Also understand the dangers of content advertising versus search and search partners. Content ads on general sites convert so badly that in my reviews of dozens of accounts only THREE keywords (words – not businesses) showed a positive ROI on the thousands they had spent. That said, well targeted content ads can convert better than search. You have to test.

Most businesses will be far better off hiring someone exceptional to do their ppc marketing than in doing it themselves. Do NOT hire someone only because they are “Google certified” because all that means is they have been trained in how to run your ads for maximum income for Google.

You want someone who runs your campaigns so that you spend the least you can to generate the most profitable sales possible. You can tell who is sharp enough to know what they are doing by what they write – like posts such as this one. Dave obviously knows what he is writing.

I don’t know Dave and I don’t know how he interacts with clients or prioritizes his time but I would definitely put him on a very short list of ppc managers to consider.

PPC is a specialty (as I proved many times to SEM companies back when I did it full time) and you need an expert who specializes in it. I don’t do ppc for clients any more but I do point out the best and recommend them as I come across them.

For those who want to know how to evaluate their ppc accounts themselves or to tell if their agency is doing a good job I offer the post I have linked to this comment.

Many thanks

Take care…

Cheers.

You’re dead right. An advertiser/webmaster/SEO would indeed be targeting more than one keyword. The points I mentioned are more tips than cold hard evidence and should of course be treated differently as the particular situation dictates.

I’m not saying multiple keywords are not a good idea to have in the title, but with the recent announcement of personalized search, CTR in organic SEPRS is now a requirement, not just speculation. In a perfect world, there would be a landing page for each keyword (like with PPC) but as we both know, that is rarely the case.

You said “Simply pick the best headline from your best performing AdWords campaign and use that as your headline on your page. Pick the description of the best ad and add that to the meta description”

The problem with this is, any good seo won’t be using his title/meta tags to target just one keyword. In fact, sometimes we target more than one keyword groups (each containing a few keywords) along with several longtails. Now in Adwords, we can have creatives and ads targeting each keyword (or keyword group). Like if you are targeting something like ‘doctor los angeles’, your Creative X may do very well. But for a search query like ‘physician la’ or ’surgeon la’, the same Creative X may not perform well. For seo, I may be using the same landing page for all 3 keywords (doctor/physician/surgeon). So it’s not always feasible to use the best performing creative as your title/meta tags for SEO purposes.

Also, there seems a mistake under Geographic Targeting “Tailoring landing pages to a users *landing page* has”; I guess you meant location (not being picky but just want to prevent any confusions for readers).

Great example. Thanks for stopping by.

Thanks for stopping by and the excellent comment.

We do most of our PPC testing in an isolated sub directory. We always robots.txt exclude this directory and for good measure, add the noindex and noarchive meta tags.

However, it is absolutely essential that the AdWords bot is able to crawl the page(s) you are testing. See here:

http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/fear-the-bots-for-your-quality-score-sanity/
Depending on what we are testing, we then roll the changes out across the “main” site.

Hope that answered your question.

First, a great article. I just re-tweeted it on Twitter. Probably the best single article I have ever read on the benefits of PPC campaigns in 10 other areas.

Here’s my question.

Since PPC is such an excellent proving ground for testing possible web pages for a site, should the PPC “test” web pages be spiderable for Google or should they be in isolation?

If a client doesn’t believe in the validity of new, permanent web pages with different keyword focuses they haven’t used, you can test your PPC theories for a new keyword with a non-spidered web page and then show the client the result. If the isolated PPC web page generates significant traffic and/or converts well then you can persuade the client that the page should be spidered into the entire website.

Or am I overthinking PPC testing for website changes. Should any landing page for a PPC campaign be built into the client’s website as immediately spiderable by Google?

I hope you have time to respond, thanks in advance.

A great way to look at this is creating a first click profile on Google Analytics that will ensure conversions are against those initial keywords that drove a user to your site.

This is really important for known brands, where a high percentage of users will eventually come back on a branded keyword.

Also, the last two lines in your message are really important. Traffic from different vehicles behave differently, splitting this up in Analytics is another great way to view it ..

Thanks for all the great info

Thanks!