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Pay Per Click - Best Practices - PPC Management Platforms

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joe.pistell

joe.pistell

Uncle Joe
Apr 7, 2009
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Joe
#1
All,

I am a PPC (Pay Per Click) newbie. Well... not quite a newbie. I have run 3 months of google ad words trials. Results are very good and I am ready to take this to the next level.

  • Keywords:
    • I compiled a list of keywords manually. I am sure that I have not got them all. I need more... lots more.
  • PPC cost management and position optimizing:
    • Do I do this manually and I am always "time challenged" What systems are out there to reduce my management time and produce opportunities that I'd miss by doing this manually?
  • Landing Pages & conversion ratios:
    • Anyone tinkering in this arena? Benchmarks anyone?
What other important topics have I missed? Any PPC management ideas, experiences would be of great help. Vendors, donot email me, please limit your reply to one paragraph and a good research link.
 
#2
Joe,

I have been through 4 different SEM companies and have found a home with Dealer.com's Total Control Dominator (TCD). It will allow you to do exactly what you're looking for. I don't know how well it works for a non-Dealer.com website, but as a simple set-it & forget-it, then go back and tweak-it solution I have yet to find anything better. On top of that, you can customize everything so you can actually be in there every second of the day going crazy on completely customized campaigns.

The only gripe I have with it is that they don't allow user-controlled deep linking right this minute - HOWEVER - they assured me it would be up within weeks.....maybe even next week.

The GUI just begs to be played with. It is kind of like vAuto where it is just fun to mess with things.

I wrote an article about it when it first came out: Search Engine Marketing has reached Stage 3 and it has just improved since then. TCD really is the third stage of PPC management and I have yet to see anything, in any technology realm, come close to touching it.....see, there are some good things about building technology for us mindless dealers :D
 
#5
Joe, we use Clickmotive, which uses a landing page approach with ppc. We are very satisfied, and our ppc is our 2nd best lead closing source. Arguing about the landing page vs. sending them to your home page approach is pretty common, but I can assure you that our conversion with the landing page approach is MUCH better. Are you looking to do the ppc yourself?
 
#6
Kevin,

I prefer to do it on my own, but, I may not beable to if the right tool isn't avail.

I've just waded into PPC, this is month#4. I threw together a fast Keyword list, put them in different tracking buckets, sync'd my goog analytics to it, stood back and watched.

I very pleased with what I see, The traffic stats are excellent (time on site, pages viewed). Conversions need work, but thats a site wide issue that I am studying.

I am ready to grow the budget (aka rob some $$ from radio to pay for PPC:lmao:)


Here's my logic on how I want to manage this and why I need help.


1st, I felt that there are 2 kinds of PPC campaigns. #1, Into my home market (where shoppers know us) and then #2, into "out of market" areas, where opportunities exist, but, special attention is needed. I created these major buckets:
  • Home Market
  • Out-of-Market
    • North
    • East
    • South
    • West
Inside these buckets are 2 major categories, Short Tail (just begun search) and Long Tail (deep in search process)
  • Short tail
    • Used Car
    • Used Car Dealer
    • Buy Used Car
    • etc...
  • Long Tail
    • SUV
      • used Jeep Wrangler
      • used Ford Explorer
      • new Cadillac Escalade ESV
      • Used 2008 Suzuki SX4 Sport
      • etc...
    • Cars
      • Pre-owned make model
      • etc...
    • Trucks
      • Pre-owned make model
      • etc...
These settings allow me to control the message, the budgets and drill down into the performance of my "home market" and "out of market" marketing. So I end up with:

  • Home Market
  • Short tail
    • Used Car
    • Used Car Dealer
    • Buy Used Car
    • etc...
  • Long Tail
    • SUV
      • used Jeep Wrangler
      • used Ford Explorer
      • new Cadillac Escalade ESV
      • Used 2008 Suzuki SX4 Sport
      • etc...
    • Cars
      • Pre-owned make model
      • etc...
    • Trucks
      • Pre-owned make model
      • etc...
And again 4 more times for Out-of-Market north, east, south and west PPC. It makes for great data and ROI, almost a 5% CTR (I think thats good?), but, now I want to grow this effort with a zillion keywords but doing it manually is NOT smart business for me.


  • I need keywords (for out industry)
  • I need a budget/bidding management tool
  • I need a landing page assignment system
Hopeless in Syracuse
Joe

kevinfrye said:
Joe, we use Clickmotive, which uses a landing page approach with ppc. We are very satisfied, and our ppc is our 2nd best lead closing source. Arguing about the landing page vs. sending them to your home page approach is pretty common, but I can assure you that our conversion with the landing page approach is MUCH better. Are you looking to do the ppc yourself?
Click to expand...
 
#9
PPC provider provide the best tools. This is what I do...

Step 1. Keywords (build the list out)
Step 2. Campaign/Adgroup Grouping (sit down and split it into multiple campaign/ad groups)
Step 3. Advert Creatives (I would do 3-5 Creatives per ad group)
Step 4. Plug in PPC Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics Goals
Step 5. Plug in Google Page Optimizer
Step 6. Make the campaign Active.
Step 7. Setup my automated weekly report.

Week 1-3. Let it run
Week 4. Review the Smallest Ad Group... Optimize the group... look at what adverts are working. Look at what sites I should ban on Content Network or Disable Content Network. Look at if I should let google decide on my ad spend or set it to spend as quickly as possible.

Week 5-6... Wait out on the results

Week 7. Review other Ad Group... optimize... get my quality score up... 7-8/10 is good. Keywords with Low quality score split them into their own group so I can target the adverts better.Start working on my optimization using Google Page Optimizier.

Week 8... Adwords has enough data... run the campaign optimizier...

Redo optimization every other week... until I'm paying the least for top position and getting the CTR and Conversion.

Hope this helps.
 
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