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.

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

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:

• Boston (July 7)
• Philadelphia (July 8 )
• NYC (July 9)

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!

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.

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?

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?

2 weeks ago at SES, a friend told me a story about a PPC client they had 2 years ago. One of the keywords they had very early in their search funnel was “broadband,” which obviously accounted for zero conversions. So they decided to cut it out and guess what? Their sales dropped by 30% (causation not correlation, it was a pure experiment). But what they didn’t and couldn’t realize 2 years ago, is the impact this zero converting keyword had in guiding the user down the conversion funnel.

Let’s say a user Googles the term “broadband”, lands on your site, you do a decent job building trust and credibility, but then they left. The following day, they search for “internet broadband” and land on your site again. This time, the confidence level is higher and the visit turns into a conversion. Did your efforts go in vain the first time around because the visitor didn’t convert? Clearly they shouldn’t.

In a typical campaign, you would have no way of finding that out, unless you test or experiment like my friend did. But with Google rolling out this feature, it should eliminate a lot of the guesswork and change your perspective when you evaluate your keywords.

Some Considerations

1. You have to have AdWords conversion tracking set up on your account

2. You have to be comfortable letting Google have all that data (some clients aren’t!)

3. Google obviously had this data for a while before making it available. How and when will they use this data to impact Quality Score of your AdWords campaigns?

4. You have to understand the benefits and limitations of the reports that Google is offering. Analytics specialist Justin Cutroni recently published a blog post about his thoughts on Google offering up these sets of reports-

“The Search Funnel reports are a well thought out way to understand how people interact with AdWords ads prior to conversion and thus help us understand the ROI of our AdWords spend.”

“I think this is a good first step by Google. They took reliable set of data that was just sitting around a data center and created some reports that will help marketers understand the real value of different types of keywords. This is all very low risk for Google with very high potential (read: more AdWords revenue).

But these new reports are also a good test of how users, and the overall analytics market, will respond to Google’s version campaign attribution reporting. Real attribution models are very complicated to create. They involve a lot of data about different types of campaigns (banners, cpc, email, etc.).”

To get a sense of the types or reports available, you can watch this video put out by the Google team:

The Future Strategy of Using AdWords

All this is incredibly valuable, especially when you add Google AdWords’ other recent offering of Remarketing.

Let’s imagine a situation where we would help launch a PPC campaign for a local gym. We may start out targeting the keyword “gym Montreal.” It may not have a great conversion rate to becoming a lead for the gym, but it may help people recognize the brand on their first visit to our website from the ad. Using AdWords remarketing, I could target people on the content network who are interested in “beauty and personal care” to encourage them to come back to the site, or to drive search demand for our bootcamp, spinning, or yoga classes. That could lead people to search for “montreal spinning class” or even “by brand name + spinning,” which would eventually convert to a lead. “gym montreal” would get the assist, the content network remarketing would bring them back to search for terms that have a higher likelihood to convert.

To get a better step-by-step understanding of AdWords remarketing, read this fabulous post.

What are your thoughts on these recent releases and how do you think it will affect your strategy in managing your PPC client campaigns?

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.

Depending on your advertising goals, some of these second tier networks may be worth considering. So any serious online marketer should know (1) what are some of the better alternatives out there, (2) what the advantages are to considering any of them, and (3) what to consider/look for once they decide to expand their online marketing reach.

Alternative Ad Networks

First, we’re going to take a look at a handful of second-tier networks that you might consider as alternatives or supplements to, AdWords or Yahoo!. This is far from an exhaustive list, but it includes some of the more reputable tier-two networks. Also, all of them are auction-based, self-serve networks, and are primarily targeted at English language markets.

Ask Sponsored Listings
Ask’s Sponsored Listings’ contextual ad network uses a CPC bidding model. It focuses on certain key verticals, and publishers include plenty of different search sites like Excite, Mamma, and Dogpile, as well as other lifestyle and technology sites (such as CNET.com). Ask also boasts a reach of over 70 million unique users.

AOL Advertising (fka Quigo AdSonar / Platform-A)
Acquired two years ago by AOL, Quigo AdSonar offers contextual advertising via its AdSonar and FeedPoint products. Advertisers pay per click and bids are selected for each sponsored placement. Sponsored listings are available on such sites as ABC.com, The Washington Post, AOL Money and Finance, CNN Money, and FOX News. Rich media ad units are also available.

Facebook Ads
With Facebook Advertising you can target audiences with a variety of demographic and psychographic filters. Reach people by location, age, sex, education, and other targeted keywords. Ads are primarily text-based (max. 135 characters in length) and may include a small image. CPM and CPC bidding options are both available.

LinkedIn Direct Ads
Through LinkedIn’s DirectAds, advertisers can target business professionals worldwide with text advertising. LinkedIn’s worldwide user base of professionals is more than 50 million, and lets you target your message according to industry, job title, company size, location. Pay by clicks or by impressions. This can be a very valuable audience for certain businesses, but it’s not always the cheapest to reach. For instance, some ad categories sell at CPMs of $50 or higher. While its text ads are available for small to medium advertisers, rich media advertising is also available, but restricted to advertisers with budgets in excess of $25,000.

Marchex Adhere (fka IndustryBrains)
Marchex Adhere offers call- and click-based performance advertising products. Bids can be placed on vertical categories (business, finance, real estate, IT, and HR), as well as site-specific pages. Site-specific placements are available with publishers like BusinessWeek, The Globe and Mail, Kiplinger.com, and PC World. While keyword-targeted placements are available, Marchex’s strength appears to rest with their site-specific targeting.

MIVA (fka Findwhat)
Formerly e-Spotting and FindWhat, MIVA was acquired by performance-based advertising network Adknowledge in March 2009. MIVA’s Precision Network is offered for targeting different verticals. MIVA also has a network of thousands of sites available for sponsored placements. There is otherwise scant information available on the specific sites and publishers in their network.

MySpace MyAds
MySpace MyAds uses its social network data to offer various targeting options. Banners are served based on user hobbies, interests, gender, education level, parental status, age, and location. CPC and CPM bidding options are available. MySpace MyAds is also part of the FOX Audience Network advertising platform.

Pontiflex (this profile has been updated as per the comment below)
This is one of the few CPL marketplaces of note. They don’t have a roster family of publishers, per se, but offer a technology that lets advertisers access the entire CPL market, and even manage non-Pontiflex campaigns. Their CPL network is available through the AdLeads and AdUnitX platforms, and publishers using the technology include Pandora, Monster, and Admob.

Why Choose a Second-Tier Ad Network

Knowing what higher-profile alternatives are available, online marketers should also understand what the benefits are to expanding their campaigns into the second-tier. Essentially, there are three main incentives to try your campaigns in second-tier networks: (1) new audiences, (2) lower costs-per-conversion, and (3) better campaign management.

The first reason to consider tier-two networks is that they can help you reach new and unique audiences with your messages. Alternative networks often strike deals with content publishers such as popular newspapers, magazines, and blogs, that the Tier One networks have limited or no access to. So through the right ad network you can advertise with publishers that have the attention of the audience you’re targeting. After all, only around 5% of pages views on the web come from search pages. The remaining 95% of page views are content-, non-search –based [source].

Another reason to consider second-tier ad networks is that you might find CPCs and CPMs more cost-effective. With a properly optimized campaign, you can often pay much less for conversion than what is available through the first-tier.

Finally, second-tier networks can help you get a better return on individual campaigns. By spreading your message out across several networks, you will be able to determine which messages perform best with what audience, and optimize your campaign on a network-by-network basis. For instance, if one network performs particularly well on a particular campaign, you’ll be able to shift more of your budget to that network.

Choosing a Second-Tier Network

Once you’ve decided to extend your online marketing reach beyond the first-tier networks, there are several things you should consider when evaluating which networks to invest in. The main points of consideration range from pricing model to partner sites and where their traffic comes from. Knowing all of this in advance will help you (1) calculate whether a network is worth partnering with, and (2) how much of your online budget to invest in any of them.

First, understand what pricing models they offer and whether they suit your business goals. Ad models can range for from CPC to CPM to CPA, and while some offer only one of these, others offer a blend of the three. As a refresher, CPC means you only pay for each visit, CPM means you pay per thousand banner impressions, and CPA is strictly performance-based, where you pay only for conversions.

Second, think about how users find your site. This will allow you to choose networks that have deals with content sites that your target market is likely to visit. Niche business can easily find an AdWords alternative this way.

Once you’ve identified a network that interests you, speak with a company rep and ask how much traffic (and potential leads) they can deliver to you from a particular niche. This will help you determine whether the network is appropriate for any of your campaigns.

Also, if the second-tier ad network is a niche search engine (such as a shopping search engine), find out how they generate traffic. The quality of traffic you get will differ according to whether they are their own, well-known brand name, or are just buying traffic from other, smaller PPC search engines and reselling it to you.

You will then want to inquire about whether they is any sort of contract to sign and, if so, what the terms are. If campaigns do not meet your expectations, you’ll want to be able to pull them and receive a refund on the balance of your funds at any time.

Finally, no matter what network you decide to try, you should first test their traffic with a small budget. This will help you both evaluate their traffic, and then optimize your campaigns around that traffic and how you’re paying for it – whether it CPC, CPM, or CPA.

Conclusion

Even though Google dominate the first-tier, and the first-tier dominates online advertising, there are still clear advantages to straying into the second-tier. While you’ll often find CPCs, CPAs, and CPMs much lower (often due to less competition), you will also be able to better target your ads through targeted niche sites. Just remember to screen them appropriately, and then test them out with a smaller budget/campaign.

And, of course, if there any ad networks that you feel have been left out, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

My preferred tool, and what essentially enables this, is Google Analytics. I value ease of access to interesting and useful data, and how quickly novices can become familiar and productive with the tool.

Google Analytics can be the lazy webmaster’s best friend (and I like to be lazy in bulk, it keeps me busy) without any tinkering, but can also be an extremely of an insightful tool for people who decide to go beyond looking at numbers, towards an interpretation of them, with a wee bit of config (and there is craziness beyond the basics, but let’s not go bonkers just yet).

A lot of what is presented in Google Analytics (okay lets get lazy and call it GA) is not quite as it seems, and without some work to dig into the data and interpret it, some default views might actually end up misleading your efforts.

Getting the basics of Google Analytics down isn’t all that complex, but if you’re just starting out I do recommend getting a walk-through from someone who has used it from a marketing perspective in the past. If you’ve got e-commerce tracked there’s another aspect to consider, and even if you’re only concerned with a specific segment such as paid search, gaining some understanding of other sources of traffic is likely to help your paid efforts.

I’m going to present a handful of ways to gain a little clarity, which is by no means a comprehensive overview of how to interpret your data (whole books are written, my friends, volumes), but it might help lessen some common misinterpretations.

1 – Clean Out the Brand & Expand

You need to mine your analytics software for keywords that can expand and contract your PPC account. The best source of lateral ideas for keywords to bid on, especially if you have a lot of content on your site, is from the organic traffic you already get from the search engines.

In order to see the terms coming from search engines in GA, click Traffic Sources > Keywords. If you select ‘non-paid’ you’ll see data over time for your organic traffic, and a short-list of your top referring keywords. You can choose another metric like source to see where they’re coming from, and look at goal or monetary information for them also. In order to clear this list up you have to apply an ‘exclude’ filter on the list of keywords. This option is available at the bottom of the list of words, just pull down where it says ‘Filter Keyword’ and select Exclude.

In the exclude field type your brand words, or parts of words, separated by the pipe symbol, ‘|’. This symbol just means ‘or’. Once you apply the filter, the data over time graph at the top will reflect the filtered keywords, which incidentally is a great way to monitor your overall organic SEO efforts, as will the list of keywords presented. Simply set the number of rows in the bottom right to something large like ‘500’, and explore the list for juicy new keyword ideas.

So what happens if you don’t have organic traffic to mine keywords from? Mine your existing adwords traffic, which is tip 2.

2 – Exacting Adwords

If you’re running a PPC campaign, you need to understand your match types, and while I believe they should only be used very strategically, chances are you’re bidding on some broad-matched terms.

The second technique I want to present for gaining clearer insight into your PPC campaign via Google Analytics is something I actually consider completely mandatory for any advertiser who utilizes ‘broad match’ in their Adwords campaigns. It’s just a set of two filters that you apply in your GA account, which reveal to you the actual phrases that people searched at Google which triggered your ad. If you’re a PC computer shop and bid on broad-match for ‘laptops’, it might be nice to know if you wasted ten bucks today for people searching ‘apple laptops’.

Revealing the long-tail of the phrases you’re bidding on lets you both expand and contract your account, intelligently. If you see phrases where the searcher-intent doesn’t match your website’s offering, look for patterns, and you might find a new ‘negative keyword’ to prevent your ad from being shown where it’s not relevant. On top of contracting with negative matches, you should constantly mine this set of ‘long tail’ phrases to find more phrases to bid on specifically. If you bid specifically on a phrase instead of on a part of it via broad-match, chances are you’ll be saving money, be up against less competition, and you’ll have a chance to tailor your ad and landing page with more relevance.

That funky string in filter 1 for you to copy/paste, so long as wordpress doesn’t muck it up: (\?|&)(q|p)=([^&]*)

3 – Compare Data in Context

Google Analytics lets you look at data over time very easily, enabling you to spot trends, but if you don’t put the time-frames you’re looking at or comparing into context, it loses meaning. Sometimes a necessary aspect to consider in order not to lose context is seasonality. I recommend, in most cases, comparing time frames to their equivalent from the previous year – it rarely makes sense to compare Q1 data to Q4 data without taking seasonal trends into account, and if you don’t have a sophistimacated formula for doing so, just compare it to the same time last year.

To do this just click the down arrow to the right of the date range box, and select ‘compare to past’. Then just change the secondary date range to read from a year earlier and click apply:

You’ll be rewarded with some contextual comparison data, and if you’ve gone to the trouble of filtering this chart down to relevant metrics ahead of time (such as non-branded organic traffic for SEO, or specific campaigns or keywords for PPC), you’ll have a nice distilled meaningful graph. Remember that seasonality is not the only way to gain context, always ask yourself if you’re comparing apples to apples or apples to oranges when you’re doing comparison work.

There you have it folks, three simple but essential ways to gain a clearer view of your traffic and trends, to make more intelligent and informed decisions for your organic and PPC search campaigns. Now, just to mess with your heads a little bit, have a look at what kind of information GA can really put at your fingertips:

Most politicians are old; it’s basically a job requirement. It makes sense. The accruement of knowledge takes time and learning what to do with it takes practice.

Not many politicians would be classed as outright ‘ignorant’, but I’m afraid that if you can’t tell me, generally, the difference between Facebook and Google, you’ve got some modern learnin’ to do. And let’s face it, we can’t learn ourselves any younger, so it’s all politicians really have. The fact is the Internet, search engines, keywords, and link graphs are all areas of knowledge that politicians, or at least their right-hand-peeps, need to get their over-educated heads around, right about now.

To their credit, our would-be leaders are beginning to understand (at least the power of) social media, but are failing to comprehend how social media really intersects with search engines, keywords, the link graph, and the simple fact that searchers are actively seeking information. That’s a lot to learn, but a first step towards a functional understanding of our strange little online world might be achieved via our easy to comprehend friend, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing. It’s a quick and simple way to get your political paws on real-life search traffic, so you can see the power of turning the tables – of appealing to people looking for information about issues, instead of just broadcasting information about issues out to as many people as possible, in any direction they might be looking. Who do you think is more likely to vote?

So why am I talking about electioneering at a time when nobody’s doing it? Last year, towards the latter end of dual American and Canadian federal election races, I wrote a post about the state of PPC advertising use by the candidates on both sides of the border – I didn’t have a method of data collection or anything statistically significant, I just tried searching for terms at Google (via the ‘view your ads in different places’ geo-targeting feature in Google Adwords), and I had a lot of trouble finding relevant political ads for relevant key-phrases.

This year I’d like to be a little more proactive – Canada (yes, it’s a weird place) might have another federal election as early as the next few months (sigh), and setting up online campaigns is something you want to start early in the election cycle and evolve, not start late. So I’d like to outline the basics of what someone running for an elected position in North American (or, you know, anywhere) should consider in terms of online campaign marketing. I don’t mean from the community building, online campaigning, get people talking perspective, but from the search perspective – where search engine optimization (SEO) and PPC advertising allow you to get your (in this case political) message in front of people who might actually be interested in it, because they’re searching for it.

Understanding this difference is essential: Search is the only medium where you’re answering questions posed by people who are actively seeking an answer, whereas grassroots marketing is simply asking people who already know you to spam people they know with your message, and broadcast marketing is just plain old traditional spam, pushing messages towards people who didn’t request them. Who is more likely to be a fence sitter in decision mode?

The complexities of setting up a full political Social+SEO campaign are beyond the scope of this lill’ole article (if you happen to be someone who actually is interested in those complexities, ahem, shameless plug, my first name at g-mail pls), instead let’s look at the essential paid search campaign. PPC is the fastest (legitimate) way to send genuine search traffic to pages which present your message in exactly the way you want it presented – viral social-media messages, which history has now proven should be part of your campaign also, do not allow you to control the content being presented nearly as comprehensively, because they require an element of sensationalism (or some other obfuscation, angle or opinion) in order to get passed around.

PPC is still horrifically underutilized as a medium for political advertising. According to Rimm-Kaufman less than half (only 44%!) of the 2008 US presidential contenders used paid search at all. They also found that the methodologies used in political PPC campaigns are simply not as sophisticated as in private enterprise. Ad copy, landing page testing and conversion tracking were not common.

In a meager attempt to begin a slow remedy of this situation, I offer some very general steps towards setting up a not-ridiculously-pathetic political PPC campaign. I’m not here to teach you Adwords or the other PPC systems, but just to give some basic “here’s what you have to do or get done” information.

Step 1) Map Your Issues

Get a list of every single issue, positive and negative, that may be a factor in the election race. Put it down on paper. I know you still like paper, you’re old. Give this list to someone who is good at keyword mining (get an SEO to train a marketing-savvy campaign staffer) – a decent common-denominator search keyword research tool is Google’s own Adwords tool. Keep in mind though that this tool is build to work within the world of Adwords, which requires some understanding in order to interpret the numbers presented for all phrase, exact, and broad-match options.

If there are some issues that have strong geographical associations, make a note of the places and the association so that you can build a different advertising message for different regions.

Do this even if that association simply means one area tends to have one opinion, and a second, another – one fish two fish, red fish blue fish.

Step Umm) Not Really a Step At All

This is just a little aside about what I like to call “searcher intent”. For each of the phrases that will be returned to you by your keyword searching slave, umm, volunteer, you have to make an intelligent inference about what that searcher might be looking for, and what you might want to present them. This, in many cases, will be intuitively obvious, but doing the work of examining the searcher intent of your phrases, and ensuring you appeal to that intent in your ad-copy (for better ad click through rate) and on your ad’s landing page (for better ‘conversion potential’), is something that I simply haven’t seen done yet for a political campaign. This is the element of craftsmanship that separates a good, effective paid search campaign from a useless one.

Step 2) Group Your Keywords

If you’re the keyword researcher, at first just worry about producing as exhaustive a set of lists for as many of the phrases as you can (lots of worksheets in an excel workbook). After this you can then worry about doing some logical (or keyword based) groupings of phrases for your ad-groups. It might be wise to group your keywords based on searcher-intent where it applies, this way you can likely appeal to a large portion of the keywords in that group with specific effective landing page copy – in general just build as many small tightly-focused ad-groups as is technically possible.

Do not forget to comprehensively cover your own name and people within your party. Online reputation management in a political campaign necessitates proactive self-referential ads. Even if the keyword research tool doesn’t show people searching for specific issues yet, but you predict them to, bid now, and bid on issues in conjunction with your name and party name. People want to know where you and your party stand on specific issues – don’t let someone else tell them. Also consider building a strategy for bidding on opponent names, as McCain did in the last race.

You’ll want to get some specific advice on match-type choices, all I can say in general is, if you do a lot of indiscriminate broad-matching you’ll lose some of the value that comes from the specificity of being able to infer searcher intent. Don’t ignore broad match, just use it strategically.

Now go back to your original list that contains information about opinions in different places, and where appropriate, make a note of which groups are going to require ads and landing pages to be geo-targeted. Geo-targeting your campaign means people searching from one area can be shown one ad, while those searching from another can be shown a different ad (reading that sentence should have made any politician smile).

Step 3) Write Your Ads

So ad-groups are just our logical groupings of keywords mentioned above. When those keywords are searched for at Google, an ad has to show, and it has to point somewhere. This is what campaign staff are for – get your minions to write hundreds of those juicy little character-limited ads (give them the character limits for Adwords and whichever other platform you’ll be advertising on, as the requirements might be slightly different, and breaking up the ads words appropriately is most certainly minion work).

Hey, ad writers, you’re going for high click-through-rates for your ads based on the keywords that will trigger them – this is a political campaign, don’t be afraid to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Adwords is a democratic system, ads that make Google more money (get clicked more) will be shown more. Just make sure there are a few variations for Google to choose from in each ad-group. This is your first line of offence in appealing to searcher intent, so be sure that the ad-copy-writer is writing based on the keywords that will be triggering the ad, and that they understand the essential concepts.

If you’ve incorporated geo-targeting into your campaign, be sure that the writer understands where the ads are going to be triggered from, and what you want to say to that specific region.

Step 4) Write Your Landing Pages

This is where you have carte blanche to completely screw up your efforts if you wish. One major technical caveat, your landing pages have to match up very well with the keywords in the search that got the visitor there. If you fail to match keywords to content, you’ll likely be penalized by Google or other PPC providers for not being relevant enough, and you’ll be charged more money for the same service. Read up on ‘Quality Score’ to learn more. This doesn’t mean stuff every single keyword variation into your landing page, but be sure to include your core keywords from the ad-group. The implication of this caveat is that you need to be relevant in order to be in a position to influence the person who clicked on your ad.

Once you’ve worked out a process of creating landing pages for each ad-group that cover the core keywords in their copy, you have the opportunity to tailor that copy so that it appeals to the searcher intent, and your ad-copy. Notice I didn’t say tailor the copy so that it displays the same message as your print and television advertising, tailor it to the searcher intent of the search phrase, and any modification of that intent that your ad might provide. If you’ve bid on too many phrases and can’t create content for each keyword, back up and try to extrapolate the dominant searcher intent in that ad-group.

Again take geo-targeting into account.

Step 5) Launch & Pay Attention

Paid search in conjunction with a good web analytics program like Google Analytics allow for a lot of insight into the effectiveness of your campaign. There may be no traditional ‘conversion’ metric to focus on or judge your visitors on (if you have a contact form, for instance, and it is not the ultimate goal for all visitors, it should not be used as a measure of success), and so you should be focussing on engagement metrics.

Engagement metrics involve things like time on site, and bounce rate (a complex one if you present a lot of information and no call to change pages on your landing page).

You should also be sure to enable some advanced functionality in Google Analytics so that you can see the full search term entered by people arriving via a broad-match in your PPC campaign. Once you have full search term access you can evaluate for searcher-intent, and you can also segment by variables like location of the searcher, gaining valuable insight into things like which issues matter most to specific constituent regions. The practical use of web analytics cannot be overemphasized (even if its power extends a bit outside of the original scope of this post), and at a minimum should be used to refine and guide your PPC efforts over the course of your campaign.