I thought I’d share with you guys this week a recent shopping story (oooh, exciting!) that should allow me to highlight a few very basic things people, lots of people it turns out, seem to overlook when putting together a PPC campaign. So come with me, won’t you, on my adventure to buy a bicycle tire – wheeee!

Chapter One: Landing Page of Doom

Tires are kind of a big deal on a mountain bike, and though the Kansas City area is short on mountains, there are still gnarly trails aplenty that are fully capable of, and happy to, throw you headlong into the dirt, jagged limestone outcroppings, trees, poison ivy, stuff like that there – point is, it’s nice having a tire set you’re familiar with, and all I wanted was a replacement for my rear hoop. These are never in stock at my favorite local shop, and to order one in you will pay a premium, so I took to the interwebz to find a new Schwalbe Rocket Ron… and so it began.

Since I deal with PPC campaigns every day I’m inclined to look through the paid search before natural, I suppose more out of a professional curiosity than anything else, and here is where the number one result, though not giving the tire’s model name, matched the make. I took it as a good sign as Schwalbe, a German manufacturer, isn’t as popular here in the States as they are in Europe, so I clicked through. I was dropped on a landing page that was jam-packed with Schwalbe tires, 16 pages worth in fact, with 28 models per page. So, yeah, I wasn’t taken to the tire I wanted, but hey, I was close now – right? This is where it crosses into site design territory, as there was no search bar to guide me directly to what I wanted, and even when I adjusted one of the few variables: the tire size, mine still hadn’t shown by page two. A non-SEO person would maybe be less of a baby about it, but I couldn’t be bothered and decided to look elsewhere.

The lesson here is to aim your PPC ads at a landing page that fits your customer’s search, or at the very least drops them somewhere close! People don’t want to solving the navigation puzzle of your site, and especially when you offer something that is not unique to you, try to keep that sales funnel as short as possible for them.

Chapter Two: The Land of Not Crazy Low Prices

Here’s a quickie: Don’t say you have crazy low prices unless you actually have crazy low prices – it will anger the person who discovers it… you know, the person who was possibly going to give you their money.

Chapter Three: Bounce

Two clicks in and I’m treated to a picture of my tire with a red-lettered, “This item is currently out of stock.”

Back ‘er up – *click* *click*

In this specific case it’s kind of understandable, you’d have to be on the ball to pause your ad after you run out of a freakin’ tire, one item out of the hundreds you stock, but this is still a hit to your ROI. Sure, you could argue that at least you drew a customer into your site, but how realistic is the scenario that they’ll adventure around looking for something else in this case? I was not a customer looking for “mountain bike tires” that’s much different than someone looking for a specific brand and model, and it’s absolutely important to keep this in mind when building your campaigns. If you’re going to go as far as building an ad group around specific items then it only makes sense to stay on top of inventory and hit the pause button if there’s going to be a delay in restocking.

Chapter Four: The Grail

The fourth ad was the first ad that actually had the model name in the ad, and hey, a sale! I was a bit skeptical when the body announced free shipping on orders over $240.00, because, well, that would be a bulk order of tires, and I worried that this was likely a poorly put together dynamic text ad that was about to add some disappointment to my shopping adventure.

Dynamic text can be a great eye-catcher as it matches exactly what the customer is looking for, but boy, if you don’t put the time in when building it, you can really do more harm than good. Before my finger had time to twitch I’d already considered how unrelated the landing page would be, this “sale” having ran through the stock already, if it even existed at all, and why I didn’t just quit screwing around and go buy from the site I usually do. Then, just like that, there it was…

I was taken directly to the item I wanted! There really was a sale! It really was in stock! Yes, I really was this excited to find the thing I’d set out to purchase. And consider this excitement stemmed from all that crap I’d just sifted through; this site was my hero, not because they did anything amazing, but because they did what they were supposed to do! These other businesses spent money to frustrate and run off a potential customer. Comparatively speaking, they’d have come out ahead by doing no PPC at all!

If you’re managing your business’ PPC campaign ask yourself if you’re making it easy for your customers to give you their money. Are you frustrating them? Are you making them write angry blogs? What’s the ROI on that sort of business model anyway?

With Thanksgiving gone and the holiday buying season having bashed us square in the face this past week, I started thinking about how best a DIY shop owner can prepare and position themselves for the carnage this time of year brings. Thing is, I quickly realized that in regards to SEO, it’s essentially already too late to ponder such a question. If you want your site to organically rank for this season’s hot items you really need at least a two-month lead. Not only do the search engines need time to index your content, but you also must remember that if you’re targeting the Christmas rush, those people have kicked off their shopping spree already. Sooo, PPC campaign, anyone?

Regardless if you’ve been caught flat-footed and are scrambling to cobble together some PPC ads, or are, I dunno’, on the ball and prepping for Valentine’s Day, let me show you a handy tool that can help you position yourself for glorious windfalls no matter the occasion. Let’s check out Google Trends.

And let me quickly tell you that the graph and numbers are only relative to the, “average search traffic in the chosen time period,” which creates a baseline where the, “subsequent terms are then scaled relative to the first term.” Yeah, I stole that from their FAQ, but it usually seems to be the first thing that comes up when I show this to people, so I wanted to keep you from getting too excited.

Anywho, go ahead and type in, “long stem roses,” to see a terrific example of a powerfully obvious trend. You probably could’ve guessed the result beforehand, but let’s say you’re running a small toy shop and are wanting to gauge consumer interest in a couple items. I can tell you that the new Space Police Lego sets have been forced into a lot of conversations by my eight-year-old son lately, along with some kick he’s on with working on cars, so there’s an erector set in the mix as well. Using these as search examples, our imaginary shop owner can compare and contrast the old standby erector set with this new Lego line to see which is garnering the most attention from consumers.

Here we see an alien learning to respect crosswalks.

If you perform this search today you’ll see the Space Police are noticeably cooler at the moment, though both are on an upswing, clearly riding the wave of the holiday season, as shown by the previous years’ data. From this information our imaginary owner could pick a direction for a PPC campaign, use it as an additional way to forecast demand in regards to ordering product, or plan future SEO campaigns. This could allow our owner an opportunity to build some nice organic results for the timeless erector sets, while leaving a PPC budget for whatever the next super-awesome, super-cool, “all my friends have one, so I need one,” toy-thing of the season. So, go play with Google Trends and see how it can help you and your business.

PPC specialists going espial with keyword spy programs really open the gap between the do-it-yourselfer camp and themselves when it comes to the PPC marketing game. The ability to see your competitions’ keyword selection and what they’re bidding is akin to playing cards with those sweet X-Ray glasses from the 50’s… you know, if they actually worked I mean. Hmmm, of course if they worked like they were supposed to I guess you’d see right through the cards themselves anyway, wouldn’t you? Hey, let’s pretend that analogy makes sense as it is and move along, shall we?

Anyway, my point is, with ever-increasing competition along with the proliferation of these types of specialty tools it’s no wonder why the DIY ranks are slowly folding and coming to companies such as our own for PPC management. For those pockets of resistance out there still determined to hold their own line let me introduce you to a couple spy networks that might help ease your burden:

Keyword Spy
Spy Fu