Small businesses are especially close to my heart. When he retired from teaching, my father ran a small art company in Maine, and I saw firsthand how fulfilling — and how difficult — it was for him to realize his dream of running his own business. Unfortunately, his business closed its doors after just a few years. His key challenge: attracting qualified customers.

Many new businesses face similar challenges, but the power of technology can help business owners find the customers they need. Whether you’re a fledgling entrepreneur trying to turn your passion into a profit or an established enterprise trying to get to the next level, Internet tools like Google AdWords are the key to being there when customers come looking for you online.

To show what’s possible, we invited 53-year-old Jay Berkowitz to share his experience creating a business and using AdWords to help it flourish. Here’s what Jay has to say:

Like most first-time parents, my life completely changed when my daughter Hillary was born in 1993. My wife Janet and I decided that one of us should stay at home to care for her while the other continued working full time. Janet kept her engineering job, and I ended up quitting my job as a Wall Street bond analyst to become Mr. Mom.

Later, when Hillary started school, I had more free time. It seemed like the perfect chance to do something I’d always dreamed of: launch my own business and work for myself. I started selling themed plates and lunchboxes at New York City street fairs. Then in 2001, eight-year-old Hillary showed me (her non-tech-savvy dad) how to turn on a computer. That was the beginning of taking the business online, and realizing a whole new world of possibility. Janet and I worked together to build a website,PlatesPlus4Kids.com, and we started advertising online with Google AdWords. Soon, my little project became a full-fledged venture.

By advertising on the Internet, I was able to reach interested customers not only in my area, but all over the country. More and more people found my store through online searches. In no time, I had so many orders that I could no longer keep my inventory of themed cups, plates and lunchboxes on the kitchen table. The stock moved to the den, then the basement, and finally to a warehouse 20 minutes from our house in Little Neck, New York. Over the years, I’ve also expanded my product line and now offer children’s backpacks, umbrellas, flatware, snack containers and sandwich boxes. What started as a hobby now brings in about $500,000 in sales annually.

I only pay when people click on my ad and go to my website, so the cost of marketing is within my means. I increase the budget during the back-to-school season and the holidays (my peak periods) so my ads show above the search results during those times. I’ve also noticed that customers seem to be in a shopping mood on Mondays and Tuesdays, so I sometimes increase my budget on those days to make sure my ads show up more. Depending on trends, I create new ads to promote different characters and new inventory. For example, now that Yo Gabba Gabba is popular andbaseball season is starting, I’m making adjustments so that those phrases combined with words like “dishes,” “placemats” and “cups” trigger my ads. And of course, I have ads that mention items with princesses and superheroes — those are top sellers year-round.

What’s really great is that even though my business has expanded over the past seven years, it’s still a small family company. Two people work for me at the warehouse, but I work from home. Janet takes pictures of the products and works on the website on the weekends. I’ve had the freedom to be a hands-on parent to Hillary and the privilege of helping other parents connect with their kids through my store. Certain celebrity parents have found me through my AdWords ads and bought items for their kids.

I consider myself a pretty ordinary guy. When I started PlatesPlus for Kids, I had no idea it would become what it is today. It’s heartening to know that by following your gut and putting in a lot of hard work, you can find a fulfilling second career. Or maybe a first one.

Posted by Claire Johnson, Vice President, Online Sales and Operations, Advertising Programs

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/it-takes-one-to-show-one-getting.html

Keen to know more about Adwords? Let us tell you more here: PPC Singapore

To find out how you can get yourself more business from Google Adwords immediately, contact us at tel: +65 94500295 or http://www.advantageseo.sg/contact-us

Related posts:

1. Google AdWords Testing New Flat Rate Local AdWords Ad Pricing Model
2. Badly-Managed AdWords Accounts — Worse for You Than for Google
3. Adwords Bans: Poor Landing Page Quality Scores

Spy tools can be useful in an SEO and/or a PPC campaign. However, many of these tools essentially try to extrapolate scraped results which can lead to some fairly inaccurate results. Also, these tools occasionally come up with in-house metrics (of which they really don’t give you much useful info about how they arrived at the data the present from these “proprietary” metrics”) to help try and differentiate their offerings from their competition.

Spy Tool Reviews

There is a much more in-depth review, with examples, up in our members forum. Here, we will do overviews of some of the more popular tools on the market. Specifically, we will be taking a look at:

• review of SEM Rush
• review of SpyFu
• review of Keyword Spy
• review of Compete.com
• review of Ispionage

Value of Spy Tools

The idea that you are missing out on something is a core marketing tactic so even if you are comfortable with one tool chances are you’ve been tempted to go with another. Keep in mind, from a cost standpoint, the ROI you would take by just finding a few decent keywords to target will likely far outweigh any cost associated with these tools. Your business probably won’t collapse if you pick an A minus tool versus an A plus tool and none of these tools are able to make concrete decisions for you. What these tools provide are additional data points for you to consider in your own research.

We hope you’ll find these reviews useful. There are perhaps a few other services we missed given how many of these tools as there are and our primary focus on SEO. If these reviews are well received we could also review everything from Quantcast & Alexa right on through to AdGooroo, but we need to know if you would be interested in those types of reviews. If there are any other cool products or services you would like us to review just let us know.

A few disclaimers: some of these services have given us free review accounts, whereas we have paid for some of the others. And some of these tools offer affiliate programs, but all reviews were done without those 2 factors influencing the editorial. Most these reviews do not have affiliate links in them (I think SEM Rush is the only one which does have an affiliate link right now), and Aaron reviewed SEM Rush before they even had a public affiliate program.

Already an SEO Book subscriber?

• We license SEM Rush’s SEO data for our competitive research tool.
• The second post in this thread has some killer member’s only tips for getting the most out of competitive research tools.
• This thread is also awesome, and these three threads really shows how to use these tools in a way that really kicks arse.

If you can’t make $1,000’s from reading those threads then you certainly are not a professional grade SEO.

Related posts:

1. Keyword Spy Review
2. ISpionage Review
3. SpyFu Review

Edelman and Moore, who both call Harvard their home, coauthored a paper titled “Measuring Typosquatting Perpetrators and Funders.”  In a blog post summarizing it, they presented several sets of statistics and wrote, “According to our analysis, 57% of typo sites include Google pay-per-click ads.”

Then they made a rather more interesting comment regarding the effect of Google’s connection: “Combining our observations with financial reports and others’ estimates, we conclude that Google’s revenue from typosquatting on the top 100,000 sites is $497 million per year.”

Also, Google’s pretty much the only search engine they point a finger at, since not nearly as many ads from Yahoo and Microsoft appear on typosquatting sites.

Now, it’s necessary to mention that Edelman is involved in a lawsuit against Google (”arising out of Google’s use of typosquatting domains to display advertising”), so he may not be the least biased person in the world.  The numbers he and Moore presented are still stunning if true.

UPDATE: Ben Edelman was good enough to drop by in the comments section, and he wrote,  “Surely it’s not Google’s fault that some people misspell. But our study [shows] that typosquatters register more domains targeting companies in sectors with high PPC prices. That tells us that PPC funding is *causing* and *exacerbating* typosquatting. Without PPC payments, there would be fewer typosquatting registrations — much less reason for squatters to register these domains. Google’s payments put the system in motion; squatters register domains exactly in anticipation of getting paid by Google. Google knows where it’s showing ads. (Example: Google shows Expedia ads if you misspell Expedia, but Travelocity ads if you misspell Travelocity!) So it’s natural to look to Google for resolution of these problems.”

>> Click to read the rest of Edelman’s comment …

No related posts.

The numbers are still significantly down from the same period last year, but any increase is a good sign of things to come. There has been a 5.4% decline from last year.

“The Internet has transformed the consumer experience of media, providing marketers with unprecedented opportunities to engage with their customers,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. “The advertising sector overall has been hard hit by the economy, but digital media has been a bright spot within the larger economic downturn as it is capturing an ever-increasing piece of marketers’ advertising spend.”

“While all segments of the media industry have experienced declines, online advertising remains resilient and is once again showing signs of growth,” said David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

The information from the IAB/PWC is considered the most accurate measurement of interactive ad revenue, the IAB says, because its compiled directly from info supplied by companies selling advertising on the web. The IAB releases a full report twice a year to reflect half-year periods. It will be interesting to see how the second half of the year plays out in its entirety.

Related Articles:

> Online Advertising is Having a Big Year

> Online Ad Revenue Tops $10 Billion

> IAB Releases Ad Unit Guidelines Update

Related posts:

1. Online advertising is on the rise
2. Nielsen Shares Predictions for Advertising Trends in 2010
3. Wall Street Turns Nose Up At Google Earnings Report

This mirroring strategy works for obvious reasons. The visitor already has a psychological attachment to the phrase – after all, they typed it in!

Making Sure You Get The Click

A lot of SEO strategy talks about how to achieve rankings.

Whilst important, the SEO pro knows ranking is only half the battle won. While it’s true to say most searchers will click on the top results in preference to results lower down the page, they will also scan across the various titles displayed. All links on the results page compete for the click, and a compelling title may win out over a higher ranking position.

If the user doesn’t find what they want when they scan, they will likely rephrase their search and try again. So the way you phrase your title tag is not only important in terms of helping attain a ranking position, it is also important that it stands out.

But how do you know which phrases will work?

What You Can Learn From Adwords

Actually, the answer is right in front of us.

Google rewards top performing Adwords advertisers with the top positions i.e. the advertisers who are achieving the highest click thru rates. The copy and titles you see in the top PPC ads are proven.

If the advertiser has been in that position for some time, it is highly likely s/he is making a positive return on their spend. Their approach is, therefore, working.

That’s a lot of valuable information.

Look at the copy the advertisers are using. What words are they using in the title? Try emulating their approach. Emulating their description is a little more tricky as Google uses snippets. However, if the phrase the user is searching for also appears in your meta description tag, Google will tend to display the tag snippet instead.

Of course, SEO’s have to balance ranking considerations, too, but if you can get these factors aligned, you’re in a great position. Given that most people – estimated to be around 70-80% – will click on a natural search result, as opposed to an advertisment, if you can occupy the top few spots using a similar phrasing as the PPC advertiser, you are more likely to get the click.

Don’t stop there.

Check out the landing pages used by the top advertisers. If they are occupying top positions over a long period of time, they are either carelessly blowing through a lot of cash, or, more likely, their PPC campaign is making money.

Whilst it’s not advisable to copy exactly what they do – and it’s probably against the law – you can use their approach as a guide. How are they structuring their landing pages? Where are they placing their offer? What language are they using? What titles are they using? How is the copy structured?

Use a similar approach in your SEO campaign.

One thing to be careful of is to understand that SEO and PPC often have a different focus. PPC tends to be driven by ROI and other profit per visitor type metrics. Once a PPC advertiser pays for the click, they try to move the visitor to desired action quickly.

SEO, on the other hand, can afford to be less specific as there is little jeopardy in only appealing to a tiny fraction of visitors who click. SEO can afford to go wide and broad. Engagement and brand metrics come into play a bit more in SEO.

By The Way…..

Because SEO can afford to go broad, and has the added task of ranking for keywords based on the content of your page, Google’s Wonder Wheel is a great tool for finding related phrases which you can integrate into your copy.

If you haven’t heard of the Wonder Wheel, here is how to find it:

1. Conduct a search. Click on “Show Options…”

2. Click on “Wonder Wheel” (shown on the list at the right hand side)

3. Click on a few of the spokes….

4. Integrate any relevant, related keyword terms in your copy….

I use this tool a lot as it’s great for picking up on long tail searches that still relate to your chosen keyword term. If any of these terms prove worthwhile, you can then develop separate pages to target them specifically.

Related posts:

1. Building Ad Groups With Keywords From The Wonder Wheel
2. PPC vs SEO
3. Google’s Display Ad Strategy

I was reminded of this whole mental muddle today reading the headline from an email solicitation, something about “getting more PPC without using Google”.

But that whole line is kind of old hat. It’s the come-on that opportunistic, non-search-based ad platform companies used to sell their crummy, remnant, and sometimes fraudulent contextual text ad inventory. Sometimes it couldn’t have even been described that neatly. It was traffic, and you paid for the clicks, and potentially you used keywords to guide the system towards certain publishers, but that was about it. You might as well have paid the effective CPM rate, as bid on clicks. Didn’t matter.

That’s why I always advocated paid search as the term of choice for people who really wanted to go after clicks from ordered results placed near search engine results, but it scarcely matters what I advocate! — people will use all kinds of terms.

SEM is another term that arose. Agenda-setters in the business tried to remind everyone that paid search (or “PPC”) is one sub-type of SEM (search engine marketing), and SEO (on the “organic side”) is another sub-type. But the fight to make SEM exclusively the global term, and not to be used as synonymous with PPC or paid search, was lost. SEM is often used interchangeably with PPC or paid search.

No matter. With all of these nomenclature battles being unwinnable, we should turn our attention to the whole reason “PPC” was so attractive as a pricing mechanism. It’s because it represented a happy medium between CPM (paying only for impressions — “cost per thousand impressions”) and CPA (”cost per acquisition” — paying for lead conversions or even revenue-generating sales conversions).

You can draw up equivalents across these mechanisms, and measure or express them all for your keyword (paid search) campaigns. So the click isn’t anything special. It can be expressed in its CPM equivalent and you can and should also be measuring ROI, ROAS, or CPA.

Indeed, according to some scholars [see "Greedy Bidding Strategies for Keyword Auctions"], the most rational strategy for bidding in a digital media auction would take you straight to CPA or revenue if that was possible. If you could bid directly on the customer acquisition or revenue, you would. (And in fact, that’s what some forms of bid management automation attempt to do, at one or two removes. And it’s what manual campaign management also attempts to do, painstakingly.)

But step back further. Are search, keywords, or clicks inherently special? Why the drive to distinguish them from other forms of media? Is it for what they are, or what they represent?

It has to be the latter. They represent potentially the most extreme (and measurable) form of granular targeting and flexible bidding, of a certain type. This is reflected in the sky-high effective CPM rates for some keywords.

But that means that all of this distinguishing one type or another is done mostly for economic or practical reasons.

Search and keywords (and clicks) fall into the general category of auction-based digital media. Whether we’re bidding on clicks, acquisitions, impressions, or other, the universe of digital media is amenable to similar tests. From a rational bidder’s standpoint, there should be no inherently good or bad media, nothing inherently “creepy” or “wrong,” nothing inherently above reproach either.

That’s mostly true. It’s not entirely true. (Dropping ad-laden anvils on prospects’ vehicles is interruption media, and some companies would pay for it, but it’s stupid and illegal.) But isn’t it a good starting point for analysis?

“PPC” doesn’t matter per se. So pitches like “now you can get ‘PPC’ from other channels than Google” shouldn’t have any special weight. You shouldn’t be looking too hard for that inventory if your economic criteria show it’s not going to pay off for you. Nor should you have been ignoring it all along just because you thought that “PPC” or “Google” were special for some inherent reason.

Related posts:

1. Google Bid Simulator
2. Google AdWords Testing New Flat Rate Local AdWords Ad Pricing Model
3. PPC vs SEO

Similarly, the flow of advertiser dollars from other channels into paid search platforms like Google AdWords has been predictable over time because of one factor: measurable performance when compared head-to-head with other channels.

In accounts where that condition hasn’t been satisfied, companies don’t increase budgets for paid search. They don’t always shut off their accounts, though. So the end result is an account that sort of wanders along, hoping for the best, performing far below potential.

At different points in time, this state of affairs might benefit Google a lot or a little. The times when it benefited Google less were when their relevancy incentives (mostly CTR-based) were set in a dogmatic sort of way. If your account was really lazily and loosely targeted, eventually stuff would get “disabled” or “deactivated.” That would kill volume for you, but you were probably doing horribly anyway, so it was actually a savings. Google, meanwhile, didn’t get to exact as much of an “idiot tax” out of you. So they had to rely on other mechanisms, such as ego bidding or a hot economy, to further their profitability.

It’s not quite like that now. Google has a sophisticated set of mechanisms for selectively allowing you to screw things up. They may not particularly like your fuzzily-targeted ads, but they’re willing to show a certain percentage of them in certain verticals as long as your bids are sky high.

The end result of a low-volume, fuzzily-managed campaign, of course, is a poor ROI for the advertiser. But here’s the curious thing. If the company has invested something in people and plans to run ads in this channel, they don’t shut it off completely. They treat it like their other underperforming channels: shrug their shoulders, hope it gets better, turn the budget down a bit so it doesn’t cause significant harm. From day one, I’ve suggested that this isn’t a true savings, but a squandering of potential. “All in” or “all out” should be the advertiser’s mentality. It is difficult, but not impossible, to optimize your campaign so that increasing the budget is feasible. If that’s not happening, why run it at all?

The fuzzy, meandering, high-CPC-low-return campaign is not a negative scenario – short term – for Google’s revenues and profits. These inefficient campaigns collectively spend heavily, smoothing out the ups and downs of the keyword auctions where advertisers are managing more tightly to customer responses. That’s one of the reasons why, in the near term, Google’s revenues will continue to rise gradually or at least be flat, avoiding the severe hits that other advertising media have taken during the recession. Look for proof of this with Google’s upcoming Q3 2009 earnings release on October 15.

At Page Zero Media we inherit such accounts fairly often. There are two common targeting errors that companies make in the early days of planning AdWords campaigns:

(1) Loose and broad targeting, particularly of the type that addresses a mass market when you’re going for a niche market. A company will say to themselves (perhaps having watched Conrad Hilton in Mad Men saying he wants to put a Hilton “on the moon”): “We want someday to be the biggest and best insurance company in the world!” But for now, they’re just focusing on being top-of-mind in car insurance for high-risk drivers, especially those under the age of 25. Somewhere along the line, possibly in a text message from a golf banquet with impressive friends, the CEO forced the associate to the assistant marketing director to try broad matches for the words “insurance” and “car insurance” in the campaign. They’re still eking along, in select markets, costing the company $18 per click whenever they are clicked, eating into the allotted budget for all the good stuff.

(2) Insider thinking. Companies get into their own jargon, right down into the regulatory mumbo-jumbo from arguments in Congress about all the players in their industry. The next thing you know, there are ad groups containing all the jargon about high-risk drivers — jargon that’s only ever come up in those Congress debates, in board meetings, and expensive consulting reports. People click on the ads occasionally, but they’re inevitably just looking for information, not a car insurance vendor.

As these cardinal errors continue to eat away at the overall budget, the ROI for the whole campaign looks poor. The budget stays where it is. And the company concludes that the channel doesn’t match the hype.

–

I got a note from a colleague who has spent years building out paid search campaigns that have formerly failed for the above reasons. Here’s his tale of woe – the industry sector changed to protect the innocent:

If I can lend a “yes this is the way it works” rule to any PPC work for [insurance] that we should inscribe into our core being: Seth Godin needs to be read by every one of the people who do campaigns for them. Most of the time (probably CEO driven) they focus on the whole “getting their name out there” thing. Each new one I see is a broad, undisciplined mess. They constantly target information seekers with words like “best insurance” or “top insurance companies”. The people who click those 1) Already have a vendor and are satisfied with them; and 2) Are simply looking for ideas; 3) In no way are targeted properly. The kicker is that those words are $5, $6, or $10 a click. They might as well spend that money on a TV commercial because that is akin to interruption marketing, PPC style. You can get fooled as well, because if someone has an article on top insurance companies on their site, like our client does, people will read it and stay. The bounce numbers tend to be pretty low, so if you are looking at that only, you get a false sense that the words are working. But when you look at signups, they are very close to 0%. I am not sure many of them do it, but content and blogs should be king for these sites, for those words; and they should spend that money on writing content. If you have and write articles based on all the key buzzwords like “car insurance comparison”, you should get bang for that on organic search for $0. Example: “Best [(competing but ultimately very different type of) insurance]” and so on. Our new client spent $22,000 on those words via adwords. They got one person to sign up for an account. ONE! [Edit: we did more checking, and it might have been two.] Conversely: Targeted to their selling proposition of [doing more research on individuals in high risk insurance categories to offer them a break on rates if possible], those words [all having to do with insurance rates, unfair insurance rates, demographics of insurance rates] and so on, with a good ad, had $4000 spent and they got 20 people to sign up. OK, long story short: For financial services, not unlike others but especially for them, being targeted to exactly what you do if you are spending $4 a click or more is so vital it is not funny.

–

Google has worked themselves into a situation where the “idiot tax” helps Google’s bottom line. So although they’d prefer it if most advertisers improved the relevancy of their advertising, the current system is built to hedge against idiocy. That being said, then, Google doesn’t stand to gain a whole lot as advertisers become savvier and more efficient. In the past, the genius of the ad platform meant that Google’s earnings and profits raced ahead faster than expected. During the recession, they’re outperforming everyone else. But as the economy recovers, this current efficiency also means that you may not see Google grow as fast as you expect. They’ve wrung a lot of cash out of relatively wasteful advertising. Less wasteful practices will definitely help individual advertisers… a lot. They won’t help Google nearly as much.

Related posts:

1. Google AdWords Testing New Flat Rate Local AdWords Ad Pricing Model
2. Google AdWords Tax Calculator
3. Getting a business off the ground with AdWords

There are many ways to optimize paid search performance. I favor an integrated array of techniques, heavy on response testing.

But the “old school” concept of finding “sweet spots” in the auction, keyword by keyword, is a nice way to do a little extra legwork to decide whether to bid higher or lower in certain instances.

It’s not always a good idea to look for so-called sweet spots, as some formal academic theory might suggest that in many cases, especially if you use enough automation, there aren’t any. But the ideal world aside, it might be nice to know if there are a lot of “bids overhanging the market,” as they say in the financial world. If a keyword auction is particularly “busy” above your bid, then you’ll have to raise your bid an awful lot for little improvement in volume.

On the other hand, if you’re stuck in between a couple of bidders but there isn’t much activity above or below them, I consider those auctions to be more “pliable.” You could go up a bit in your bid and reap volume associated with higher ad positions on that keyword. You could go down a lot and not lose too much volume (with the caveat that Google is under no obligation to serve your ad in every auction if your quality score won’t support low bids, so lowball bidding can reduce volume if Google really doesn’t want your dime that day). The more pliable the auction, hypothetically the more room you have to pick a bid strategy that suits you.

Case by case, it gets interesting. Take, for example, an account where you figure you’ve done a great job whittling average CPC’s down to 23 cents. Now on a lot of the keywords that you’re getting for 15 cents, you’re not doing great ROI-wise, but you’re reasonably content since the price is low by historic and industry standards, you don’t feel like risking the effort to go down to 11 cents.

I think the bid simulator may be helpful in helping advertisers decide when to take risks like that. Shaving those few pennies on lukewarm keywords, across several hundred keywords and a thousand clicks a day, can add up to a lot of saved cash you can then turn around and devote to better performing keywords or channels (or simply, profitability).

I’m told that the Bid Simulator is now in limited release. So despite the fact that you may see it in your account or several client accounts right now, it’s not in full release by any means. Its impact on Google’s revenues, and advertiser performance, isn’t likely to be felt until 2010.

“Old school” PPC auction jockeying may not be everyone’s idea of fun – but different strokes for different folks. We’re also keenly interested in when Bid Simulator data might be available through the AdWords API. This might be helpful for (for example) running dramatic one-day volume tests across an account, based on more keyword-by-keyword auction intelligence to help decide where to shake things up.

Related posts:

1. Google Bid Simulator
2. Decifering Google’s Quality Score
3. PPC Has Always Been the Wrong Term

You can use the Wonder Wheel to quickly build keyword lists and Adwords groups in a visual way. With this tool, Google shows you the terms that relate most closely to your chosen keyword terms.

What Is The Google Wonder Wheel?

The Google Wonder Wheel is an interactive graphical application that shows related keywords.

The wheel starts with your keyword in the center, and shows terms related to that keyword in the “spokes” surrounding your keyword “hub”. If you click on a related term, the wheel creates a new hub, revealing more related terms.

Here’s how to find it:

1. Search on a keyword term.

2. Select “More Options…”

3. Click “Wonder Wheel”

Let’s say your main keyword area is “culinary schools”. The Google wheel suggests related keyword terms such as “culinary arts”, “pastry schools”, “le cordon bleu”, “top 10 culinary schools”, and so on.

These keywords become your Adwords groups. Next, click on each of those terms, and you get further terms that will make up each group.

Easy, huh.

You get Adwords groups built around related keywords, which come together to form a theme.

Themes And The Content Network

The theme is particularly powerful when it comes to the Google Content Network.

The Content Network is Google’s syndicated advertising network. You can choose to have your ad appear not just on Google search results, but also on sites across the Google’s Adsense partner network. This option is turned on by default whenever you create an Adwords campaign.

Traditionally, many Adwords advertisers have turned off the content network because of perceived abuse and junk traffic. However, attitudes are changing as the network matures and the bid prices on Google’s search engine head into the stratosphere. The ROI from the content network starts to look more appealing.

It all comes down to ROI. If it’s positive, run with it.

In Google’s whitepaper entitled “CPA Perfomance Trends on the Google Content Network“, Google found that:

…..half of the advertisers had a Content Network CPA at least 2.6% lower
than their average Search Network CPA. In total, 51.6% of advertisers analyzed had an average Content Network CPA equal to or better than their Search Network CPA

It has taken a while, but it looks like Google and advertisers may have got Google’s content network figured out. As the report suggests, it is important that the advertiser pay close attention to landing page optimization and site exclusion.

How does this all relate to the Wonder Wheel?

When Google looks to place your ad across the network, it does so based on themes.

If you use terms that are defined as being related in the Wonder Wheel throughout your text, particularly in your ad groups, you’re more likely to show up on relevant sites across the network.

Google describe this affect on their Adwords Agency blog:

One particularly useful application of the tool is to identify new ad group themes for content campaigns. Since your ads are matched to publisher pages at the ad group level, creating different ad group themes helps you target your ads more precisely on the Google content network…..

You can then use the Google keyword tool, and your other favorite research tools, to flesh these groups out further.

As the blog notes, this is no guarantee of better performance, however the Wonder Wheel is a great – and fun – place to start.

Other attempts at keyword clustering can also be useful for campaign creation. Such features are offered via search suggestions on major search services, via synonym search (using ~) on major search engines, and as keyword clusters on many meta search engines. Specialty search services like the Quintura keyword map, Microsoft Search Funnels, Google Sets, and Google Squared can further help you come up with relevant keyword ideas.

Related posts:

1. Borrowing From PPC
2. Google Bid Simulator
3. Google AdWords Tax Calculator

For many years, global brands have altered their marketing campaigns to target different countries.

An advertisement for a food product running in Australia may be markedly different from an advertisement for the same food product in the USA.

Why?

Whilst we share a common language, cultural values and norms differ markedly from country to country, and even region to region.

For example, what is considered soft sell in the US is often considered hard sell in the UK due to differing acceptance of overt commercial activity in those two cultures.

There are many differences:

Viewed from commercial America, British advertising looks like something bent out of shape by a culture so consumed with embarrassment it can’t look a salesman in the eye when he’s making a pitch, particularly if that pitch is laden shoulder high with emotion – love of country, family or God. From a mainstream US perspective our quirky elliptical leave-them-guessing advertising approach is kind of charming, but kind of unworkable too in America, with its fragmented audiences and ethnicities, its raging sensitivities and, above all, its huge risks. American advertising is risk averse because there’s so much at stake with those huge clients and their mega-spends. It means everything is researched to death so all backs are covered.

If you’re running a PPC campaign in different geographic markets, then you’re running a global campaign. So, you need to think about approaching such a campaign as a global brand would do, and tailor your message accordingly.

Your competition – who may understand those local markets intimately, as they live and work in them – will be designing their pitch based on local norms, so too should you, if you want to convert.

Here are a few ideas on how to target different cultures effectively:

1. Watch What Others Do

Take a look at how your product or service is advertised in other media in your target country. What language do they use? What imagery do they use? How are they making the pitch? Is it subtle? Hard sell? Humorous?

Now evaluate the ad copy and landing pages of your PPC competitors. What similarities do they share to each other? To ads in other media? How do they differ from how you would advertise in your own local market?

2. Spelling

A PPC ad written using US spelling displayed in another country screams “not relevant to this market”, especially when surrounded by ads that use local spellings.

Use “s” instead of “z”, and watch those vowels! Color becomes colour, center becomes centre and check becomes cheque.

Here’s a good reference guide to common differences.

3. No, They Don’t Think “Because It’s American, It’s Great”

Every culture thinks what they do is great, and what foreigners do is suspect.

Just as you don’t assume that something from Germany is great, Germans aren’t going to assume that something from America must be great. Some may even be hostile to the US – it just comes with the territory of being the new Roman Empire

It’s not that you have to cave to others demands, but it does pay to be aware of them. If you’re trying to convince someone to buy something, then you need to talk the customers language, on their terms, no matter if they live in New York or, well, York.

4. There Are Regional Differences

Just to complicate matters, there are significant differences between language in different regions in many countries, and particularly in the UK.

Just like there are differences between New Yorkers and Angelenos, there are differences between those in the north of England, and those in the South.

The South tend to think of themselves as intellectually and culturally superior to Northerners, and Northerners tend to think of Southerners as soft, fake and, well, elitist. These are generalisations, of course, but be aware that they exist, as these differences may alter your pitch.

5. Test

As always, test.

Change the language of your landing pages and ads depending on the accepted norms of local markets. Align your language and style with the most successful PPC ads targeting those markets.

Run with the winners and cut the losers.

Final Thoughts

The world is get smaller. The internet, and tech in general, is being driven from America. Naturally, it comes bundled with US cultural values.

This is leading to the Americanization of other countries and making boundaries, both physical and cultural, less of a block than they have been previously.

A pitch that works in America can translate into other cultures without change, but that won’t happen as a matter of course.

Think local.

Related posts:

1. Google AdWords Testing New Flat Rate Local AdWords Ad Pricing Model
2. PPC vs SEO
3. Google’s Display Ad Strategy