Making Paid Search Your Friend

I met a friend of mine last week at the University of Tampa to talk about his entry into the 2010 Google Online Marketing Challenge. He and a group of classmates combined forces and put together an insightful search market research report about competition, the search arena for that particular niche’, budget information and more, and really rounded out the overview.

So why was I there? From where I was sitting it looked like they had everything well in hand. My friend brought up the not-yet-activated campaigns on his laptop and we took a look. He and his group did a lot of things really well. I was impressed with how well their campaign “first draft” had turned out, which made it a lot easier to point out some simple but important factors that would influence the performance of the campaigns. These are pretty basic to a seasoned internet marketer but they’re things anyone can miss in the course of a project. The easiest mistake you can make is to look over something or forget about it.

Keyword Matching Options

Turns out you can use the same keyword in four different ways. That’s hard for some people to wrap their brains around but if you do your research and do some testing of your own, you should be able to find that firm grasp. When you do, you’re going to be able to fine-tune your keyword lists to separate the irrelevant visitors from the converters.

Make your Creative Compete

One well written ad is really nice, but you should always be testing an ad against a different version to see which gets a higher click-through-rate and also to measure conversions. That little ad you cooked up is the first impression a lot of potential buyers are going to have of your website and your product or service. You can always, always do better and you should always be searching for a more successful ad. You can take some creative license here and mix it up in your pitch. That’s why they call it creative, after all.

PPC Poaching At Its Finest

If it isn’t enforced intellectual property, then there’s nothing wrong with bidding on the brand name of your competition. Why not do it? The bid amounts are usually pretty low for brand-related search terms and believe it or not, much of your competition probably isn’t doing it. This gives you a greater chance of being seen. I have never run a brand-focused campaign with a 100% click-through-rate, so those clicks are going somewhere. Probably to my competition. You may as well return the favor.

I hope my friend and his campaign do well in the 2010 Google Online Marketing Challenge and I’m looking forward to following the progress. Don’t worry though, I’ll be sure to update you all!