It was well worth the hour drive to Nashua New Hampshire to hear Matt Van Wagoner, from Find Me Faster, speak on pay per click advertising. These SEMNE events have yet to disappoint.

A Warm Welcome

It always feels nice to be greeted in personal way by organizers, in this case Jill Whalen and Pauline Kerbici. Pauline somehow remembered that I am from Winchester, MA.

Search Marketers Old and New

I met some great people that night before the speaker began. I met an employee of an old aquantance, Hans Reimer of Market-Vantage.com. What a great surprise. Sounds like Hans is doing well. I need to call him.

I met Rori Stumpf whose entire business focuses on AdWords. I said, oh, you need to meet that guy over there, pointing to Todd. They talked until the presentation begain. I accepted a LinkedIn invite from Rori the following day.

I of course talked with Todd Bairstow, who I had met previously at SEO Meetup in Arlington. He is the sharpest guy I have met with Google AdWords. He was kind enough to answer a few email questions after that first meeting.

Pay Per Click Presentation (by no means an exhaustive record)

The presentation started and finished on time. Hurray! Matt provided incites into Google, Yahoo and MSN, but Google writes the rules here. He even cracked open an attendees AdWords account and reviewed it on screen.

Oooh the Content Network can really eat up a lot of impressions and money. It has it’s place, but not for most of us. This is where the most click fraud occurs. It is better for branding than sales. Remember those boxes of ads you see on web sites and blogs, AdSense, that is the content network in action.

It is important to understand negative keywords, and the matching choices. Broad, phrase and exact match. Each have their place. If you don’t understand them and use them properaly it can really bite you.

GeoTargeting is very important. Did you know that you can draw on a Google map to delineate where your ads will be displayed? Very specific and very cool.

Did you know that Local ads can be presented across the country? Maybe not what you expected.

A New Hampshire Pizza Parlor selects the key word phrase Pizza New Hampshire. Because of “intent” if a searcher in California types in New Hampshire Pizza, the ad will be presented to him in California. Makes sense. He is probably flying to NH for vacation and is hungry already.

Another bit of advice. Set your daily ad budget high enough so that you don’t run out of click cash before the end of the day. You are only prolonging the learning curve towards which ads and key words to use.

Don’t search for your own ads! As search gets more personalized, just imagine Google sees you searching and searching for your own product, say beads, but you never click on the ads. Eventually your ads will not be displayed to you. You will see your ad showing up on the fifth page. Meanwhile, the rest of the world sees your ad on page one.

Instead, use the Google Ad Preview Tool. Yahoo does not have one. Bummer.

Get your site ready before paying for advertising.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a popular way to promote your web site and JBS Partners stands ready to assist you with PPC campaigns. Let me first help you maximize the investment in PPC before you pay.

Before you pay for pay-per-click
Web site optimization, including improving the link profile and creating landing pages, is a vital step before undertaking a pay-per-click campaign.

A few ideas you might consider before starting a pay-per-click campaign:

# Key word research – what are useful search terms and how competitive are they?

# Semantic structure, meta data, code – is the site well constructed for visitors and search engines?

# Page content – does the quantity and quality of the text meet minimum standards for visitors and search engines?

# Inbound/Outbound links – how many exist and are they beneficial or not?

# Design – is the desired out-come clear and actionable?

# Analytics – are analytics tools installed to track and analyze web site traffic?

If you are unsure of any of these techniques, please give us a call so that we can help.

Optimize before investing in PPC
It makes good business sense to ensure that your web site is optimized, has a strong link profile and at least one landing page.

This will allow you to turn an increasing number of visitors into clients. And it will increase the productivity of your web site and the value of every future dollar you spend on pay-per-click.