I was thrilled to see that Google has rolled out SMS text to the masses via Gmail Labs.  This is going to be a big help to me as I coordinate much of my day with family via text message. I even send texts to kids when they are in the same house to come to dinner, get out of bed, etc.

While I’ve definitely become more adept at using my iPhone keyboard, it’ll never approach the convenience of desktop SMS-ing.   And the ability to get responses in the same window is fabulous.

With video chat, gmail integration, automatic translation, along with a great mobile and desktop client, Google Talk becoming a really powerful communication tool.

I find myself not even launching Trillian these days.

Many people are taking a hard look at their Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns on Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Adcenter and trying to determine how to reduce their budgets.  But I worry about how they are going about it.  So today I would like to provide some tips/reminders of how to get control of your budgets that will keep your core campaigns performing.

Question 1: Are you wasting money on unmeasurable, ineffective traditional marketing that should be shifted to the web?

Take a good look at your OTHER marketing spends as they compare to your web marketing spend. If your direct postal mail campaigns are all waste, then it might make sense to cut back there and shift funds to what’s working.

Question 2: Are You Doing Enough Organic/Natural SEO on your website? (e.g. is PPC a crutch?)

If not, you may be missing tons of free traffic that converts nearly as well as a good PPC Campaign.  Even small adjustments to many sites can boost traffic 10-20% in a matter of weeks.  Paid search is a great marketing tool, but organic search is often far, far better.

But if you’ve made your way through these considerations, and determined that PPC must be reduced, then be careful you’re not chopping prize flowers out with those weeds and think through the process systematically.

We’re talking about focus, precision, and control.  Things that PPC gives you in spades if you choose to learn and use them.

Goals:

• Maintain high performance arrangements of keywords, adgroups, campaigns, landing pages.
• Reduce PPC Engines’ “flexiblity” with your money (e.g. take control of your campaigns.)
• Increase the Click Through Rates on your most important terms.
• Increase the Conversion Rates through proven techniques.
• Increase the Quality Score
• Reduce the waste brought about by laziness during setup, structure.

What not to do when cutting back on PPC:

• Reduce overall daily campaign daily budget amounts arbitrarily, letting Google / Yahoo / Adcenter turn off ads across-the-board some of the day.
• Arbitrarily turn off entire thematic campaigns.
• Arbitrarily cut keyword bids adgroup-wide or campaign-wide.
• Arbitrarily turn off entire sets of keywords in bulk
• Let Google / Yahoo / Adcenter decide on your keyword matches

What to do when reducing PPC Spends

• Take control of your keywords and match types!
• Reorganize campaigns and adgroups so you can tweak them in a way that makes sense for your business.
• Reorganize campaigns so you can precisely tune ad writing and landing pages, this can help your quality score and reduce click spends 20-30%!
• Utilize precision matching techniques (long tail, peel-and-stick, exact and phrase match.)
• Utilize dynamic keyword insertion (may require campaign reorganization)
• Take another hard look at negative keyword collections (campaign and adgroup level.)  Check your server logs and search logs for new negative phrase ideas.
• Be careful with negative match types - filter away precisely without throwing out entire chunks of profitable terms.
• Develop high performance, low distraction landing pages for top products - I cannot emphasize this enough.  If your CMS or shopping cart program don’t allow this, you’re using the wrong one.
• Utilize a vanity URL on display-URL setting and 301 to the same page.  Domain names are cheap and this can boost click through rates 10-15% (along with quality score.)
• Daypart campaigns (especially if USA only or for purchases made on phone.)  Look for patterns in your sales that would help you daypart more precisely.
• Reduce content network spend as appropriate.  Utilize new placement matching and cut away poor performing properties from your content network mix.

In general, the recommendations follow a theme:

Reduce Google/Yahoo/Microsoft’s flexibility while increasing Quality Score and maintain tight control over when and which ads are displayed to whom.

(Whew, that’s a mouthful….)

So be careful out there, and as always - I’m available to review your PPC campaigns if you want a pointer or two.  Just send me a note.

I’ve long advised clients that there are few good reasons for a splash screen of any type on any website that outweigh the problems they cause. They are widely hated and have sometimes strong impact on search result.   Well if there was any doubt that Google may treat these sites differently, this should put an end to the debate.  Google are again testing a  “skip intro” link on the search results.

Why would Google do this?  Well, most likely they are reading survey results like this.

Professional Flash designers should rejoice too.  Why?  Because the layperson user associates “Flash Web Design” with “Splash Screens” over and over again in my conversations.  By obliterating these ridiculous things you will also benefit from improved perceived value among potential clients.  I do not develop Flash sites but occasionally contract flash “components” out to developers. Flash should be used where its platform offers a unique advantage to the user of the site and, in turn, to the business running the site.  It should not be used to pad the portfolio of designers wanting more eye candy to show off.

I ordered a battery for my Plantronics headset from Headsets Plus last week.  It’s about the size of a SD Card.  And it was the only thing I ordered.

Their site, order process, and other parts of the process was okay.  The packaging… not so much.

I’ve been hearing of stories of retailers starting to adjust how they package items, and have seen other examples of wasteful packaging online, but I think this one is among the worst I’ve seen.

When I placed the order, I even included this in the comments during check-out.

This thing is tiny - if you can ship it cheaper than $6.94 via another method please do so and credit my card.

At least most of it was recyclable.

I’m not a huge tree-hugger or anything, but damn, people.  Have you not heard of padded envelopes?

I have enjoyed being a member of Triibes, a community set up by Seth Godin after the release of his book of the same name.

The ebook was set up by volunteers in the community - and was really well done. Highly recommended.

[ Triiibes EBook] - PDF file

Google posted today that 20% of the queries they receive have not been seen in the past 90 days, and this is a reason to utilize broad match. I agree, but with a severe caveat. Your broad match keywords need to have bouncers, or fences built around it. Think of an ideal setup like a game of Skeeball where the query is the bowl itself.

Google Adwords always goes with the most restrictive match. If you have multiple keywords in your list, and include all the match types, you can be sure to cover all the bases, in sequence. The ideal match-type setup does all of the following well

• Catches unpredictable keyword searches
• Allows dynamic keyword insertion or headline tweaking
• Allows custom text presentation on landing pages.

So, if you use this as your keyword setup, you get the benefits of broad match as your fall through, the tight control of exact match, and the medium ground of phrase match

Keyword examples:

[lexington convention space] (exact match)
….Dynamic Keyword Insertion Heaven -> Tight Landing Page
“lexington convention space” (phrase match)
… Adgroup-controlled ad text -> Moderately Tight Landing Page
lexington convention space (broad match)
… No Dynamic Keyword Insertion -> Basic Landing page

-Massachusetts (negative broad)
-”Lexington MA” (negative phrase)
-[Lexington MA Convention Space] (negative exact)

Of course negative keywords are critical for each type, as well

If you let Google use broad or automatic match, you give up two big layers of control. Yes, it’s a hassle to create the campaigns and adgroups with so much in them, but it’s a big savings down the line. This is why when we are in the advanced Adwords sessions at conference and someone asks how many keywords people have in a given campaign, you’ll hear numbers well into the thousands.

What about discovering new keywords?

Google broad/automatic match have some interesting discovery capabilities especially if you are able to write very specific exclusionary ad text headlines as well as stuff your negative keywords list to the hilt. I think that you should isolate your automatic match campaigns in your account and just keep using them as disposable “research” type expenses. But there seems to me plenty of ways to discover keywords you should have in your account.

Skeeball Pic by Benny Mazur and Used Under Creative Commons Licens