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?