While the screenshot below highlights the Google organic results, I am experiencing the exact same phenomenon on Yahoo!/Bing as well. Someone is definitely going aggressively after the insurance industry. And, it’s been going on for a while. I have seen such results for at least 3 to 6 months.

A few key takeaways from this situation:

1. If you’re in the insurance industry, keep a very close eye on your organic program. It may be suffering due to these low quality results pushing down your organic program.
2. The search engines need to figure out how to stop this stuff, it’s just embarrassing from a user standpoint.
3. I dislike seeing this stuff because makes a bad name for affiliate marketers and affiliate programs.

So, what do you think? Have you been noticing similar low quality results in your vertical?

Image of Google search results © Google

• Kenshoo’s whitepaper is 25-pages. It’s incredibly thorough and a must-have reference when it comes to paid search bid management.
• The whitepaper goes into detail about all different types of modern pay per click bidding models. If you enjoyed my post about Portfolio Theory Versus Margin Maximization, you’re going to really enjoy Kenshoo’s whitepaper. It provides all of the details to truly understand your bidding options.
• Kenshoo’s whitepaper is unbiased. It shows the pros and cons of all bidding models. It leaves it up to the reader to choose the best one for their particular situation.
• The whitepaper provides specific examples, with math to back up and help explain the bid management models.
• Kenshoo’s whitepaper will make you look really good at work. It’s a great reference that will help you answer any question about enterprise level bidding technology.

I hope you have an amazing weekend! If you have a few extra minutes this weekend, make sure to read Kenshoo’s free Bid Management Whitepaper. You’ll definitely enjoy it and head into the office on Monday empowered as a bidding expert!

Image of Kenshoo © Kenshoo

Diddy

Want to follow the one and only Diddy? Look no further than Twitter. Tweeting under the @iamdiddy handle, Diddy offers pure inspiration. Some of my favorite quotes include:

• “Nobody said it would be easy-they just promised it would be worth it!!”
• “Dream it Believe it Pursue it… DONT STOP!!!”

If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you probably know that Rap Music Drives My Online Marketing so I’m a huge fan of following my favorite rappers on Twitter. Diddy inspires me to keep going with the can’t stop, won’t stop mentality!

Rev Run

Historically, I have not been a super religious person. However, as I look for inspiration, I see a consistent theme… It’s coming from religious sources such as Rev Run and Joel Osteen. Rev Run always has a really positive message and I cannot thank him enough for his inspiration. You can follow Rev Run on Twitter at @RevRunWisdom. One of my 2012 Goals is to give back as much as possible. Rev Run has inspired me to do just that.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton is a personal friend and business leader. He blogs about Domain Names and, in my opinion, has the best blog on the topic. What amazes me about Morgan is he gets so much done. He’s literally running 100s of websites, buying/selling 1000s of domains, and building businesses such as Appraiso. When I’m looking for motivation to get stuff done, I head on over to Morgan’s blog.

Dividend Mantra

Another one of my huge goals this year is cash flow. I’m doing everything I can to save money and invest wisely in dividend-paying stocks and other instruments such as Lending Club. I found a neat blog called Dividend Mantra that echos a lot of my own beliefs when it comes to finances. While I’m not trying to leave the workforce too young like the author (I love my job in online marketing too much), I totally want to build up portfolio of passive income. Dividend Mantra inspires me to save money and invest wisely.

Mr. Cash At Hand

Do you have haters? I hope you do! It seems like the better you do, the more haters you have. When the haters are hating, I often turn to my friend Mr. Cash At Hand. He offers a positive outlook on life and has one of the best channels on YouTube. Mr. Cash At Hand provides practical advice on having the right perception and getting the most out of life. He fuels success!

The Free COO

My good friend Donald Landwirth, also known as The Free COO, is a career leader and COO. In fact, he was either the founder or first c-level executive in four incredibly successful startups. His achievements in business are too many to count. If you’re looking for inspiration to be an amazing business leader and offer your organization everything you have, look no further than Don and his radio show on Spreaker. A few months ago, I Was Live On The Free COO.

PPC Ian Readers

I continue to receive amazing emails, questions, comments, and praise every single day. There would be no PPC Ian without all of you! All of my readers here at PPC Ian inspire me to be a better blogger and writer, every single day. Thank you!

My Wife

I like to think that I have all the good ideas, but honestly I’m often just in execution mode. My amazing wife, Nicole, is the true brains behind this guy and she inspires me in every way imaginable.

I hope you enjoyed reading about some of my favorite leaders and mentors. They key takeaway from today’s post: Find your own sources of inspiration. Those who excel have mentors. They always aspire to more. They stay inspired by following the right leaders!

Image in this post © iStockPhoto – raywoo

If you’re in the corporate world of online marketing, it’s likely that you are working on a variety of projects across pay per click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), and social media. If you’re managing a large, enterprise-level brand, you need a truly global approach. In pay per click, the best practice is to launch separate campaigns per country and optimize your landing pages and user experience to each country. It’s a lot of work to do this right, but the geo-segmented approach is clear in the mind of the online marketer. In search engine optimization, you have two segmentation options: (1) launching separate websites per country or (2) having separate sections of your website per country. Personally, I prefer separate websites per country. Looking for an example on the PPC and SEO side of things? I feel like Nextag has scaled their global business well. They have methodically launched separate websites per country, making the PPC and SEO strategies clear.

Social media as a a channel is newer. When it comes to managing your global brand via social media, what’s the best approach? Adobe’s awesome whitepaper discusses this very topic. You’ll definitely enjoy the background information/statistics, specific examples/case studies, and the four-step approach. Download this free whitepaper tonight and go into work tomorrow with some brand new ideas about managing your global social media strategy. Nice work, Adobe!

Image in this post © Adobe

So what’s happening? Basically, rotate evenly will only work for 30 days. Then, after 30 days, Google will start optimizing for clicks. I can totally see why Google is doing this. I’m sure plenty of advertisers set rotate evenly during ad copy testing and then forget all about it. Due to a less than optimized CTR (they forgot to conclude the test and pick a winner), the advertiser is getting fewer clicks and Google is earning less revenue that way. And, honestly, from an advertiser’s perspective it is nice to have something like this in place because we all forget about ad copy tests from time to time.

That said, there are some downsides here. First, when I test ads, I like to look at both CTR and conversion rate. It’s easy to conclude a winner based on CTR since it’s top of funnel and statistical significance comes fast. However, if you’re in a lower conversion rate vertical, getting statistical significance on conversion rate can take some time. Frequently, it will take more than 30 days. In my opinion, 30 days is just not enough. Therefore, the 30 day limit will lessen the ability to perform a proper ad copy test for certain advertisers.

The second downside I see here is you cannot use rotate evenly to allocate ads anymore. Let’s say you have a specific allocation in mind. Let’s say you have two ads, one of which should show up 90% of the time with the other showing up 10% of the time. The historical trick was to set the campaign to rotate evenly and then to deploy the first ad 9 times and the second ad 1 time. That quick hack gets you exactly the ad allocation you want. However, with rotate evenly only lasting 30 days, this ability will become too cumbersome. Sure, you could re-deploy all the ads every 30 days, but that’s certainly going to create more work.

So, where does this leave us? Really, I see two action items. First, it will be critical to perform an account audit. Where are you utilizing rotate evenly? Find ways to conclude those tests and get away from rotate evenly. To the extent you can figure it out ahead of time, there will be no unwanted surprises. Second, it’s time to really think through ad copy testing strategy. Some of the strategies that were used in the past may no longer be viable (especially if your tests took more than 30 days). This applies not only to ad copy testing, but landing page testing too (if you happen to test landing pages by splitting ads via rotate evenly). Best of luck! Personally, I’m not the largest fan of this particular change, but it also probably won’t be that big of a deal for the majority of advertisers.

Image of rotation © iStockPhoto – sundikov

First and foremost, a bi-directional link is required to take advantage of these Google+ advertising opportunities. It’s quite simple, and this allows you to verify to Google that you own your Google+ page. All you need to do is link to your Google+ profile from your homepage. Then, you need to also link to your homepage from your Google+ profile. Specific information on how to do this is located on Google’s Social Extensions Tutorial.

Once your bi-directional link is in place, you will want to get as many followers as possible and regularly update your Google+ page. The more relevant your Google+ page, the more likely it will show up within the organic search opportunity. On the paid side of things, not sure this affects things as much, but it’s still important because your ad is likely to have a higher CTR if you have more followers.

Once you’re ready to start leveraging Google+ in your paid ads via Google Social Extensions, it’s as simple as setting up a new ad extension in your AdWords account. Add that extension to the campaigns in which you’re interested in testing this exciting feature. I wanted to share two interesting benefits of Google Social Extensions.

• First, Social Extensions are complementary to your other extensions (such as Sitelinks). If you already have Sitelinks activated, you can also activate the Social Extensions in parallel. You can see this firsthand in the Quicken Loans copy below. Personally, I think the combination of both extensions is unbeatable.
• Second, Social Extensions will improve your CTR. Sources tell me that the CTR improvement can be as high as 5%. Just having that Social Extension there adds credibility to your ad.

So, there you have it! Are you using Google Social Extensions yet? If not, I highly recommend trying this great strategy. Personally, I still have a lot to learn about Google+ but I feel like I’m on the right track!

Image in this post © Google

With baseball season upon us and San Franciscans sniffing rawhide, it’s time for a fun blog post: if the Giants starters were SEM channels, which would they be? (Based on Ian’s recent weekend musings about trips to AT&T, I’m guessing he’ll like this topic.)

One fan’s take:

Tim Lincecum – All the rage. The people’s choice. A merchandise-moving combo of style and substance. And like Timeline and its page-loading issues, Timmy’s fastball doesn’t get there quite as quickly as it used to. Yeah, he’s the Facebook of the starting five.

Matt Cain – Steady. High-performing. Reliable. Consistent. He’s not the flashiest choice, but he sure gets the job done. Sounds like AdWords to me.

Madison Bumgarner – He’s young, he’s developing, he’s already had a big impact, and just about everyone (Giants check-writers included) is betting on him going from star to superstar over the next year or so. Madison = mobile.

Ryan Vogelsong – He’s been around for a while (longer than you’d think). And while his performance used to be underwhelming, he’s better than he’s ever been, thanks to a trickle of adjustments and improvements, including better (retargeted?) control. Display it is.

Barry Zito – He was a whole lot more valuable 10 years ago, and just when you’re ready to write him off for good, he pulls out a gem and keeps hope alive. Do you Yahoo, Barry? (They also love him on Pinterest.)

Batter up…

- Hillary Read is the Marketing Manager at PPC Associates and is thankfully not in charge of any SEM accounts. But she is a huge baseball fan.

Image of baseball © iStockPhoto – 33ft

In that spirit, I have been embracing some new investment vehicles, one of which is Lending Club (affiliate link). What is Lending Club? It’s a peer-to-peer lending platform that allows normal people like you and me to lend money to others. Those who need to borrow money (often for such purposes as consolidating debt) get a much lower interest rate than credit card companies. Those who lend the money, get a much higher interest rate than is available anywhere else. In short: Both lenders and borrowers win!

I started investing on Lending Club in October of 2011, wrote my first post on PPC Ian about Lending Club in late February (check it out here), and am now ready for another exciting update! As you can see in the screenshot below, my current net annualized return is 12.99%. I’m excited about that because it’s only down a little from 13.04% in late February. Since I’m newer to Lending Club, I expect my net annualized return to dip over time since some of my loans will default. In addition to my consistent high returns, I’m now invested in 173 loans (2 of which are in funding).

I wanted to briefly highlight my Lending Club strategy today because I feel that it will be core to my continued success with this peer-to-peer investment platform. The best way to illustrate my strategy is through numbers. My total Lending Club account value is $4,137.27. Of that amount, $4,048.66 is invested in 173 loans. If you divide $4,048.66 by 173 loans, I’ve got an average of $23.40 in each loan. However, if you’re new to Lending Club, you may know that the minimum you can invest is $25. That is absolutely true. However, the real magic here is that your loans get paid off each and every month. If you start small, consistently add more money, regularly reinvest your profits, and grow your portfolio over time, you will get into a sweet situation where you have less than $25 in each loan, on average.

It’s really as simple as that. You don’t want to drop down a large amount of money all at once. You want to invest slowly over time, also known as dollar cost averaging. As your loans get paid off, you want to invest the proceeds is more loans. Eventually, you will have diversified into many different notes, with different start dates, and will have less than $25 in each loan. It’s all about persistence, diversification, and longevity. It’s not rocket science, but it definitely works (based on my experience so far).

So, there you have it, my Lending Club investment strategy. If you are thinking of investing in Lending Club (affiliate link) and enjoy reading PPC Ian, I would truly appreciate it if you signed up via my affiliate link. Thanks so much and best of luck in your own investing! I’m looking forward to my next update.

Important Note: I’m not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice. Please consult your own financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
Image in this post © PPCIan.com

So, what is this Bing Rewards? Basically, Bing is allowing you to earn points just for searching. As you get more points, you can redeem your points for rewards such as gift cards, Xbox LIVE points, and more.

I think this is a really neat idea. I’m sure that Bing Rewards will draw some more attention to Bing and increase loyalty. People love freebies and rewards. That said, Bing Rewards could also potentially lower click quality. Some people may search just to get more points. Some may go as far as creating automated bots to search on Bing. With those increased searches, it is possible that some of them click paid search ads with a lower propensity to convert. It will all come down to Bing’s click quality monitoring, which in my experience is quite good. My end conclusion: This is a really neat concept, hopefully it will increase volume over time, and (especially in the short run) it will be important to keep an eye on click quality just in case Bing Rewards affects click quality.

Image in this post © Bing

1. If you’re not on Google+, make that investment now. Make sure to get in as many people’s circles as possible. Make your Google+ profile great, and get lots of interaction happening. This is going to be another major source of traffic to your site.
2. If you’re a big paid search advertiser, make sure to get in the top, yellow bar if at all possible. The paid results on the right rail are getting pushed down. If you can make it into the yellow bar, you’re set. Otherwise, your traffic is going to drop on such terms as “insurance”.

Image of this post © Google.com