This is both true and not true. Find out why so you can be a savvy services shopper. (Hmm. That sounds like a great category name, no?)

How PPC Cost Is Constructed

If you’re looking for hard dollar amounts, I’m sorry to say, you won’t see those. Firms are so vastly different in their pricing strategies and package prices, there’s no way to say. But, here’s what I can tell you: what goes into PPC, and how MOST firms will break out charges.

PPC Cost always includes what you pay per click. This can be higher or lower, depending on things like your vertical, and how good your campaign is running – in Google, that’s your Quality Score, and it dramatically affects your bid costs. (You can read more about why you should seriously give a big crap-ola about quality scores here.)

Beyond your per-click cost, you’ll be paying a vendor to manage it. Most vendors charge you in one of two ways: a) a flat fee of what you spend total in a month on your clicks or b) a per keyword charge. You’ll likely have a setup fee, and then additional charges for campaign expansions, etc.

The other charges you may incur are incidental, depending on  whether you have an in-house designer or not. The cornerstone of most successful PPC campaigns are the landing pages, and someone’s gotta design ‘em.

How SEO Cost Is Constructed

I won’t lie, SEO can get expensive. Like I said, the search industry belief is that SEO is way less expensive over time, and I tend to agree. The hard part is swallowing the price tag, because it’s a LOT of manual work.

Usually the initial SEO of your site is a flat cost. Most proposals I see are custom-made because every site is so different, and different verticals means a whole set of challenges that are unique to each client. Why’s the price tag so big? Here’s what is usually includes:

- Keyword research and implementation. This means finding keywords that are viable and you stand a chance to rank for, and then going through your site extensively to implement them. This is everything from writing content, to re-naming your pages.

- Site architecture. This means making sure the coding aspects of your site support SEO efforts….so, no menus in images or javascript, proper 301 redirects in place, blah blah blah.

- Off page optimization. This means directory submissions and link building, and frequently there are other costs associated with that because there are a lot less freebies than there used to be.

All in all, you’re easily looking at a price tag of a few grand for a really good initial SEO foundation for your site.

The thing about SEO is that you don’t achieve a ranking and keep it forever. So you’ll likely wind up having ongoing maintenance charges, and that can vary widely. Perhaps your SEO firm has you implement a blog to keep keyword-rich content flowing. Are you going to maintain that, or pay them to? You’ll need ongoing link building and participation on blogs and in forums to get your site out there. Are you going to maintain that, or pay them to?

The best online marketing is going to have a combination of both. Normally a site will start out with SEO to get that going, and use PPC in the interim to drive traffic. Once they start ranking orgnically, they’ll dial back on the PPC budget.

I know, getting into spend a cool few grand starts feeling like serious business, and it is. It’s a lot of work, and it takes patience because good campaigns and good rankings take time. Don’t give up. Also, vet your people thoroughly, and be sure to come back for my advice on finding a good SEO and PPC vendor. I won’t let ‘em screw ya.

So, I started in email marketing, which over the past few years, has gotten a little beat up. People wrote it off as insignificant, that everything was going the way of social media, and the archaic methods of emails and enewsletters were SO yesterday.

Lately, email’s been the comeback kid. It makes me feel better, because hey, what good is expertise in an area that everyone thinks is lame? Made me feel like the old woman in the corner going, “Back in MY DAY email meant something!”

In that vein, I’ll be adding email marketing to the roster of things covered here on CC. There will be other online advertising methods added over time as well, but given the buzz that email’s back. No really. It’s not dead, and you know that’s probably true when Darren Rowse says so. (And he offers stats. Numbers and graphs make my heart skip a beat.)

That guesswork changes. With search advertising, you know what they’re looking for and can position yourself accordingly.

So if you know what someone is looking for, wouldn’t it be nice to use their EXACT search term in your advertising? Sounds scary, right? Sounds like I’m smoking crack-laced running socks, right?

Ha. I’m not.

You might be bidding on 100 keywords or 532, 394. Either way, you need to use those keywords as tools.

If you didn’t read it (and don’t tell me if you didn’t, it’ll just make me pissy), we reviewed campaign and ad group setups. I also mentioned that when you create an ad, it’s tied to the ad group level. That can get daunting. Maybe the theme of your ad group works, but dammit, there are a few different kinds of keywords and you can’t fit them in the wretched character limit on the ads.

Meet Dynamic Keyword Insertion

For as many tools as Google makes available (most of which I think probably overwhelm PPC do-it-yourselfers), the whole dynamic ability is kind of buried. And, let’s face it, it sounds kinda…icky. Techie. Code-ridden. Scary.

It’s not. It’s oh-so-friggin’-cool.

When you use dyanmic keyword insertion, you’re telling Google “You’re showing this ad because someone searched a keyword I’m bidding on. I want you to use that exact term they bid on *here* and *here* in my ad, please. Kthanks.” It literally inserts the user’s search term into your ad.

Why’s that cool? I know you didn’t just ask me that.

Let’s say you sell Chevy car parts. Let’s also say you bid on “corvette door handles.”

You that keyword in a “door handles” ad group, which also has things like “silverado door handles” or something. The ad that runs for this ad group is….um…let’s say it has a headline like: Chevy Door Handles.

It gets the job done, it’s relevant.

Then a searcher decides to search for “corvette door handles.” Two ads come up: one that says “Chevy Door Handles” or one from your competitor that says “Corvette Door Handles.”

Guess which one they’re more likely to click on?

My Competitor is Psychic Now? Damn Them!

No, they’re not. They used DKI, or dynamic keyword insertion. They TOLD Google to use the searcher’s term in the headline.

Here’s how you do this:

Before I go any further, understand that if the searcher types in a phrase that’s too long to fit into the headline character count, Google will need a fall-back option. So if your Corvette handles searcher looked for “used chrome corvette handles,” Google goes, “Um, I’d like to put this in your headline like you asked me to, but it’s too long. Now what?”

The “now what” has to come from you.

Ok, so go into the Ads tab and create a new one. In the headline, you’re going to want to format it like this:

{Keyword:Insert the “now what” fall back here}

So, like we mentioned above, this ad group’s theme are Chevy door handles. So it’s pretty safe to use something like that for your headline. It would read:

{Keyword:Chevy Door Handles}

In essence, you’re telling Google, “Use the search term that the user put in, but if it’s too long, use what I put in.”

Voila! You’re done.

Try it as a user. Type in a longer-tail, more specific term. You’ll likely see some ads show up with that term as the headline, and others will be more generic. They’re smartypants advertisers, and now you are, too. Lookit you, all advanced-user-y.

And none of that really has to do with PPC, right? Wrong. Understanding at least the basics of how SEO works will help you be more prolific at certain aspects of PPC.

SEO-to-PPC-Skill #1: URL names

Perhaps I should call these the S-to-the-P skills. Er, skillz. Mad ones, yo.

One of the important ways you use your chosen keywords is to include relevant ones in the names of your site URLs. (If I’m already speaking Greek, we can cover more SEO in the future. Always feel free to suggest topics.) One of the first things a search engine looks at is the words that are in your URL – in other words, they’re of mucho importance.

The same logic applies to your landing pages tied to your PPC ads. When you bid on a keyword, Google looks at your ad as well as your landing page to determine your ad rank. Naming your PPC landing page with the relevant keyword you’re bidding on can help your ad rank/bid cost, just like the names of your URLs can help you in organic search.

S-to-the-P Skill #2: Keyword usage

When Google digs around to do its organic listings, it looks at the keywords that are on the pages of your site. It does this also when it checks out the PPC landing pages you create. Now, I’m not saying to barf up your keywords in eight million places on your page – this would seriously piss off Google for organic rankings, and it will make your PPC landing page seem weird. (”Why is this business repeating this word over and over? Is this some kind of freaky subconscious crap? I’m SO outta here.”)

What does help is relevant use of your keywords, and that’s true for organic rankings or PPC landing pages. Use your keyword when you can, but don’t force it. If you’re bidding on a word and Google sees it on the page, it’s reassuring that your bid makes sense.

S-to-the-P Skill: #3: Keyword picking

Choosing PPC keywords can be daunting, and personally I find picking organic ones probably a little more scary. There are millions of keywords out there, and in PPC you probably have a limited budget. In organic search, you have budget limitations, vendor issues, or  if you’re doing it yourself, you have a finite amount of time you can devote to nursing your organic rankings.

Either way, you have limitations that make it crucial you understand how to balance those issues with the keywords you want to go after. You have to make tough decisions when you’re first starting out, and it’s the same whether you’re going with paid or organic. (Or both, in an ideal world.) Be picky, be realistic, and understand you have to do the one-bite-at-a-time implementation. It takes time to rank organically, so focus on the keywords that work. It takes time and solid bidding and strategy to rank efficiently on Adwords. This time will be all-the-more frustrating if you don’t focus on relevant keywords, and pay attention to what actually WORKS and not what you wish-to-God would work.

You don’t have to know SEO to have a great PPC campaign, but if you understand SEO you’re ahead of the game when you launch a paid campaign. Use your SEO noodle to really make your paid campaign portion sing.

I take for granted that these are things people have a knack for. Like driving. But I won’t yell at you and smite your ancestors  like I do if you suck at driving.

This all came to me very clearly today, as I was looking at an old PPC campaign that a company is having me overhaul for them, and was horrified.

Let me be clear. I wasn’t horrified that the setup was terrible – I don’t expect anyone to know innately how online advertising works. I was sitting there shaking my head going “Oh jeez, come ON” because it was done that way by a guy who had billed himself as a PPC person to these people.

So, this lesson may be too elementary, but it’s probably a good reminder that there are basic things that should be set up a certain way so you’re not causing problems for yourself and having to fix things later. (Or hire me to. Not that I’d turn it away, of course.)

Since we’ve all been told the beginning is a good place to start, let’s do that. If I don’t, I’ll have so much I want to cover, that it’ll drive you crazy, you’ll leave, and I’ll be heartbroken. Bad ending.

Campaigns, Ad Groups, Whatever…I just want to buy some keywords!

When I logged into the aforementioned account today, there was a single campaign with a single ad group and about 50 terms being bid on that weren’t really related to each other.

I  know that sounds scary.  It was. But it’s SO avoidable, if you understand why each of those things is important on its own.

Campaigns are the highest “level” of your PPC advertising. You may only need one, most companies do fine with that. What’s important to understand is what is set in your campaign level versus what is set in your ad group level.

At a basic level, campaigns house two very important settings: geotargeting and daily budget setting. A lot of other stuff is set up here, but I’ll set those aside for another Tools You’re Not Using lesson. For a basic setup, geotargeting and budget setting is what I find to be most commonly used. They’re also what I’ve found to be the biggest deciders in having more than one campaign.

For example, if I sell creepy china dolls (they’re all creepy, I don’t care what you say) but I only sell them to Maine, Texas and Arizona, I’ll probably want to set up three different campaigns. I don’t HAVE to, necessarily. If I’m using the same keywords for all of them, then I can have one campaign that only runs in those states. But, chances are, I’ll want “creepy, soulless china dolls Texas” and I won’t want that to show up for my Maine searchers. It keeps it cleaner to have them all in separate campaigns for tracking purposes, too. When you start lumping creepy china doll keywords together, you start losing the ability to see which states would be performing better, if your cost per click is drastically different and therefore you’re better off only running in one state, etc.

So. When you  are faced with that “campaigns” page in AdWords, don’t sweat and obsess. Just think, “Do I need to segment my audience by location?” If so, then set up a campaign for each one. If not, you’re probably going be alright with a single one.

The exception to that is if you get fancy with budget. If you are considering running some things only during some days and times, and other things on a different ad schedule, you’ll want to group them into campaigns so you can control that. For instance, if you offer a service where you can’t receive phone calls after 5pm because you want to actually answer the phone, you can specify that your ads don’t show after 5. If you also sell an ebook that people can buy anytime, you’ll want that ad running 24/7. These two things would have to be two different campaigns.

This is a very, very basic guideline for when to break out campaigns, but it would fix a lot of the problems I stumble across out there.

Man, You’re Anal. Dare I Ask About Ad Groups?

So glad you did, friend.

Ad Groups are a little more subjective, but the rule you can use to help you is: what ad do I want my PPC keyword searchers to see?

Would you show the same commercial for someone that’s searching for Coke as you would searching for Diet Coke? No. They have different motivators. The Coke person doesn’t care if you’re zero calories, so you shouldn’t have an ad that says so. Well, not if you want them to care, anyway.

Ad Groups can be harder because you can probably justify a lot of different ways of grouping your keywords in them. I usually suggest that you look at the keywords you know you want to go after, and start grouping them together based on the messages you’d use to advertise. You’ll start to see natural patterns emerge. Some ad groups might have 50 words, and others might have 5. There’s no hard and fast rule on that –  just clump them together and ask yourself as you do it, “Would I show the same ad to all of these words?”

So Campaign begets Ad Groups, begets your keywords the ads tied to those keywords.

You got it.