Trimming Your PPC Fat

In order to meet your conversion objectives in a pay per click campaign with AdWords, it will be of critical importance to manage the costs of your campaign. Controlling spending throughout your campaign occurs at a number of levels. You can make a small number of manual changes that can cut your costs. A more practical solution though is to employ automatic software— particularly software that has control over bid management—as these programs are able to automatically adjust costs for keywords.

First you will want to determine your costs on the level of the campaign. If your campaign is utilizing both Google’s ad networks as well as its content networks, then you will want to set up a campaign that exclusively targets the search aspect and a duplicate campaign that focuses on the content side. Creating these separate campaigns will allow to you control spending for each one separately, so you can find optimum costs that maximize the utility of each campaign. In your content based campaigns it is also important to use exclusions for both site and category terms that will prevent your click dollars being spent by putting your ads on unrelated websites.

When your campaign has gotten started and you are seeing some results, you will want to analyze the data coming back on your top performing keywords, and adjust their spending so that you can see even more returns on them. In addition to this, you can also add new query match formats for your existing and underperforming keywords to boost their functionality, allowing you to develop a unique bid for every match type that you are using.

Be sure to monitor the quality scores of all of your keywords. Stop using terms that have zero conversions and/or low quality scores, as they are essentially wasting your time and money. Remember, that your keyword’s quality score will affect its cost per click and its estimate in bids for the first page. Quality Score also affects the ranking of your ad and its eligibility to be featured in an ad auction.

When you are working with an insurmountable number of key words, it is simply not possible to manage them by hand, you will require the assistance of software to help manage your spending for each of your selected terms. The following list details a number of management tools that will help you to adjust your campaign spending in the most efficient manner possible:

• Acquisio SEARCH. This is a top of the line, well programmed pay per click bid management tool. It is able to offer suggestions on which keywords should be paused, alerts you by email to keywords that are given low quality scores, and allows you to set programmable cost per click values for your keywords.
• Clickable. This tool is able to offer performance enhancing recommendations for your campaign. It will indicate calculated and reasonable bid increases on high performing keywords, a reduction of bids on your lower performing keywords, or alerting you when keywords have not met their first page estimates.
• DoubleClick DART Search. This tool is able to automatically bid on any of your keywords a maximum of twelve times daily. You can create a bid strategy that is executed based on a variety of factors concerning your keywords.
• Omniture SearchCenter. This tool offers the standard bid management tactics that you find in such software which includes portfolio based or rules based routines. This tool also features day-parting, but this comes standard with almost any modern pay per click engine.
• Podium adCore. This tool can adjust your bids on a wide level and will allow you to remove underperforming words that do not meet specific performance requirements.

Though these tools sound like they will have your campaign running itself, it will still require regular human intervention, if only to collect your earnings. Though these tools will help maximize your profits, they still require solid human generated ideas to be truly effective. If you give your campaign the human touch that it needs and employ the tools above, your campaign will really start gaining steam and really getting your ads out there!

Simple & FREE Password Management

If you are an SEO or multi-domain webmaster – or even just a social site junky, chances are password management is driving you crazy.  If you use more than one computer, accessing your stored passwords can be a real PITA.

In less than 5 minutes, that can all change.  Here is a step-by-step guide to setting up a permanent, flexible, and secure password management solution:

Step 1: Download KeePass.  Choose the Portable KeePass 2.xx version.

Step 2: Extract to a directory of your choosing.  Then run it – you may want to create a desktop or taskbar shortcut.

Step 3: Enter a master account password – choose something new, this is the one password you will ever need to know from now on.  Add one entry (the key icon).

Step 4: This is the powerful step that allows you to access your passwords from all machines and anywhere you happen to be.  Choose file > save as > save to URL.  Enter your ftp details.

Even if you don’t have a server, your ISP likely has given you some space to store a personal page or files.  If you don’t know your ftp details, contact your ISP or network administrator.  ** Choose an easy to remember location.

How it works: Whenever you open KeePass it will access the file on your server.  Whenever you save the file it will upload the newest save to the server.  From now on, from any machine, your passwords will be updated in real time and you will always have the latest passwords!  If you are on a new computer – just download KeePass again, then file > open > open URL.

*  If you like this solution, send KeePass a donation – this is a well supported and extremely useful program.

How Does BrowseRank Rank?

Microsoft has unveiled BrowseRank, and Google has sat up and taken notice. BrowseRank is the newest browsing algorithm, and it’s designed to eventually do more and be easier to use than the PageRank system that Google has. This is huge, because the way that pages are ranked is very important.

The way that BrowseRank works is not be measuring incoming and outgoing links but by whether people visit a page, for how long, and how many of them do this. That’s vital for people who have a lot of content but don’t have a lot of links. They largely get ignored by Google and seen as unimportant when they may actually be great sites that just don’t need to have a lot of outgoing and incoming links to do what they do.

Microsoft hasn’t been doing that well when it comes to coming up with ranking systems, but this new one seems like it’s going to be something that other sites will actually have to contend with.

Are YOU Losing Out While Adobe & Microsoft Fight?

It’s no secret that Adobe and Microsoft have been battling it out for eons, each one trying to gain dominance of the Internet through their various competing web software technologies. At face value it may seem that you stand to benefit, whatever the outcome, but is it really so? Or is the gigantic squabble between the two lumbering giants spelling out a giant headache for you?

Think of it this way…

If you were in a small closed-off field with two heavyweight Spanish fighting bulls and both of them were calm and peaceful, there wouldn’t be much of a problem. But if those two heavyweight bulls decided to fight each other, all that heavy charging and crashing around would be very dangerous for you and you couldn’t be sure of your safety in the final outcome.

Is the Adobe versus Microsoft Internet battle squaring up to be a bit like that for you?

I think it is!

Adobe’s Flash technology has been around for a long time. It’s served the web well, but now there’s a new kid on the Internet block muscling in – Microsoft’s Silverlight.

NBC used Silverlight on their site for the coverage of the recent Beijing Olympics when they screened more than 2,000 hours of sporting video. Over 40 million people downloaded the Silverlight browser plugin needed to watch NBC’s video coverage of the games.

At a time when millions were eager to watch something extremely important to them, should they have been forced to get to grips with a new and unfamiliar technology?

It’s true that Silverlight’s video handling meant that four video playback screens could be accessed simultaneously, and with commentary too. Maybe that made it worth the hassle, for some at least.

Britain’s BBC dumped Microsoft’s technology in favor of Adobe’s about a year ago. Adobe gave the BBC their undivided attention for three full months to ensure a successful rollout, and it worked too. The BBC increased its viewership by a factor of eight and visitors now hang around the site five times longer on average than they did before.

Yippee for the BBC, but the poor lonely web surfer has to struggle with one technology one day and another completely different technology the next. It’s plain confusing! Does being pushed from pillar to post improve your Internet experience? I don’t think it does.

I don’t blame sites like NBC and the BBC for changing to the latest and greatest. They have a duty to serve their loyal followers. I just question if, by bowing to the whims of the Big Boys, they actually are serving their loyal followers in a way their followers deserve to be served!

Maybe you and the Internet would be better served all round if this perpetual puerile push and pull for dominance by Adobe and Microsoft wasn’t happening.

Being prompted to download a plugin or program in order to view or listen to media is irritating at best. The experience is no longer smooth and seamless when you have to concern yourself with changing technology issues. Yet this is the situation that the Adobe versus Microsoft Internet squabble has placed you in. They are putting a stranglehold on YOUR Internet, and the irony is this: you are letting them!

Sources:
Forbes
Techradar