Successful PPC campaign for a small Car Rental
The Nordic eMarketing team recently launched a new Pay Per Click campaign for the family-owned Icelandic car rental agency, Glacier Car Rental; which has already proven to be a huge success for both parties.
"We had to make those travelling to Iceland aware of us, instantly. And with Nordic eMarketing, this is exactly what happened," said Hallfreður Emilsson, Co-owner and Marketing Manager at Glacier Car Rental.
Through Google Adwords, Glacier was able to penetrate the online marketing space within several hours, "Google boosted orders through our website by over 90%, and there is still visible growth," commented Hallferður.
"We are really happy with the results of this campaign," explained Haukur Jarl Kristjánsson, Project Manager and PPC Specialist at Nordic eMarketing. "Especially because this is a small, local car rental agency with very personal services, and does not have the power of the big brands behind it."
Click on the following link to see this PPC case study on successfull PPC campaigns and to view other successful PPC campaigns with Google AdWords click here
Twitter to start an advertising program this spring
Twitter social 
networking and blogging messages are known as tweets messages. These tweets posts are text based statements consisting of up to 140 characters, displaying related searches on Twitter.
Twitter users are twitting on news, education, political campaigns and simple daily things one wants to share with others. Twitter usage is on the rise with around 74.000.000 users in January 2010 worldwide; a sharp 8% rise from December 2009.
Just saw Paulo Maranhao from Microsoft do a great presentation on the MSN PPC tool
Just saw Paulo from Microsoft do a great presentation on the MSN PPC tool, the tool as before intergrades beutifully into Excel 2007 (not 2010 beta) and in minutes he gathered over 1000 very valuable keywords regarding flowers. Fantastic tool that can be found at letsearchmakeyousmarter.com (Microsoft Advertising Intelligence). Speaking at this session beside me are:
Thomas Bindl, SES Advisory Board & Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
Constance "Connie" Stack, VP, Sales & Marketing, WordStream
Paulo Maranhao, Search Media Strategist, Microsoft
The session was firmly moderated by Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board & Principal, Page Zero Media.
for more information on SES London goto their page
Next stop Search Engine Strategies New York
When should you use PPC as a part of a PR strategy?
Air France Google Trends
One of the most dynamic ways of communicating to the masses ASAP is through Google PPC, a great sample of that is the crash of the Air France Airbus plane flying from Brazil to France. The plane goes down after 300 KM and news start to spread.
As a part of an PR crisis strategy Air France should have gone out and paid for customized message for their brand search, dealing with questions like; Is it safe to fly with Air France' and/or How can I find information about the crash?
Using the same method, Airbus could have dealt with people frighten to fly with Airbus planes, answering questions like is flying with Airbus planes save?
As one of those that fly frequantly but are not comfortable flying I was one of the first looking for anwers like the above and I do belive that I was not the only person. Check Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends?q=air+france&ctab=0&geo=all&date=mtd&sort=0 to back my case.
Why it is important not just to open a PPC campaign
We recently worked for a client that wanted us to do a PPC campaign at Google for 3000 pounds, thee campaigns with several ad groups and run it for three or four weeks . The problem was that the campaign was actually not the three campaigns and couple of ad groups, this was four campaigns and some 20 ad groups with all its related keyword clusters.
Is Microsoft Adcenter converting better than Google in Paid Search?
A recent study IndexTools has reinforced Microsoft's claim that their paid search product converts much better than Google's across a broad range of search verticals. The study was not a small one either, covering over 15 Million visitors from paid search, Indextools found that Microsoft Adcenter adverts converted into sales around 20% better than Google's AdWords product.
There is a great article on this at Dixons Jones Receptional News Site.
You can also read about the Paid Search Study at the Visual Revenue site.
Back from NY where I did my Managing PPC for Multiple Clients session
Back from New York where I did a session called Managing PPC for Multiple Clients. The case was to help agencies or consultants in trying to juggle multiple clients and projects and I feel that we managed quite well. With a good line-up of speakers and a great moderator the session hit it's mark, moderator David Szetela, CEO of Clix Marketing and speakers included me in behalf of Nordic eMarketing, Gregg Galletta, Director of Sales, IndustryBrains, Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster and Ken Yarmosh, Director of Search Technology for Clickable.
Exchanged a bottle of local vodka/schnapps with Matt Van Wagner who brought me a bottle of a very fine Vodka and instead a bottle of 8 year old Brennivin (Black Death). The highlight for me how ever was that my wife saw me speak for the first time.
Protecting you brand from competitors’ PPC
A couple of our clients have had competitors setting up PPC campaigns with Google, using their patented brands. For some it has taken months to stop this, having to go through the beaurocracy of Google. For if Google looks simple from the outside it most definitely is not so within, take my word for it. If you are having this kind of a problem, contact Google by all means. But remember to have at hand all the legal documents you need to prove that you are indeed the owner of the brand, Google will be calling for it. Perhaps understandably, they can't help you protect your brand unless you officially claim it.
Improving online PPC Campaigns
In this short article I will try to explain in as simple terms as possible how to improve your pay per click campaign at Google and even though Google and Yahoo and MSN are not friends this will also apply with them (on top of this MSN also offers demographic targeting).
1. Keep daily budget as high as you can
The daily budget determines how often the ad is shown for the keywords. Set the budget high enough so that ads don’t turn off during the day.
The Google PPC algorithm:
What really determines your ad visability at Google looks a little like this “[ MAX BID * KEYWORD CTR * (AD GROUP CTR or AD COPY AVERAGE CTRS or something to this effect) * POSSIBLE A CAMPAIGN WIDE CTR * POSSIBLY SOME CAMPAIGN OR ACCOUNT AGE FACTOR * (A LOCALIZATION FACTOR APPLIED DEPENDING ON WHERE THE SEARCH ORIGINATED)] = RANK SCORE”
Source: http://www.positionconcepts.com/
You can read more about Google new PPC algorithm here: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061110-085425
2. Improve the ad’s position
Trying to simplify Google AdWords algorithm this is the deal; The ad’s position can be improved by increasing cost-per-click (CPC), refining the text or having a high click-through rate (CTR).
3. Refine keywords to target specific audience
a. Choose specific keywords for the product or service - General keywords generate the most impressions but often result in the fewest number of clicks. Eg. companies that sell football equipment, should not choose the keyword ‘football’, because the ads could appear to people searching for subjects unrelated to the product, such as football matches. Instead, choose more specific keywords like; ‘football gear’, ‘football boots’ and ‘football clothing’.
b. Use keyword variations – People use different spellings of keywords so include spelling variations, plurals and common misspellings in your list of keyword.
c. Change keyword matching options to widen/narrow focus - Specify which type of keyword matching option you want to make the ads appear.
The options are:
Broad Match: just enter the keywords, such as ‘football boots’ (Google uses Tennis balls in their sample, or was it tennis shoes?)
The ad will appear whenever users search for ‘football’ and ‘boots’, in any order, and even if the query includes other terms, such as ‘football clothing and boots’.
For Google, broad matching also utilises expanded matching in which it analyses the keyword list, ad text and daily Google search queries, then shows the ads for other relevant terms and variations (such as ‘football shoes’) even if these were not included in the original keyword list. (Expanded matches can be stopped by adding them as negative keywords or by changing broad match keywords to exact or phrase matches.)
Phrase Match: include quotation marks around the keywords, eg. “football boots”
The ad shows when users search for ‘football boots’, in this order. The ad would appear for ‘Reebok football boots’ but not for ‘boots for football.’
Exact match: include brackets around the keywords, eg. [football boots]
The ad appears when users search for ‘football boots’, in this order and without any other terms in the query. The ad wouldn’t show for ‘Reebok football boots’ or ‘football clothing and boots’.
Negative keywords: include a hyphen before the keywords, eg. ‘-blue’
If the keywords are ‘football boots’ and your negative keyword is ‘–blue’, the ad will not show under the search ‘blue football boots’
4. Target audiences geographically
Languages, countries or regions can all be targeted separately.
5. Improve ad text
• Make sure to include targeted keywords. Do some research, refine, research, refine and so on….
• Be very clear in your messages.
• Focus on what makes the product or service unique.
• End with a call-to-action.
6. The ad links
• Use links to send people to the relevant and useful landing page and don’t be afraid to do some A/B testing. Use third party analytics to messure your conversion rate and ROI, I reccomend IndexTools.
• Monitor the conversions; track how many ad clicks convert to purchases, sign-ups, page views, leads etc…
The most important part is always to remember that a well managed PPC campaing is a full time jop and for it to work well you need to compine competitive analysins, indepth keyword resarch, refining and professional web analytics. I do not reccomend using Google to monitor Google and you can’t monitor MSN and Yahoo with GA.