Be sure to submit your high score - you could earn the title of Super Santa Rider Champion 2008!

CLICK HERE TO PLAY SUPER SANTA RIDER

PS - we originally let the developers do whatever they wanted. Bad mistake. To see the uncensored version of super Santa Rider, click here. Be aware that this may be a little disturbing.

Instead, I’ll take a slim sliver of the concept embedded in my previously lofty goal: negative keywords in PPC - and try to offer something more solid than philosophy. In PPC advertising, negative keywords are ones which prevent your ad from being triggered. A simple example: say you’re running a campaign selling luxury jewelry and you have a phrase-match or broad-match on the word ‘engagement rings’. You might want to have the negative keyword “cheap” attached to the campaign so that your ad is never shown when someone searches for “cheap engagement rings”.

This, in loosely knit PPC campaigns, is as close as many people get to interpreting the searcher intent of their incoming traffic. A great deal can be done on the positive site, but in many cases, a great deal is still left to be done on the negative side.

First, let’s look at a handful of ways that you can delve deeper into who, exactly, your PPC campaign is attracting.

Find out what you’re already paying for:

Google recently (okay it was a while ago  now, in internet years) released a new feature in its Adwords reports section called a ‘search query report’. The idea here is that Google will simply tell you exactly what a surfer searched for before clicking on your ad, because as we know, when you’re broad-matching, it’s anybody’s guess. 

As I wrote over at the NVI SEO Blog, the search query report fails pretty miserably to live up to its promise – but a better solution has already been engineered by our friends over at ROI Revolution: the Google Analytics keyword sleuth. In fact, they’ve directly compared their own tool to the search query report, with not very surprising results.

Yes, it requires that you be running Google Analytics, but the insight it provides is truly exceptional. You’re guaranteed to go on a negative keyword adding spree when you can see some of the bizarre things you’re likely paying for in that expensive, bloated, broad-match campaign your client is so attached to.

But it pays to be proactive too, where some good old fashioned human-brain based sleuthing comes in handy. Lets look at some ways you could predict negative keywords, and stamp them out before they cost you one click.

The obvious:

The Google Keyword tool, or other major keyword research tools such as Wordtracker or Keyword discovery – The most obvious, but often ignored method of the bunch: just plug in the shortest-tail version of your primary and secondary words, then scan the lists.

Yes, now you’re going to have to do some work that requires ack! thinking! and waaaa! reading! You know your products and services, and you now have in front of you a list of the ways that people search for your products and services – scan the list for things you wouldn’t want to bid on – where the searcher intent doesn’t line up to your offering, don’t pay for the click. It’s that simple.

Let’s say you’re selling inventory software, and part of your list looks like this:

• Inventory software
• Inventory management software
• Business inventory software
• Inventory control software
• Inventory software free
• Home inventory software
• Small business inventory software
• Pc inventory software
• Manufacturing inventory software
• Bar code inventory software
• Web based inventory software
• Inventory software download

You know your product – does it run on a PC? Is there a free version or trial? Is it applicable to small businesses? Does it integrate with bar codes? Is it web based? Used at home? Downloadable?

Almost half of the most popular phrases that a broad match bid on ‘inventory software’ would trigger might not even apply to your offering.  

Product search engines with suggest features:

In the world of product marketing you can use any site that categorizes or suggests things for you based on your root keywords to find more potential negative matches. A good example of this is the Google product search. Search for your short-tail words, then scroll to the bottom of the results page, where you’ll see suggestions and brand names:

You might want to consider placing a negative match on your competitors brand names (or you might not, up to you! As a lot of you know, there’s a bit of a brand-name bidding loophole with broad-match), and the related search field can give some very direct ideas for negative keywords. To expand the lists further just click the ‘more’ link beneath them:

These, and other forms of this style of product research have been spoken about written about extensively by Linda Bustos on Get Elastic, The Ecommerce Blog (get the RSS, trust me) and the SEOmoz Youmoz blog, where she details how E-bay can often be a more comprehensive database for products that share names, over traditional keyword research tools. 

Once you have a short list, expand it:

The techniques above will help you get started in creating your own personal ultimate negative keyword list, but don’t rely on computers to guess what human searchers might do – go over your basic list and start to expand it logically, with synonyms, different forms of words, and phrases, misspellings, and whatever you can think of. 

For the concept ‘cheap’ for instance, you could build out a list like this:

• bargain
• cheap
• clearance
• close out
• close outs
• closeout
• closeouts
• discount
• discounted
• free
• inexpensive
• liquidation
• odd lots
• overstock
• remainder
• remainders
• freebie
• complimentary
• complementary
• complimentry
• complementry
• offers
• gratis
• irregular

The above list is actually an amalgamation of two that I found previously published, one by Jennifer Slegg, and one by Andy Komack. Andy has written before on the subject, and has actually authored one of the most informative and useful posts on the topic yet put together, where he simply gives away his negative keyword seed lists.

In that post Andy does a great job of showing how different styles of keyword lists can apply to different accounts, or even different parts of the same account. He reels off lists to help you avoid job seekers, avoid knowledge/reference/stats seekers, bargin hunters, price shoppers, DIYers and gives great lists for those selling commercial software, in the manufacturing arenas, in law and in business to business environments. If you’re having trouble getting your list started, just read through Andy’s post. Keep in mind that when you include a word as a negative, such as ‘web’ Google Adwords will exclude all ads with the word ‘web’, you don’t need to add additional negative keywords for ‘web based’, ‘web enabled’ ect.

So start adding some negatives - it’s a direct, uncomplicated path to ROI.

1. Do not bring more than 2 bottles of wine per person per day. I would say that 1.5 bottles is just enough lubrication. Except for the next morning headache.

2. Food - don’t let your bacon cook unsupervised. Unsupewrvised bacon eventually turns black and powdery. Not good. 

3. Don’t do hotels. Cottages are best. Especially large lake side cottages with large bay windows on a large lake with large snowflakes and large bedrooms. Wi-fi must be available everywhere.

Over the past 2 days, we accomplished so much that we’re seriously pondering a permanent move. We talked shop - lots of it. We also planned loads of great stuff for our beloved clients. We actually know exactly what we’re going to do with our money.

We couldn’t have been this productive if it wasn’t for someone’s delicious meals, attention to every detail, and absolutely perfect preparation. From the melt in your mouth osso bucco to the best strawberry pies ever - ever. Marie, thank you Soooooo much, we had a great time at your gorgeous country home, it couldn’t possibly have been better. You’re awesome!

While they are essentially different marketing tactics, PPC and SEO overlap heavily in a number of areas, most notably keyword research. Of course you’re well aware that it’s never a bad idea to crunch some PPC data when trying to identify which SEO ranking goals to concentrate on, both for volume estimates and conversion potential, but how else can these two tactics borrow from each-other in a complimentary fashion? Over the years I’ve found that PPC marketing, which clients love because of the instant traffic and sales, can be a useful tool for explaining and opening the door to SEO work, which clients learn to love because of the cheap, renewable traffic.

PPC accounts are broken down into campaigns, ad-groups, and keywords – a structure which offers an intuitive way to explain to clients that their products or services can be viewed as a hierarchical structure. Sure it’s only three levels deep - campaign, ad-group, keyword - but it is a tree structure, and that’s what counts:

Google AdWords openly states that the relationship between the keyword you’re bidding on and the content of the landing page that the visitor is sent to bears directly on the quality score of that keyword (and hence, how much you pay per click). With Quality Score and conversion potential as the backdrop clients can get their head around the idea of creating specific landing pages for every ad-group in a campaign. The more focused and tight an ad-group is the better chance it has of living in Quality Score nirvana.

Taking this concept one step further it’s not difficult to explain that if every key-phrase had a specific landing page tailored to it, that landing page would likely stand the best chance at conversion. Nine out of ten times these PPC landing pages should be isolated, and excluded from search engine indexes, simply because they’re more than likely to contain substantial duplicate content.

But if you can convince the client that with a little extra effort, they can create sales pages that are worthy of being stand-alone useful content for visitors, why not integrate them into the site? Once someone is committed to the idea of creating a unique page for every productive keyword in a PPC campaign, it’s not a far leap to suggest that a couple of hundred words of unique text on that page is a good idea, heck, it can even be user generated – throw the titles into an H1 tag, create unique title tags and meta descriptions, and you’ve got product pages that are segmented into SEO silos naturally.

The crux of this transition from PPC landing page to SEO page is two-fold:

• The content on every page must be unique and substantially different from other product pages, including title tags, meta descriptions and body text
• The section and sub-section pages must link down to their appropriate lower level pages, and the product pages and sub-sections must link up to their appropriate parent pages. Just imagine every line in the above diagram being a link back-and-forth between pages. This is easily accomplished with breadcrumb navigation.

The concept of sharing landing pages and SEO optimized pages goes both ways – if your PPC campaign is suffering quality score problems, take a look at the landing pages. If they don’t contain the keywords that you’re bidding on, it could be the source of your problems. If the website you’re working on has information pages that are better associated with the keywords you’re bidding on, maybe you could make these information pages the PPC landing pages. If you’re hesitant to do this because you feel the PPC landing pages hold better conversion potential, it might be worth paying some more attention to the conversion potential of the site’s information pages.

There are many other ways in which organic search engine optimization and pay per click management cross paths – stay tuned for continuing parts in this series: PPC and SEO – What the Left Hand Can Learn From the Right.

There, I said it.

It’s a damn good looking town town, I’m a big F.L.W. fan, but I truly wish the Search Engine Strategies event organizers would do a little climatologically based scheduling. California in the winter months, Chicago in the summer months. That’s all I ask.

Last time I made it to an SES in the windy city, not only did it live up to its moniker, it put Montreal to shame – we were still enjoying crisp fall evenings in the great white north while Chicago was deep freeze central. I actually saw two polar bears just outside of Buddy Guy’s place (hey is that place still open? I heard rumors they closed down, that would be a damn shame, it was the best chicken fried steak I ever had (no need to even mention it was the only chicken fried steak I’ve ever had (dang))).

But from whence we dredged our frozen bodies, one year hence we shall return, this time with a bigger, fluffier jacket. If you feel like joining us, the Acquisio booth will be at SES Chicago - it’s less than two months away now, and we’ve got couponish goodness to share: 20% off teeth whitening (and/or conference admission) when you plug this in the online form: 20ACQ

Go forth and prosper, but always remember to bring a towel (I recommend stuffing it up under your coat).

It was Arnold Schwarzenegger.

THE Arnold Schwarzenegger. With the big arms. And he was calling little ole me to say:

“This is Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I’m here to PUMP… YOU UP! About President Bush”

I wish I was kidding. By the fifth call or so the novelty had worn off and I began to hope secretly that all the marijuana consumed in the governator’s Mr. Universe days had seriously affected his non-political performance abilities.

It was simple, classic, invasive, annoying marketing. The old standby really. In Blue Hawaii it seemed destined to offend the majority of recipients, but at least reach the portion of the undecided population that, you know, had phones. It was more reminiscent of e-mail spam than savvy marketing, leading me to wonder what percentage of the party ad budgets were blanketed over non-targeted, broad market awareness campaigns.

Is this really effective in reaching swing voters trying to make a decision? Isn’t there a better way to allocate those presumably precious pennies? In 2004, I could forgive election campaign managers for not being familiar with the fine art of keyword research and character limited ad-copy. Come 2008, I’m back home in Montreal, this time inundated with the dual-propaganda of simultaneous federal Canadian and American elections. I’m still in the world of internet marketing, keywords still rule my life, and I’m left to wonder, have the electioneers’ comprehension of this strange world of search marketing evolved with the times?

Last week, as I was contemplating this post and poking around what political ads were where, Jane at SEOmoz was handling the weekly roundup and pointed out this valleywag post. Apparently Hitwise and Valleywag had done some dirty work and constructed lists of key-phrases that each presidential campaign is buying advertising for via Google AdWords.

It’s almost as unbelievable as Arnold Schwarzenegger calling me on a Sunday morning. Meaning, I’m not quite sure I believe it. If these are actual, unadulterated lists of the phrases each candidate is bidding on then I’m a little dumbfounded. If it were revealed that they had been cobbled together by a vast number of monkeys with vast numbers of typewriters, I may find myself unable to feign surprise. Okay a little harsh maybe, but really, is this the work of the brains behind the western hemisphere’s next front-man?

Let’s see, the Republican campaign appears to be bidding on 148 phrases, the Democrats, 219. If we subtract from each campaign the key-phrases that are self-referential to either the presidential candidate or their running mate we have left:

But wait, I swear I saw an Obama ad on a Plain search last time I was south of the border. Off I go to the Google ads preview tool to see if these lists are even realistic.

Starting at the top, there are no McCain ads for: price of oil per barrel today, obama, joe biden, presidential election campaign jobs in ny city, obama campaign, cost of iraq war 10 billion, republican party hopkins county texas, campaign issues, register to vote republican, who’s (sic) ahead in the election.. okay hang on. Zero for 10? Really?

And Obama - maryland democratic headquarters in annapolis, yup Obama ad. Denver convention center, nope. VP, nope.

The only positive in the bunch looks like a broadmatch on ‘democratic headquarters’ - which is supported by the fact that an Obama ad also appears on the nonsensical query ‘democratic headquarters in Uruguay’. Beyond this most of the ‘brand’ keywords centered around the names of the candidates and running mates can be explained by broadmatch also.

Back to my original hypothesis: monkeys.

Now that I’m certain these lists are near meaningless (like the bid on ‘www.realistate laws’ didn’t give it away), I think it’s time to do a spot check on some GOOD keywords to see if anybody is bidding where they should be. Google has been none too subtle in its attempts to grab part of the campaign spending pie, sponsoring political events and releasing some rather loose AdWords guidelines on their public policy blog. It’s perfectly okay to bid on peoples names so long as there are no ‘personal life’ attacks on the site. The policy is pretty lax in general, so much so in fact that you’d think each campaign headquarters would have brought in experts to ensure every conceivable keyphrase was covered by either the official site or some support sites. Almost anything goes, and this is the cheapest most targeted advertising available, you can directly solicit people who haven’t made up their minds or are reading up on the issues; this is a no brainer!

Now I have to think like a monkey for a second and come up with some phrases that might be plugged in by swing voters seeking information. How about:

• election issues
• palin on healthcare
• cost of the iraq war
• mortgage crisis
• bailout plan
• immigration policy
• education
• free trade
• gas prices

Nobody. At this point, I’m not surprised.

Can it really be that nobody at either campaign sees the value of bidding on these phrases (and the ten thousand more that could be relevant) leading up to what will inevitably be a close election? Google has condoned it - heck, they’ve encouraged it, paid big bucks to try and inform the parties of the value they’re missing out on, and all, seemingly, to no avail. Or maybe Google’s ad preview tool sucks. I’m sure you guys will let me know. A quick scan of Canadian election hot topics like ‘Afghanistan’ and even candidate names like ‘Stephane Dion’ pull no ads whatsoever. It’s just as bad north of the border.

The electioneers on both sides of the political spectrum, not to mention both sides of the border, appear in dire need of a PPC makeover - it’s so bad it’s absurd. If you’re a search marketer and politically active, now might be a good time to contact your local representative and see if you can’t explain to them the concept of keyword-triggered advertisements, targeting people looking for issues. If you know what targeting someone in the sales-cycle means, explain to them what it might mean to target someone in the decision-cycle.