Ben & Spencer pose with their MAX Award

Amplify Interactive was awarded the “best single medium advertising campaign” at the 2010 AMA MAX Awards. Amplify Interactive’s work on a campaign for our client SawStop was recognized as the best among 8 entries in the category from other Portland area agencies & companies including a campaign from our office-mates Grady Britton as well as our partner eROI, and Intel (with whom we tied for 1st place) among others.

Great job on the AWARD WINNING work guys!

Links to related info:

• Press Release: Amplify Interactive wins a 2010 AMA MAX Award
• Our entry/case study: PPC Campaign Domination – Launching SawStop’s New Professional Cabinet Saw with PPC Advertising
• AMA MAX Awards
• Pictures from the 2010 AMA MAX Awards Ceremony
• Our series of posts on how to  “PPC Campaign Domination“

We’re always looking for clients who want to do award winning campaigns. Follow the link to find out more about our PPC Management Services.

This is part of my series of posts that I’m putting together about how we approach PPC campaign management for our clients.

My planned PPC Campaign Domination topics:

• Landing page optimization
• Google Adwords, quality score & you
• Why cost per conversion isn’t ALWAYS the best metric
• Aligning your efforts with business goals

Today’s topic is:

PPC Campaign Organization

Everyone at Amplify Interactive knows that I tend to obsess about organization. I have a folder for everything, I maintain a well pruned task list, I harp on them about keeping our project management systems up to date, we have a process in place for nearly everything, etc. So it should come as no surprise that  all of our PPC campaigns must be well organized and thought out so that our efforts at optimization are easy.

“Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up.”

-A.A. Milne

Success Starts at the Very Bottom -  Organizing Your Terms

One of the biggest PPC campaign pitfalls we see when we take over campaigns from someone else is that the previous owner was lazy and put too many terms into too few ad groups. Taking the time to organize your terms into granular, extremely focused ad groups makes things easier in the long run. Consider the following example:

Let’s say your company is called “SawCompany” and you make Circular Saws. After doing your keyword research, you realize there are three major categories of terms.

1. Branded: terms that contain your brand name “sawcompany”
2. Circular Saw: searches for circular saws ranging from general to extremely specific
3. Safety/Injury Prevention: searches for safety features

In AdWords – we’ll turn these distinct categories into “campaigns”. Within these campaigns – we’ll organize the terms into specific ad groups where the terms within each ad group are specifically related to one another, and generally related to the general category. After some work – we come up with the following structure:

Example of an organized PPC campaign

PPC Campaign Organization Will Set You Free

Organizing a campaign like this will give us the power to do two very specific things:

1. Understand performance and manage our spend by term, group and category. If a particular Ad Group and/or Campaign is performing particularly well – we’ll be able to tell right away and explore options like allocating more budget to the top performing group/campaign so that our ads show as often as possible. We’ll also be able to tell if there’s a specific group or campaign that doesn’t perform very well so we can prune it from our spend and maintain a good quality score.
2. Test ad copy at the ad group level and run the best possible ad copy for each individual group which will, you guessed it, help us to maintain a good quality score. If we didn’t have our search terms broken up into really specific ad groups, we might end up running the same ad copy for a term like “woodworking safety” that we do for “best contractor saw”. These terms are clearly entirely different and we should be serving different ads and landing pages for each.

There are other benefits to be sure, but I’m not going to give you all our secrets. Please feel free to share any PPC campaign management & organization tips with our readers by commenting below!

The surprise answer – run display ads.

Just read an interesting article over at eMarketer “Display Campaigns Boost Search Effectiveness” about a study that  shows that display ad campaigns increase visits from search engine users by nearly 14% from both organic (SEO) and PPC search combined. Another benefit? Cost per click for PPC decreased as well – demonstrating greater efficiency of the PPC campaign as a result of display. Read the rest of this entry »

Hot on the heels of the announcement that Microsoft’s Bing & Yahoo will be teaming up to take on Google, StatCounter reports that Bing gained another 1% of the search market last month and is slowly but surely growing their share. In a preview of what’s to come with a joint Bing/Yahoo effort, their combined market share comes in at a little over 20%. Granted – it isn’t Google’s near 80%, but the opportunity to reach 20% of the search market with a Bing/Yahoo combined effort is worth paying attention to.

We’ve already had several clients start inquiring about testing a PPC campaign with Bing and I’m sure we’ll see more as we move into Q4 and start looking at 2010 budgets. Let us know if you want to look into a PPC campaign with Bing or any of the rest. We’d also like to hear about any recent experiences you may have had with Bing.

Finally – maybe Google will get a run for it’s money. I love Google as much as the next guy, but it’s been tough to watch the rest of the “competition” get left so far behind in the dust.

As you can read in this article on Search Engine Watch “It’s Official: Microsoft and Yahoo! Finally Strike a Search Deal” – the deal basically says that:

1. Bing will power Yahoo’s organic search results

I think this is a great move. Bing has made some pretty terrific strides in creating a better search engine. Spending another 100 mil on advertising it is making a dent as well. Bing isn’t perfect, but Yahoo organic results haven’t been all that great either.

2. Yahoo will handle the paid search

Again – this is a great move. If you manage paid search campaigns – you know there’s two specific problems with Microsoft/Bing.

1. AdCenter sucks to use. It just does. That’s not to say that Yahoo’s platform is great, but it is better than AdCenter and now they can focus on making it more usable.

2. Low search volume: WIth the exception of some verticals, the search volume is rarely there for clients to justify the time, energy & budget required to build & manage an additional campaign with Bing

So ideally, as a part of this deal we’ll just be able to opt-in or out of displaying ads on Bing with a simple check box. Just like you check a box to add the Google search partner network today.

This move will still be tricky and they’re both a long way from pulling it off. But hopefully by allowing each to focus on what they do best – maybe they’ll be able to actually compete and we’ll also have to start thinking about results from more than one search engine!