Guy Levine from Return on Digital

This morning I went to a brilliant SES session by Guy Levine (@guylevine from www.returnondigital.com). Aiming to 'make PPC as sexy as possible', he covered all the basics of paid search, plus a few added extras, and generally left the audience with a comprehensive starter pack for creating an effective account on Bing, Yahoo!, Google and Facebook. Here are his top insights and tips.

1. The main differentiators between the competitors are:

Google has the biggest market share. With that though come higher CPCs and the most competition.

The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance has better conversions and lower CPCs. It also has some 'cool tools'. Guy described Microsoft Advertising Intelligence as 'brilliant' and said it 'gives you some good information in a format you can really play with'.

Facebook offers such good demographic targeting capabilities that it would be possible to write an ad saying 'I love you' and target it so specifically that only your partner will see it! (Guy claimed he wasn't soppy enough to actually try this, but I might do!)

2. The more targeted your campaigns, the better they perform. Ensure keywords within ad groups are really tightly themed so that the corresponding ads will be as relevant as possible.

3. The more targeted the landing page, the better the conversions. Deep link, deep link, deep link.

4. Attention to detail creates winning campaigns. Make sure ads are spelled correctly, that you've included all possible keyword variations and that your account is tightly organised.

5. Make sure Excel is your best friend.

6. Test. Guy recommends using the 'peel and stick' method with keywords. This involves putting keywords that are performing brilliantly into their own ad groups to focus the strong performance. Do the same with ads. At 'Return on Digital' they start off with three 'wildly different' ads for each ad group, work out which one is performing, write three more slightly different ads based on that one, and so on and so on until they've got one unbeatable ad.

7. Use negative matches. Guy urged the audience to remember that a lot of searchers act like four year olds, even the really clever, savvy ones. They will often click on ads that obviously aren't relevant to their search. Therefore, it's really important to use negative matches, particularly on Google where three types of broad match can result in very untargeted results. For example, 'formal shoes' can match to 'men's dress wingtips'. Ensure you use comprehensive negative matches to relieve this issue.

8. "Remessaging is the coolest stuff ever online". This involves repeatedly showing ads to users who didn't convert originally. There's another session about that this afternoon, so please look out for the upcoming blog..

Good luck everyone!

Thanks a lot,

Libby Thomas

 

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