PPC Management Software For Agencies

Tax Season Isn’t Over

July 22, 2010 By Noran El-Shinnawy Leave a Comment

At least for online marketers engaged in PPC efforts.

They say great minds think alike. So it was no surprise last week when Andrew Goodman and Bryan Eisenberg managed to write nearly identical columns about the Google AdWords “tax”.

So what the heck is this tax and why do we have to pay it?

Andrew calls it the tourist tax, Bryan calls it the simplicity tax. Names aside, all it boils down to is the price you pay for being in a hurry, taking shortcuts, or not asking the “locals.”

Very often, we are lured in by the fact that we can starts showing our ads to the online world in as little as 10 minutes. Pick a bunch of keywords, decide what you want to pay for them, write some ads, and you’re all set. Right? Wrong!

You can read Andrew’s column here and Bryan’s column here. But what I really want you to do today is answer the following:

3 questions to make sure you are not getting taxed


1. Did you need to opt out?

Your AdWords campaigns are opted into the entire Google Network by default. This includes Google search, search partners, and the Display Network. If you’re not optimized for the entire network, running along with the default settings will only hurt you.

2. Did you create keyword groups?

Because of the way this part of the process is set up, people end up creating keyword groups instead of ad groups. You almost have to work this backwards. Instead of creating a list of keywords then grouping them, create themes for your ads, then come up with keywords that fit nice and tight. Do that and you’ll have highly targeted ads with decent CTRs and Quality Scores.

3. Did you bid lazy?

Ad group max CPC bids apply by default if you don’t specify otherwise. Start off by defining what your goals are. Here are a few suggestions:

  • Clicks –> use CPC
  • Visibility & awareness –> use CPM on Display
  • Conversions –> use CPA

    It’s perfectly fine to start off in automatic mode until you understand and assign different values to your keywords and ad groups. Switch to manual mode when you’re ready, or go semi-automatic with the bid simulator to see the possible effects of adjusting your bids.

    Now What?

    Those were just a few of many possible reasons someone can get penalized in AdWords. Make sure you go back into your account and make any necessary adjustments. The last thing we want is to hire PPC Accountants to handle our AdWords taxes.

    Filed Under: PPC, blog

    Google AdWords Modified Broad Match Keyword Tool

    July 15, 2010 By Marc 3 Comments

    Google AdWords has just released the Modified Broad Match to the rest of the world. After a successful test in Canada and the UK, they decided to unleash this great new feature to all advertisers. However, implementing this would require a lot of time in Excel, so we put together a quick and dirty little tool to help you get started with modified broad match keywords today.

    This simple modified broad match keyword generator will add a + sign in front of each “word” which comprise your keywords, or in front of those specific keywords you indicate. You can then add these new keywords to your campaigns using the adwords editor, the Acquisio Editor or the standard Google AdWords interface. Enjoy, and don’t hesitate to tell us if we can make any useful changes to the tool. We’re listening :-)

    Filed Under: PPC, Uncategorized, blog

    FREE: 3 Tickets to PPC Training Workshop at OMS

    June 29, 2010 By Noran El-Shinnawy 8 Comments

    Next week, I will be joining Bryan Eisenberg in a super charged and fun PPC training workshop at the Online Marketing Summit.

    The workshop is titled: PPC Optimization: The Road to Recovery and will cover:

    • The 7 most common PPC mistakes to avoid
    • 4 hot metrics you should be monitoring and including in your monthly reports
    • A powerful 3 step process to increase Click-Through-Rates (CTR) and relevancy of your ads and landing pages
    • How to boost your Quality Score rankings and lower CPC costs
    • The simple technique that will make you stand out from your competitors
    • A 12-Step process to optimize and improve your PPC management process

    We are giving away 3 FREE TICKETS, one to each of the following cities:

    Ready to learn how to take your PPC to the next level? Get in touch and let us know which city you want to attend the workshop in. First-come first-served!

    Filed Under: PPC, blog

    Cool activities at Acquisio!

    June 29, 2010 By slemieux Leave a Comment

    Wear it Pink!

    Click for Photos of June Activities

    The past few weeks have been quite exciting!  For one, on May 27th, the girls were all wearing their Acquisio pink t-shirt as it was “Wear it pink day”!  This day is organized by the Jewish General Hospital to promote the Weekend to End Women’s Cancer’s Walk.  Our colleague Laura will be participating in this fundraiser event next August.  This was our way to show our support!

    Get out, Get Active.

    On June 4th, we had an Awesome Event. We all went to play outside for a part of the afternoon.  It was hot and sunny and we started by playing a game of Ultimate Frisbee.  It was initiation time for most but we discovered lots of talent.  We also played a game of soccer, had time to talk with everyone and enjoyed the picnic.

    Dragon Boat Competition.

    June 13th was our Dragon-Boat competition.  Our colleague Annie is going to attend the World Championships next July in China and was organizing this great event to raise money.  So we got a chance to try this amazing sport on the St-Louis Lac in Lachine.  Perfect day, perfect sport…very cool!  Many thanks go to Annie for bringing this sport to us!  And good luck to her and her team in China.

    Want to see the full photo album of our June activities? Click here!

    Filed Under: Working at Acquisio

    Guess Who Just Hooked Up!

    June 9, 2010 By Noran El-Shinnawy Leave a Comment

    Solving the Marketing Puzzle
    Think of your marketing efforts as a rubik cube. You can’t possibly solve the puzzle without being able to see all sides. In your traditional marketing efforts, you cannot unfortunately see all sides. It’s incredibly challenging to try to focus on one aspect, be it your search, analytics or website, without ignoring the others. So how do you look at all sides and solve your marketing puzzle?

    Whether you’re an analyst or a HiPPO, you’ve got some sort of reporting to do. The bottom line is: you want to know how well you are performing based on how much you are spending. This goes beyond average metrics like of cost per click or ROAS. Because average metrics yield average results. And average results lead to average decisions.

    What we’ve really been missing is a way to seamlessly combine our PPC and Analytics data together to have more meaningful metrics. Sure, Google Adwords and Google Analytics have started playing nice recently. But it’s still not the type of seamless integration you need. And what if you are advertising on search engines other than Google?

    The Hook Up
    So how do you pull all this data together and make sense of it? You throw them in a tool and let them make love to one another. We usually don’t use our blog to promote our tool. But integrating Google Analytics into Acquisio SEARCH, is well… it’s kind of a big deal!

    It’s Kind of a Big Deal
    Whether you’re a publisher, run an eCommerce or B2B site, it’s kind of a big deal! You suddenly have this new way of looking at metrics where you can measure almost Anything per Anything. Here are a few sexy PPC and Analytics metrics that can make your reports just a little more provocative.

    Sexy Publishing Metrics

    • Cost per Page View
    • Cost per Visit, Visitor, New Visit
    • Cost per Bounce

    Sexy eComm Metrics

    • Average Revenue per Item
    • Average Revenue per Transaction
    • Average Value per Goal Completion
    • Average Item Revenue per Click
    • Average Goal Value per Click

    Sexy B2B Metrics

    • ROAS per Item Revenue
    • ROAS per Goal Value
    • Bounce Rate per Click
    • Page View Rate per Click
    • Visits, Visitors, New Visits per Click

    You can even drill down and get as granular as you need to by measuring cost, rate, revenue and ROAS per campaign, ad group or keyword. The possibilities are endless. And remember: Average metrics yield average results. Are you basing your marketing decisions and spending your dollars on average metrics?

    In the next blog post, we will look at an example of how combining PPC and Analytics metrics can help you make better marketing decisions.

    Filed Under: PPC Tagged With: Analytics

    The Best Things in Life are Free

    May 27, 2010 By Noran El-Shinnawy Leave a Comment

    Sam Cooke once said that the best things in life are free- the flowers in spring, the robins that sing, and free consulting at Search Engine Strategies Toronto. Okay, he didn’t really say the last one.

    This year, SES Toronto is on fire with express and site clinics. You now have the chance to review your site with top industry experts and get solid actionable recommendations… you know, the kind of stuff we don’t all have a budget for.

    Site clinics will take place on Day 2 (June 11th) and include:

    Search Ads & Landing Page Clinic

    Moderated by Bryan Eisenberg, yours truly and Mona Elesseily will show you how to carry out your promises from ad to landing page to ensure a smooth visitor experience, increase your relevancy, and boost your conversions.

    Tough Love: Get Your Site Tuned Up

    Let experts Jonathan Allen and Dawn Wentzell give you a little tough love about your site in a session moderated by Mike Grehan. They may be tough on you, but you’ll love the tips and tricks you learn in this session.

    Here are the express clinics lined up:

    • Express Search Usability Clinic
    • On-The-Spot SEO Site Review
    • 3 Steps to Conversion Nirvana
    • Landing Page Improvement Clinic
    • Socializing your Website
    • If Links are Votes… Is your Site on the Ballot?

    These clinics are free for anyone to attend and require no appointments. Best of all, they’re spread out throughout the 2 days, which means you can go to all of them if you choose to.

    If you’d like some suggestions for sessions to attend, check out Andrew Goodman’s blog post: Red Hot Topics at SES Toronto 2010.

    And While You’re There…

    Make sure you stop by the Acquisio booth to say hello and pick up one of our famous t-shirts. People who wore Acquisio t-shirts during SES New York have reported having better social lives, getting promoted at work, and being offered free drinks… no, seriously, see for yourself:

    See you in Toronto!

    Filed Under: Landing Pages

    Bad (PPC) Romance

    May 11, 2010 By Noran El-Shinnawy Leave a Comment

    Please don’t think any less of me for titling my post after a Lady Gaga song. But when I hear her sing about bad romance, I don’t think about her and Sir Gaga’s relationship (Ew!). I think about that of advertisers and AdWords.

    Every advertising medium has always had its share of challenges and frustrations for advertisers. Back when there were only 3 major television networks, advertisers were complaining about monopoly, prices and rules. Before we knew it, cable came along and fragmented all that, making it harder to reach your audiences. I bet there’s still people out there reminiscing about the good old days.

    It’s true that history repeats itself. Because if you fast forward to today, you can still hear the same frustrations and concerns by advertisers. Common complaints include costs, campaign structure issues, AdWords user interface, better client management tools, etc.

    They say the first step to recovery is admitting that there is a problem. So when asked about their main frustrations with AdWords, we weren’t surprised to find that top industry experts like Andrew Goodman didn’t hesitate to share.

    (P.s.- you can look at content and search CTRs separately in Acquisio SEARCH ;) )

    The fact of the matter is, people have always had problems around some of the measurements of the advertising mediums they use. Sure, 3rd party vendors in the PPC management software space have offered amazing features like campaign automation and more user friendly interfaces and continually improve their offerings to reduce the complexities of maintaining effective campaigns. Even Google has been working hard on making Analytics and AdWords play nice. Sure, some of the metrics you are shown are still not necessarily as complete or accurate as you hope. You are forced to work with averages and have to dig deep to find the right data to pull insights from and that gives you every right to complain. But remember, in the good old days of TV, we had to rely on panel measurements. So if given the choice today, which would you rather have?

    Last week, someone told me they wish AdWords would just know what they want and do it. And while full automation is possible, that doesn’t mean it is ideal. You certainly need the human touch to make the final decision and work in semi-automated mode.

    Be careful what you wish for. Yes, part of our frustrations are high costs and ambiguous rules, but at least it’s easy to reach audiences who are seeking solutions to their problems NOW. While AdWords doesn’t offer your the option of buying your way to success, you can certainly work hard enough to achieve it.

    I say bad romance is better than no romance at all. What’s your bad romance story with AdWords? What are your AdWords frustrations? Have you found ways to put the spark back into your PPC romance?

    Filed Under: PPC

    3D PPC Landing Pages

    April 23, 2010 By Noran El-Shinnawy 6 Comments

    How do you make your PPC landing pages jump off the screen?

    a. By giving your visitors cheesy 3D glasses? Everyone looks sexy in those.

    b. By designing with animated Gifs, CSS sprites, and excessive Flash?

    c. By optimizing your landing pages with the 3 Dimensions of the conversion trinity developed by Bryan Eisenberg?

    Did you guess right? Fresh off Bryan Eisenberg’s online presentation 2 weeks ago where he introduced his conversion trinity; a simple but very effective way to optimize your PPC landing pages by examining the following 3 dimensions:

    1. Relevance: Focusing on understanding the intent of your visitors and delivering the most relevant content for their needs.

    2. Value: Making sure your visitors understand the value of purchasing from you.

    3. Call To Action: Making sure that your visitors not only know what action they should take next, but that they feel comfortable taking it as well.

    To put this more in perspective for you, I’ll show you how we’ve used the trinity internally to develop a landing page for our new free eBook: You Know You Need a PPC Management Tool When… (see my analysis below the graphic.)


    1. Relevance

    We’re in the business of PPC, talking about PPC to the people who like PPC.  Think of it the same way you would about your keyword targeting and ad placement.

    Just like  a PPC ad, when a visitor clicks on your offer, you’ve only done half the job by making it compelling enough and click-worthy. Finish off the job by making sure that your landing page not only matches the offer, but reinforces it. This offering is about a free eBook and so is the landing page.

    Besides, you don’t really want your ads looking like this:

    You want them to look more like:

    2. Value

    I’m sure your offer is unique and valuable, but what are you doing to convey that to your visitors? This is where your unique value proposition (UVP) needs to be prominent on the page to remind your visitors of why you’re not only a relevant, but the best solution for their problem. This where you also get to harness the power of copywriting to convey the value of your offer in an easy way that stands out.

    In this case, Acquisio’s UVP (PPC management software for agencies) is loud and clear at the top of the page. We’ve also used concise bullet points that first communicate pains the visitors can relate to, then benefits they can use to overcome their problems.

    3. Call To Action

    Nothing is worse than a visitor bouncing off your page because they didn’t know what to do next. It’s your job to hold their hand and guide them throughout the whole experience, until you lead them to the action you want them to take.

    To ensure that, we’ve designed our call to action buttons using action verbs with implied benefits that are relevant to the offer. “Get Your Copy” vs “Submit” or “Download”.

    Finally, a little scent doesn’t hurt. We’ve made sure our e-mail blast and landing page are not visually disconnected by using the same template, pictures, and wording.

    Whether you’re currently running some ads you can evaluate, or thinking about creating some new ones, make sure you keep those 3 dimensions in mind to create relevant, valuable, and actionable landing pages that pop off the screen for your visitors.

    Filed Under: Landing Pages

    Keywords- Who Gets the Glory?

    April 6, 2010 By Noran El-Shinnawy 1 Comment

    As we watched the Canadiens score in last week’s hockey game, my brother screamed “nice shot!” while I thought to myself- “that was an awesome pass!“

    And that got me thinking about Google’s announcement of AdWords Search Funnels at SES NY. Just like any other sport, the player who scores gets the glory, but the credit goes to the team as a whole. Take that same concept online and you’ll see that campaigns work pretty much the same way. The keyword that converts gets all the glory, but what about all the other keywords that “passed” the conversion along or “assisted” in it?

    [Read more...]

    Filed Under: PPC, The Marketing Market Tagged With: attribution, search funnels

    Need for Speed

    March 8, 2010 By Noran El-Shinnawy Leave a Comment

    No, no,  I’m not referring to the 1997 computer game, though I know it surprises you that I played it.

    I’m referring to Google, who announced last November that speed will be added to the algorithm determining a site’s quality score. In simple words, the slower your site loads, the more your ads will cost you. If you are way too optimistic, you’re thinking that there are hundreds of other factors in that algorithm and so the weight placed on speed can’t be tremendously significant, right?

    Well, yes and no.

    Even if you don’t end up paying through the nose for ads, you are still leaving a ton of money on the table. Last week, results of a study conducted in the UK revealed that almost 50% of all people surveyed cited slow loading time as the main reason that turned them away from a site. Simple but scary math translates this to 5.5 abandoned transactions per consumer over the last 12 months. Could this have been happening on one of your clients’ sites?

    If that’s not sending chills down your spine, consider this- not only will traffic continue to increase, but more and more people are browsing on their cell phones. You cannot afford to be slow… literally!

    Our good friend Bryan Eisenberg suggests 2 very simple but valuable ways to speed up landing pages.

    1.       Running a Speed test using tools like Web Page Analyzer, Yahoo! YSlow for Firebug, or Google’s Page Speed. This will help determine how slow the site or pages are.

    2.       Slimming down “fat” images with tools like Smush.it, Dynamic Drive, or Web-Resizer. To state the obvious, this will speed up the loading time.

    In my Conversion Optimization Certification course, I learned that telling someone their website sucks is like telling them their baby is ugly. So as an agency, how do you break the news to your clients? what initiatives can you take to educate and help them? Should this even be your responsibility?

    Whether or not you think its your responsibility, the lurking guilt of knowing should drive you to take at least a small step towards helping your clients. For starters, you can run those testing tools on their sites and send out some suggestions and recommendations with next month’s report. Shed some light on the issue and work hand in hand with them to keep that quality score solid, so that their users can have a better online experience and you can manage their campaigns more smoothly.

    Filed Under: PPC
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