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Searching for the Best Search Marketing Strategy Contest
PPC Summit is calling all internet marketers to submit their proven most effective Search Marketing strategy or technique that increased your conversions!

All you need to do is Answer the following questions

Question #1: What Increased Your Search Marketing ROI Last Year?
Question #2: What one thing could you point to and say “THAT made the difference!”

>> Click here to Submit Your PPC Best Practices to PPC Summit.com

How To Enter The Contest:

• Please provide two paragraphs describing your most effective SEM tip, technique or strategy.
• Only one submission per person and make sure to include your name and email in the spaces provided on the submission form.
• The winner will also be recognized on all participating blog host sites.
• Stand by to see if your Best Strategy submission is chosen as the winner, and you will win a FREE FULL CONFERENCE PASS TO THE NEXT PPC SUMMIT!

Contest Rules:
PPC Summit will review all submissions and choose one overall winner on May 9. The winner will be notified by email and posted on all contest blog hosts by May 12. If your submission is chosen as the winner, you will win a FREE two-day conference pass to the PPC Summit of your choice ( San Francisco May 19-20 or Los Angeles Sept. 25-26).

About PPC Summit:
The PPC Summits are educational two-day Internet Marketing workshops which connect you with the world’s leading pay per click experts. You won't want to miss the upcoming PPC Summit to learn from the Microsoft Keynote and other industry leaders during two full days of expert SEM lead generation and sales producing strategies.

Stay tuned! The lucky winner will be announced and notified by May 12. 
Thank you for participating. Good luck!

Is Google Putting A Hurting On Your Expectation Management With Clients?

When trying to convince new PPC prospects to sign up or persuade existing clients to transition over to your organization for paid search services is probably getting more and more difficult as Google continues to "inflate" the CPC prices, especially with ROI% sensitive clients and markets and also with a recession knocking on the door. In the Political World, Google's rather extreme relevancy standards is putting a too much unnecessary "brain damage" on the search agencies and other search folks who are managing these campaigns. If you working on Political based campaigns, it's a friggin nightmare.

Since traditional paid search within the Search Network accompanied by conversion based analytics is becoming an endangered territory lately these days, I am seeing, especially within the Political Arena, that promising specific ROAS targets is like throwing darts at a moving target during a category 4 hurricane. It's not an easy life to perform under those expectations. So, to help protect yourself against the Google Game of inflated CPCs, it's time to pass the "reality" onto the clients.

Here's a real life example of a Political Candidate where Google's Interpretation of Poor Relevancy has forced all keywords to either $5 or $10 min CPC to activate.

Adgroup:
Cutting Taxes

Keywords:

• cut taxes
• cut tax spending
• Child Tax Credits (poor, pay $5)
• Tax Relief (poor, pay $5)
• help tax relief (poor, pay $5)
• dividend tax (poor, pay $5)
• death tax (poor, pay $5)

Ad/Creative:
[Candidate Name] on Cutting Taxes
Repeal Death Tax. Make Child Tax
Credit Permanent. Support!

Landing page: Relevant Content based on "Cutting Taxes, dividend tax, etc..."

Summary of this Google Hell:
This one adgroup was considered not relevant enough by Google and we were told to break down even further and have separate landing pages created for each of those rejected keywords. You've gotta be kidding me, especially when you have a too many hands in the pot, not to mention the sensitivity of the political messaging which is carefully approved.

Ok, so in the political World, the process for setting things up and putting approved content and strategies in motion is not as easy as you would think. For example, just to get a PPC campaign started, here are just a few elements of "reality" that need to be taken care of.  In most cases, there is no past history to help with Quality Score, so you have that problem. To play the Google Relevancy game, the creation of 20+ landing pages just for PPC is a monumental task, especially with the small, State and Local level races:

Political Campaigns at the "Non-National" Level typically have the following:

1. Separate firm who designs the site
2. Separate PPC Marketing Firm who is responsible for messaging, getting analytics tracking code on the site, keywords selection, reporting, yada, yada, yada.
3. Separate 3rd Party Donation Payment Processor
4. Lengthy review process
   1. Campaign Managers
   2. Candidates review
   3. Consultant review
   4. Oh yeah, Google Editorial Review

In Conclusion:
As Google increases the costs, forces agencies and search marketers to spend more time breaking down more and more campaigns and adgroups even further, it is only good business sense to not only protect yourself from the madness, but to save $$ on MIDOL (hee hee). If the ROAS% was 500%, perhaps communicate to the client that based on Google's inflation of CPC, that they lower their ROAS projections to say 300% and also start monetizing other actionable elements such as newsletter sign ups, contact us forms, phone calls, etc...

Don't let Google ruin your client's relationship. Embrace the reality and it's your obligation to communicate it to the client. If you don't, you will lose that client.

IndexTools & Yahoo: You Must Accept The Agreement Or Goodbye Customer

One of the first things I worried about with the Yahoo purchase of Indextools, was the impact it would have on the agencies who have many of their own clients under this umbrella. So, in the spirit of sharing what I know, below is word for word what Indextools had sent me and I am showing to you. If you are an existing or past customer of Indextools, below is some important transition information that you will need to know.

Clients & Partner to Accept new Yahoo Agreement:
In case you have not received In the coming days, we’ll require our partners and clients to accept a new Yahoo! agreement. We will make this agreement available to you soon for your review and let you know when your acceptance is required. The only issue so far with this is the next sentence which basically says "either you are with us or against us" It is important to note that our clients and partners must accept this agreement to continue using the service.

If you accept, it's FREE
Yahoo! currently intends to provide the service FREE of charge to clients and partners who accept the Yahoo! agreement. Further to this, it should be noted that Yahoo! does not intend to add any new partnerships or direct clients in the short to midterm, while we prepare for the next roll-out wave. This means that both our partners and clients will be in a unique position to either provide a service or use a service to which the rest of the market will not have ready or immediate access.

Only Indextools can Add Accounts of Projects
This is an interesting section to read. To avoid a deluge of accounts being added to the system, we have temporarily suspended the ability for you to add accounts/projects to the system. Your account manager has full access to do this and I would ask you contact them directly if you wish to add an account or project to the system. Please understand we have a lot going on at present and be mindful of requests to add 10s and/or 100s of accounts/projects to the system at this time.

Ongoing Support:
Our support capabilities will remain unaffected so that we can continue to serve both our partners and clients alike over the coming weeks.

Conclusion:
C'mon, this was eventually going to happen anyway, especially with the shift in company buyouts to control the market share of the Internet properties as well as advertising expenditures. Indextools offers a great solution for a much cheaper price than Omniture, Atlas, etc... Perhaps, this is Yahoo's attempt to out-due Google for their Google Analytics purchase of Urchin back in the day. As long as they continue to enhance their product and make it available to everyone at a lower cost, it's a win-win for everyone.

Paid Search Becoming A Software Idea Goldmine

As the life cycle of PPC continues to evolve, we are seeing an increased visibility by known and unknown software companies who are building programs to help PPC Marketers "novice and experienced" do their job. Problem: They need to realize that even though automating the PPC process can be beneficial, removing the human element of past experience, creativity and the ability to think "outside the box" can not be altered or automated. Throughout the past year, I have seen these  companies making strides to improve the process. Let's discuss....

One company came to me and asked me for a review of their product and not only was that a great experience to be in a position to review this software from an entrepreneur perspective, but also as a SEMGeek. Now, even though they provided me with very small compensation for my time and I did not want to give away the farm, I simply reviewed their business model, asked questions regarding methods/techniques and general audience targeting questions. After looking back from this experience, it reaffirmed my previous thoughts that the market is telling us that the future of PPC is going to be about saving time and streamlining the processes rather than strategic hands-on implementation. In addition, I am not so sure that packaging PPC software as an "all-in-one" solution promising amazing results based on automation and marketing it to the mass public is the correct answer.

Another company contacted me recently and also asked for me to review their software product. I did not review it yet but this one is a little bit different than the previous company. This software is geared to building a solution to help agencies and Search Marketers effectively and simultaneously manage/create campaigns for Google, Yahoo and MSN all in one place like the Google Adwords Editor. Ironically, this company contacted me based on my past article entitled 2008 Wishlist: Universal Adwords Editor for Yahoo Search and MSN AdCenter which is exactly what this company is doing.

In conclusion:
In a world filled with entrepreneurs, great ideas and a booming industry, it's very easy to expect this movement from companies. The part that scares me a little is the intentions of the software firms. The last thing we want is for some software firms to preach what they want you to hear so they can profit from their evangelistic endeavors. What I mean is, if they created a solution for which "they" think is important doesn't make it right or even factual. Also, as Google, Yahoo and MSN continue to change their algorithms and push towards a more viral and contextual marketplace, how are these companies complimenting their efforts for that? Does it matter to them? Is it just a matter of time and already in the pipeline to lure in more investors? Who knows!!