The biggest revelation that was drawn from this and the subsequent thread over on WebmasterWorld was that Google was flushing out even the “highest quality” affiliates. They were even flushing out direct linking affiliates that were advertising with the parent merchants consent. I wont go into the rights and wrongs of all this, it’s been done to death on the WMW thread already and I do not want to discuss the whole Google Vs Affiliates topic again either. What I do want to point out is what happened next.

On Wednesday, November 11th, the Inside AdWords blog announced Product Listing Ads. Product listing ads are image ads that appear along with the “normal” sponsored listings on a Google search result page except they have images, merchant name and prices associated with the ad.

Pay only for results: Product Listing Ads are charged on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, which means that you only pay when a user clicks on your ad and completes a purchase on your site. Because Product Listing Ads is charged on a CPA basis, it offers a risk-free way for you to reach a larger audience on Google.com.

While this is still in very limited beta it’s quite interesting. I was wondering how Google would go about charging merchants the CPA. I’m not sure how long this has been a feature in Google Merchant Center, but you can now link your AdWords account to your merchant center account.

You can now specify your AdWords account information in your Google Merchant Center account. By doing this, you can surface your product information in your AdWords ads. AdWords campaigns that are linked to Google Merchant Center accounts will receive the benefit of richer, more specific product information in their creatives; including images and prices.

You can add multiple AdWords accounts to a single Google Merchant Center account. To do this, simply enter your AdWords Customer ID under Add an AdWords Customer ID: and click Add. Once you’ve entered your AdWords Customer ID in your Google Merchant Center account, you’ll need to create a Product Extension within the Campaign Settings section of your AdWords account and link it to your Google Merchant Center account.

So now Google is allowing merchants to link their product feeds to AdWords and set a price they want to pay for each sale? Isn’t that what a PPC affiliate does/Used to do? Only this time, Google being the owner of the search engine can offer what no other affiliate can, images and branding directly in the search results.

Could it be that Google flushed out all the affiliates to make room for the merchants that it is promoting on a CPA basis? What if Google were to allow it’s affiliate network merchants opt in to product listing ads? All their feeds, data, images and prices are already uploaded to the network. Couldn’t/Shouldn’t Google start displaying product listing ads in the search results for it’s own merchants and getting a nice juicy CPA for it? Doesn’t this make sense? Google has all the data it needs to display the most profitable product ads too. Affiliate marketing is a multi billion dollar industry. Why wouldn’t they get on board? Especially if it compliments their existing search results. It appears that others have come to the same conclusion. Google have since announced more AdWords bans and in typical Google fashion, refuse to communicate clearly.

Google has just announced a whole slew of new ad formats, is slowly making organic results less visible and now with product listing ads is monetizing the remaining space above the fold. It’s also worth noting that this month, Google also released DFA analytics. It’s all mounting up.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is great for merchants and I am a firm believer that Google can and should do what they want with their own search engine. I am also not sounding the death knell of affiliate PPC marketing. I do however believe that PPC affiliates are going to be up against a pretty powerful 800 Lb Gorilla in the very near future.

I’d like to end with a quote over on WMW by the very wise Netmeg (You should follow her on twitter too):

But nothing pisses me off more than seeing all the talk about how Google has destroyed your business. Google has NOT destroyed your business. If your business cannot survive without Google, then YOU have destroyed your business..

…Google is not responsible for the success or failure of your business. YOU are.

I was wondering why Google was flushing affiliates out of the AdWords system and not so much the organic results. This is, in my opinion, a possible reason why. Google is making room for itself. Time to focus a little more on paid search? What do you think?

With PPC, you can get detailed demographic data, hourly conversion data and of course what we are going to touch on here… typo conversion data.

PPC data comes with a huge bonus, conversion data. If you bid on typos, you can see what typos are actually converting. While the volume is usually a lot lower, over time, this conversion data can be very valuable in optimizing for organic search engine rankings.

Lets use the screenshot here as an example. If you were presented with this data, you can see that the search term “londkon hotel” over the past year and a half has had 314 conversions. With each conversion being valued at $80, that’s a little over $25000 in revenue for this “fictional” company.

If this “fictional” company was to organically optimize their organic rankings for for the search term “london hgotel” they would probably have seen zero results. If they had optimized for “londkon hotel” they would have seen some fantastic results. Assuming the organic number one position gets (a conservative) double the number one PPC result, that would be an additional $50,000 in revenue for this company. That’s just for one search term! More than likely, they wouldn’t have organically optimized for ANY typos.

Caveat: Bidding on typos in AdWords and Yahoo will usually result in a poor quality score for those keywords.

Now, if we take this data and write a press release, an article and a blog post all containing links to the company site with the anchor text “londkon hotel” that would probably be enough to rank their site for that search term seeing there is much less competition for it. Organic search engine optimisation without conversion data for each keyword is not where you want to be focusing your efforts. Most online companies engaged in active search engine marketing know that and focus on their core keywords. This leaves the competition in the typo landscape for that niche much easier to compete in.

So there’s another good reason why SEO and PPC compliment each other. So while you competitors are eating each other alive in the PPC Pirahna tank, take a step back and see how you can take advantage.

There is a lot to be said, both good and bad for the various keyword research tools but there is no better data than your own (organic) conversion data. Remember Google Analytics? You set it up on your site many moons ago when you were writing your first “welcome to our website” page? Did you remember to set up your goals? If you never set up goals, go do it now. Goal tracking is exactly what it says on the tin. It could be a sale, a form submit, a request for more information, an ad click or a new RSS subscription. When you define your goal, analytics lets you track that goal like a just like a PPC conversion but for all traffic, not just PPC traffic. I’ll briefly run through a quick goal setup below. There is usually a lot more to it (e-commerce value tracking) but for the sake of this post, I’ll keep it simple.

1) Set Up Your Goal.
Set your goal name and the page defined as a conversion for you. Think of the page you are going to install your AdWords conversion tracking code on. The beauty here is that you don’t even need to add any additional code onto your goal page. It’s already there (assuming you have Google Analytics code on all pages of your site).

2) Set Up Your Sales Funnel.
The next part is optional but highly recommended for analyzing your visitor behavior throughout you conversion path. You basically only add the pages a visitor must go through to complete a conversion. On an e-commerce site, that is usually the shopping cart pages. It’s as simple as copying and pasting the URLs from your address bar.

3) Locate Your Organic Keyword Data.
When your goal has been setup and you have left it enough time for analytics to collect the data, you can now go and “mine” your exclusive keyword list for the top keywords. Log into Google Analytics and go to the “keywords” submenu under the “Traffic Sources” parent menu item.

4) Find The Best Keywords To Target.
Now you will be presented with a list of all the keywords (both long and short tail) that visitors typed in to find your site. What we need to do now is find the keywords that we know actually convert. Google has made this very easy for us. Above the list of keywords, there is a “Goal Conversion” tab. Simply click on that and you can sort through all your keywords that resulted in a sale, signup or whatever you defined as a conversion when setting up your goals.

5) Mine The Gold.
On the Goal Conversion tab you can organize your keywords by their conversion rate. See where I’m going with this? View 500 keywords per page using the drop down box below the keyword list and arrange your keywords by goal conversion rate. Now it’s a simple matter of copying all your converting keywords (that you can see clearly convert) and pasting them into your own preferred keyword editing tool or a spreadsheet.

6) A Final Check.
When you have all the keywords modified and pasted into AdWords, use the duplicate keyword finder tool in AdWords Editor to make sure the keywords are not in any of your other campaigns, assuming that you already couldn’t stand the temptation and created your campaigns first.

Conclusion
There you have it. A rock solid keyword list that your data shows converts. You even get to see accurate volume information on them (unfortunately not actual searches per month and the likes). Why start off with a list of keywords from costly keyword tools when you already have the best keyword tool right under your nose for free?

It should be noted that I have simplified the process a little above and you should be aware that organic and PPC traffic does not always convert the same. Just bear that in mind. Also, it might be worth pointing out that a lot of the keywords that you copy from your analytics, you will be ranking organically for pretty highly already.

So what are you waiting for? If you have not set up goal tracking in your analytics package, go do it now. If you are looking for the best possible keyword list to kick start your PPC campaign use your own data. You can then expand on your list as you grow your campaign.

*** Hat tip to Mr Gary Lee for the inspiration for this post.

1) Get an SSL cert.

You might not need one but having an SSL cert for ALL forms on your site shows search engines that you are serious about security and reassures your users that the information they are providing is being sent over a secure channel. If you were a web spammer would you care about any security or privacy of your website visitors?

2) Register your domain for ten years.

At a cost of about $10 a year, registering your domain for ten years shows search engines that you are serious about your business and domain. Spammers are renowned for registering cheap .info domains to do whatever nasty business they are planning and then letting them drop when they are caught. If you were spamming would you shell out your money to register your domain for ten years if you knew what you were doing would probably get you banned from the search engines?

3) Get a dedicated IP address.

If you cannot get a dedicated IP, make sure you are not sharing your IP with any “less than desirable” websites. This is a widely debated topic but the general consensus among SEOs is that a static IP address is better. There are a few technical reasons for this and Barry sums it up pretty nicely here. Getting a dedicated IP address can be as simple an affair as calling up your hosting company and asking or at most paying a few extra Euros a month for the privilege and peace of mind.

4) Get listed in the top authority directories.

Quality paid and free directories show search engines you are willing to shell out sometimes big bucks to promote your business and market it online. Adding your site to the Yahoo Directory and Business.com are costly annual fees for the average webmaster but the authority gained by both listings can make a huge difference. Likewise, a DMOZ listing shows search engines that a human manually reviewed your site and deemed it to be worthy of classification among the best in it’s category (It’s debatable how much of a “review” a paid submission to Yahoo or Business.com gets you).

5) Use factual information for your Whois data.

Don’t hide behind domain privacy services if you don’t have a legitimate need to. There is evidence that search engines can see right through this “wall” anyway and it makes your site less trustworthy to normal (albeit tech savvy) visitors/customers. Make sure the whois data matches the contact details on your site and in your privacy policy too. Have a read of the post on Whois Data and SEO by Adam Sharp. Adam goes through a session at PubCon last year about the topic with Matt Cutts and is well worth the read should you disagree on this point.

It should be noted that after implementing all over the above there has been a noticeable increase in search engine rankings, quality score and overall online visibility for not only our own sites but our client sites also.

While there is no real way to test exactly what effect each has on how search engines perceive your site, they are common sense, real world methods to get that extra authority for your domain with very little effort. Many people have reported that using the above methods can dramatically improve SEO efforts and along with a general “site cleanup” get search engine penalties lifted. Try them for yourself, you have absolutely nothing to lose (except for a few extra Euros a year).

What other methods have worked well for you? What other methods are within the dedicated webmaster/business owner control?

The following advice is based on questions received from our clients and from companies who have come to us seeking consultation.

1) Having a non-converting landing page.
I would estimate that about 90% of our clients come to us either directing PPC traffic to their home page, or directing it to a standard product they are advertising/selling page. It is very easy to get caught up in the excitement of PPC advertising and the instant gratification the search engines promise but just throwing traffic at your site will not cut it. If you are advertising a product for the first time You absolutely need a tailor made landing page for that product. The page should cater for PPC visitors only and be very targeted. You should have split testing or multi variant testing set up on this page before you start sending traffic to it. When you have the optimal landing page (according to your tests) then start to focus on the intracies of PPC bid management, gap surfing, bid jamming and all that fancy stuff. Your landing page is also an essential part in getting your AdWords quality score perfect from the start. Your landing page will make or break your PPC campaign. Do it right from the get go.

2) Installing only one form of tracking.
The majority of accounts came to us from other PPC management agencies and a lot of what we see is quite shocking. Many accounts have not installed their conversion tracking code and any that did left it at that. For example, if you use AdWords and sell online You need to install e-commerce tracking to track each and every order. If you are not comfortable with the sometimes complicated setup, at least use the basic value tracking in your conversion tracking code.

3) Not tracking the correct metrics.
It may take more time but if you can, set the value of each sale in your conversion tracking code or e-commerce tracking code as the profit per sale. This will allow you to see exactly how profitable your campaigns are and focus more on the keywords, ad groups and products that are making your more money. If you run a completely e-commerce based product site, set the value tracking as your profit and your e-commerce up normally. It’s win-win. At the end of the day, your ROI is the most important metric (generally). Make sure you know exactly what it is. (And I mean EXACTLY, not just a rough estimate from how positive your bank balance is at the end of the month.

4) Failing to optimize ad serving for your ads.
By default, AdWords sets your ad creatives to be “optimized”. This means that they display the ad with the highest CTR more often. You do not want that. You want to be able to make that decision yourself after a statistically sound sample size (about 30-100 clicks per ad). In your campaign settings, simply change your ad serving preference to “Rotate Ads Evenly”.

5) Using broad match only.
When adding new keywords, add them with ALL match types. The match type with the highest quality will be shown more often and with higher placement. You can make decisions as to which one to keep down the line based on the ROI data of each.

6) Entering the content network without modifying your bids.
This is our favorite one. We can increase a campaign ROI by up to 300% relatively quickly with this one! Many advertisers are STILL opting into the content network as part of their search campaign. Don’t opt out completely, simply duplicate your campaign and set it to content network only. Make sure you set your bids much lower to begin with and optimize accordingly. Running ads on the content network and search network can skew your ROI data and force you to make bad decisions with your campaigns.

7) Not running content network reports.
This is a fairly new one. Content network campaigns can be VERY profitable if managed correctly and they have the added benefit of being a wonderful way to brand your product or service, even if a user never clicks on them. Make sure you run a placement performance report and act accordingly. Block non converting/spam sites and perhaps think of running a site targeted CPM campaign on the ones that convert well.

8) Not testing your ad position.
Many advertisers want the top spot on the PPC engines. While in a lot of cases, the head men/women upstairs insist on this, this can usually have a negative effect. It is important to test the ROI (remember, total profit-total cost) for each position. In a LOT of cases there is more money to be made from being in positions 2-6 as a result of the lower cost of attaining those visitors/leads/customers.

9) Not day parting.
While many consider this an advanced form of pay per click management, it most certainly is not. While there are many caveats, Only showing your ads at certain times of the day and indeed only at certain days of the month can decrease the number of window shoppers clicking on your ad and again…. increase your overall ROI. It can can also free up some monthly budget for spending on the top positions if they are most profitable.

10) Bidding high to increase your quality score.
The small part that CTR has in PPC quality score is normalized to it’s position. Don’t bother spending a fortune on top position clicks just to bring your CTR up in the hopes of improving your quality score.

11) Hoping your quality score will get better.
You may notice that your quality score fluctuates from Good to poor different times of the day. sometimes you can still get a lot of quality traffic when it changes to “good” for those few hours. But something is wrong, fix it.

12) Failing to run the search query performance report.
Running the Search Query Performance report should be done at least once a week to see what words in phrases that trigger your ad on broad match should not be showing your ad. You can then add those words to your negative keyword list. Simple, effective and will improve your CTR and ROI.

There are many other mistakes that one can make with their AdWords account. Many simple and silly and many a little more complicated. The list above are the ones that we see time and time again. If you can avoid those, you will be in excellent shape and in most cases will prevent you from having to go to a PPC management company to fix your problems. Feel free to add to this list in the comments below.

1) Search Engine Real Estate
The more space your name and message occupy in a search engine result page, the better. Eye tracking studies have shown that visibility above the fold of a search engine result page is vital.

Thanks to Enquiro for the image and tests. As you can see, there are some small differences with each search engine. Enquiro did a fantastic job with their research into these studies. Below you can see the “Eye Share” according to the respective positions.

As you can see from the eye tracking report, bidding on your company name or your branded terms is one less piece of screen real estate that your competition can show up in.

2) Branding.
The more your name is out there the better. Most PPC search engines also have a content network where your company name and ad can be seen across thousands of websites. Obviously there are some caveats to this, but in general, the more a customer sees your company name, the more trust that instills. If someone blogs about you or mentions your name in an article, there is a very strong chance that your ad will appear on the page with the reference. Scott over at Marketing Pilgrim has some useful ideas on using PPC for branding. Some may be less than savory methods (Bidding on your competitions names and weaknesses) but there is some useful starting points.

3) Control.
Just like any PPC ad, you control the message. You control where the user goes. A generic company name search usually brings up the home page in the organic results. With PPC, you can promote special offers and bring users to a target sales page customized to their demographic or region. You can also add phone numbers and time sensitive information to your ad.

4) Spelling.
I cannot tell you how many people come to our site searching for our name so misspelled that it does not even show up in the “Did you mean…” results in Google. When you are bidding on your own name, you can bid on variations and common (and obscure) misspellings and snag those loose end searchers.

5) Defence.
In many markets, brand name trademark holders have a constant battle against their competition tactically outbidding them on their own trademark and branded keywords. Bidding on your own terms allows you to actively “counter attack” any negative ads being run by your competitors. While you can request that your trademark not be used in your competitions ads, you cannot stop them bidding on the keywords themselves.

We bid on our own keywords, site name and some branded words. Why do you or don’t you bid on your company name or brand keywords?

Hat tip to Christine Parfitt who runs a wonderful Australian Search Engine Marketing Company for some clarity on some of the points.

Increase the reach of your ads through our content network.
On May 14^th, The Ask Sponsored Listings Team will roll-out an exciting new feature – contextual targeting. With contextual targeting, you can seamlessly extend your pay-per-click search campaigns to sites in our content network.
Reaching over 34 million unique users each month, the ASL content network includes premium content sites such as Match.com, Citysearch, Evite, and Ticketmaster and more. Ads are targeted to publishers’ web pages by matching ad content and keywords to page content so the ads displayed are highly targeted to the reader’s interests.
The email reads as follows:

This I am sure will be a great new addition to the ASK.com PPC Management offering. I am a huge fan of ASK.com as it has some amazing conversion rates in some markets.

I have no idea if they will enforce a ridiculous ten cent minimum bid for the content network (somehow I doubt it) like Yahoo! does. It will be interesting to see how this one progresses.