Have you heard people talking about the “click funnel” or “assisted clicks?” Exactly what is it? It refers to searches for certain keywords as part of a discovery process where people make certain searches before they do the search that leads to the actual purchase/conversion.

An example might be when you search for “discount vacation” before you search for “Dubai discount vacation” where the first search result does not convert and the 2nd does convert. Easy enough? It depends on whether you look at the relationship after the fact (what consultants do to offer you their opinion) or if you are looking at it before you have to pay for the first click (what we do to optimize the ROI on your money). Get the picture?

There is an army of bloggers and consultants feeding advertisers with lies about how this works, and this makes our job more difficult because we need to pick apart why it simply does not work that way. Is there a relationship between the “assisted clicks” and the “converting clicks?” Absolutely. Is it a predictable relationship that you can act on to optimize cost/performance? For the majority of the scenarios the answer is a BIG no! Here is why:

1. Given the choice of paying for a click that will convert or assist, which one will you pick? I thought so

2. Only after exhausting the conversions you can get for your cost threshold should you explore going to the next level and look at assisted clicks. Or should you? Paying for assisted clicks means that you will pay for TWO clicks to get one conversion, thus increasing your cost per acquisition.

Is the relationship between the first and the second click tight enough that you can, with confidence, predict that you will hit your cost threshold? What the consultants will not tell you is how often the assisted click will turn into a conversion, giving you this formula:

CPA = (# assisted clicks * CPC) + (CPC for converting click / conversion rate)

The double hit will most often kill your CPA target.

3. Let’s assume you can get yourself past the above: Unless all your keywords are in position No 1, you are likely better off increasing the target for the converting clicks (these are direct conversions) instead of betting on something indirect and less reliable and unproven. Allocating budget for assisting clicks will increase your CPA dramatically (because now CPA is CPA + cost of all assisting clicks per conversion). Why not simply raise the target for the converting clicks?

Consider this example: You pay $100 CPA for a B2B lead. You decide to allocate 25% of the budget to assisted clicks. If you take the 25% away from the existing budget, you are taking budget away from certain conversions and putting it towards indirect and uncertain conversions; not very smart.

If you add 25% to the existing budget, why not allocate it to what has proven to work and be willing to pay $125 CPA? Which one do you think will produce better and more predictable results?

4. Stretching even further, let’s say that after the above you can still justify allocating budget to an assisted click. What makes you think the person doing the initial search is loyal to you? Not only do you need to make room for someone clicking on your first ad, but they also have to pick you from the 8 ads on the first page of their second search, AND then turn that into THE converting click. So now you are paying for this:

CPA = (# assisted clicks * CPC) * (CPC for converting click / conversion rate)

It is very easy in hindsight to explain and show that an assisting click leads to a conversion, just like it is easy to guess the score of a game after it is played. Player No 7 passed the ball to Player No 9 who scored, therefore player No 7 has equal value as player no 9! This is a true statement if player No 7 is the one who ALWAYS passes the ball to Player No 9 who then ALWAYS scores. Is that likely to happen? NO! What makes you think it will happen with your budget in PPC?

Everyone can explain what happened in the past, but the one who can predict what will happen in the future holds the keys to big success. Can you? At Finch that is what we do; with our pay per click optimization we predict what will happen with great accuracy.

The only case where a click funnel (assisted click) strategy can be helpful is when a campaign has position #1 for all the keywords and still is inside the cost target. Then it becomes a viable strategy. If that is not you, go to www.finch.com to get a specific analysis of what should be changed and why those changes will produce positive results in your existing campaigns.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

SMX West is almost here; and with that the registrations for the SMX AdWords Workshop will be closing soon.

If you live in the area or your will be attending SMX and want to learn more about AdWords, I suggest you attend.

The event will take place on February 27th, 2012. Here’s all the details:

Even with all of the new marketing channels that have opened up over the years, AdWords is still the core of many companies interactive campaigns. If your PPC campaigns are not running efficiently, it can have a drastic impact on your bottom line.

Join Brad Geddes for a full day of AdWords education and discussion that will teach you not only the best practices, but also advanced concepts and strategies that are based upon a decade of research and testing.

What Will I Learn?

Comprehensive Keyword Research: The absolute center of every PPC campaign is keywords. Learn the effective methods to discover and research keywords. While keywords are the lifeblood of PPC, perfecting your match types usage while controlling your negative keywords can drastically increase your overall revenue.

Writing Compelling Ad Copy: You will learn how to sync your ad copy with both your keywords and buying cycle stages.

Ad Copy Testing: Testing ad copy is essential to any AdWords account’s success. You will takeaway several ideas for ads to test by the time you leave the session.

Demystifying Quality Score: Quality Score has a larger effect on your account’s visibility than any other setting inside of AdWords. Quality Score can be a challenge to increase. Receive step-by-step instructions in how to prioritize Quality Score improvement, and what actions to take to increase your Quality Scores.

Increase your Reach Through the Google Display Network: Consumers spend about 5% of their time with the search network. The rest of their time is spent on content sites. Learn how to effectively reach users beyond search with contextual ads, placements, and enhanced campaigns.

Control Your Ad Display with Location Targeting: Do you think that geographic targeting isn’t relevant to a national business? Think again! Whether you are a brick and mortar local business, or a global e-commerce site, learn how geographically targeted campaigns can create additional connections with searchers.

Increase Your Landing Page Conversions: The first impression to a potential customer is the landing page. With only a few seconds to engage the buyer this may be more important in your conversion funnel than anything else. This section of the course will not only go into best practices and usability, but how to test landing pages in a simple and effective method.

Networking Opportunities: Conferences are fantastic places to network and meet fellow practitioners of online marketing. Lunch will be provided so you can spend time getting to know your fellow attendees.

Who is Brad Geddes?

Brad Geddes is the Founder of Certified Knowledge, a company dedicated to consulting, educating, and training marketers on Internet marketing theory and best practices. Not one to hold secrets, Brad is a prominent educator in the PPC industry.

• Google Certified AdWords Trainer
• Author of “Advanced Google AdWords”
• Host of Marketing Nirvana on Webmaster Radio
• Internationally recognized speaker
• Trained more than 10,000 businesses on AdWords
• Columnist for Search Engine Land
• Founder of Certified Knowledge
• Worked with companies with budget ranges from $17 month to millions each month
• Has worked with Red Lobster, Encyclopedia Britannica, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, YellowPages.com

Past Training Video Testimonials

How to Register

If you would like to attend the Advanced AdWords Training @ SMX West you will need one of two passes for SMX:

• Workshop only pass
• All Access Pass + Workshop

More Information:

• Learn about SMX West
• Register for Advanced AdWords Training
• Learn more about the workshops

Please Note: This is a one day event that is a partnership with SMX. This is not the same as the AdWords Seminar for Success. This is one day event that is jammed pack full of information in a short amount of time. Please come ready to learn.

I’m excited about going to SMX at the end of this month. SMX West is in the San Jose McEnery Convention Center where SES San Jose use to be located.

This venue is fantastic. It has two hotels connected to the convention center, so the after-hours networking is fantastic. There has been a trend recently with conferences holding the event at a conference center, which means the attendees stay all over the town at various hotels and it cuts down on one of the best conference benefits – meeting new people.

The location has plenty of nice restaurants and other activities right around the venue if you want to slip away and have a quiet dinner, or hop over to Google’s campus for some meetings.

I’ll be speaking several times at SMX. Here’s my current agenda:

February 27th – SMX Workshop: I’ll be teaching AdWords for the entire day at the Advanced AdWords Training Workshop. If you want to learn more about AdWords, this is the place to be – see the full workshop agenda.

February 28th – Power Tools For The Paid Search Pro: This is going to be an interesting session. We’re not focusing on high priced tools. We’re examining a lot of low cost or free tools. I’ll be moderating and speaking, but don’t come to this session just to listen to me. The speaker lineup is fantastic:

• Chad Summerhill, the creator of gazel and Query Miner (one of my favorites)
• James Zolman who I recently had the pleasure of meeting at Pubcon will be there
• David Rodnitzky, CEO, PPC Associates, and someone I often converse with will be speaking as well

I really respect these speakers, use their tools, and value their opinion. I personally can’t wait to see what this session brings. And don’t worry, it won’t be a pitch-fest of our own tools – this is the stuff we use ourselves (which means some will be our tools or us showing the audience another speakers’s tool).

February 28th – Retargeting & Remarketing: The New Behavioral Ads: Remarketing is a hot topic, and with good reason – it works fantastically. I’m going to focus on segmenting AdWords remarketing by utilizing analytics, Google’s options, and your conversion flow to show how to use remarketing. I don’t yet know the other speakers topics, but it’s a pretty good speaker line-up:

• Eshwar Belani, vice president of products and business development, Rocket Fuel
• Darrin Clement, CEO, Maponics
• Luke Coltrin, Senior Manager, Online Marketing, Overstock.com

February 29th – One of the lunch table specialties: Did you notice it’s February 29th – leap year – this will be a special day. When SMX first launched, they flipped the search conference scene around by serving good food. The hot buffet lunch tables have replaced the terrible box lunches for most of the search marketing conferences. Thank you SMX! SMX has ‘theme tables’ during lunch hour. I haven’t confirmed which table I’ll be leading; but suffice it to say – it will say PPC, Conversion, or AdWords on it somewhere.

March 1st – PPC Tune-Up Clinic With The SMX Mechanics: Usually this is my favorite session of every conference (although with the Tools panel this year-  I’m reserving judgment). In fact, if I’m a a conference and can’t find something I want to see – I hang out in whatever room is doing a clinic.

Clinics are live Q&A with the audience. Bring up a site, an AdWords account, or whatever you want analyzed and chat live with the panelists and they dissect the data and present options for improvement. It’s always a fun time – and often not highly attended compared to some other sessions. It’s like getting $400/hour consulting from four people at once – what’s not to love?

• Matt Van Wagner is moderating. He did the technical editing for the 2nd edition of Advanced Google AdWords and while I trusted his opinion before that project, I really respect his knowledge after working with him for several months
• Rick Galan, Director of Paid Search Marketing, Mercent. Rick is a great guy. In fact, if there’s someone who needs help with feeds – he is your guy. I have no problem sending people his way. Of course, he knows a lot more than feeds and will share during this session.
• Kelly Gillease, VP Marketing, Viator. I don’t know if I’ve ever met Kelly before. Matt picked her to be on this panel, so she must be good – I’ll find out.
• Barb Young, President, PPC Strategies. Barb was on this panel a few months ago in NYC. Often we can get so detailed in what you could be doing that it can sound a touch mean (it’s not – we’re just tossing out ideas so quickly that some of the ‘positive spin’ filters get bypassed); but she makes sure we all place nice with others

I’ll be around the conference all week. Stop by and see me speak, sit down and have lunch, or just say ‘hi’. I hope to see you there.

Banner ads may still be incredibly popular for marketers, but it’s also under threat all of the time from a phenomenon called ‘banner blindness’; the ability of web surfers to filter out the advertisements to the point where they never even know that the ads are there. This means that most banners have a low click through rate and low costs.

BANNER BLINDESS!

But, banner ads are fighting back. The allowance of the creation of eye-catching designs, rich media format ads and the ability to be more discerning about where your ads will be placed are all ways which the advertisement and the advertisers are fighting back. The best way to do that is to boost your ad’s strength through solid research and good goals. Figure out the objectives of your ad, your audience and of course, where the ad should run. Each goal has its own steps, so read on!

Gather Your Information

There are several ways to gather information on your marketing campaign.

1. Ask!

As always, ask and answering questions about your banner ad is incredibly important. The most important one is "What is the ad’s objective?" What are you trying to accomplish? Every aspect of your advertisement should tie back to the answer you give.

Ads to sell products vs. ads to build brands are the most common question because a product selling ad will need a picture of a product and a call to action. A branding ad will use things like company colors, name and logo.

But there are other things to look at too:

• Type of ad to use
• Dimensions
• Images
• Does your ad have to match other aspects of your campaign, the web page or brand?
• What’s your message?
• What will your call to action be?
• Benefits to users?
• What’s your audience?
• Will you use an ad network?
• What are the limits of your advertisement?
• Scribble answers down somewhere and keep it close for future reference.

2. What Will Your Users Experience?

As marketers, it’s easy to only concentrate on your end of things and forget about the user. However, you should also spend some time figuring out how your user will experience your campaign. Make sure that everything is smooth and that you’re not missing anything during the whole campaign. A banner ad actually means more than just figuring out the ad: you also have to have a landing page with ecommerce architecture and you may need added gimmicks like video or music.

Ad Design

1. Attention Grabbing and Action Invoking

The old adage AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) holds just as true with banner ads as it does with any ads. A balance between the visual and text elements of your ad will both attract a user and create a sense of interest and response. You need both a visual element to attract attention and then a solid call to action and this often includes some form of motion.

There are actually three elements of design which are best to use:

• Plain text
• Faces
• Cleavage or other ‘private’ parts.

And of course, your call to action should be something which is enticing. Things like ‘Free information’ have great results because people like the word free and information is always good without requiring a commitment.

2. Clarity

Ads should always be clear in what they are offering. Nothing about the message, benefits or other things should be muddy.

3. Honesty

You should never claim benefits that are too good to be true and you should always make sure that the landing page delivers on your promise. It’s easy to have calls to action like ‘You Won! Click here!’, but it’s impossible to follow up and your site quickly hits the scam list and dies horribly.

4. Ad Within content

Some publishers are willing to let you publish ads and text links which can go in your content or near navigation links in order to bring people in. But make sure that your publisher is ok with this before you do it or you could just end up annoying people.

Ad Placement

Ads can be placed wherever you want on a page since it’s just a line of code; however, where you are allowed to place your ad is up to the publisher. The best places are: top of the page, to the right or left, and middle of the page, though some advertisers also swear by the bottom of the page for very relevant ads since people will finish the content and click on your ad to learn more.

Ad Networks or Individual Publisher?

There are two options for running your ad: ad networks or individual publishers.

Ad Networks:

Running your ad on lots of sites is hard work if you do it all yourself and so ad networks is easiest for this. Advertisers usually pay on a CPC, CPM or CPA basis and then the network gives a portion of the revenue to every site hosting your ad. Networks vary in their reach, pricing, dimensions and ability to target an audience. Some networks give you a ton of audience details, others organize based on topics. Most networks will take bids based on keywords to figure out where ads should be placed. There are lots of networks to choose from!

Ad networks do have a couple of downsides. You have a distinct lack of control over where your ad will be placed and that means that your ad could end up somewhere completely undesirable to you. The other thing is that since your adds will be scattered all over creation, it may be a little trickier and take longer to track your results.

Individual Publishers.

Individual publishers work best if you want to micro-target an audience. You get more flexibility in negotiating prices and placement, you know where your ad is going and publishers usually have some great demographic details as well. All in all, it means greater control over the situation.

However, you lose out on the centralization of a network and that means that if you try to go with a hundred publishers, you have to go to each publisher separately to see how your ad is doing and that is practically a full time job in itself!

Targeting Your Advertisement

Finally, you have to let your ad out into the real world and set it loose. Targeting your audience as sharply as possible is important so that you can get better response rates and more convertible traffic. Contextual targeting is the key here where you make sure that your ads are placed on sites which are related to your advertisement.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

A large number of conversions happen over the phone. This can be very problematic for many companies as they have no idea how many calls they received, or they do not know what traffic source or keyword caused the phone to ring.

Call tracking is the answer to this problem. It has been around for several years on the web, but it has not seen the adoption rates one would expect from a technology that can help close the offline sales loop.

Much of this problem stems from companies either not knowing it exists, or not understanding all of its uses.

The next episode of Marketing Nirvana is dedicated to call tracking.

• What is is
• How can it benefit you
• The different types of call tracking and accuracy
• Best practices for choosing vendors
• And a lot more

I have a special guest for this episode, David Szetela.

Many of you might remember David from his days with Clix Marketing and PPC Rockstars. He’s been around for a long time in the PPC industry and has quite a bit of insights to share.

These days, David is semi-retired from the PPC world and has moved into the call tracking space having taken the position of Chief marketing officer for Bionic Click.

Like me, David is an educator first and a sales person second. Therefore, while he does work for a call tracking company that we do discuss in a little bit of detail, the show is geared to educate you how call tracking can help and what to look for in a vendor or technology.

The show will air at 9am PST / 12pm CST Monday the 6th at WebmasterRadio.fm.

Later on, the show will be available for download from our Marketing Nirvana page or on iTunes.

I hope you enjoy the show.

Coupons are experiencing an explosion in popularity—among consumers and marketers alike. For the former, the attraction is clear: coupons are a quick and simple way to save money; if they are available, there is no reason not to put them to use. For the latter, it can be a little more complicated. Coupons offer a juicy incentive for new customers, but coupon-based promotion campaigns can be risky business. Here are some of the elements to take into consideration in order to decide if this sort of strategy is the right choice for your website:

Finding a Target Audience and a Product to Promote

1. Online coupons should be tailored for new, potential buyers: Generally, the objective of any marketing campaign based on coupons is to attract new customers. In the case of online marketing, the idea is to up the website’s conversion rate—in other words, to turn visitors into actual buyers. Therefore, promotions should be put in place where casual viewers will readily find them. On the other hand, too many people making use of coupons can seriously dent profits.
2. The established customer base should not be using online coupons: From a marketing standpoint, it’s a bad thing if proven buyers are finding and using the coupons meant to bring in new patrons. These are the people who would likely buy a given item even without that 50% discount. So—somewhat paradoxically—online coupons work best when they are advertised in such a way that only new buyers find them. There are a few ways to avoid a loss scenario and insure that a couponing campaign reaches the right people:
   • Offer a discount on a very specific, niche product—this way, the buyers using the coupons will be customers with a legitimate interest in the item, not just all-consuming bargain hunters.
   • Use coupons to get rid of excess inventory—items that are beginning to serve only as a drain on resources are always great candidates for discounts

Methods of Distribution

Once you know what you’re discounting and who you want using the coupons, you can figure out a strategy for distributing them:

1. Major players: Vendors like LivingSocial, Google Offers, and Groupon are devoted to the circulation of coupons. However, relying on these third-party players can be risky—once you’ve made a coupon available to a vendor, you lose control of how many customers ultimately end up discovering and redeeming it.
2. Video couponing: Video ads are safer than third-party vendors because they allow you the freedom to disable sent-out coupons after reaching a goal without having to take down the ad and lose the associated boost in visibility.
3. Social media: The brand new Facebook Deals presents yet another avenue for a couponing campaign. The benefits of advertising through Facebook are already well-known to marketers: a massive base of potential customers who are already categorized by their likes and interests is something of an advertisement dream come true. Only time will reveal the true effectiveness of Facebook Deals as a coupon distributor, but for now it looks very promising.

Coupons can seriously boost business for a small company, but it’s important to remember that a poorly thought-out campaign can end in disaster. If you decide that coupons are the way to go for your own business, always plan your marketing strategy very carefully. Make sure you have a complete understanding of your current model, where your profits are coming from, etc. Avoid distributing coupons for proven sellers; focus on new products or less popular items. And give it some thought: is promoting your company and gaining new patrons worth the potential loss in profits? Plan ahead, maintain control, and you’ll be on the road to success. Good luck!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

We’re teaming up with SMX to conduct a one day intensive AdWords training course before the SMX San Jose conference starts.

If you live in the region and want a solid day of training – this is perfect. If you’re going to be at SMX San Jose; come a single day earlier and leave with a lot more knowledge about the intricacies of Google AdWords.

The event will take place on February 27th, 2012. Here’s all the details:

Even with all of the new marketing channels that have opened up over the years, AdWords is still the core of many companies interactive campaigns. If your PPC campaigns are not running efficiently, it can have a drastic impact on your bottom line.

Join Brad Geddes for a full day of AdWords education and discussion that will teach you not only the best practices, but also advanced concepts and strategies that are based upon a decade of research and testing.

What Will I Learn?

Comprehensive Keyword Research: The absolute center of every PPC campaign is keywords. Learn the effective methods to discover and research keywords. While keywords are the lifeblood of PPC, perfecting your match types usage while controlling your negative keywords can drastically increase your overall revenue.

Writing Compelling Ad Copy: You will learn how to sync your ad copy with both your keywords and buying cycle stages.

Ad Copy Testing: Testing ad copy is essential to any AdWords account’s success. You will takeaway several ideas for ads to test by the time you leave the session.

Demystifying Quality Score: Quality Score has a larger effect on your account’s visibility than any other setting inside of AdWords. Quality Score can be a challenge to increase. Receive step-by-step instructions in how to prioritize Quality Score improvement, and what actions to take to increase your Quality Scores.

Increase your Reach Through the Google Display Network: Consumers spend about 5% of their time with the search network. The rest of their time is spent on content sites. Learn how to effectively reach users beyond search with contextual ads, placements, and enhanced campaigns.

Control Your Ad Display with Location Targeting: Do you think that geographic targeting isn’t relevant to a national business? Think again! Whether you are a brick and mortar local business, or a global e-commerce site, learn how geographically targeted campaigns can create additional connections with searchers.

Increase Your Landing Page Conversions: The first impression to a potential customer is the landing page. With only a few seconds to engage the buyer this may be more important in your conversion funnel than anything else. This section of the course will not only go into best practices and usability, but how to test landing pages in a simple and effective method.

Networking Opportunities: Conferences are fantastic places to network and meet fellow practitioners of online marketing. Lunch will be provided so you can spend time getting to know your fellow attendees.

Who is Brad Geddes?

Brad Geddes is the Founder of Certified Knowledge, a company dedicated to consulting, educating, and training marketers on Internet marketing theory and best practices. Not one to hold secrets, Brad is a prominent educator in the PPC industry.

• Google Certified AdWords Trainer
• Author of “Advanced Google AdWords”
• Host of Marketing Nirvana on Webmaster Radio
• Internationally recognized speaker
• Trained more than 10,000 businesses on AdWords
• Columnist for Search Engine Land
• Founder of Certified Knowledge
• Worked with companies with budget ranges from $17 month to millions each month
• Has worked with Red Lobster, Encyclopedia Britannica, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, YellowPages.com

Past Training Video Testimonials

How to Register

If you would like to attend the Advanced AdWords Training @ SMX West you will need one of two passes for SMX:

• Workshop only pass
• All Access Pass + Workshop

More Information:

• Learn about SMX West
• Register for Advanced AdWords Training
• Learn more about the workshops

Please Note: This is a one day event that is a partnership with SMX. This is not the same as the AdWords Seminar for Success. This is one day event that is jammed pack full of information in a short amount of time. Please come ready to learn.

Almost all conversion activities end in some type of form:

• Ecommerce checkout
• Contact form
• Whitepaper download
• Newsletter subscription
• and many more

Yes, most forms are not well designed. The best traffic you can buy will not help you out if your form doesn’t work properly.

However, designing forms isn’t that difficult if you know the major problems to avoid. In this video you can learn some of the major pitfalls to avoid with your forms.

If you avoid the bad stuff, and increase the good stuff – then conversions will go up. And that’s what we all want – more conversions.

The video is recorded in HD. So feel free to increase the resolution to 720 and watch in full screen. If you are reading this in an RSS reader or email; you’ll probably have to click through to the site to see the video.

I hope you enjoy.

When you do AdWords account audits, you need to go beyond the data to see how savvy the AdWords account is. If the account is well put together, then the account manager generally knows what they are doing and you will end up talking quite a bit about the data and the account’s strategy.

If the account is lacking in the advanced use of features, often your conversation will be geared around education and some strategy.

While I often start with the One Minute Account Diagnosis, there are a few signals you can use to see if the account is savvy or not before you start talking to the account manager about increasing the account’s performance.

Conversion Tracking

Every account should be tracking conversions. Sometimes this is in AdWords, other times it might be in Google analytics or their own in-house system.

If the account does not have conversion tracking of some sort, this should be the very first step to getting an account on track.

Extensions

Every account can benefit from some extension. Everyone can use sitelinks. Local accounts can focus on location extensions. Ecommerce accounts have product extensions. There are call extensions, social extensions, etc.

If an account does not have any extensions, then the account manager generally needs to be educated in not just extensions, but also top vs side performance of ads.

I find a lot of older and very sophisticated accounts often do not have location extensions enabled any longer. These accounts are often large hotel or restaurant chains that took the time to create Local Business Ads, which were retired a few years ago. However, when the ad format was retired, these companies often did not take the time to rework all of the data into location extensions.

Search vs Display Campaigns

A properly organized account will have separate search and display campaigns. If the campaigns are targeting both search and display, you will usually need to educate the company about the display network and how to properly organize it.

Negative Keywords

Does the account have negative keywords? Are they using negative keyword lists? If yes, then at least the manager knows what negatives are and you can go beyond education to finding the words that need to be blocked.

If the account has zero negative keywords, then you usually end up in a conversation about match types and search queries.

Modified Broad Match

Is the account using all broad match? If yes, you need to have a serious talk about match types. I find that many accounts use broad match for good reason, but have never heard of modified broad match. Modified broad match is a nice middle ground between phrase and broad match.

If an account is using all exact and phrase match, the account was often set up and optimized more than two years ago when expanded broad match was spending too much money without enough conversions.

Default Bids

Are all the keywords bids ‘default’? This means that all the bids are at the ad group level and are often 0.25, 0.50, 1.00, 2.00, 3.00, etc. If so, Odds are the account has no bidding strategy at all. There are times when you need to bid at the ad group level such as when you have a lack of keyword data. However, if you are bidding from some conversion metric, then some of the bids should be precise numbers such as 1.03, 0.29, 0.98, etc.

If all the bids are roughly the same, then you need to have a chat about bidding strategies that often ends up being about the company’s marketing goals.

Filters & Automated Rules

If an account has saved filters, automated reporting, or has set up automated rules, then usually the PPC manager is fairly educated. These are strong signals that you are going to talk to a smart person who wants a second opinion or is too overworked to get into the nitty gritty data analysis that can help out an account.

Conclusion

There are many other signals you could use to determine how savvy an account is; however, I have found these signals are indicative of how savvy the account is as a whole.  Also, you can see all of these settings in just a few minutes of time. I do recommend using the AdWords editor as that will show you all the campaigns at once so you can quickly see mobile, tablet, desktop, search, display, time of day, location, and other settings from a single screen.

Just because these items are in place does not mean the account is perfect and well run. Also, not having all of these items in place does not mean the account is poorly managed. These settings give you an indication of how many features the account is using so that you can speak to the education level of the account.

You should know your audience, and in a PPC audit – the audience is the account manager and maybe their boss. Therefore, understanding the account manager’s knowledge will help you speak to your audience so that you can make sure you’re spending your time on strategy versus education so at the end of the audit – everyone is happy with the outcome.

Did you know:

• 44% of all US internet users have created some content online (Pew Internet – PDF)
• We create as much information in two days as we did from the dawn of man through 2003 (from Eric Schmidt)
• The world’s roughly 27 million computer servers processed 9.57 zettabytes of information in 2008 (source)
• More video content is uploaded to YouTube in a 60 day period than the three major U.S. television networks created in 60 years (YouTube press)
• 1.8 zettabytes of data was created in 2011. It would require 57.5 billion 32 GB iPads to store all that info; which would cost $34.4 trillion; or equivalent to the GDP of the United States, Japan, China, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy combined (Source: Mashable)

So what’s my point other than we make a lot of data?

Well – are you having issues with your content marketing? Content takes a lot of time to create. However, there’s a lot of it already.

Therefore, you don’t always have to create content to do content marketing – you can leverage other people’s content (in a legal and ethical way).

That is the subject of this week’s Marketing Nirvana show. It’s about content marketing, but there are some great tips in how to do this type of marketing without having to always create lots of material (sometimes you will want to create it yourself).

The show guest is John Fox (who some of you may remember from a previous episode we did on auto-responders and PPC Mindmeld).

John is also the founder of Venture Marketing – a company that specializes in B2B and partner channel consulting; as well as the author of several books.

We chat about:

• Twitter
• Borrowed credibility (I’m a huge fan of this)
• Connectors vs creators
• A little bit on auto-responders
• Content creation
• Content marketing
• How to leverage (legally and ethically) other people’s content for your marketing
• And a few other random things that hopefully you will find useful

The show aired on January 9th if you caught it live. Right now you can download previous shows on iTunes.

Listen to it, and to previous shows at Webmaster Radio on the Marketing Nirvana page.

It’s yet another fun show, I hope you enjoy it.