By Britnee Nguyen

If you’re planning on doing a PPC campaign or any type of internet marketing through the winter months, you’ll want to take the holiday season in consideration. Undoubtedly, there’s going to be a rise of on-line traffic during the holidays as many people turn to the web to find gifts. You’ll want to make sure you have your PPC campaigns properly set up to make the most of your on-line advertising investment. Use these guidelines to be successful during the holiday season through your PPC campaign.

Use keyword reports from the previous holiday season to see what keywords did well during that time. You can use the search-based keyword tool to see these reports. Most likely, these terms will do well again this year. You’ll want to use Google’s sbKT (search-based keyword tool). When you’re on the website you’ll see how well keywords are ranking and how much they are per click. This is really helpful any time of the year, but can be of great assistance if you’re trying to sell your product or service during the holidays.

The one day out of the year you should have your PPC campaign geared for is Cyber Monday. This is like Black Friday which is the day after Thanksgiving where every store has discounted prices on items. Cyber Monday occurs the Monday after Thanksgiving and is for sales available on-line. You could bid higher this day compared to other days to take advantage of the increased traffic on Cyber Monday. To get the most clicks, you’ll need to get your ads in the top 3. If you don’t, then it might be useless to do it since your competition will dominate you. You’ll want to be part of the holiday revenue that day so make sure you maximize your ROI the best you can on Cyber Monday.

Also, even after the holidays come and go, many sales happen after the holidays. Consumers are looking for the best deals after the holidays, so don’t miss out on this opportunity either. Don’t end your PPC campaign on Christmas Day, instead you should keep it and monitor it to make money off of the post-holiday shopping. You’ll might want to alter your keywords a bit after this to make sure you’re still targeting the on-line shoppers.

This holiday season, don’t miss out on increased revenue from your PPC advertising. Be sure to plan and prepare it in advance to get the most ROI. If you’re busy taking care of your own holiday shopping, it’s best to hire a professional company who can handle your account during the busy season. Submit Solution is an example of a company who are experts in pay per click advertising and will maximize your ROI this holiday season.

By Robert Lockard

Optimizing your website’s content for search engines costs about half as much as relying solely on a paid-search campaign for getting customers to your site. So says a recent study by Frommer’s Unlimited I read about in the Travolution article, “WTM: Rich content ‘more cost-effective than PPC’.”

Of course, the main flaw I saw in this study is that it analyzes SEO and PPC results separately when many ecommerce companies use a combination of the two. SEO and PPC have different strengths and weaknesses. SEO is slower but more cost-efficient while PPC is fast, but each click costs money.

It’s essential for a website’s long-term future for it to have strong content that is designed to attract search engines’ attention and increase its ranking in their search results. But that doesn’t mean PPC is irrelevant or too expensive for companies to take advantage of in their Internet-marketing campaigns.

According to Frommer’s study, it costs about 17 cents per visitor to optimize a site’s content. On the other hand, it costs about 33 cents per visitor through PPC ads.

The company based its findings on the results of eight companies focusing on travel, hotels or airlines. They divided the total cost of an SEO package by the total number of visitors who clicked on the sites’ natural search results to get the cost per SEO visitor. They divided the total amount paid for a PPC campaign by the number of visitors who clicked on PPC ads to get that average cost.

They found that 70 percent of their site visitors clicked on an organic search result, not a paid-search ad. Thirty percent isn’t bad, though.

What are your thoughts on this paid-search vs. search engine optimization debate? Which works best for you, or do they both work well together?

This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post: “Is SEO a better deal than PPC?” The photo of the SEO, PPC Scrabble game is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of therichbrooks.

By Britnee Nguyen

When you have a PPC ad in Google AdWords, you’re only given 25 characters for the headline and 70 characters for the body of the text. You probably thought writing in 140 characters on Twitter was hard! But after seeing the very limited amount of space you’re given for a PPC ad, you realize you have to be extremely clear and concise to get your message across.

While being concise, you need to make sure that you include relevant keywords, explain the benefits, stand out and have a “call-to-action” message. In addition, you need to remember that you are speaking to real humans so don’t sound too wordy or stuffy.

When writing PPC ads, you need to focus on the goal. The immediate goal you’re looking for is to convey why the person should click on your ad. The next long-term goal is how to convert those clicks into sales. But for this post, we’re just talking about the goal of getting them to click. Getting someone to click with just 95 characters total to entice them can be difficult. The last sentence I just wrote was 87 characters which shows just how concise you need to be.

Headline (25 characters)

Your headline is the attention grabber.

If your headline isn’t interesting, the viewer won’t continue reading the rest of your text; therefore, won’t click your ad. It needs to simply say what you have to offer. If you are selling free birthday cards on-line and want to do a PPC ad to promote your website. If you wanted your keyword to be “birthday e-cards” then you should keep the headline simple such as: Free Birthday E-cards. It’s basically just blatantly stating what you have to offer because you don’t have room to do much else.

Body (75 characters)

When you write the body text, this is where you’ll want to explain more about what you offer. This is typically one sentence long and you’ll want it to be “call-of-action”. This means that you are telling them to do something with action words. You can do this by starting off your sentence with words such as “Send”, “Choose” and “Make”. In the example of using “birthday e-cards” as the target keyword, here are some good examples you could do using the call-to-action and keywords:

Send a personalized birthday e-card to your loved one today.
Choose from 550+ unique birthday e-cards delivered right to the inbox.
Make your friend’s day special with an interactive birthday e-card.

So just make sure you get to the point of what the person will get if they click on your ad. Remember to keep it clear and concise and don’t use too much flowery words because they’ll just skip over it. Make sure to use an action word so they will actually take action and click on your link instead of just reading it. PPC ads can be very effective when written properly. Take the time to write your PPC to make sure it targets the right keywords and creates a call to action.

By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

Writing a paid search or PPC ad is almost an art form: it takes practice, constant effort and preparation.  This, of course, is assuming that you want your ad to be successful.  If you’re not a stickler for getting the most out of your paid search ads, then by all means, follow the guidelines stated here, in a list of how to write stinky PPC ads.  However, if you do want to use PPC ads successfully to aggressively drive traffic to your website and become an internet marketing genius, then avoid these tips at all costs!

1)  Do not do keyword research.

One of the keys to a stinky PPC ad is a lack of keyword research.  Just bid on whatever words you think are relevant to your site and hope for the best!

2)  Stay away from attention-grabbing calls-to-action.

Go ahead and describe your product or service, but do not by any means ask the reader to do anything!  Just to be sure, stay away from any words in verb form.

3)  Try not to give the reader a reason to click on your ad.

When writing your paid search ad, do not ask yourself, “Why should someone click on this ad?”  Make sure that your ad is merely informational and does not solve a problem or provide an interesting service.

4)  Avoid numbers and eye-attracting words.

If at all possible, try to spell out your numbers to make sure that nobody is attracted to your ad.  For example, instead of the extremely attractive “$.05 / month,” try “five cents per month” instead!

5)  Do not consider running your ads at certain times of day or testing your ads.

If you’ve followed all the previous steps outlined above, you shouldn’t have to worry about which of your PPC ads are successful, because none of them will be.  Just run them when you want to run them!  Do not consider holidays, time changes, or when your biggest competitors will most likely run their ads.

So… do you get the point?

Sadly, many online business owners are actually running their paid search campaigns in this manner.  However, you can be one of the lucky ones who actually knows better!  Congratulations.

By Robert Lockard

An excellent blog post on Practical Ecommerce got me thinking about how paid-search campaigns are handled. The blog post is entitled, “Pay-per-click Advertising: Seven Pointers for Smaller Campaigns.”

I was amazed when I read all of the pointers on how people can improve their PPC efforts because basically all of them are easily handled by Submit Solution. I think it’s a great idea to be educated on the best practices of online promotion, so you should definitely read that blog post and take its advice to heart.

After you come up with a plan and thoroughly research your keywords, you can present your ideas to a Submit Solution PPC expert, and he or she will be able to improve upon your ideas and fully implement them for you. Submit Solution offers a number of pay-per-click solutions, including one-on-one support, easily updatable keywords, up-to-date reports and more.

The seven things you should keep in mind when using PPC in your marketing strategies include learning about negative keywords, long-tail keywords and match types. Negative keywords are phrases that include your selected keywords, but attach unfavorable or irrelevant words to them. I’m sure Nintendo wouldn’t want to pay for people who click on its ads when they type in words like “Nintendo Wii defective,” or something to that effect. Those people are more likely to be looking for information or venting rather than hoping to make a purchase.

Long-tail keywords are great because a relatively small number of people search for them and so they used to be less expensive to advertise on. But now that the secret is out that Internet marketers want those targeted keywords more than the general ones, they’re becoming more expensive. A long-tail keyword is a search term with more than one or two descriptive words in it. Terms like “Internet marketing” have a high amount of competition to be number one on search engine results pages. Terms like “Internet marketing solution Orem Utah” will have fewer searchers, but they will be much more targeted.

Match types help you get even more targeted traffic to your website by adjusting how precisely you want people’s search terms to match your selected keywords and phrases.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my discussion of PPC campaigns. This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post: “Submit Solution offers PPC solutions.” The photo of the bad advertisement is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Unlisted Sightings.

By Britnee Nguyen

Recently, YouTube announced they are allowing advertisers in Australia to buy search keywords for their videos. I never realized YouTube had the option of Pay-Per-Click ads for videos posted there. Apparently, they’ve been offering this service in the U.S. for a year now. It’s quite a brilliant idea for internet marketing since more people are apt to click on the ad because it’s a video over clicking on an ad that is just has text.

The two major advertisers who use this service are Mitsubishi and Holden who have been doing it in the U.S. Other popular advertisers are automotives, entertainment industry and packaged goods. It’s a clever way to get more hits on videos. How it works is that the advertisers buys popular search keywords that relate to themselves and then their ad for their video pops up when someone types in those keywords. When someone actually clicks on the video ad, then advertisers pay for the click.

With these YouTube pay-per-click ads for videos, it is starting to blur the lines between what is advertisement and what is entertainment. Because of this, I think it’s easier to get more clicks through YouTube, then through a regular search engine. To make it even more effective, if your company actually produces a pretty fun video that can turn viral, plus with pay-per-click ads of it, it would eventually get so many hits that it would probably organically show up in the results and you no longer have to pay for views. It’s quite the clever way to be creative and use YouTube’s paid search to promote it.

So it’s a pretty effective tool to use. The only downside that could happen with it is that a negative video about the company could show up in the organic search results right next to the paid advertising video from the same company. It might deter the message from the paid video. A YouTube spokesperson did say that advertisers can add keywords to their campaign that they don’t want to show up for. So that would probably solve that problem. Overall, it sounds like a great way to get a company out there in the web community.

By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

Running successful paid search ads is almost a “guess and check” type of process.  It can often seem like ages before you find an ad that works for you!  However, there is one main aspect of internet marketing that is often underplayed in the world of PPC: landing pages.

Your paid search landing page should be carefully crafted to suit your visitors so that each click from your ad counts.  If you, like most companies, run multiple utah paid search PPC ads at once, catered to different key words and phrases, you should create corresponding landing pages for each ad you run. The “one size fits all” method, with all your paid ads running to the same, generic landing page, is a thing of the past!

Here are some of the reasons why you should create separate landing pages for different keywords:

Targeted Marketing: When you’re running more than one PPC ad, it’s likely that they all cater to a different feeling or benefit.  For example, one of your ads can claim to save people money while another can boast of its ease of use or low price social security disability.  All these ads create a different meaning to the visitor who clicks on them.  If they are looking for an easy to use product, you should create a landing page that outlines how easy to use your product is!  Your visitors will not only get the information they are looking for, they will also get a targeted marketing strategy that will prove profitable for your business.

Multi-Faceted Approach: If you were stuck with one generic landing page for every paid search ad you ran, you would only be able to address two or three benefits of your product in the same place.  For example, “Our online marketing product is easy to use, cost effective and will save you money!”  When you cram too many benefits into one page, your marketing starts to sound gimmicky and will be ineffective.  By creating multiple landing pages catering to different facets of your product, you can be more successful, for each specific page will be stronger than one catch-all page.

Keep these things in mind when embarking on any utah internet marketing endeavor you have.  And remember, if your landing page stinks, your paid search efforts will have been in vain, no matter how successful they were!

The photo of the friends smell bad sticker is from Flickr, and is the copyright of evelynishere.

By Robert Lockard

Search-engine giant Google is trying to buck the overall downward trend in Internet advertising sales by grabbing a bigger slice of the pie and by eating a little of TV’s pie, as well.

In my blog entry, “Google debuts ‘stock market’ for display ads,” I talked about Google’s attempt to make its new DoubleClick Ad Exchange successful. At the end I touched on Google’s attempts to grow beyond its core competency of search ads into the world of display ads. I’ll pick up where I left off.

According to the Wall Street Journal article, “Google Decides to Find Its Creative Side,” Google is trying to translate its ownership of YouTube and DoubleClick into a more dynamic advertising approach. Google is so well-known as the king of search ads that it might be difficult for it to break into Yahoo’s territory of creative display ads.

They’ve already created YouTube ad campaigns for J.C. Penney and Quaker Oats, but they saved their most innovative campaigns for Hewlett-Packard and Volvo. For those two companies, Google helped create YouTube ads and display ads featuring the latest updates (tweets) from Twitter.

Search engines are notoriously slow in catching up to social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook. You can read my insights into this topic in my eHarbor Blog entry, “Google can’t keep up with Twitter.” It’s a promising sign that Google is making this effort to use Twitter in its online-advertising services.

Google’s foray into YouTube might be the key to grabbing some of the TV industry’s advertising sales. In the United States, TV receives more ad revenue than any other medium. Google’s ad-sale growth has fallen from 56 percent in 2007 to 31 percent in 2008 down to 3 percent in the second quarter of 2009. It’s still growing, which is remarkable since we’re in the middle of a recession, but Google wants to stop the downward trend.

Can Google pull it off? They seem to be fighting a war on three fronts. They’re trying to hold on to search-ad dollars, which have fallen because of the recession, while also jumping into both display ads and TV-like ads. I won’t count them out because they might just have the resources and patience to do it. We’ll keep an eye on what happens.

This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post: “Google flexes its creative muscles.” The photo of the cat in the Coca-Cola box is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Greencolander.

By Britnee Nguyen

A new and free research tool, Google Insights, provides e-commerce owners with the ability to improve their pay-per-click (PPC) advertising with its search data. Many on-line retailers depend on utah PPC services to get more customers to their shops. If less people are clicking, then that means less business coming in.

Some may not see the relevancy in PPC or even understand how many people actually use it. Google reported that most of its $5.5 billion revenue in the last quarter was from PPC advertising. This is why Google has a keen interest in paid search ads and want to help on-line retailers receive the best support in it.

So the newest tool is Google Insights which helps hone a marketing message. You can choose three different ways to describe your product such as “environmentally-friendly”, “portable”, and “high-tech” for example and plug them into Google Insights which will tell you which term is searched for most in the U.S. or whatever area you’re in. This gives you a starting point on knowing which phrase will benefit you the most.

You can also see how a certain keyword tends to trend each year. For example, “softball cleats” trends to be the highest on March when softball season is about to start. You can also see which states search for the most and other related keywords and how they trend. You can see below how each divot and peak occur around the same time each year.

Note that Google Insights doesn’t tell you exactly how many people search for that keyword, but instead scales it accordingly. It is a helpful tool to help those with pay-per-click and to use it more efficiently. It’s not the only tool needed to succeed in utah PPC, but it is definitely one you’ll want in your toolbox.

By Robert Lockard

In September, Google introduced a new way for its customers to buy and sell online display ads. It’s called the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and it allows Internet marketers to find a variety of Web pages to advertise on and quickly make a bid. This speeds up the process for both advertisers and publishers looking for ad revenue.

I heard about this development in a Wall Street Journal article, entitled “Google Unveils Market for Display Ads.”

Google has literally thousands of partner websites scattered across the Web that display its online ads. However, Google has never been very good at display advertising. It bought DoubleClick back in 2007 for $3.1 billion and has been trying to come up with a good way to jump into this part of the paid-search market. This appears to be its big move.

This isn’t the first online-advertising exchange service. Actually, other major search engines, like Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have had them for some time, though none of them has been able to make them particularly big or useful, yet. Maybe Google will find a way to make this exchange service popular and profitable.

Google’s move comes with plenty of risks. What if few ad publishers and advertisers sign on to the service? Who would want to participate in a service that no one else is using? Internet marketers are looking for ways to reach the right audience in simpler ways.

Surprisingly, Google is far behind other search engines in the display-ad market. Google is definitely the king of PPC with about a 70-percent share of the industry’s total revenue, but it only received 1.3 percent of all display-ad views. Yahoo is actually the leader in display ads.

Apparently, Internet marketers who want to target a specific audience with simple Internet ads turn to Google. But if they want something more dynamic, appealing to customers’ emotions more than their intellect, they are more likely to turn to Yahoo or TV advertisements.

This is a complete version of the blog post on the eHarbor Blog: “Google tries to expand into new PPC forum.”

The photo of the fiery wok is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of liber.