Giving a specific answer of who is "the best" in this category would be nearly impossible.  However, I have played around with traffic from nearly every PPC engine out there and would definitely say these 1st tier engines are the only place that most of you will want to play.  Most of the PPC engines outside of the 1st tier tend to have much poorer quality traffic, which is never fun to get.

So what IS the difference between these 3 big dogs? (soon to be 2 possibly)…

Yahoo! Marketing Solutions

Yahoo doesn’t get nearly the amount of traffic that Google contains, but I have noticed that most of the traffic I receive from yahoo converts better than my traffic at google.  I have never had any problems with Yahoo and they have been improving their PPC system dramatically over the last year.

One drawback of Yahoo that I, and other marketers, have noticed, is that many times keywords that have been approved and running fine…will all of a sudden become disabled, or declined, or simply disappear.

When this first started happening to me, I was worried…called Yahoo, and got some BS excuse like always.  After asking around…this happens to almost everyone I know who uses yahoo and keeps tabs on their accounts to notice it happening.

Other than this small drawback I would say Yahoo is probably the best PPC engine for any PPC beginner to start out at since the traffic is generally cheaper than adwords and the clicks usually convert better.

MSN Adcenter

It took me awhile to get used to MSN.  I get quite a few campaigns in MSN that convert pretty well also, however it seems to be much more hit or miss than Yahoo.  Bid prices at MSN are comparable to Yahoo, maybe a bit lower.  However the traffic seems to flow even less than Yahoo.

Another downfall I feel is that MSN’s interface is really hard and confusing to work with.  I have been quite surprised to not see MSN make any decent changes like Yahoo and Google have.

I think MSN will continue to slowly grow in this area, however with the recent news that they may be purchasing Yahoo, that would help them tremendously.

MSN is also a good engine for beginners to dabble with since their is less traffic, cheaper prices, and it still converts pretty well.

Google Adwords

Here is the REAL big dog.  Google has the largest mass of traffic compared to the other engines.  Google’s traffic can convert really well or poor depending on how you run your campaign.  One thing is for sure, if you are a newbie, you need to be extremely careful when setting up your campaigns.  Make sure to use negative keywords, only exact and phrase match for your keyword types, and run everything through a tracking program to make sure you aren’t paying out loads of money on traffic that isn’t converting.

Unlike Yahoo and MSN, Googly’s adwords has sort of revolutionalized the way PPC works.  They continually are working with things and changing their algorithms to produce the best user experience.

Because of this, I recommend not to use adwords unless you know what you are doing.  Take your time testing and learning using Yahoo or MSN and then after you get some experience under your belt, then come back to Google and start pounding at its door.

Let me know what your favorite PPC engines are.  I know there are a few 2nd tier PPC engines out there that are pretty decent, leave a comment and let me know what you have found in your experiences.

When creating your PPC campaigns I sure hope you are using negative keywords wisely.

The ONLY way you won’t have to use negative keywords are if you use exact match keyword phrases only!

Anytime you are doing your keyword research, you should keep your eye out for any keyword that doesn’t relate to the product or service you are promoting.  You should also read through the keyword phrases and see if there are any phrases that don’t really qualify for your specifications.  So for example, if you are promoting something and you are seeing support or cancel in some of the phrases, these are also keywords that should be added to the negative keyword list.

You should also go search Google and Yahoo (even MSN if you want ) to look for any results in the SERP (search engine results page).  Like before, anything you see here that isn’t related to what you are promoting should be added to the negative keyword list.

This negative keyword list you have generated will now do quite a few helpful things for you.  First of all, it will prevent your ad from being shown to unqualified visitors, which will result in your ad getting a much higher CTR since the ad will be targeted so much better than before.  Also, by having this negative keyword list you weed out any unqualified clicks to your ad by not even allowing the ad to be show.  This results in a lot of saved money from wasted clicks.

If you do this, and see your impressions go WAY down…this means you were definitely not managing this campaign effectively or efficiently.

If you aren’t using negative keywords with your campaigns, then get in to adwords, adcenter, YMS or wherever you use, and get these loaded into your account right away.  This will cut your costs down and get your ctr up…something we all need!

Not to long ago, Yahoo Marketing Solutions updated their interface used.  There were some minor changes made which I thought improved YMS.  This being said, I was helping a friend the other day with some PPC campaigns he was running and suggested he use an ad which contained a question mark in it.  He told me it wouldn’t allow him, and I passed it off as it probably being user error or something wrong with his browser possibly, who knows these days…

Now tonight I went through and was tweaking old campaigns and adding a bunch of new campaigns.  Towards the end of my workload, I was trying to ad an ad which contained a question mark in not the title, but the body of the ad.  Every time I would type in a question mark it would automatically be taken out of the text box immediately after it was typed.  It has come to my attention now that Yahoo must have made changes to their system which now forbids users of using question marks in their ads.

NO QUESTION MARKS IN YOUR ADS?!?!

Are you kidding me???

It seems like these 1st tier engines are taking away every right that we as advertisers have!  I understand some of the changes, and even encourage them usually.  But some of the things, like not allowing question marks in an ad is ridiculous.  I can think of many situations (ads) that could be made 100 times more effective by being able to use a question mark in the ad.

PPC is my favorite method of getting traffic and has been for quite some time.  However, the way these big guys are treating some of us is getting to be just unfair.  I am making an attempt to really broaden my knowledge on different tactics of traffic generation this year and hope that many others will choose to also consider this route.

Let me know what you think… Are these companies really pushing some of these things or is it just me?

In the last year I have spent a lot of my time focusing on how I track and record everything with any of my traffic generation techniques.  There are many different methods to track the different types of traffic available to us.  I am going to talk more specifically about tracking traffic coming from PPC campaigns (even more specifically; direct linking CPA/Affiliate offers) as I think this is the most complicated for most and the least cared about by many.

When tracking with PPC campaigns, CPA/Affiliate networks use a script to track everything that their affiliates do.  These scripts consist of code to track where the traffic is coming from (by grabbing the referral URL) and then a redirection to the offers landing page.  Because of the demand for better tracking capabilities, almost all of the networks have given us marketers an area to track where the traffic is coming from.  This can be called many different things but is most commonly called a Subid.  How this works is when you grab your url from the network for whatever you are promoting, you can add &Subid= or whatever it is that the network uses, and whatever value you want after the = sign, and it will be tracked and recorded by the network.  Now like I was saying, each network uses different names for the subid area of the url.  So for instance a url from hydra looks like this: http://www.lynxtrack.com/afclick.php?o=6492&b=0yf8r68m&p=14353&l=1  Hydra does not use &Subid= as there tracking mechanism, what they use is &s= so my final url would look like this http://www.lynxtrack.com/afclick.php?o=6492&b=0yf8r68m&p=14353&l=1&s=EnterSubidHere replacing EnterSubidHere with whatever you want to pass along to remember where the traffic was coming from.  To find what you need to add into your url to pass along the subid data, you can just ask your affiliate manager or contact the CPA/Affiliate network if you don’t know your affiliate manager.

When you are tracking PPC traffic there are again more than one way to track this traffic.  More specifically, there are two main methods to this. 

The first method consists of giving every keyword in your PPC campaign a unique destination url.  This method is good because it is easy for accounting purposes, since you can match every keyword your bidding on exactly with the conversion.  However it does have a few drawbacks such as the fact that using this method you will never find out the TRUE searched for keyword that made the conversion.  For example, you may be bidding on the keyword "math book".  Now a user comes along, searches for "math book 101 for college" and buys the book.  You know that the conversion came from that keyword "math book" with this method but you DON’T know that it actually came from a different more specific phrase, "math book 101 for college".  Another problem with this is that in the PPC engines, when you use a unique destination url for a keyword, there is no way to test which ad is making the conversion since the unique destination url overrides the ad url.  There are scripts that make this process much easier for you and are able to import and export csv files, etc.  Most of the scripts out there that do this right now in my opinion are lacking in many areas, however I know there are a couple of tracking scripts coming out in the near future that will really help most marketers.

The second method also involves using a script, most commonly php/mysql, to grab a certain part of the referrer code which passes on the keyword as a variable in the url.  Here is an example of a referrer url grabbed by my tracking script: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en-us&q=sixflags&btnG=Search  Looking at this url tells us many things, for instance, that the visitor was using Safari as a browser, that they speak English, and that they were searching for the keyword "sixflags".

These tracking scripts then take that url and enter it into a database taking what it needs from the url and organizing the information into the database as it adds it.  By using these scripts, you just give your ad a url generated by your tracking script and then when it runs it through this script it adds the information needed, logs whatever needed, then does whatever you have it do (most likely redirecting it if you are direct linking).  I don’t know if most of these programs allow you to do this, but it is possible with this method to track which conversions are coming from specific ads.  You can give each of your ad a unique tracking url and since the keyword is pulled through the referrer url you can also find out the exact keyword that made the conversion.  Not only this but you can view the url and find other useful information to help you with your search engine marketing.  Many times the URLs will tell the exact location of the searchers.  Not long ago I had an offer up and found that like 80% of my converting customers were coming from California.  By Geo targeting this campaign, I bumped my CTR way up and lowered my click prices by adding the converting long tails that were showing up in my tracking script.

On the other side of the PPC table, you can also use the second tracking method with content network traffic and find out some very useful information.  For example, your referrer url will be where the site is coming from, so you will find every site that is displaying your ad as AdSense, and you can see how much it is converting.  You can find some goldmine opportunities here by weeding out the sites that aren’t sending converting traffic, and just show your ad to the sites that are sending that quality traffic.

Now that I have gone over the pros and cons of both of the different methods of tracking your PPC traffic, I want to bring up another point.  Why is no one tracking the conversion rates of their ads?!?!  I talk to many ppc marketers who just don’t understand why they would want to go through the work to know the conversion rate of their ads.  They figure the best CTR is the most clicks and that’s the best.  THATS WRONG!  People need to worry MORE about the conversion rate than they are.  I realize you always need to have a bit of balance and use your best judgement when choosing between traffic quantity and quality/conversion but why NOT know which ad is converting the best?

This happens to me time after time but I will give you one example of just last week.  I had an offer that was $40 per lead.  I was bringing in around 3 or 4 leads a day.  I was also split testing two different ads.  The ads were actually identical, except for the display url.  They were both getting about the same amount of clicks and had about the same CTR.  However, the ad that was getting a slightly higher CTR actually did not have even ONE conversion.  I started backing up and looking at larger groups of data and broadening things out to a week view on the traffic, the exact trend continued the entire time.  I was really shocked on this one but the numbers don’t lie.  Once I stopped the higher CTR ad, I found that I started to get almost double the sales.  This was ALL because I was tracking each ad separately so I could test my conversion rates.

I had my script custom programmed by a genius friend of mine, but if you have any knowledge of php/mysql or any web programming languages, you would be able to create something yourself.  There are also many other premade scripts out there that you could purchase, but in my opinion they just aren’t worth it.  For example, most of the scripts can’t import your CPA/Affiliate network csv files into the script so that it can figure everything out.  My script will bring in any csv for any network I am in and many more.  Now not only does my script do the tracking, but it imports all of my network data and compares it all to the data in the mysql database, which then reports back to me in an organized manner all of the information it had logged including additional information like the TRUE EPC of every single keyword, and the ad and ad group in a whole.

Knowing this sort of information is priceless and can help you save TONS of money by knowing which keywords are the money makers and which ones are the money drainers.  It can also help you find traffic you wouldn’t have known about otherwise along with other information.

I would recommend taking a look at your tracking strategy and maybe revamping it so that you aren’t passing up all the information you are paying for.

Let me know how you choose to track things when it comes to your ppc campaigns.  I’m interested to hear if anyone else out there agrees with me on this viewpoint.

A couple days ago I threw up some campaigns on adwords to try and test how to get cheaper more reasonable clicks.  I am not using any cloaking or keyword stuffing or ANYTHING.  This is as white hat as you can get…

Now this hasn’t been worked with at all, these are just today’s results when I went in to start tweaking some campaigns that were doing good.  Now look at this.  I am getting clicks from adwords at $0.02 per clicks!  This is officially the cheapest clicks I have ever seen.  This traffic is not only coming in cheap, but converting very very well.  I know the traffic is very low on this, but with the CTR I am obtaining it doesn’t matter, PLUS this screenshot was taken mid-morning when not much traffic had flowed through.  However, it has been running at this same $0.02 CPC since I’ve thrown it up and it still is.  Now that I have tweaked the campaign just a bit and added a few more campaigns, I think the ctr will rise even more.

The biggest reason I wanted to show this to you is because look, I am barely getting any impressions, yet I turn the few impressions I get into clicks, then I convert those clicks into leads or sales.  This campaign is profiting very well for me right now, and I wanted others to see that you don’t need tons of searches, you don’t need tons of keywords, you just need to focus on the ones that matter.

Another point I wanted to make is, like most of my other campaigns, the 80/20 rule still continues to apply.  If you look, you can tell out of that campaign one keyword is doing about 80% of the traffic, and also 80% of the profit result.  Instead of worrying about getting every keyword making money, just zone in on the campaigns or keywords that do well, and worry about making it better.

ANYONE can make money with PPC, just go after targeted traffic, make a targeted add.  Don’t worry about boatloads of traffic, just worry on the traffic that matters!

Has anyone seen clicks on adwords recently cheaper then $0.02?  Anyone else have any methods or theories as to how to properly get cheap adwords clicks?  I’m interested to hear if anyone has anything to offer on this conversation.

As I’ve noticed with almost every other form of advertising out there, using adwords content network can be hit or miss depending on your campaign.  I have used content network with tons of success and have used it where it just wasn’t worth it.  If you do some site targeting though… you may be able to do wonders with your content network traffic.

Many people don’t really use content network properly, they use it sloppily and pay for it in prices and quality of traffic….duh….this is what google and everyone else wants…for you to fall into the rat race and keep the industry flowing.  For people who do treat it like ppc, which let me say, with ppc I track down to every single ad group, and every single keyword (actual keyword searched, not just the keyword you are bidding on), I try to get  as specific as possible and cut out what isn’t making money and what is.  This is what needs to be done with content network….just like in the regular search network except instead of hunting for keywords your more hunting for sites or pages.

You can either start off the bat using site targeting only and just testing a specific site or sites, or even find specific pages and only target those.  You could also just run it on some keywords and have it run through a good tracking script which will grab the referrer code and display it.  This will show you the site that the traffic is coming from and you can then cut it down to only sites sending you converting visitors, or whatever it is you want in your traffic.

Just treat things like a business, you need to learn to manage and micro manage…be able to look at things in a whole and then break it down and look at things at an ad group perspective, at a keyword perspective, learn how to view stats and break things down quickly so you can determine where the "good" and "bad" traffic is coming from and what action to take about it.

OK, I just got done watching a video on keyword research from a very popular and liked internet marketing company and wow I was a bit shocked.  Jeeez they spent 10 minutes going over if its better to phrase your search on a singular or a plural version of a word, for example "buy microwave" vs. "buy microwaves".

First of all, if its that big of a deal, why not just focus on both terms?  If you don’t have a site with enough juice to pull it off then throw up a minisite or a subsite somewhere and just get a few backlinks for the second term.  Its not that hard.

Second of all, isn’t this stuff that should be taught in like Keyword Research 101?  Anyone who can go to google and type in "keyword research" will find very many tools that mixed with common sense should suffice quite well.

In case your to lazy to go and actually sift through a few entries on that google page, than just use Keyword Discovery’s free tool.  I have been using this for ages and that free tool is all I need for my keyword research many of the times.  From what I hear, if you take the results from Keyword Discovery and take it times three, that will be a much more accurate number of the amount of searches.

Now when I want to dig a little bit deeper to understand the traffic patterns of certain keywords I will many times use Wordtracker’s GTrends Tool.  You can get an idea on the amount of competition on Google compared to the amount of searches.  Now these numbers are far from accurate, BUTTT if you can kind of step back and take a broader look at things, don’t worry so much about the numbers but compare the trends since it shows the past history.  See if its steady traffic, traffic that is going extinct, or traffic just starting to peak.  By using this tool, you can many times find some golden opportunities.

It really comes down to just using common sense.  Just sit down and think… What would other people search to find this?  What would I search for to find this?  Try phrases in your keyword research tool to get new ideas and find the higher trafficked most targeted phrases.  DO NOT look at the numbers spat back out at you by these programs as accurate numbers, they rarely ever are.  But like I said you can still use these tools to get ideas on new keywords, search patterns of users, and many other things, that mixed with the information of trends in that area, can really help a guy out

There are tons of other Keyword Research tools, some are pretty good, some are complete junk.  Feel free to comment and let me know which tools you are using and why it is you choose it over others.