Many advertisers question the need to pay for PPC ads for their own brand terms. Because their web site is likely to rank in the top spot organically, they see little reason in paying for an ad if the user is going to find them anyway. This argument has a lot of merit and that is the biggest reason why this debate continues. In most cases, if a consumer types in your name, they are looking for you and will probably arrive at your site by clicking that top link.

However, there are still some compelling reasons to advertise on your own brand name. Here are four of the main reasons we’ve found:

1. You can easily control the message. While you may be able to alter the description that Google displays for your site, it is not a straightforward process, isn’t guaranteed to work, and takes time. A PPC ad, on the other hand, can be changed at any time. So if you have a special promotion, seasonal sale, or launch a new product, your PPC ad can easily highlight that.

2. You control the destination. Generally, the organic result for your brand name will be your homepage, but with a paid ad you control the destination. You could show consumers your new product or highlight a sale with a special landing page. When consumers search for “Your Brand + Product A” you can make sure that they arrive on a page that features ‘Product A’.

3. Defense. If other people are bidding on your name, they are syphoning off some of the traffic you might have recieved otherwise. You can use a paid ad to get most of that traffic back. Ads for the “official site” almost always trump the competition and help insure that you get the lions share of the traffic.

It’s worth noting that sometimes, especially for big brands, it might make more sense to squash the competition through legal means and eliminate those competitive bidders (search for Walmart, American Airlines, or Office Max for examples of that). However, some brands (like eBay) know that even when no one else is bidding, reason #4 still applies:

4. It brings in incremental traffic at a very low cost. Even though your brand is the top result, there are other links on the page. Some of those links may be from your company, but many will not be. There might be news links, videos, or sites that offer reviews and even criticism of your brand. The more real estate you have at the top of the page, the larger your share of the available clicks will be.

For most companies, ads on brand terms will cost less then $0.10 per click (and we’ve seen plenty of advertisers that pay Google’s minimum of $0.01). If there are other advertisers appearing on your brand, those costs will be higher, but will still cost much less than your non-branded keywords.

Given those reasons, you can probably see why many brands choose to advertise on their own brand. We feel that the risk, in terms of dollars, is very low while the potential benefits are pretty large. Of course, every company’s situation is different, so it’s worth considering the pros and cons before making a decision.

A lot of companies are looking for ways to use social networks to find the talent they need. An interesting example comes from oDesk, an online marketplace that connects freelancers with buyers (mainly small businesses) who are looking for their services.

According to Inside Facebook, oDesk recently started using Facebook Connect API to allow freelancers to link their oDesk profile into Facebook. From there, friends and colleagues will be able to see what kind of work they do, what they charge, how they’re rated on oDesk, etc. It’s an idea that makes a lot of sense. Freelancers often find work through their personal networks. This feature gives freelancers a greater ability to tap into those networks online.

As Facebook Connect grows in popularity (and functionality) we expect that more companies will find similar uses for it. After all, there are a lot of people on Facebook.

More to the Facebook click fraud story that we wrote about earlier this week has surfaced on TechCrunch.

When the first story broke, many people were wondering why Facebook would have such an issue- unlike the Google Adsense program, which shares revenue with a network of publishers who have great incentives to click their own ads, Facebook ads are only on Facebook. However, it now appears that a financial incentive does exist, it is just a bit more indirect.

Much of the fraud, it seems, is being perpetrated by advertisers against their competitors. Nefarious advertisers are using software to generate fraudulent clicks on competitor’s ads using large sets of falsified Facebook accounts. The idea is to reduce the level of competition by driving up the costs, reducing ROI, and causing some advertisers to pull their ads. This is not entirely surprising given that a large portion of Facebook’s ads are purchased by affiliate marketers, a group that has long sported a dark underbelly.

Facebook says that the fraud is back under control. While they are employing a variety of techniques to detect and filter fraudulent clicks, they are not cancelling the fake accounts, since that would only result in the creation of new accounts and give rise to new techniques. Advertisers who have been affected should be issued credits automatically. Of course, some advertisers report that they are still having problems, which means that Facebook still has some work to do. Though discrepencies will always exist between ad clicks and site visits (for a variety of reasons), we are glad to see that Facebook is taking this issue seriously.

While Comscore and others have been talking about the bump in search traffic that Microsoft is getting from the launch of the Bing search engine, we have yet to hear much about it’s advertising performance. The format of the search results pages on Bing introduce some new elements and features which might lead more users away from ads.

Fortunately, that does not appear to be the case. The Search Agents blog reports that since the switch to Bing they have seen the following changes across a cross-section of Microsoft adCenter client accounts:

Click Through Rate (CTR) up 15%

Conversions up 6%

Conversion rate up 18%

Cost per Acquisition (CPA) down 3%

They attibute these improvements to more selective and relevant ad placement on the new engine. They note that impressions have decreased overall, but the improvement in CTR and conversion seems to compensate for that. All of these findings are very early, and most of them are based on limited (rather than global) datasets, but frankly we’re encouraged about the prospects for advertising on Bing.

TechCrunch writes today that Facebook advertisers are seeing wide-spread issues with click-fraud. Some advertisers have been airing their complaints on online forums as well as trying to resolve the issue directly with Facebook. While the article states that Facebook has yet to resolve the issue, the exposure on TechCrunch seems to have kicked the response team into high gear. A representative from Facebook is quoted in an update as saying that they have a click-fraud monitoring system in place to detect and filter out fraudulent traffic. However, they have “seen an increase in suspicious clicks” over the past few days. The rep goes on to say that they have “identified a solution which we have already begun to implement and expect will be completely rolled out by the end of today. In addition, we are identifying impacted accounts and will ensure that advertisers are credited appropriately.”

Click fraud can have serious consequences, both for advertisers and the companies they advertise with. Beyond wasting advertiser’s money (and unjustly enriching the ad provider), click-fraud can destroy the relationship of trust that must exist for the sale of clicks to continue if it is not properly addressed. Fortunately, we have yet to work with a company in this space who would not respond to clearly cataloged evidence of click fraud or other discrepancies. Now that this issue is out in the open, we hope that Facebook will be able to provide a transparent resolution.

Which would you prefer: Watching a slightly longer than normal ad at the beginning of a video, or having three regular breaks (of 30 seconds or less) during the show? Well, if you are viewing some of the premium content on YouTube, you just might get that choice.

NewTeeVee reports that YouTube recently launched a test campaign that gives users some choices in ad type and content at the start of the video. Users can opt for either a longer pre-roll ad or the regular spots during the program. Interestingly, the pre-roll option also gives users a choice of which ad to view.

As NewTeeVee notes, Hulu has been doing something similar for some time. However, we think the YouTube trial is important because YouTube and Google are much more likely to share the results with advertisers. The data from this experiment could go a long way towards educating advertisers about what works in terms of video advertising, which is what Google needs if it ever wants YouTube to be profitable.

If you are using Google AdWords then you have probably seen their new interface. If you are like us, you probably have mixed feelings about it. While it doesn’t quite “feel” the same as the old AdWords, it has definitely improved certain aspects of campaign management. Whether we like it or not it will soon be the only available interface, so we though we would start highlighting new features within the interface that we find useful (and perhaps offering our opinion on potential improvements, in case Google is listening).

A feature that caught our attention recently is the “See Search Terms” button that now appears at the top of each ad group:

This button allows you to select one or more keywords in the ad group (or all of them) and generate a Search Query Performance report for those keywords. Instead of taking you into the reporting area to setup and then access the report, it simply appears as a pop-up overlay above the current view. This gives you instant access to critical data about the keywords in the current ad group are connecting to actual search queries (including conversion stats for each query if you have Google Conversion Tracker installed). The date range for the report is determined by the date range of the current view.

Once the report is open, you will see that Google has tried to make the data actionable by adding some new indicators and functions. Search queries in the report that are already in the ad group are given green ‘Added’ labels. Keywords that have been added as negative keywords are given a red ‘Excluded’ label. Those should only show up if the date range you use includes dates before the negative keywords were added. Another caveat there is that the excluded label is only given to keywords that match a negative keyword exactly (i.e. if you have the negative keyword ‘free’, the keyword ‘free chairs’ would not register as excluded in the report, even though it would be filtered by that negative).

After you have evaluated the list, you can use the built in ‘Add as keyword’ or ‘Add as negative keyword’ functions to add selected keywords into your ad group as appropriate. While this is handy, it may be of limited use for many advertisers. If you need to add third party tracking codes onto your keyword URLs, for example, you might prefer to use the ‘Download’ function to grab a list of potential keywords that you can upload later. The same goes for negatives, since this tool only allows you to add whole keyword phrases. Adding larger phrases as negatives is often less efficient than adding just one word that is common to many trouble phrases (i.e. you could add ‘free chairs’, ‘free blue chairs’, and ‘free brown chairs’ as negatives, or just the word ‘free’, which would filter out all three, as well as many others that haven’t shown up yet).

All in all, the placement and functionality of this feature is a welcome addition to the AdWords interface that we think will help many advertisers improve the performance of their accounts.

Steve Woods, author of the book Digital Body Language, was one of the speakers at the Online Marketing Summit which was here in Cleveland on Monday. We learned quite a few interesting things at the event and thought we might share a little bit of that insight.

Steve’s area of expertise is B2B marketing, and in his presentation he talked a bit about today’s B2B buyer. We thought that the tips he gave might be helpful for someone who is marketing a B2B product or service online. For example, he gave the following (paraphrased) list of attributes about today’s buyer:

• Wants information on his or her own timeframe.
• Does not want to be sold to (but wants access to sales people when ready).
• Wants interaction, not marketing. Data is critical.
• Will likely interact with your brand/website multiple times before making a purchase decision.

Based on those points, here are some questions to consider about your site: What do you offer in the way of immediately available information? Is your info all locked up in white papers that require lots of personal information (and which will clearly result in a sales call when completed)? Does the customer have to schedule a demo in order to get anything more than a cursory amount of information about the product?

When you are thinking about these questions and how you might tailor your site and your materials to meet your prospect’s needs, remember that they are going through a process. As Steve described it, the process is as follows (with our interpretation in parenthesis):

• Recognition (this is where your PPC campaign helps prospects realize that you exist)
• Evaluate (key time to provide easy access to information about the product/service)
• Sample (now the prospect is ready for a demo, or to trade their info for more detailed specs, etc.)
• Integrate (now the sales team is involved and from here it’s about follow-through)
• Test (the soon-to-be customer is trying things out)
• Deploy (you have a customer)

The goal of your website should be to help prospects make their way through this process. Prospects are unlikely to give information that will lead to sales calls at the outset. They need to know more about your offering to see if it is worth that kind of commitment. As they learn more about the product they will become more likely to trade their contact info for more detailed information such as a demo.

This is the kind of information that is good to keep in mind as you are designing landing pages for your marketing campaigns. It will also help you evaluate  the success of the campaigns. From a PPC perspective, you might expect broad keywords to bring visitors who are more interested in the materials meant for early stage prospects. That is where they should be directed. More specific, niche keywords might correspond to more advanced prospects who might be willing to sign up for a demo or white paper. Again, the landing page should reflect that.

As your campaign progresses, your analytics should guide your decisions. After all, that is where you will find the clues to your prospect’s digital body language.

From what we have seen over the years, the question of ad group structure is something that many PPC advertisers struggle with as they are setting up new campaigns. The main question seems to be, which keywords should I put where? Some questions that stem from that are: How many keywords is too many for one ad group? If I break my keywords up into smaller groups, on what criteria do I base the groupings? We’d like to share our ad group philosophy and hope that it can help answer those questions.

Google’s learning center suggests that “ad groups should be organized by common theme, product, or goal”. What the themes are, and what groups you end up with, will be determined by your keywords. Ad groups should be comprised, as much as possible, by keywords that share a close resemblance to one another. That generally means that all of the keyword phrases in the group will share certain words. For example:

• Cleveland marketing agency
• Cleveland marketing company

In those phrases, two out of the three words are the same. In addition, the phrases mean essentially the same thing. That’s a good sign that they belong together. If you are not sure whether a keyword belongs with a certain group, a good question to ask is: Will the ad copy for this group address this keyword? If not, it probably belongs in another group. In the same way that your keyword phrases in the ad group should share words, your ad copy should too. For example:

• pay per click marketing agency
• pay per click advertising agency
• recruitment advertsing

There are a few ways to analyze this group, but generally speaking your ad copy for this group would be focused on the words ‘pay per click’, ‘marketing’, ‘advertising’, and ‘agency’. While it might be possible to work the word ‘recruitment’ into your ad, it probably makes sense to put that in a separate group. The distinction would likely be clearer in a real campaign because you would probably have several other ‘recruitment’ keywords which would fit together.

Another guideline that will help you make grouping decisions is the number of keywords you have in the group. Google says, “If you find that the keywords or placements in one ad group become unwieldy, split the ad group into two to make them easier to manage.” Our interpretation of this guideline is that when it comes to ad groups, smaller and tightly focused is better than large and inclusive. That doesn’t mean that you should be creating hundreds of tiny ad groups with three keywords in each. However, if your group is getting into the hundreds of keywords, you should probably look for a way to break it up.

Once your campaign is live, a good way to see if you have created a strong ad group structure is to check your keywords’ quality scores. An ad group that has a lot of keywords with a low quality score may be an ad group that needs reorganization. In some cases, the keywords that relate well to each other and to your ad copy will have higher q-scores while the outliers will have lower scores. Moving the low scoring keywords into more relevant ad groups (or getting rid of them altogether) should help improve the performance of the core keywords in the group.

While ad group creation is a fuzzy science, we hope that answers some of the most common questions. As always, if you have questions about your ad group structure, or any other aspect of your PPC campaigns, we would love to help.