If you are managing PPC across the three major search engines, I would guess that your budget allocation looks very similar to many of our clients’ –  ~75% to Google, ~15% to Yahoo and ~10% to MSN.

And honestly, that’s being pretty generous to the latter two, unfortunately.

Truth be told, as happy as I am with Google (no seriously… minus some frustrations, I really am), for the sake of diversification I would very much like to see our spend more evenly distributed.  Similar to investing for retirement, it is worrisome to have too many eggs in one basket.

But, alas, I don’t see any major shift in spend among these three Tier 1 engines happening anytime in the near future… if ever.  The search volume from Google, combined with the ease of their platform, the robustness of their reporting tools among other pluses leaves us pretty much addicted to Google.

But what about the 2nd tier PPC engines, comprised of platforms such as Ask.com, Business.com, 7Search and others?  Is this a source of diversification worth exploring?

Results from Tier 2 engines are mixed as you can see from PPC Hero’s recent survey that asked ‘Which second tier PPC search engine has generated the best results for you?’.  31% of advertisers have never tried a 2nd tier engine.  16% of advertisers said that none of the Tier 2 engines have ever worked well for them. But there are some bright spots like Ask.com and Business.com that are producing results for some:

Until 1/2 year ago I would have been among that 16% who had tried 2nd tier engines, but not seen good results.  Recent experience, though, lands me happily in the purple piece of the pie.  We have actually seen some great results for some of our B2B clients on Business.com and are excited about the unique features this platform provides!  If you are a B2B advertiser and you have not yet explored Business.com, now is the time to do so for a number of reasons.

Reason #1: Data Speaks.  Here are last month’s PPC results for one of our clients.  As you will note, Business.com is the 2nd highest campaign for lead volume and the cost per lead is $22 less than Google:

Reason #2:  Cool Features. Business.com has some unique features that make this a pretty sweet channel to include in your marketing mix.

For starters, you get a WHOLE 60 characters for your headline and 150 characters for your description!  Holy PPC, this is like Christmas for those of us who are used to squeezing in 95 characters total into an AdWords box!

Second, it is not a blind auction.  You can actually view the top 5 bids to help make judgments about what to bid yourself.  There are pros and cons to this, but I have to say that I personally find this to be a nice mini-vacation away from the blind auction/quality scoring black box.

But what I like best about Business.com, is the option to include ‘Multlinks’, or multiple landing pages/calls-to-action as such:

Reason #3:   New Conversion Tracking. The clincher.  For those of you who have steered away from Business.com in the past due to their lack of conversion tracking, those days are gone.  Granted in beta, you can now track your listings to conversion and ROI data:

So will Business.com work well for all B2B advertisers?  Absolutely not - among our clients, the results have been mixed thus far.  As with any channel, you’ll need to test, track, analyze and refine to determine if Business.com is a viable marketing channel for your organization.

Best of luck if you decide to diversify and venture down the Tier 2 path - Business.com or otherwise.  Feel free to share your experiences, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

Well, it is Day 3 of our adventure in Austin at SXSW and we are loving it!   If the names of the places we hit up on 6th street over the past couple of nights are any indication (The Chuggin’ Monkey, The Dizzy Rooster and The Thirsty Nickel), it is safe to say we are having fun in this funky, ‘weird’ town.  Nighlife aside though, I do have to say it is invigorating to be in a crowd of people who are enthusiastic about the web, music and film.

So what else has CLM been up to?  

The CLM Trade Show Booth - If you are here, come see us at Booth 616 and figure out the answer to how to ‘make $5000 in 5 minutes’.  Tomorrow’s the last day!  We are offering free Google AdWords and Landing Page live assessments.

Bike Hugger Mobile Social Ride - In true Lance Loveday fashion, he rode in the BikeHugger Mobile Social Ride through the streets of Austin.  What is Bike Hugger?    Best described in their words:

Bike Hugger is bike culture blogged. Our events are for like-minded cycling fans of all types to get together and talk about bikes. They’re like a coffee klatch on bikes, an excuse to get together with your buddies and geek out.

If you happen to be a cycling enthusiast, be sure to check the BikeHugger website out!

BikeHugger Brush Square Park Party - Urban cyclists and conference attendees alike have gotta eat!  Yesterday afternoon we got to mingle in true Texas style eating BBQ at Brush Square Park, right across from the Convention Center.

SXSW Block Party - Tonight was the SXSW Block Party.  CLM held a drawing for a magnum of Silver Oak Cabernet.  I was deeply saddened that internal employees were not eligible for entry.   WORST RULE EVER!  

Hey Cupcake!  -  No trip to Austin would be complete without a stop at Hey Cupcake - a favorite of Lance, Amy G and mine.  The 3 of us insisted on taking the whole gang there for cupcakes to prove that all of our hype was justified.  If in Austin, go to Congress Street and look for a dirt parking lot with an Airstream trailer that has a huge glowing cupcake on top (inconspicuous, I know)  Seriously, one of my favorite Austin destinations (sad, what that says about me). 

So needless to say, lots of fun in Austin and a really fantastic conference.  More to come…

As an SEM practitioner, I am a self-proclaimed fan of Google AdWords.  I love the ease of their platform, I love the depth of their reporting, I love our dedicated Google agency team and I especially love the ROI that Google AdWords drives for our clients.   To be honest, Adwords management is a dream compared to the other major PPC engines.

But while there are many things to praise Google for, I’m not totally naive.  Google is a business.  A BIG business.  One that needs to continue to make money and grow in order to appease stakeholders and further secure their dominance.

As a result, Google doles out some advice to its advertisers that is questionable at times.  Not to mention, some of their account defaults make it all-too-easy to run a less-than-optimal campaign if you are a newbie to the game.  In short, not everything that Google puts out there is in the interest of the advertiser.

Here are four examples of when you should think twice about blindly following Google’s defaults and advice:

“Optimizing” Ads to CTR (Google revenue), rather than conversion (your revenue)

When setting up a Google account there is an option to ‘Optimize’ your ads or to ‘Rotate’ your ads.  Upon first thought, you might think that ‘optimize’ sure does sound nice.  And hey, it has already been chosen for you by default so why argue?  Google states that this will simply allow you to ’show better performing ads more often’.  They even explicitly state it is ‘Recommended’.

In actuality, if you are an advertiser whose primary goal is to maximize conversion (sales, leads, etc) then the ‘Optimize’ default is not for you.  Why?  Because ‘optimize’ by Google’s definition means serving the ads that have the highest click-through rate (CTR), NOT the highest conversion rate.

Why would Google push for ads that have the highest click-through rate?  Well, at least partially because ads that get more clicks produce more revenue for Google.  Google will also make the point that ads with a higher CTR are more relevant and therefore provide a better user experience.  But it’s hard to completely ignore the Google revenue incentive. (Read the full article…)

There you are, a solid 9 months into a relationship with your SEM agency. You’re paying them 15% of what you’re spending with the search engines. Yes, they’re paying for themselves through their gains, but lately, you’re starting to question what they’re doing. There was the initial bump, and then a few months ago, a junior account representative was assigned and the hockey stick ROAS chart you thought you’d be seeing is starting to look more like a hockey rink – flat and cold. In the back of your mind a few questions are racing around… Did I just get placed onto the autopilot list? Do these guys know what they’re talking about? Am I being taken for a ride? Did I just find the end of the Internet?

Well from our experience, you’re not alone. And unfortunately, as this field has grown in popularity, the number of bad practitioners has grown exponentially. And, since the word we’ve chosen is “bad”, let’s dive a little deeper, since there’s some ambiguity.

What does bad look like?

(Read the full article…)

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Let’s be honest.  Setting up a new PPC campaign or editing an existing one is a somewhat tedious process.  Granted AdWords Editor has eased some of those burdens, but still there are a lot of processes that are just downright timesucks to say the least.

Over time, I have stumbled upon tools which have helped minimize my time spent on menial, yet essential PPC tasks.  However, these tools were spread out over a variety of websites and there were some tweaks that I could envision that would make them even more suited to what I personally needed.

So at Closed Loop Marketing we realized one day, why don’t we just create some of these tools ourselves so that we can do our jobs even more efficiently AND get more out of our clients’ campaigns?  And our next thought - why not share these tools with other SEM practitioners so that we can all be freed up more to focus on strategy, instead of spending too much of our valuable time on tedious, lower-level, manual tasks.

So, with that, let me introduce four Closed Loop Marketing SEM Tools that I hope will be as helpful to our readers as they are to us.

1. Keyword Geo Targeting and Wrapper

The Old Timesuck:  If you are doing any local targeting, you know what a headache it is to capture all geographic variations of keywords.  People search by city, state, city/state combination, state abbreviations, zip code, etc, etc.  How can you be sure you’re covered on all variations?  And if you’re targeting a metropolitan area, have you covered all suburb names?  And what even are all of the suburb names?  What are the associated zip codes?!?

The New Timesaver:  Enter your keywords and provide the zip code and radius you are interested in targeting.  Additionally, choose your match type.  The Keyword Geo Targeting and Wrapper tool will provide you all city, state and zip code keyword variations.

In Action:

2. Keyword Permutations and Wrapper Tool

The Old Timesuck:  People search a billion different ways it seems and if our keyword lists aren’t robust we miss the opportunity to capture relevant traffic.  Are you sure you’re covering all singular and plural variations?  Common misspellings?  Reversals?  Word variations with hyphens vs spaces vs no spaces?  Across hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of keywords building all of these variations out manually is near impossible.

The New Timesaver:  Cover more bases by entering your keyword ‘parts’ into 2 or 3 different lists.  The Keyword Permutation and Wrapper tool will provide all permutations of your keywords for inclusion in your campaigns.

Side benefit:  less reliance on Broad Match.

In Action:

(Read the full article…)