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.

This post has nothing to do with pay per click advertising. So why publish it then?

That’s a question that David Szetela received from his listeners when he interviewed Guy Kawasaki on his radio show, PPC Rockstars. If it doesn’t pertain to PPC then why talk about it?

I think there are some good reasons to talk about Guy Kawasaki’s use of Twitter and the controversy that he has created among other Internet marketers who are calling him a spammer. Some of them are quite vocal. You can read the blog posts by visiting David Szetela’s blog and clicking the links. He’s got them all right there.

The most vocal criticisms of Kawasaki and his use of Twitter involve his use of ghost writers to write his tweets and the amount of self promotion that he does on Twitter. He sends traffic to his web property Alltop.com by tweeting links to aggregated content. That has some SEOs miffed because none of the links he is promoting are original content and he’s driving tons of traffic to his website just by linking to it from Twitter.

Well, David Szetela interviewed Guy Kawasaki to ask him some questions about his use of Twitter and allowed Kawasaki’s critics to send in questions of their own. Listen to the interview here.

Magpie is a service that distributes online advertising through Twitter. Not in a hard sell kind of way, but in a conversational marketing kind of way. You, the advertiser, get to choose how much a particular keyword is worth to you. Then Magpie will target your keyword to a Magpie member who is also a Twitterer. Your ad will be tweeted from that person’s account and their followers, and anyone else following your keyword, will see your ad in the Magpie-Twitterer’s Twitter stream. How cool is that?

Since this is a relatively new service, you can get in on the virtual ground floor here. Your keywords will not cost you an arm and a leg as so many at Google do. And you don’t have to be a Twitterer to advertise. You can actually run your pay per click campaign through Magpie without yourself having a Twitter account.

So if you are looking for pay per click advertising opportunities outside of Google and Yahoo! Search Marketing, Magpie just might be the low-cost avenue that you need.

This is no joke. Or if it is, the joke is on us, not you. But Rob Garner at MediaPost wrote a stunningly funny post about weird search queries people type into their search browsers. Some of the weird searches people make online include:

• Where did I put my car keys (no kidding!)
• Where did I put my glasses?
• Have you seen my stapler
• What is the number for 911
• What is my religion
• What is my name?
• Why am I hot
• Why am I so broke
• Who stole my mojo?

The list goes on. People search for weird sh*t.

Garner got me thinking (I’m sad to say). Can you create pay per click campaigns around these weird search queries and actually get click throughs? I was dying to find out, so here’s what I did.

I went to Google. Signed out of my personalized search – because I didn’t want Google in on my weirdness. And started searching for some of these phrases to see what came up (Oh God! Now I’m a statistic.) Know what I found? Yes, PPC ads.

For the following search queries:

• Where did I put my car keys
• Where did I put my glasses
• What is the number for 911
• What is my name? (yes, for real)
• Why am I hot

Evidently, other people were thinking the same thing I was. Weren’t they? No, not really. Upon closer examination, it appears that most of the ads that popped up for these search queries were keyed to show for a specific single word within the phrase that I used or there are actually products that have the name of that search query. For example, “Why am I so hot” returned two ads. One where the title was “How Hot Are You?” and the other where none of the search phrase was used in the ad at all. But from all appearances that ad looks to point to a dating site.

“What is my name?” returned one ad for Ask.com. The ad’s title was “What Is My Name?” Now that’s weird.

There is actually a book titled “What Is The Number For 911?” The sole ad for that search query leads to Amazon books. Ditto for “Where did I put my glasses?”

And what about “Where did I put my car keys?” The key phrase is “car keys” and there were two ads.

So what’s the lesson to be learned here?

If you’re going to target long tail key phrases that have an element of weirdness to them then be sure that

1. Perform a search to see what comes up and use the negative keyword filter if necessary to prevent your ad from returning for search queries that will cost you money with no promise of return
2. If your search phrase is truly weird, make sure that you have a product with that title specifically and optimize your landing page for it
3. If your weird phrase uses a common key phrase that people will search for, decide whether you want your ad to show for that key phrase and if so use the appropriate match type in your keyword targeting for that ad campaign
4. Go to great pains to make your ad relevant to search queries and don’t be afraid to think outside of the box

Bottom line: It’s OK to be weird. Just do it on purpose and target your keywords effectively.

A fairly new pay per click advertising provider is one called Netklix. This is a great service if you have an active blog. Billing itself as the PPC provider for bloggers is actually a smart idea and one that I think will push this service up to the top of smaller providers very fast (smaller providers being anyone who isn’t Google, Yahoo! or MSN adCenter).

Whether you are a publisher or an advertiser, you can connect through Netklix. For advertisers, the opportunities are enormous because you can find blogs related to your niche and advertise on those blogs. Since blogging has become quite the phenomenon that it is and since more and more niche bloggers are figuring out how to make money with their blogs, this actually makes sense. An advertiser who wants to reach a particular market can do so through a popular blog that attracts the same audience. The best way to do that is through a service that connects advertisers with publishers marketing to the same audience. Netklix does that.

To sum it up: Netklix provides advertisers with targeted advertising at a fraction of the cost you’d pay at Google. Sounds good to me.