PPC (Pay Per Click Marketing) is where you place a short ad on a search engine or network site and pay only when someone clicks on your ad.

The great thing about this payment model is that you only pay for people actually interested in visiting your site (i.e. they will click through) and you can see from the reports a lot of detail about each click. PPC is one of the most accountable of all marketing spends.

With all the information at your fingertips, there are lots of things you can do to optimise (or reduce) your spend and ensure you are getting the most relevant traffic for your money.

Here is a list of things you should check at least monthly, to ensure your PPC money isn't going down the drain.

1. The Search Query Report (not the keyword report). The search query report shows the terms people actually used to visit your site. Using this, you can find keywords which should be made negative in your campaigns. For example, if you own a shoe store and see a lot of people arriving via the term socks (and you don't sell socks), then maybe you need to add that as a negative keyword. Note this kind of thing shouldn't be a problem if you have exact match keywords, but could if you use broad match.

2. Check your bounce rates against your Ads and keywords - whichever ads and keywords are resulting in a high bounce rate or low time on site  need to be reconsidered. Those ads are obviously not targetted to your key market, but they are still costing you money. Try to fix them by making them more targetted, or delete them.

3. Click Through Rate - if you have a very low click through rate, it could be due to one of a few of things, but, if you are ranking well and for the right keywords, a low CTR could be because your ad copy is not enticing. Improve your ad copy, make it more compelling and more professional. Use keywords in your heading and try to identify unique things about your business which means people should click on your ad instead of a competitors.

4. Bidding Wars - The thing with PPC marketing is that it is an auction type process, you bid and you get a placement. The higher you bid, the higher the placement of your ad. For some competitive types, this can be addictive, and they can bid themselves right to the top. The things you need to remember are firstly, top spot isn't always the spot which will get you the most clicks and secondly, you need to question whether that particular term is worth the cost you are spending.

5. Cost per conversion - calculate an approximate cost per conversion for each of your ad groups to see if you are staying within a reasonable budget. For this to work, you need to have Google Analytics on your site, and then you can either use the Google Conversion Optimiser, or create your own. Make sure you judge the costs you are spending for traffic and conversions against what you are ACTUALLY happy to pay for them.

Regular monitoring of your ad words account will mean that you minimise your wasted spend. Don't just set your Adwords and leave it, or you could see your money going right down the drain.

I found the following picture at the SEO Moz blog the other day.



They used the picture to illustrate their decision to exit out of SEO consulting to concentrate on developing SEO tools. They believe that while SEO provides the majority of search traffic, it gets a very small amount of the spend due to the fact that the industry is under developed and lacks sophisticated and integrated support tools and platforms.

I find the picture interesting because it shows such a stark contrast between PPC and SEO. And while I know that the picture does oversimplify things and hide some truths (like the fact that the SEO clicks would include all those search visits which were from inappropriate or existing customers, or perhaps the fact that SEO costs often accrue for months before the clicks start increasing) it probably does provide some grain of truth - that PPC costs are more expensive than SEO costs and that SEO still sends the majority of traffic. I think this would be true for many mature SEO campaigns.

Press Releases are a great source of content to use in your offsite optimisation efforts. If you have a PR person or copywriter writing a press release for distribution, don't waste that content by keeping it offline. Not only can the internet help you reach a much wider audience, it can also point straight back at your website with embedded links, helping increase site traffic and SEO efforts.

The release should be written in a slightly different way for online, so make these adjustments first;

• Have at least one link - it may or may not be allowed to have anchor text depending on the site you are submitting it to, (obviously anchor text is better), but you at least want people to be able to find your site.
• Make sure the headline includes keywords that people in your industry or target market would use and search for (e.g. don't use the word fragrance for perfume).
• Apart from a href tag, try not to use html, because the release might be syndicated to many different sites, and you can't be sure it will end up being displayed properly.
• Similarly to html, don't use foreign characters or accents which might not be transferred to syndicated sites intact
• Don't include your email on the publicly available release because spammers can get a hold of it

Once you have your release ready for readers (edited and checked for errors), you can start distributing it online. Keep track of all the sites you distribute to and see how often they actually get published, whether links stay embedded and how long they stay up. The best sites you can then use again for new releases.

Look at press releases from other companies, and search for a snippet of their press release in Google. Where has it been posted? Post yours there too!

Unfortunately, I didn't, so I don't.

Yesterday there were a few stories circulating the web hinting that today Google would release a new feature for Gmail which was touted as being either a Twitter-killer, or a Facebook-killer, depending on which one you read.

I held off writing a piece about that, because until an official press release comes out you never know who to trust, and there were no reliable sources discussing it anyway.

Today, the Gmail blog (and Google blog) both published an article announcing Google Buzz, an add-on to Gmail, which is being rolled out over the next couple of days.

Yesterday I was sceptical, because to be honest, I don't like Gmail all that much. Other Google products in the social sphere have also been disappointing, like Orkut (only big in Brazil) and Wave (which is not yet out of beta, and which I also dislike anyway).

The big obstacle in the way of Buzz being a Twitter killer is that it is integrated into Gmail, which puts it behind the 8ball because gmail is such a user-unfriendly interface, whereas Twitter is so simple.  I suspect it would have been better to introduce a new, simple product with a nice interface rather than try to staple something on to Gmail.

What is Buzz?
Buzz, which you can kind of get from the name, is Google's next attempt at entering the social media sphere. It uses your current social network (i.e. your Gmail contacts) with new functionality to help you ' talk with them about things that are interesting you at the time'. Google is touting it as a new way to organise the social web.

It seems to be using a bit of the Google Wave technology, where you can easily share photo's, video's and links with a group, and any responses to things you post will get sent to your email where they are not 'static emails'  but rather ' live conversations' (like they tried to do with Google Wave).

You can also make things 'available to the whole world' if you want, by opening up your privacy settings.

Like Twitter you can follow people and find out what they are doing and sharing online, and like Twitter it uses @replies.


Why Did Google Do It?
Google is basically built on ad sales, and with more people spending time on non-Google social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, this is reducing their ability to advertise.  With this new tool they hope to get a piece of the addictive-pie that is social media, and therefore be able to sell more ads on Gmail.

It is integratable with Twitter and Flickr already, with other sites likely to be introduced in the future, so basically it is hoping that you will stay on a Google site to view all your other social media information.

Interesting Features
Their mobile version is not just the small screen friendly version of the normal site, but also has an addition to the "what are you doing now"  status update, you can add a ' Where were you when you said that'  kind of thing. That is awesome if you are a Facebook stalker, you can take it to a whole new level.

My prediction
This is not a Twitter or Facebook killer.

If Google were a cake, would it look like this?

(photo's courtesy of ladyironchef.com and herecomesthefood.com.au).

Yesterday I visited the Adriano Zumbo patisserie in Balmain (made famous by MasterChef) and found this delicious looking Google-named cake. For those interested (and who wouldn't be), it is a passionfruit and banana cream tart.

For those working in online marketing, see if you can expense it like I did (kidding!).