Paid Search Lessons from David Szetela

Today I sat in on a Search Marketing Now webinar hosted by Marin Software and taught by David Szetela, the founder of Clix Marketing. He gave some great tips about common PPC and paid search mistakes, and I thought I’d share them below.

1. Don’t mix search and content campaigns. David recommends turning off the content network and not mixing search and content, which he said will bleed away money.
2. Search keywords are not the same as content keywords. Your keywords should describe the target site, not necessarily your product or service. Think about what words would appear on the pages where you want your content ads to appear. Some of his tips regarding ad groups and bids are:
   • Don’t have more than 20-40 keywords per ad group
   • Match types (except negative) are irrelevant
   • Individual keyword bids are irrelevant
   • Negative keywords are necessary
3. Don’t be ignorant about content ad sites. Become familiar with Google placement performance reports. They show you exactly where your ads are appearing plus the number of clicks, conversions, CTR, and conversion rate. Eliminate poorly performing sites with the site exclusion tool (which now has topic and page type exclusion).
4. Don’t use search ads in content ad groups. Search ads and content ads are different. Content ads need to stand out among the content on the page. Be sure to yell, not whisper. You also need to be more competitive–maybe offer free shipping or some other incentive. Include strong, explicit calls to action, and don’t forget to test.
5. Stop neglecting long tail keywords. Don’t forget adding common stems to your keywords, like “best,” “online,” etc. Bidding on false plurals is also recommended, as David stated that incorrect plurals are searched for more often than correct plurals (e.g., “widget’s” vs. “widgets”). Also bid on your domain name and variations thereof, such as www.widgets.com, widgets.com ww widgets, etc. People search for weird delimiters, such as dash marks, plus signs, greater than symbols (>), etc. Sometimes search engines filter them out, but sometimes they don’t. If you bid on these delimiters, you’ll get keywords for a much lower cost. Lastly, bid on your competitors’ terms and domains. You can’t use their name in the ad itself, but you can bid on the keywords.
6. Get rid of those gigantic ad groups. This often comes about because people dump their entire keyword research spreadsheet into an ad group. Don’t bid on too many unrelated keywords or blindly extract every keyword a keyword research tool dumps in your lap. Be sure that every keyword you bid on can get worked into your ad’s copy and is used on your landing page.
7. Write good search ads. Use the keyword, then a qualifier, in your headline. Emphasize benefits over features. Tightly couple ad text with keywords and landing pages. Be sure to test everything, even seemingly inconsequential things like capitalization in the display URL.
8. Don’t have users land on your home page. Create a custom landing page (or several) for your ads. Assume that every visitor suffers from ADD–you have milliseconds to convince them that they’ve come to the right place. Make especially good use of the upper left-hand corner of the page, since that’s the spot users are likely to see first.
9. Get rid of those complicated B2B lead forms. Offer multiple contact options (phone, email, fax, form, etc). Make your contact forms neat and clean, and only require the minimum amount of information necessary. The more fields you require, the more complicated you make the process. Also, use apologetic error trapping. Never pop up a box that says “You made a mistake;” instead, when someone neglects to fill out a required field or if there’s some other error, say something like “We’re sorry, but…” and explain what’s missing so you don’t seem hostile or like you’re alienating your user.
10. Stop manually bidding on complex campaigns. Basically, if you’re spending $20k/month and/or are bidding on 20k keywords, you may want to consider bid management software.

For me, the suggestion about making your error messages more empathetic was a great tip, and I also liked how he stressed separating your search campaign from your content campaign. Not everything can be easily duplicated across the board–you’ll just end up throwing money away if you try to cookie cutter everything. He emphasized the importance of ensuring that the keywords you bid on match your ad and your landing pages, which may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s something I didn’t know when I first started tinkering with paid search.

David also talked about adding your keywords in the display URL, so SEOmoz could have a URL in our ad that was “seomoz.org/buy-yellow-pumas” if our keyword was “yellow pumas.” Starting April 1st, for Google AdWords the display URLs in your ads have to match the landing page URL, but David said that the root of the display URL has to match. As long as the root domain name matches the landing page, you can still include extra words after it.

Overall, I thought the webinar was great. It was only 30 minutes long and got straight to the point. I really want to become more well-versed in PPC and paid search, and it’s really hard for me to get a quality education because I’m so busy with my day-to-day tasks and responsibilities at SEOmoz. I’d love to attend a PPC boot camp or train with an experienced PPC professional or company, but until that happens, I’m kind of learning as I go, and little webinars like this prove to be extremely valuable for someone who doesn’t have one-on-one training and can’t find a comprehensive workshop to attend. I hope more webinars will become available so I can continue to learn and apply these tips to our campaigns.