I’ve always said - if you think you know a lot about Adwords, you haven’t met Brad. He’s kind of like the Hank Haney of paid search.

We all know your account is more Charles Barkley than Tiger Woods, so you best take advantage of this opportunity.

Why do I bring up the seminars now? Because they’re going to be dropping in on my turf this summer. They were kind enough to provide a 10% discount for my readers:

Discount Code: theppcbook (good for 10% off any of the stated prices, which means 20% off a two day pass)

Registration Link

Event Info:
Doubletree Hotel Minneapolis-Park Place
1500 Park Place Blvd
Minneapolis, MN 55416

8:30 am - 5:00 PM

7/16/09 AdWords 301: Advanced Account Optimization focuses on best practices for Keywords, Ad Copy, and Landing Pages in addition to a deep dive into Quality Score, the Content Network, and Geographic Targeting. This day is jam-packed full of tips and techniques you can functionally use to improve your accounts overall performance.

7/17/09 AdWords 302: Advanced Conversion Optimization concentrates on how to increase your conversions and your profits! Topics include Bidding Types and Strategies, Tracking Conversions, Split Testing, and Account Organization. The information included in this session can have a positive, dramatic impact on your bottom line - this is a must attend event!

Bonuses:

* $100 AdWords Credit ($50 if you register for a single day) **Must Register 7 Days in Advance
* 2 USB Thumb Drives with Presentation Materials (1 for each day)
* Other Google Goodies
* Bonus Presentations:
7/16: Marketing in a Down Economy: Superior Profits on a Minimal Budget
7/17: Actionable Items: Step-by-Step: How to Maximize Results for Your Limited Time

I’ll be at AdTech tomorrow through Wednesday. I’m not speaking but i will be doing quite a few meetings. If you’re looking to talk paid search, affiliate marketing, or cubs baseball - I love meeting fellow colleagues once I get out of the office. Drop me a line - jeff @ theppcbook dot com ….

See you there!

Apparently it’s building the fastest billing system known to man (and woman)…

I took this snippet at 8:54. Believe me, they know up to the minute the status of your funds.

That’s great!

How about my ads?

Hmmm…. 5am? And 10pm last night for the conversion data? Wow. You guys are ON TOP OF IT.

So much for intra day bidding changes in Yahoo. My best Yahoo campaign decided that it can’t update faster than a every 12 hours or so. In that case, I might as well buy Yellowpage advertising.

Me: Hey, how are my ads doing?

Fictional Yahoo Guy: I don’t know, we can tell you sometime tomorrow. Sit tight okay?

Me: Hey, how are my ads doing?

Fictional Yellow Page Guy: I don’t know, we can tell you sometime next year. Sit tight okay?

Same difference to me.

Me: Mr. Barack sir, my keywords are no longer worth what I’m paying.

Barack: I inherited this mess you know.

Me: I know, and I inherited this campaign.

Barack: Hmmm. Are your ads cynical, or are they hopeful?

Me: My keywords are hopeful, but the ad copy is cynical.

Barack: This is the problem with America, too much cynicism. Are your ads about guns and religion?

Me: No. Google doesn’t allow gun ads. Religion? Is that a good niche?

Barack: You’re a cynical man. Move to Hawaii, the sun will do you some good.

Me: Good idea. Thanks. Now about my mortgage…

‘click’

These events take place between 7am and 8am.

Just like Jack, my producers have kept me off the air for extended periods in between seasons. I asked why and was only told, “At this point we can’t tell you.”

Fine, I said, “I’ll keep doing what I’m doing” and here we are in January. Much to my surprise, a couple weeks ago Fox producers called and said they were sending Jack to my office to help out. They apparently overheard me mumbling over ‘yahoo $*&@# bulk upload’, ‘quality score my a$&’ and a few other cries for help during the past few weeks. It got to the point Jack was concerned (in a tough love Clint Eastwood kind of way, of course), and he decided to take over some of the workload.

Jack walked into my office and I immediately started describing some of my major complaints. Jack said, “Shut up and give my your PDA”. I complied of course. He was initially confused by my iPhone but smiled once he saw the GPS and some of the first person sniper games I’ve downloaded.

I handed him a list of my smallest clients, clients I shouldn’t be working with, and said, “good luck”. He immediately started dialing with no hesitation. I sat back and soaked it all in.

Jack Bauer: I’m federal agent Jack Bauer, and today is the longest day of my life.
Client 1: All I want is a report for the last 3 months!

Client 2: You’re lying.
Jack Bauer: Yes I am. But you’re still going to have to trust me.

Client 3: I don’t believe these numbers. Is this click fraud?
Jack Bauer: Listen Mr. $50 website and $2mm in inventory, part of getting a second chance is taking responsibility for what you did wrong in the first place. Fix your website and we’ll talk.

Jack Bauer: Our campaigns are up and running.
Client 4: I don’t believe you.
Jack Bauer:(smiling) I don’t care what you believe. You don’t even have a contact form on your website.

Jack Bauer: Maybe you should try running this campaign yourself. Do you know how to use one of these?
Client 5: No.
Jack Bauer: Point and click.

After that Jack got a call from Bill Buchanan and nodded to me as he walked out the door. Just like that, Jack had appeared to solve all my problems in 30 seconds flat. I’m not sure I would hire Jack full time but he can certainly come in and deal with the trouble areas every once in a while.

I’ll have to tune in next week for more client management tips from Jack. Don’t be afraid to channel some of your inner Jack next time you have problems!

sigh…

A question like that is my fault. Education is just as important as management, and at the end of the day the education part is the first to go when you’re busy.

How about a report with:

Spend
Revenue Generated
Top Selling SKU
Revenue by SKU

(try getting those numbers from your yellow page rep)

John over at ppchero highlights more of this education gap.

The reality is, as long as some of us feel we’ve been in this industry, it’s still new new new. And it’s still a black box in the eyes of the average SMB. At the end of the day what your client needs to realize is it’s not a black box when it comes to performance, tracking, and measurability. I’ll take this black box over a year long YP contract or Superbowl ad any day.

After Christmas break, take your clients back to class when you’re planning 2009. It will help us all in the long run.

I’ve spent most of the last week playing around with the Google Website Optimizer, and I’d like to start out my contributions here with some thoughts on website optimization and experimental design. First off, the Website Optimizer is yet another well-designed Google product with enough features to keep math geeks like myself up many nights playing and exploring.

Over on the Google Website Optimizer blog, the taglines include “Experiment or Die!” and “Always Be Testing.” Clearly, Google is pushing for more campaign optimization, although it is notable that most of the blog entries are written by Google Authorized Consultants, who make their living running website optimization experiments, so perhaps they have some motivation to get more people optimizing.

The most important part of any experiment is the design. A well designed experiment is an extremely powerful tool that may give you (or your client) a huge advantage in the marketplace. A poorly designed experiment is a meaningless waste of time. This “Experiment or Die!” mentality worries me. Experiment for experiment’s sake leads to what we statisticians call “analysis paralysis,” where you have so much data and so many, often contradictory, conclusions that you can’t make any useful decisions.

A key element of experimental design is power. Does the experiment you’re conducting have enough power to actually prove any thing? Power comes from two elements: the number of items that you’re sampling (unique website visitors) and the size of the effect. Its much easier to detect a large effect (like a 50% improvement in conversion rates) than it is to detect a very small effect (like a 1% improvement). In PPC website optimization, the limiting factor is your number of unique visitors. If you get millions of unique visitors, your experiments will have higher power than a site with a few hundred or thousand visitors per month, and you can experiment to your hearts content. With fewer visitors, you have to be a little more thoughtful about how you design your experiments

I started my analysis with a simple A/B split test, the most basic website optimization experiment. Assume you have two versions of your landing page. You drive traffic half your traffic to one page and half to the other and track conversion rates over a set number of unique visitors. Below is a graph of the power of that experiment assuming four different effect sizes: conversion rate improvements of 5% (green), 10% (blue), 25% (red) and 50% (black).

A finding that surprised me: if you’re only expecting a 5% improvement in conversion rates, 100,000 unique visitors only give you 25% power to detect the effect. That means two things: if one landing page really does convert better, you only have a 25% chance of detecting that, and if you see a difference between the two pages in your experiment, there’s only a 1 in 4 chance that the difference is real. So if you already have a well optimized sites and you’re constantly testing to improve 1% here and 2% there, it is likely that you’re wasting a lot of time and energy chasing after trends that may or may not actually be real. However, for a site that’s never been optimized or is being significantly overhauled and is expecting improvements on the order of 25-50%, those tests are generally well powered with only 10000-25000 visitors. Predicting effect size is really just an educated guess based on what you already know about your site and your campaign.

Moving from an A/B split to a multivariate design only compounds the problem. In a multivariate design we take two or more elements of the campaign and test two or more versions of each. As a test case, let’s take the two landing pages from the previous example and add different versions of the ad copy. Now, rather two variables (Landing Page 1 vs. Landing Page 2), we have four:

• Landing Page 1, Ad Copy 1
• Landing Page 1, Ad Copy 2
• Landing Page 2, Ad Copy 1
• Landing Page 2, Ad Copy 2

And the power curves look like this (50% - black, 25% - red, 10% - blue, 5% -green). Note that the scale for number of visitors now runs from 0 to 1,000,000.

The practical question that comes out of all of this is how many visitors do I need before it’s worth my time to do an optimization experiment? In genetics, we consider an experiment to be well powered if we have 80% power to detect the given effect. In the table below are some rough estimates for the number of unique visitors necessary to provide 80% power for a variety of different optimization tests and effect sizes. Keep these numbers in mind as you’re designing your optimization experiments. Carefully select the variables you’d like to change, and let the experiment run long enough to give you meaningful results.

Next week, more on the fundamentals of split testing and multivariate testing.

1. Taking my cue from Barack Obama, the best thing to come out of Chicago since the 85 Bears, I’m bringing in some voices with alternate viewpoints on paid search. Why? Because I’m always focused on the art of paid search, and less on the science. So I went hunting for some scientists, and found one, and we’ll be publishing a few guest posts here as an ‘experiment’. I will look for your feedback as this develops.

2. Take the time to listen to Perry Marshall’s interview on PPC Rockstars. Perry’s into the art of paid search, and his writing is always creative. There are a few nuggets in the interview that are worth your time.

3. From my very unscientific analysis, Thanksgiving did not bring a significant drop to my overall November traffic in the larger campaigns I manage. I was extremely surprised and it messed up a few of my budgets. Other than seeing a dip on Thanksgiving day, traffic was almost back to normal Friday and over the weekend. What this tells me:

Nobody takes time off anymore

Nobody likes their relatives

The Detroit Lions being on television is actually good for online commerce.

Anyhow, no complaints from me.

I do have a question for you though:

What are you planning for budget, as a percentage of normal, for the last 2 weeks of the month?

“eMarketer estimates US advertisers will spend $25.7 billion on the Internet next year - about $2.7 billion, or 10 percent, less than a forecast from just 3 months ago.”

Here is the
online version of same article.

C’mon. Is that just a wee bit misleading? Sounds to me like the PROJECTION is dropping. Not the actual revenue. But hey, who’s paying attention anyway?

Just to clarify, Ad Revenue is not going to drop, it’s actually going to grow to the tune of an 8.9% increase over 2008

Nice try Mr. Newspaper Publisher. Enjoy your gold watch and pending retirement. Maybe I’ll throw you a bone on the content network every once in a while.

When your PPC Analyst:

Gently suggests you current landing page is holding you back…

Offers to build you a better landing page…

Says they have a good hunch it will work out better for you…

LISTEN TO THEM

You’ll thank me later…