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It’s the holiday season and a lot of first-time pay per click marketers are running campaigns. PPC marketing is an excellent way to capitalize on the busy holiday season. But, as with every revenue generating system, it pays to be careful–particularly this time of year. To that end, following are two things you can do to guard against click fraud this season.

Conduct Data Analysis: You get a wealth of campaign reports when you run pay per click campaigns. Take some time to go through them and do some data analysis.

Where are your clicks coming from? Are they converting? Does the referral source seem suspicious? Is your account being drained of dollars very quickly?

You don’t have to be an internet marketing guru to understand these reports. They are provided to help increase your ROI, so use them.

Set Affordable Ad Budgets: This is probably the simplest way to guard against click fraud, and is one of the things that make pay per click marketing so attractive.

Following is the key thing to remember when setting your PPC ad budget . . . set it to get the most exposure for your ads, without breaking the bank. This can be a tricky balance as you have to figure out the most profitable keywords and phrases to bid on that will: (i) bring in the most business; (ii) this time of year; (iii) via this medium (ie, the internet).

Confused by PPC Marketing: Get the Training You Need
And, this is why it’s important to know what you’re doing when use pay per click marketing. It pays to get pay per click marketing training to run successful holiday campaigns – indeed, year-round PPC campaigns – from the beginning. 

In our latest newsletter, we discussed how to Get the Biggest Bang for Your PPC Buck this Holiday Season. We want to to take another look at this topic and add a little bit more to it. The holiday season is so short and the economy is still struggling, so we’re staying on you a little bit so you can get the most out of it and start off the new year in good shape. 

Hire Help: one of the best things you can do right now is to hire help or outsource work. “But,” you may be thinking, “I can’t afford to hire help. My sales don’t support adding additional staff.”

We don’t mean hire staff to help with sales; we mean hire help so you can get sales. For example, if you haven’t done your “holiday” keyword research, then outsource it so you can get that Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa, Solstice campaign up and going!

Start Early: Do you notice that every year the holiday decorations, holiday TV ads and holiday radio announcements seem to come earlier every year? This is because merchants are extending their selling season.

After all, the sooner shoppers start thinking about the holidays, the sooner they start shopping. What have you done to extend your holiday sales season? Offer early bird holiday coupons on you landing pages, use holiday language in all of your pay per click ads, “decorate your website, blog, landing pages (ie, use holiday themes), etc.

As an online marketer, your holiday doesn’t have a definitive date; it’s not Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Day or New Years Day. Your holiday has a “selling” season – and it’s right now. Are your pay per click campaigns reflecting that? If not, then check out the AdWords Advantage Online Summit - it’s a must-attend online training event to help pay per click advertisers increase AdWords results!

Recently, Google started sending pay per click marketers their account performance data via email. This information has always been available to PPC marketers, but you had to log into your account to get it.

The reason getting this information via email is so important is because it:
(i) reminds you to check on your pay per click campaigns; and (ii) allows you to take a few minutes to tweak what may not be working.

So if you see an email with the following subject line land in your inbox, take a break and see what it says, for one or two insights gleaned from these reports can significantly increase your ROI. AdWords Oct 2009 Account Performance. Customer ID: (Your Customer ID Number)?

This is for October 2009, obviously.
Following is one way to quickly use the info in your Google’s Account Performance Reports to increase your ROI.

The report is categorized into four sections, ie: Account Overview; Keywords with the Most Clicks; Ad with the Most Clicks; and Content Sites with the Most Clicks.

If you’re pressed for time and can’t analyze all the data, as keywords drive success in pay per click marketing, go directly to the “Keywords with the Most Clicks” section. Using the info there, you can make do two things:

I. Increase Organic Traffic: As you have a list of your high-performing keywords there, use this to create keyword-rich copy for your website. You’ll drive organic traffic, in addition to the traffic you’re paying for.

II. Tweak Poorer Performing Ads: Add these high-performing keywords to ads that aren’t performing as well as you thought.

If you get in the habit of checking your pay per click ads when your Google Account Performance Report lands in your inbox, you don’t have to worry about settling into a pattern many PPC marketers fall into, ie, “set it and forget it” marketing.

It’s not hard to make money with Google AdWords, but many fail to do so because they make it more complicated than it needs to be.

Keep it simple by doing the following:

Decide On Your Offer: Putting together a successful AdWords campaign starts NOT with keywords, but with your offer. Why? Because you have to be very clear about this before you move on to selecting your keywords.

For example, if you operated an online bookstore, do you want to send readers to the romance section, the science fiction section or the history section? “But,” you may be thinking, “I don’t care what they buy, as long as they buy something.”

We counter with, in order to get browsers to “buy something,” you have to first get them interested in “buying what interests them.” And, this is where you get specific.

Think of it like a local bookstore they may wander into. A reader may pop in to buy a specific book, but once there, they start to browse and come out with two, three or four things.

The bottom line here is – web surfers don’t care about making a purchase from you. What they do care about is getting that book that their friend, mother, aunt, etc. recommended.

If your specific pay per click ad landed them in your online store, you have a chance of making that sale.
Use Keywords Effectively: Once you have tightly focused your offer, now you can move on to doing effective keyword research. Here again, be specific. When choosing keywords remember, it’s not about how much traffic a keyword will bring, but how much “qualified” traffic it will bring.

Rock the Landing Page! Round out your campaign by having a clear, concise, professional landing page that gets prospects where they want to be. Don’t make them surf to find what your ad promised. Land them there directly.

If you do these three things, you will be well on your way to Google AdWords campaign success.

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About the Author
Want to out perform your Google AdWords competitors? Attend the AdWords Advantage Online Summit (Dec. 1-17) and learn how to fast-track your pay per click marketing profits. Register now and save 40% at http://www.AdWordsAdvantage.com.

As every pay per click marketer knows, keywords and keyword phrases are the foundation of every successful campaign. In order to assist you with this, major search engines like Google and MSN (Bing) have three different kinds of what’s known as (phrase/keyword) matching.

The 3 Different Kinds of Matches in Online Search

Exact Match: This is the most limiting of the keyword/keyword phrases match type. With this type of match, your pay per click ad will only show up if a prospect types in an exact keyword phrase on your list.
Broad Match: In contrast to Exact Match, with this type of match, your PPC ad will show up even if the term is not on your keyword(s) list.

Search engines return keyword variations – these can be for example, singular and/or plural forms, synonyms and phrase variation.

Phrase Match: Phrase match is kind of a hybrid between Broad Match and Exact Match in that your pay per click ad will only be shown when a surfer queries your keyword phrase using these keywords in the exact order you enter them.

For example, if your keyword phrase is “womens running shoes”, your ad would show up if the user typed that in phrases like “Nike womens running shoes” or “discount womens running shoes”; but not, “womens athletic shoes” or “female running shoes”.

Now that you know the difference in the match phrases, you can accurately discern which one is more profitable for your pay per click campaign. 

When most people think of pay per click marketing, they think of tiny little “word” ads that you click on. Video doesn’t usually enter the picture. However, “PPC video marketing,” so to speak, has been around for a couple of years.

In 2006, Google bought YouTube (for an astounding $1.65 billion, no less). This allows it to offer a very valuable service to internet marketers via an already established outlet – loyal “YouTubers” who like receiving content via video.

The Beginning of Video in Pay Per Click Advertising
It took Google about a year and a half to capitalize on their acquisition of YouTube. In February 2008, they started testing the use of video ads in their pay per click advertising model. Now, video ads appear as display ads on MySpace and other social media networks.

How Video Ads Appear in Pay Per Click Ads
Experts generally agree that it is very easy rich medium platform to master. Video ads show up as a single link under a normal pay per click ad.  This link is next to a plus-sign icon, indicating that there is a video (or more information to be found if the surfer clicks).

When a web surfer does click, a small window (about 160×140 in size) appears in which the video will show.  A timer shows how long the video is. Most are very short – less than 30 seconds. At the end of the video, a URL of the advertiser’s site appears.

Ready to Set Up Your Own Video Pay Per Click Marketing Campaign?
Learn more about how to set up and run a PPC video campaign (via Google). If pay per click marketing confuses you altogether, it’s a good idea to invest in some training (Pay Per Click Summit is coming up soon in Chicago on Nov. 4-5) to make sure you’re doing it right – from the beginning.

Pay Per Click marketing is known for its effectiveness in generating quick sales. And, this is a good thing. Quick sales, however, should not be the foundational goal of any online marketer. The ultimate goal is to create long-term relationships with customers. For, over time, these are the customers who will bring you the most profit.

So, how do you use Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing to cultivate lifelong customers?
Quite simply, you take the time to educate them. Sometimes, this means foregoing the quick sale and employing more multi-step marketing strategies.

The Best Way is to Educate PPC Prospects and Get Them to Buy More from You

In order to accomplish this, you must become a go-to source. You must be thought of as an authority. On your landing page, for example, you might ask prospects to sign up for an informational brochure that addresses a certain problem they have – in detail.

For example, if your client sold organic baby food, a free e-report entitled “How to Sell Organic Baby Foods to New Moms” would be a good informational brochure to distribute. In it you would address the problems inherent in selling to new moms and how to overcome them.

Of course, the solutions you offer would be ones that your company provides. Then, when it’s time for prospects to purchase the type of product/service you offer, your firm will be top of mind – all because you’ve used a pay per click strategy that “educates” instead of “sells.”

Learn more pay per click marketing strategies like this by attending the next PPC Summit.

We hope 2009 is off to a great start for you! In 2009 we look forward to bringing PPC Summit, the premier Search Engine Marketing educational conference, to Chicago: April 22-23, New York: June 16-17 and Los Angeles: Sept. 23-24. During two-days of comprehensive training, PPC Summit offers laser-focused educational sessions to help online advertisers increase their ROI and maximize their Pay Per Click marketing dollars.

Experts from Microsoft, Google, and others lead hands-on workshops, panel discussions, training sessions and more. Sessions cover keyword development, customer conversions, bidding strategies, web site analytics and tracking, quality score & site rank, search engine copywriting tactics, B2B & B2C ad techniques, web site & landing page development and deployment and more!

Here’s what past attendees are saying…“My sales are up 350% and cost-per-sale is down 48.3% after applying the PPC Summit expert strategies.” David Wagner, PPC Summit Los Angeles attendee.

PRE-REGISTER NOW and SAVE $400 for PPC Summit:
>Chicago: April 22-23
>New York: June 16-17
>Los Angeles: Sept. 23-24

For more info visit, www.ppcsummit.com or email marketing@ppcsummit.com
Just 160 seats available at each conference!

It’s prime time to target holiday buyers and profit from the increased traffic and consumer spending. If you haven’t already built seasonal keywords into your Pay Per Click campaigns, there is still time! Read on to learn a few tips on applying holiday related keyword phrases to your PPC campaigns.

Here are a few PPCto help you reach holiday buyers: tips

1. Research the keywords that are searched most often during the holiday seasons. Check out Google’s Hot Trends tool to learn what people are searching for and review popular searches. Keep in mind timing, Christmas related searches start as early as September according to Google Trend data. Build popular seasonal keywords into your campaigns now!

2. Incorporate holiday related (seasonal) keywords into your campaign. Your keyword should match what your potential customers are searching for during the holiday. Here’s a Christmas example using holiday related keywords: Christmas toys, holiday toys, toy gifts, Santa Claus toys…

3. Research your competition and learn their ad copy strategies. Do a search on your keywords and review the ads that you are competing with. Also try using longer keyword phrases that your competition is not using.

4. Streamline your PPC campaign management and set up different campaigns for each season/holiday. When the season ends, you can turn the campaign off until the next year.

5. Be sure to analyze your seasonal keywords and campaign results to plan for higher ROI next year.

Make the most of your PPC advertising this holiday season!

PPC Summit LA Trainer David Szetela

PPC Summit LA 2008 Lunch Keynote

PPC Summit LA was a huge success on all levels according to event sponsors, speakers and 100+ internet marketers who attended the conference on Sept. 25 -26, 2008. We would like to thank all of the sponsors, speakers, and of course the attendees for making this conference a winner. PPC Summit LA sponsors include: Google, Business.com, Lyris, ContextWeb, Engine Ready, Adapt Technologies, Orange Soda, Web Host Industry Review, PR Web and Search Marketing Standard.

We are grateful for the expert speakers and trainers who shared profitable Pay Per Click campaign secrets for optimal results on Google and other search engines. Attendees had the opportunity to learn from 20+ sessions covering: improving quality score, keyword best practices, better website and landing pages, winning copywriting strategies, bid management and much more.