, test.
• Test everything. Keep what works, toss what doesn’t.

Online advertising doesn’t have to be expensive. Take advantage of every opportunity to save a dollar and make a dollar. Test, implement, test again.

The Content Network can be a good source of traffic and revenue for any pay per click advertiser, but many advertisers who use the Content Network end up losing money. Why?

I think the No. 1 reason PPC advertisers lose money through the Content Network is because they lump their Content Network ads in with their search campaign ads. This is completely wrong!

You have to understand that the Content Network is not like search pages. Your strategy should be completely different. When a searcher enters a search term in one of the search engines and pulls up a search page, they are looking for specific information. When a visitor to a web page sees your ad mixed in with the content on that page, that visitor is not looking for information. Presumably, they’ve already found it. So you’ve got to get their attention in another way.

That means you should target different keywords and you should write your ads differently. By approaching your advertising differently than you do in your search campaigns you increase your chances that you will attract the clients you are looking for and that you will increase your CTR. Do it right and you’ll increase your ROI as well.

Are you running pay per click advertising campaigns simultaneously with social media marketing? Are they working together or against each other? Do you know?

It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. If you have social media campaigns running with search campaigns at the same time, I’d advise against sending them to the same landing page unless you have three things on that landing page:

1. Advanced tracking so that you can track the results of both pay per click and social media campaigns
2. A call to action that appeals to both audiences
3. Page design elements that meet the needs of both audiences

It is highly likely that your PPC traffic and traffic from your social media campaigns will have different needs. Your PPC traffic is likely to buy right now. Your social media traffic is likely NOT ready to buy right now.

When you market to a pay per click audience you are primarily targeting people who are ready to buy now. They search for information. They’ve found it in your ad. They click. They like. They buy.

The buying process for social media audiences, however, is different. They likely won’t buy the first time they visit your site. So you need to think about how to attract their attention, make them want more, sign up for your newsletter or RSS feed, and keep them in the loop so you can drive them back to your website again. It’s a different kind of marketing. Make sure you have different landing pages for your PPC audiences and your social media audiences.

Inevitably, you are going to want to move beyond Google AdWords and do some targeted pay per click campaigns through another search engine or pay per click advertising company. Do you just migrate all of your information from Google AdWords and set up another account at Yahoo!, MSN, or one of the many smaller providers? In a word, no. It’s much more complicated than that.

I’m sure when you started your Google AdWords advertising that you took it slowly. You likely started with one test campaign and if it worked well then you rolled it out with a larger budget. As time moved on you noticed that your ad did better with certain keywords and during certain times of the day so you tweaked your campaign settings to put more of your budget into those keywords and times of the day and less into other keywords and times. Maybe you noticed that a certain demographic was lagging behind all the others so you started another campaign to target that specific demographic with different keywords. That’s all in the playing of the game.

Well, don’t assume that what you’ve learned at Google will be the same at Yahoo! or MSN adCenter. It won’t be. You’ll still need to run a test campaign and watch your PPC dollars like a hawk. It is not only possible but likely that one demographic will more easily reached and influenced at Yahoo! while another is more easily reachable at Google or MSN. That is where your testing comes in.

Google is popular among the web-savvy and tech crowd. Yahoo!, on the other hand, is still popular in some demographics. That doesn’t mean that your PPC campaigns will be more success at Yahoo! or Google based on the demographic. It does mean that you may have to target each demographic differently depending on which pay per click company you are using. Manage your campaigns accordingly and you’ll see great results.

Saving money is simple. Not easy, but simple. You know you can cut corners and usually you know where. But saving time can sometimes be a bigger challenge. But saving time can actually make you money. In more ways than one.

When it comes to saving time while managing your pay per click advertising campaigns I’ve got a few suggestions:

1. No. 1, perform all like-minded actions at the same time and at the same time every day. In other words, write all of your ads for each ad group and PPC campaign all at the same time instead of doing each individually. This means you’ll switch from one activity to another less often and maintain a consistent focus. Also, if you write your ads at the same time every day, or every time you are in the ad writing mode, then you’ll be in the habit of thinking in a certain frame of mind at that time of day. It will take you less time to get focused and save you time, thereby making you money.
2. Secondly, rely on your reports. If there is not a report for the data and information you need to collect to make the best decisions regarding your PPC campaigns then create a report that does contain the necessary information. By analyzing the correct information, you make sound decisions and save yourself time and money in the long run.
3. Set a reasonable budget. It may not make sense on the surface, but a budget can save you time and money. If you know the limit that you can spend then you won’t waffle on decisions at a critical moment you’ll save some time, but you also won’t make bad decisions that cost you money. Set a budget and stick to it.
4. Put your keywords in ad groups. Here’s another way to save time and money. Make sure your keywords are in ad groups. Not only will they be easier to manage and save you time, but they will perform better in the long run, which will make you money.

Saving time on your pay per click campaign management will save you money. The more time you save, the more money you save. The more time you save, the more money you can make. Develop good campaign management habits and increase your profits.

When times turn sour businesses cut budgets. That’s the way it’s always been and the way it always will be. But where you cut your budget depends a great deal on how you survive the recession. It may seem counter-intuitive, but there is no better time to spend money on advertising than when the economy turns south.

Savvy investors know that when everyone else is selling that’s the time to buy. Conversely, when everyone else is buying, that’s when you sell. And when your competitors are cutting budgets, it’s time to increase yours.

Increases in business can be directly attributed to advertising spend, even during a recession. If you spend money on advertising you can be sure, if it’s effective pay per click advertising, that you’ll see a return. You may indeed have to cut your budget some, but don’t cut it out completely. If you don’t advertise at all you’ll likely lose a lot more business than if you reserve a portion of your budget for advertising. Don’t kill budget completely.