Image via CrunchBase

This is a guest post by Nupur Birla

Most of you PPC Analysts would spend your time in evaluating and optimizing your clients’ accounts periodically for 2 simple and important reasons – Lower Costs & Better ROI! Of course every advertiser has a different goal and hence the optimization techniques involved would differ. It can involve ad copy enhancement, additional keywords to be targeted, more organized campaign structure, strategic changes to bids, etc.

While doing so have you ever been in a total state of confusion on identifying your first step to begin with? Here is a ready checklist to make your in-depth performance analysis faster & simpler.

• Historical Account Performance

You basically run an Account performance report for different durations to ascertain how the account has been performing over the past few years/quarters/months/weeks. It helps you understand if there had been a sudden spike in Conversions/CPA or any other metrics during a given period. Then you could be looking out for all possible reasons for that change. It could be seasonal or due to certain changes in the Adwords campaign like geo-targeting, budget, landing page, incentives, etc

• Campaign Performance

Normally an account is divided into several smaller campaigns. A campaign summary report would help you judge the strong/weak performing campaigns in the account. Have a look at the daily spends of these campaigns to check if any of them meet their daily budget on a regular basis and if there is scope for overall budget reallocation to further boost the number of sales for the account. Dig a little deeper into the ad groups/keywords for these campaigns to see if there are specific set of ad groups or keywords that are responsible for the overall damage/progress of that campaign.

If these are top ticket items, they should be structured in a campaign that can have an uncapped budget.

• Search v/s content

It’s essential to know which network for the account spends the most and is profitable. An account performs differently on both Search and Content network and hence the plan of action would get altered accordingly. The first and foremost step would be to split the Search and Content campaigns for the very basic reason that both the networks function differently. Search is more intent oriented where a user types what he/she is looking for whereas Content is more theme based i.e. your ads get placed against the most relevant content on the sites which are Google’s properties.

The keyword themes need to be tighter and more specific in a Display network campaign compared to Search-based for Google to comprehend your keywords and showcase ads accordingly on the most relevant partner sites.

More competitive & popular are your keywords, higher would be the CPC’s on Search. Similarly, more well-known or niche are the partner sites, the bidding strategy would vary to get ads placed on such websites. Also, bids can be altered at keyword level in Search campaigns whereas in Display campaigns (keyword contextual targeting) the bids are adjusted at ad group level

• Bidding Strategy & Match Types

A recent keyword performance report will help you check the latest positions and competitive bid pricing for all your keywords. It will also help you filter the high/low performing keywords/themes across all your campaigns.

Once the best/worst performing keywords have been filtered out, it’s time to take action against them. You could either pause the worst performing one’s or drastically lower their bids as the first preventive step to bring your CPA under control! Push bids for the stronger one’s gradually (this is one of the very effective techniques to improve the quality score of your keywords!) Make sure that your high converting keywords are active in Exact match type so that you are spending efficiently on more targeted and relevant traffic.

• Placement Performance

Like a keyword performance report, a placement report would assist you in identifying the kind of placements/sites where your ads were displayed. Of course not all these placements would be of relevance to the product you sell or the service you offer. Eliminate the one’s which are of no importance and build out a strategy on integrating the one’s which have significance. A simple solution would be go through the pages of such sites, study the content on these pages and put the URL in the Google Keyword Tool. This will help you discover some completely new keyword themes to target!

• Negatives

Ensure that the campaign has a healthy list of negatives to weed out irrelevant clicks. It’s very simple; run a search query report to identify the kind of searches that triggered ads for the campaign and then keep adding relevant negatives (preferable single word in broad match unless they prevent relevant clicks!) Similarly, negative placements/sites can be deployed after running placement reports.

• Reach of the campaign

The keyword structuring within a campaign can be classified into different categories

• Keywords targeting all products/services (for e.g. wedding shoes, debt settlement, etc)

• Keywords related to your Brand & Competitors (for e.g. wedding4you.com, www wedding4u, etc)

There are various tools to help you identify newer keyword themes. The best one would be the search queries, for a simple reason; they tell you what your potential customers are typing to find you!

• Ad copies

Compare the ads across all relevant ad groups and decide which one had the best CTR’s. Analyze the various elements in your copy that would have driven the CTR’s up and try incorporating those in your new set of ads.

• Landing Pages

Firstly, check if there were multiple landing pages used. If yes, identify the best performing landing pages by comparing their respective conversion rates. You could also attempt to find the best ad copy/landing page combination and try maintaining that arrangement. Perform a brief audit for the pages which seemed to have had a lower conversion rate to discover areas that could be worked upon from the usability perspective.

There are definitely a lot of areas which would have to be looked in detail based on the type of business you advertise for, the way your account has been structured, the history associated to your campaigns/keywords, etc. I hope all of these above pointers would give some direction in executing your thought process in action.

Author Bio:

Nupur Birla is a professional writer and blogger, associated with Offshore Ally – A premier virtual assistant and link building company. She has contributed many posts on PPC and other related topics.

I decided to take the banners off the site. They didn’t help with the view. And unless my traffic increases exponentially here soon, I am not going to lose any money by doing it. What I am going to do is not look so much like a walking billboard.

Some clothes make you look like a billboard. And you pay a premium.

Cars don’t come without the car maker’s logo.

But no one owns this blog, but me. So, no ads.

I did accept one paid post in this blog’s lifetime. It was for a product that I was going to write about anyway. But it still made me feel like a whore. So, none of those either.

I will sell on my other blogs. But here, I need the freedom to say any type of crazy shit I feel like. And price tags don’t allow me to do that.

I do have Entrecard and that works. I have run into some great blogs through the service and it does bring traffic and get my blog out there.

This blog’s domain is my name. I am considering any ads like I would consider putting a tattoo on my forehead. And my forehead goes all the way back to the base of my neck. Lot’s of space, but that doesn’t mean I want to paint a billboard up there.

There doesn’t seem to be a common consensus on what keyword tools are useful or whether you need to use them in the first place, but there are a lot and we will get to them. Sometimes I used them, sometimes I don’t.

There are tools that can build a mass of keywords and cost some money like Keyword Elite. I myself see no use of having 5000 keywords on a niche. I did maybe at one time. But it is much better to build a general overview of your niche with a knowledge of a few of the keywords people would use to find it. Then write articles that gravitate around a few main topics of the niche.

Since I currently write in niches that I originally learned online, I know what I was looking for when I was initially lost. I used phrases that I no longer use because now I know the correct terminology. Some of the articles on this blog were written during research using a lot of incorrect terms. I figure that if I write in the midst of learning, I will pick up a lot of search hits that I will be losing later and what may look sloppy to my direct peers may reach the audience I am intending to reach.

Then start using your own keywords from your stats. As your base of articles grow, your pool of long tail key phrases for future, more directly target articles grows. Or optimize your titles. Or hunt down these phrases in your post and use the Alinks module to hyperlink the post getting the hits. One way to use Alinks.

But eventually you get the psychology behind the search phrases and the word patterns people use. Some only make perfect sense after you see them.

So I see these keyword tools as exactly what they are, tools. Use them to learn how people search. If you are writing a post, check your topic out first. A little insight into what people are looking for can help a lot. That’s about as technical as I get with keyword tools unless we’re talking about Pay per Click.

Just Cool and New

• The Rarest Words – Read the article at Techcrunch

Keyword Services

• WordTracker
• Compete
• Keyword Discovery

Competitor Keyword Spy Tools

• KeywordSpy
• SpyFu
• KeyCompete
• AffSpy
• SeoDigger – A tutorial

Pay Per Click Company Site Keyword Tools

• Overture – The old standby, no longer that reliable.
• Adwords – Good for everyday blog posts.
• Miva
• MSN – There are some cool keyword tools you would have never thought of here.
• 7Search

Keyword List Processors

• Google Adwords Wrapper
• Geo Targeted Keyword Lists
• Keyword Lizard

Typos, Brainstorming, and Misspelled Keywords

• Mistypes
• Typo Generator
• Urban Dictionary
• Keyword Map
• Visual Theasaurus
• Wordnet
• Lexical Free Net
• SearchRadar

Other Keyword Tools

• SeoBook – This one combines a lot of the other tools on this list together.
• Wordpot
• Wikipedia Article Traffic Statistics
• Niche Warehouse
• 123 Promotion

Time is money. It may be something we all agree on, but what does it really mean.

Fixed costs are nice. One of my fixed costs is hosting. When I make $4000 in a month, my hosting is $125. If I triple that, it will still cost me the same and the ROI triples.

On the other hand, PPC advertising moves with the income. If I make more through PPC this month, chances are I spent more too. Yes, I can increase ROI. But for the most part, I have to spend more money to make more. And it doesn’t help that the amount of money I spend on ads is limited by my credit.

Now there are a few campaigns that I currently have running that have not been tweaked for months. But for the most part, I have to babysit. Not much now. But if I were to increase my Adwords spending to the point it replaced all the other sources of income, I would have no time to do anything else and I would be stuck in the same rat race I am trying to remove myself from.

I ran into a similar problem with the direction my blogging was going. A post a day may be recommended for a lot of bloggers. It isn’t going to work for me any more. Don’t get me wrong, I most likely write a post or more a day, but not on every blog. And this blog, which is mainly a journal of my journey makes no real money. And I like it that way for now. I am not looking for money here yet.

Building links is like hosting and social media marketing is like PPC advertising. Both have their place, but my time is limited, so I had to work out a balance.

A link I get to a site today will most likely be there tomorrow, next month, and next year and since I know a little SEO, the traffic results of that link may be less volume than I would expect from a Stumble but the quality of that traffic will be much greater.

Don’t get me wrong. You can’t just build some links and then go take a nap for the rest of the year. But here is what I know. I made $25,000 in the last 12 months from the results of links that were already there. Not John Chow money but it beats being a 24/7 internet hustler.

And all links are not created the same. Some take more time to build. A directory links takes a minute. If you want to release software to promote a site, it’s going to take some time but that time will come back to you once the ball is rolling.

I am writing this post to beat something into my head. I have a weird relationship with money. I spend in the range of $100 in Adwords a day and have to pry my wallet open to buy software and hire people to speed up the link building process. Money spent there will free up time and possibly lower the need for so much advertising. It is basically a fixed cost. Spend the money and see the results for months or even years. You cannot say that for PPC advertising.

This has also forced a weird relationship with time. If I am doing my own grunt work because I refuse to hire someone than I am basically paying myself what I would pay the other guy to do it for me. So if I refuse to pay $10/hour, that is what I am paying myself. If I buy software that speeds up a process, than I am effectively raising my hourly rate. If a job that took 3 hours now only needs my guidance for 20 minutes, I just gave myself a 900% raise for that time period.

It’s a way to look at things and a way to start putting money and time in balance. Hopefully it works.

I’ve been meaning to give TNX the once over for a while. I’ve played around a little with test link buying and know the importance of links that look natural. Plus I like checking out the twists companies can put on advertising. There has been an explosion of ad networks lately.

How TNX works

The unit of currency is TNX-points. These can be purchased or earned by selling ads on your site. The system is unified, which means you can be a publisher and advertiser at the same time.

Okay, an easier to understand explanation. TNX works like the casino. You buy tokens to get in and can cash them out when you leave. While the tokens are in the system you can buy advertising wherever you want. Any any credits you make from selling links go into your account to sell back to TNX or use to buy advertising.

The amount of points you get paid for a link from your site depends upon the Pagerank of the specific page it is on. This is not a site wide link system. You can choose ads for each page on your web site and each page can have different links.

The unified system is a great way to move traffic from a highly ranked site that makes you no money to a lower ranked site that makes you money. Sell text link ads on the no-money site and use those points to buy ads for the site you want to boost.

For this service, they take 12.5% which is a really low percentage.

Signing up at TNX.net as A Publisher

Then I added a site and waited a couple of days to get it approved but once it was, link sales started taking off. You can block ads, delete them or ban an advertiser from adding any more test links to your site. Everything is ultimately under your control, up to the amount of links you will list on each page, starting at one link per page.

The code is either php or perl, so you need to have a site which is on your own host.

The credits are paid in advance, so removing your site from the system takes a little time, if you want to do that. They don’t recommend just removing the code as that can get your site banned.

Buying Links Through TNX

You can choose links across a range of site categories and Pagerank and they are very affordable because you are not paying for site wide links. You pay for a link from a page at a time.

They even have link generator that creates varying anchor text for your links, details here. It is sort of confusing at first, but after a little playing around with it you can generate a whole lists of text ads. This makes the links look more natural to Google.

You start out choosing categories, the Pagerank of pages you want links from and the amount of money you are willing to pay each month. From there you choose how many links you want from each category. You do not see the actual links. Then your ad is sent to moderation. This is as far as I got in this process and will have to investigate it further.

Pagerank Adjusting

Does anyone remember when everyone was trying to set up tree way linking schemes? Well, TNX takes that a little further by turning links into credits. Therefore the credit from adding someone’s link to one of your pages gives you a way of putting a link on anyone else’s site.

Theoretically, you could use the ranking of lower profit high ranking sites to build the rank of sites you have monetized more effectively. Using the credits earned from one site to boost another.

The TNX Affiliate Program

You earn a hefty 13.3% lifetime commissions on other site owners that you sign. These are paid as credits which can be cashed out or used to advertise one of your own sites. Details at TNX.

Some TNX Resources

How to Rank Number 1 in Google With TNX

Links as Editorial Endorsements

Signup and Get 5000 Free Links

Other TNX Reviews

Blogtrepreneur

The Blog Herald

Search Engine Journal

Sign Up

You can sign up here (affiliate link).

I had a surprise in my Entrecard dashboard today. The inbox has a feed of the last 50 people to drop a card at my site. I quickly added it to my bookmark toolbar, chose that folder and saw how long it would take Firefox to open 50 tabs by choosing "Open All in Tabs."

I have yet to write an Entrecard focused article yet, but I have noticed a few ways to speed up the process of dropping cards.

Let me say this first. Some sites I just drop cards on because I don’t have much feedback to give on any of the current posts. But a lot, I leave open, continue dropping cards and then come back and comment. I have easily been covering my quota of commenting on about ten blogs a day.

Now for the quick methods:

• Sitehoppin – An auto browser site. Jumps from one site to the next. Not sure about this one. There is an automatic mode that jumps every five seconds or so. Not really conducive to leaving comments.
• Chain Dropping – I use this most often. Open the last 10 people in your inbox, drop cards, click on their current advertisers, drop cards and repeat until you have no sites left.
• Mass site opening – I just did it with them method above. I might try again with a faster loading browser. My Firefox installation has a lot of addons.
• Use a fast loading browser – I went back to Internet Explorer or Opera a few times just for Entrecard, because, like I said, Firefox can get really slow with a lot of addons.

Got an email from Adwords today. It seems that they just opened a beta program where advertisers can bid on specific groups of people.

Demographic bidding is a way to help your ad reach audiences of a certain age or gender. If you want your ads to be seen by women aged 18-24, or people over 55, demographic bidding can help. Demographic bidding is a new feature which is now available to a limited number of AdWords users.

When I first read this, it gave me the creeps. Google must really be mining its user’s data. Then I took a breath and read some more. It is only for contextually targeted or placement targeted campaigns. So those sites that you visit, that run Adsense, and have you sign up are the ones using the data to gear ads specifically at you.

They say that only publishers that have permission from their users to use theit data can be involved on the Adsense side. Makes you want to read that fine print a little quicker before you hit submit. I know I never do.

What does that policy look like? "We will be giving your information to third parties, so sign right up."

But if you have read this blog for a while, you know I am just going off, half humorously.

But now this will give contextual advertisers the ability to bid higher on certain demographics of their choice, to have their ads show for only certain demographics, and to see demographic based reports showing which age and gender groups clicked the most.

It’s beta right now. We all know how that goes. Sign up and see if you win the drawing. They invite everyone though and then only allow a few in, just to make those people who didn’t get in feel loved.

I am not really sure what to do with this one, but I went to my Adwords reports menu and found this today:

I have to admit that I got stuck in the Clickbank trap. Buying the next latest and greatest ebook on how to make thousands daily while I slept. And most turned out to be systems. Systems that would only work for a while until everyone was doing it. And I would try the system and the system would work, but the money would eventually slow down or the time I had to put in to get money out got to be more and more. I would write software to try to streamline the system so I could spend less time and still make the same money. But eventually, I would get the next ebook.

I’m done with this cycle. There is too much too learn in this dynamic growing thing we call the Internet to be stuck between the pages of a PDF ebook written over a year ago by an author who was trying to trick the system. He only sold the thing because he realized the end was coming near. Others were on to his little trick. Might as well make a quick buck on the system before another guy does.

There are some that I have read that have been worth it, like Perry’s Marshall’s book on AdWords or Google Cash. Many of the search engine optimization books have given valuable information, but to tell you the truth, I discovered more in the Complete Idiots Guide I bought for less than half the price.

But most suggest setting a professional looking site up, so that you could pull off reviews of products that you never purchased, including all the stars, screenshots, and stolen testimonials. Some 100 or more page ebooks were written around just a single sentence like "People search for product names." Some just rehashed what had been written in other books. And most of these books are being sold by people using the method in the book.

It’s almost as if these ebooks are self-perpetuating pyramid schemes. The book is about how to sell the book. Of course, the same method could be used to sell other ebooks, but the author knew that many of the people buying the ebook would try their hand at selling the ebook, which in turn, would create more salesmen for the ebook.

I would only rarely get out of this cycle of reading ebooks, playing with systems, and writing software to track the systems. At those times, I would check out blogs and social networks for a day or two. Each time, the internet landscape had changed so much I didn’t even recognize the new names. It was as if, in internet time, missing a week means you’re living under a rock.

This time though, I took a long break and plan on continuing it, after finding a wealth of information on blogs I read for the first time just this week.

Like Evil Blog Promotion Techniques which outlines ways to promote a blog or web site that I never thought of. Or SexySeo’s post on optimising your user page on MyBlogLog. Information like this is freely available all over the internet. You just have to look for it. Paying for an ebook only means you are getting, old secondhand information.

Stop spending the money. Start doing the footwork. That is my plan from now on. That was my plan before but I got sidetracked and stuck with tunnel vision. And anyone else stuck in the same trap that I was should get their nose out of the ebook and check out some more great posts:

The Secret to Utilizing All Social Media Sites

Commenting Your Way to the Top

98 Blogging Tips for a Lazy Sunday

pepperjamBlog » Blog Archive » Affiliate Marketing – Thinking Outside the Box

Great post on thinking outside of the box when it comes to being an affiliate.