4 replies to this topic

[zenhead]

Folks:
Forgive my lack of knowledge, but I am a complete beginner, just having been offered the chance to take over the PPC program for my company. I have no idea how to begin learning how to do this, and I must say that I have the sneaking suspicion that I will not have the time to administer the program as completely as it should be done. So, my questions to you are:
What kind of time committment am I looking at (hours per day?)

Where do I go to learn how to do this? A good book? A class? Dive in and flail around until I figure it out?

Any advice you might be able to offer would be greatly appreciated.

[qwerty]

Welcome, zenhead

This isn't a personal recommendation, since I haven't read it myself, but Jill has talked a lot about an ebook by Andrew Goodman on running AdWords campaigns. Here's a link to it that I got from her site: 21 Techniques to Maximize your Profits on AdWords

[Haystack]

Hi zenhead, welcome to the forum.

Andrew's report is definitely worth it. Here's a previous thread about that:
http://www.highranki...p?showtopic=899

A few things to consider:

If your company is only bidding on a dozen or so terms, they could be doing a lot better by significantly increasing the breadth of terms they're advertising on.

If you're only driving traffic to your site's homepage, you may be missing opportunities to drive people to more specific content within your site.

If your PPC ads are not unique for each term you're bidding on you could be doing better.

If you're not using at least Overture and Google you're missing out on opportunities.

If you don't have a stats program capable of tracking which search terms are converting to leads/sales, you're probably not spending your ad budget as effectively as you could.

If your site is dependent on PPC advertising to drive traffic, it would definitely be worth investing some resources into SEO.

For time commitment, you will probably need a dozen or so hours to familiarize yourself with the interfaces of the various programs. For ongoing bid management, a few hours a month is generally enough time unless you're in a very competitive market. However, you could also look into bid management programs such as GoToast to keep your bids within the range you'd prefer.

Hope this helps.

[zenhead]

Thanks for the tips. I will look into the Goodman report.

[Hippo]

Andrew Goodman's report is definitely what got me hooked. It is a great report that applies not just to Google AdWords. Many of the comments in it apply to Overture as well, even though there are some important differences. The principles are similar.

And ROI tracking is critical to success. Check out Conversion Ruler.