The great thing about web analytics packages is that they are very powerful tools.

The downside of web analytics packages is that they are very powerful tools!

The sheer amount of data, and the complexity of reporting tools, such as Google Analytics, confuse many marketers. What can be overwhelming for the beginner can be just as overwhelming for the expert.

The trick lies in knowing which data is important…

How do you decide whether to push you campaign into content networks, such as Adsense, or Facebook?

The simple answer is you should be everywhere your customers reside, so long as the ROI is positive. The Balkanisation of the web is ongoing & won’t be complete until every single person becomes a demographic…

Insights For Search

Google Insights For Search is a tool that shows you the approximate volume of searches over time. For example, here’s an Insight graph on the term “Halloween”.

As you can see, interest in Halloween is flat for most of the year, except in October, when searches suddenly spike as the celebration draws near…

Well, we would say that….

But we do offer a free introductory course, and there are some fantastic resources out there, some you may not have heard about. Here’s out top ten picks of external sites and resources. The tools come with a wealth of useful case studies you can use to enhance your own campaigns.

1. Google Adwords Certification

A comprehensive, free course for Adwords…

That was a New York Post headline.

It was a great headline for the New York Post. I think it’s fair to say they understand their readers.

Is it a good headline for a post on PPC Blog?

Maybe

You tell me.

In a minute.

But first….

A Post About Headlines

Today we’ll look at the headline in the context of PPC. This topic is probably nothing new to PPC veterans, but if you have a background in traditional media and copy writing, hopefully it will give you a way to approach PPC, and search marketing in general…

Are you thinking of starting a web business? Starting a PPC Management agency? Setting up your own site and selling things, or building a web publishing empire?

Before you start, ask yourself the following eight questions. The advantage of this Q&A is that you can quickly see if the idea you’re going to throw your money and soul into is likely to work.

1 . What Do You Do?

Define what service the business provides…

Whether we work for ourselves, or we work as part of a bigger business, we should always be accountable for what we do. Clients, bosses, and bank managers will always want to see us demonstrate that we are working steadily towards achieving goals.

Project management has become a specialized task in it’s own right. Dedicated project managers delegate tasks, ensure people complete those tasks, and generally keep projects on track…

Should you hire an external PPC consultant? Or can you do the job better and/or cheaper inhouse?

Large companies – companies with over 1,000 people – typically have less need to outsource than smaller companies. Existing in-house teams can often adapt in order to provide extra services, with a little extra training required. Smaller companies typically benefit the most from outsourcing, as the overheads for each added employee can be considerable…

Psychological triggers are a very powerful marketing tool.

Psychological triggers are the mechanisms of thought by which people make a decision to view your ad instead of others, or convert from tire kicker to buyer.

Let’s take a look at twelve common psychological triggers that you can weave into your ad copy and landing pages.

1. Engagement

People love to feel a sense of engagement…

Good copywriting isn’t just about writing.

Good copywriting is the process of convincing someone to take action.

Good copywriters convince a person to exchange their cash for a good or service. A poorly written landing page, however, can earn a back-click. In PPC, there is no click more expensive than the back-click.

Could your landing pages convert at a higher rate with a simple rewrite of your copy?

Let’s look at the proven tricks and techniques great copywriters use to achieve high conversion rates…

In a market downturn, there is always pressure to cut your prices. Trouble is, the same pressure applies in an up market, too!

Can you ever win? Either the client won’t pay what you’re worth because of tight budget constraints, or so many competitors enter a flush market that there isn’t enough money to go around.

Here are some ideas on how to achieve premium pricing for your PPC services…

If you’re great at PPC, then why would you sell those skills to others? Why wouldn’t you become an affiliate marketer, or set up your own site selling goods and services? What’s the point of working for a string of new bosses as an independent PPC consultant?

There are a few reasons why becoming an independent consultant can be a great idea. Lucrative, too.

1…

Look at any competitive PPC area today, and you’ll notice many of the ads are selling the same thing.

This is a fundamental problem.

No matter how great you are at PPC, it the product or service you’re selling is flooded with competition, the more your margins will be squeezed. The more your margins are squeezed, the less you will be able to spend on advertising…

Usability is common sense. Good design is common sense. After all, there is no point building a site that is unusable, or a site that isn’t designed well.

Typically, talk of usability orients around function i.e. ensuring websites are easier to use by streamlining content and making navigation clearer. The problem, like with any set of functional guidelines, is that usability is about much more than functional interaction…

Thankfully, shopping cart issues are typically a result of poor usability and poor process, and therefore reasonably easy to fix. The key to solving most shopping cart problems is to provide greater levels of transparency.

Let’s look at eight ways to super-charge your shopping cart conversions. We’ll use a cart you’re probably familiar with – Amazon’s – as an illustrative example…

Each element on the page, each word, graphic, block of text and link, contributes to conversion, or lack thereof. However, this complexity can be boiled down to six essentials.

If you’re designing a land page, or revamping those pages you have, make sure you cover these six points:

1. State Your Value Proposition

What is it? What value are you providing the customer? What is in it for them?

Your value proposition should be part of the ad text, and it definitely needs to appear on your landing pages…

How will you differentiate your services from the rest?

Formulate A Brand

Typically, small companies don’t think much about brand. Brand is for the big guys. But whether we formulate a specific brand or not, everything we do – the way we talk, write, execute and interact with clients – is our brand…

Successful people tend to use their time more effectively than others. They are not gifted, and there is no mystery to how they do it, they just tend to organize themselves in a deliberate, calculated manner. Time management skills can be learned and copied…

Differentiation

Given that the PPC provider market is crowded, you first need to figure out a point of differentiation.

Points of differentiation include level of service, locality, knowledge of an industry, price, level of awareness, etc…

Let’s presume you’ve got your PPC chops, have built up some practical experience and are now looking to make money out of your skills.

Let’s take a look at how to go about it.

Size Of The Industry

SEM spending is estimated to be worth $18 billion by 2011.

Most activity, in terms of spend, in the professional search marketing space is in PPC, as opposed to SEO…