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

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 Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

It is too often the case that when starting a paid search marketing campaign, people tend to lose sight of the main point.  What’s the main point, you ask?  To get people to click, right?  Wrong.

Yes, it’s true that Pay-Per-Click ads provide quality leads most of the time.  However, no matter how interested the “clicker” is in your products, services or niche, if your site is poorly designed or organized, your marketing would have been in vain.  There is no point marketing a site that is difficult to use, messy, or otherwise messed up!

Make sure that your PPC ads are really being effective by testing your site for usability, attractiveness, etc.  There are hundreds of free and low-cost tools for this purpose!

Here are some online tools to test the quality of your site:

1. Five Second Test: With this nifty tools, website owners can upload a screen-shot of their landing page which will then be viewed by users for five seconds.  There are two different versions of the service, one where the viewers view your photo, then list everything they can remember from it.  The second is a click test, where the viewers click on the areas they find most prominent or interesting.  This tool can really help you test how first-time viewers are seeing your landing page.  Then you can cater the page around those findings to make your ads more effective!

2.  Website Grader: Website Grader is a simple and effective website tester tool.  Once your site is entered in, Grader will measure your site’s marketing power through SEO statistics, traffic and marketing strategies.  Once finished, they will even give you tips to improve the areas where you may be lacking.  This is a great tool for those “less-expert” of us in the field of development and marketing.

3.  Google Analytics: Without fail, Google Analytics has proven to be one of the most powerful marketing research tools.  Easy enough for beginning users, but with tons of extras and plugins for experts, it suits most online marketing levels.  On top of all this, it’s free!

To capitalize on all of your internet marketing campaigns, use free tools like these to see how people are viewing your site.  This will greatly increase the productivity of your PPC ads, SEO strategies and social media marketing.

By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

We’ve all experienced this before.  I’m typing in “iPod Touch” in a search engine, but accidentally spell out “iPod Tuch.”  I immediately realize my mistake as I see the popular question, “Did you mean: iPod Touch?”, encouraging me to search for the correct terms.  However, many of the listings that pull up are relevant, so I don’t redo the search with the correct spelling.  Then I see the paid search ad on the side with the incorrect search query inserted in.  I can’t help feeling annoyed

PPC ads like I just described implement what’s called a DKI or Dynamic Keyword Insertion technique.  These ads automatically insert search keywords into a paid ad.  This form is popular because, if used correctly, it can produce very specific results that will generate quality traffic.

However, the use of DKI in PPC ads can result in annoyance, as in my situation, mistrust or even generic and weak ad content.  I am going to outline some of the pros and cons of using dynamic keyword insertion in your paid search ads.  Then you can see for yourself if this method is right for you!

PRO:  Customized Ads

Sometimes, DKI can greatly increase your traffic.  For example, when searching for foreclosed homes in Provo, UT, I came across this specified landing page.  It seems like this page would be exactly what someone would be looking for with their search.

CON:  Incoherence

However, with the same site, I found I could type in anything for the name of a city in Utah where I would like to find foreclosures.  The result?  You get the picture.  Obviously, there is no place called Crappy, UT.  With DKI, by allowing any search term at all to be included in your ad or landing page, you run the risk of becoming incoherent and purposefully spam-like to the public eye.

CON:  Generic and Misspelled Ads
When you create a PPC ad using DKI, your wording will need to be deliberately vague, so that multiple terms can be inserted without changing the meaning of the ad.  The problem with this is that the ad will be weak.  Even if the ad does include the specific word that was searched for, there is little likelihood that it will be strong enough content wise to draw a quality click.

All-in-all, pay-per-click ads using DKI appear desperate and can even resemble spam.  If you choose to use this technique in your paid ad, do so carefully and choose only key words that both fit your ad and are relevant to the service or product you are advertising.  Stay tuned for more posts on social media, SEO, web design and PPC!