Google certainly knows how to squeeze more money out of folks. There is no question about that. But one needs to give credit where credit is do. I do get the fact that mobile ads are designed for folks who want to advertise on mobile phones. Personally, I don’t believe my market is ready for mobile ads. The conversion is atrocious, and you end up burning a lot of money on nothing. But you’ve got to give it up for Google for making desktop ads available on the iPhone.

It’s true that Google is going after its very own mobile users with the introduction of Android, but for them to come out and target one of the fastest growing mobile phones in the world shows that they get it. What I like about the desktop ads for mobile phones such as iPhone is the fact that you get to track them separately (like you would your content ads).

So we are no longer limited to mobile ads for mobile devices. There are more iPhone owners in the world than the total population of my mother country. Being able to target these guys more effectively is going to help a few of us grow faster than expected. But I still don’t believe mobile ads to be conversion friendly. Good for branding? Yes! Good for conversion? I have no evidence for this argument. So I would suggest you take a few anti-depressant before putting a lot of hope in your mobile ads.

Innovation is the only way to survive in a hyper-competitive market. If you can’t stay relevant in your area of expertise, you may as well choose a different career. This concept applies to us pay per click marketers as well. Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and all other search networks are changing all the time, and old methods won’t work in these new days. You are going to have to constantly innovate, optimize, and find other ways to grow.

But folks often think of innovation as recreating the wheel or coming up with something out of this world. The fact is, you don’t have to actually create a new box for yourself to continue your growth. There is such a thing as gradual, evolutionary innovation. In other words, you don’t necessarily have to add new search networks to grow your PPC business. It is possible to improve the existing campaigns and find innovative ways to increase your CTR, quality score, and reduce your bids.

It’s true that folks keep jumping on these new networks (e.g. FaceBook, LinkedIn), and that is just fine, but that is not innovation. That’s early adoption. Folks who jump from one network to another are often left frustrated by their lack of success and keep jumping in hope of better results. But innovating is a few steps above adoption, so unless you take these extra few steps you are going to be an adopter and not an innovator.

Which one are you? Are you an adopter or an innovator?

If you have been following this blog, you probably know how strongly I feel about the merits of SpyFu. SpyFu is a great competitive intelligence tool that gives you a lot of ammunition to chip away at your competitors’ strengths in your niche.

If you have used SpyFu before, you are probably familiar with the above search box. It is your portal to finding what’s working and what’s not for your rivals. But until now, SpyFu allowed you to figure out what your competitors were doing and try to figure out what you were not doing. SpyFu Kombat takes it to the next level by allowing you to figure out what you have in common with your competitors, and what they are doing differently from you. Take a look at the below diagram:

It just goes on to prove my assumption that John McCain is doing a better job in the paid search channel. John Mccain ads show up for almost anything you can search for. But the Obama campaign has done a magnificent job with their organic campaign. They have obviously been helped with bloggers and publishers linking to Obama’s web properties.

But that’s not all. You can also compare these figures on a graph to figure out any historical trends.

You can get down and dirty with these diagrams and figure out what keywords your competitors are using. Now, I don’t compete with SpyFu with my coupon site, but it’s interesting to see what I could have in common with SpyFu.com.

It turns out that I have nothing in common with SpyFu (too bad!). But that doesn’t mean I am hopeless. If I wanted to change my coupon site to compete with SpyFu, I would obviously need a similar or better service. But also, I can use the keywords that SpyFu Kombat brings to light to create content pages to compete with SpyFu. This is just an example and not a very good one. But you get the point. If you know what keywords your competitors are showing up for, it’s easier to customize your pages and create new content to target keywords that your sites are not optimized for.

SpyFu is now charging $50 for this super bad @$$ service. But you get more than SpyFu Kombat. You also get the standard SpyFu service. I personally do recommend signing up for the annual subscription as it helps you save money and protect yourself against any increase in fees. But my experience with SpyFu folks has been great. These guys are in it not for the money but to provide value to us marketers. If you compare SpyFu with any of their competitors, there is no question that SpyFu provides the best bang for the buck by a big margin.

Who Shouldn’t get SpyFu Kombat:

SpyFu Kombat is not for everyone. If you are lazy to get down and dirty with your SEO and paid campaigns, SpyFu Kombat is not for you. If you have money to burn, you are more than welcome to spend it on SpyFu. SpyFu is for serious marketers (emphasis on serious). You don’t have to be a guru to take advantage of SpyFu & Kombat, but you need to have the spirit and the backbone to get down and do some great things. The sky is the limit with SpyFu, but like a powerful machine gun, if you don’t use it, it’s not worth the money. But if you are ready to challenge your competitors head on and make some cash in the process, SpyFu should definitely be a part of your arsenal.

Google Adwords is known for having a wealth of matching options for advertisers to use. With Broad, Phrase, and Exact matching you can pretty much define what phrase you want to show up for. But one matching option that goes unnoticed is embedded matching. Here is how normal matching workds:

Broad = Keyword1 Keyword 2

Exact = [Keyword1 Keyword 2]

Phrase =  ”Keyword1 Keyword 2″

So these are pretty straightforward. You show up for the exact matching if someone types your keyword order in the exact order and everything. With phrase matching you are a bit more lenient, but with Broad matching almost anything goes. Now here is how embedded matching workds:

- [Keyword1 Keyword2]

This is very powerful as it allows you to define the exact phrase that you don’t want your ads to show up. So golf for young kids would shoud up if you put “young kids” in the bracket. But the only way your ad won’t show up is when people search for “Young Kid” only. There are many ways to play around with this matching option, but at the end of the day, I have not seen my ads CTR improve dramatically by using this. It is only used to get rid of exact negative terms that you don’t want to show up for. Now I wonder why Google doesn’t talk about this feature very much…

Do you use embedded matching for your campaigns? have you seen decent results? Please share your thoughts.

I don’t know about you but I am in love with the StumbleUpon advertising platform. It’s not that complicated, and you basically don’t have many options, but boy it can deliver cheap traffic to a website. StumbleUpon currently charges 5 cents a visit (not a click), and that is a decent price for getting traffic to a new site. The system does not have complicated budget options and the minimum cut off for traffic is 100 visits. 

Like any system, there are major glitches in the Stumbleupon service. For instance, often your funds do show up correctly in the system. The approval process is long and rejection notes are often as vague as they come. But I can’t tell you how frustrating it is not being able to convert this traffic to sales. StumbleUpon is great for getting a lot of people to your site and just have them look around but don’t expert a decent conversion rate with these guys. I have gotten as low 0.1% conversion rate with StumbleUpon which is dismal. The traffic is cheap, and you can actually make money with it, but I recommend StumbleUpon for cool or heavy content sites and not for sites that only focus on sales. There are few strategies that help you increase your conversion rate on SU (I will talk about them in future posts), but don’t go around building your PPC business around SU alone.

One of the most underrated advertising services that often goes under the radar is ClickRiver. So what is Click River? It’s your key to the kingdom that is called Amazon. Amazon is one of the most visited sites on the Internet. A large number of people visit Amazon on an everyday basis with their credit cards handy and ready to buy, so you do have a whole lot of people that are in the shopping and buying mode. If you have used Amazon in the past couple of years, you have probably seen listings that are similar to the following:

The good thing about Clickriver is that you can choose to pay by category. Whether you have a service on stocks or just a programming product that you want to sell, you can list it on Amazon using the ClickRiver service.  Here are the main categories that you can use for your ads:

• Automotive Services
• Home Services
• Leisure Industry
• Education
• Personal Finance
• Health & fitness services
• Technology Education

There are many subcategories to choose from, but best of all, you can use Amazon’s geo-targeting to show your ads only in local areas! Now that is very powerful. Clickriver is very similar to the advertising system offered by Stumbleupon. It is a very basic system that does it’s job brilliantly. I personally have found that ClickRiver traffic is more qualified and converts better than Stumbleupon. A lot of people feel that the traffic from ClickRiver should convert as well as Google Adwords to be a viable option, but the traffic is cheaper, and if you have hit the ceiling with Adwords, can help you acquire more customers.

Should you use ClickRiver? It really depends on your business. A lot of people don’t even bother with Clickriver, but you’d be surprised how well it works in some verticals.

Google has announced that they will be updating their quality score in the upcoming days for the Adwords service. Google’s quality score is their crown jewel, and now they are improving it to make provide more relevant results to search. So what does it mean for you as an advertiser?

• Uncertainty: The new Quality Score will be calculated at the time of query which means your quality score can go up and down at different times during the day. But what is certain is that landing page quality has become just a bit more important as its score is calculated less frequently.
• Inactive Keywords: Google used to make keywords that were found irrelevant to your site inactive unless you paid a large amount of money per click. Google has announced that they will activate those keywords and show them if there is a relevant search out there.
• Bye Bye Minimum Bids: not really, but Google will now show what it takes to show on the first page. First page bid estimates are really what matter to most marketers, so this is an interesting move by Google. You are going to probably pay more in competitive markets to end up on the first page, but at the same time, you don’t have to use the First page bid estimates as your minimum. You can bid below it and still be shown on the subsequent pages.

The effects will be known soon, and I am sure there will be a lot of complaints by affiliates and PPC marketers. But that’s usually given. Check inside Adwords for more details.

Now I get this question a lot. If you have read any books about pay per click marketing, you have probably heard the saying that you shouldn’t graduate to Yahoo! and MSN Adcenter until you have pretty much mastered Google Adwords. The truth is, a lot of concepts that you learn by using Google Adwords can be applied to Yahoo! and MSN. But at the same time, you won’t waste your money away as Google usually has the best traffic. But a lot of people start with all three at the same time, and that is understandable as well. Now here is the thing. What should you do if you have exhausted all the options with the three services above?

If you are a one man business, then you probably have enough to worry about with the top three PPC services. But most big companies are not satisifed with the amount of traffic they can get from these three, so they look at other services such as ASK, Miva, ClickRiver, and even Stumbleupon. I personally have had so much success with Stumbleupon, but Stumbleupon is not really for everyone. In fact, they won’t even approve your site if you don’t meet their content criteria.

But of all the other 3rd party PPC services that I have tried, Miva seems to have the most reliable traffic. Now you can’t expect to get Google type results from Miva, but you don’t waste your money with Miva either. Best of all, these guys are very responsive to questions, which helps a lot.

This is a question that has probably been asked since Google introduced the feature. When you set up a campaign in Google Adwords, Google by default puts your campaign’s ad-serving to be optimized:

As you see in the above picture, by choosing the “Optimize” option, you allow Google to show your better-performing ads more often. So that’s a good thing right? After all, your better ads keep showing up, and you get better results. Add to that the fact that Google is out to take care of you, and you are golden, right? Wrong! The last time I checked Google was still a public company, out to maximize its advertising revenue. By choosing the optimize option you simply kill any chance that you have for conducting a true A/B testing on your ads. Don’t forget that Google chooses this option by default, so you need to pay extra attention every time  you set up a campaign. You don’t want to spend thousands of dollars and find out that your A/B testing never happened.

Now here is a general rule of thumb: love Google but never trust it. This pretty much applies to all Google dilemmas.

You have probably tried the StumbleUpon service by now. It’s a Web 2.0 service that allows you to stumble upon interesting sites. It’s a very addictive service and extremely useful in finding good authority sites. But did you know that you can advertise on StumbleUpon? In essence, StumbleUpon allows you to take advantage of their pay per view system to get visitors to your site through their service.

Unlike Google Adwords, StumbleUpon allows you to pay per visit and not per click per se. So your site will load and the visitor will have a glimpse before you are charged the whole $0.05 for it. Not only that, StumbleUpon doesn’t work with keywords but categories. So the traffic is targeted but not by keyword.

The downside to StumbleUpon is that the traffic is not highly convertible. The traffic that you get on StumbleUpon is more interested in doing research in surfing and less in buying. You can obviously optimize your landing pages to get higher conversions with StumbleUpon but the conversion will never reach the Adwords level.

So is the pay per view model here to stay? I think so. The PPV model is suitable for businesses that want to get eyeballs to their sites and not necessarily convert them. Besides there is no click fraud to deal with and the traffic can be cheap. I am sure at some point StumbleUpon will increase the cost per visit and make this system more complex but right now you would be out of your mind not to try StumbleUpon and their PPV model.