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Pay Per Click Universe – February 6, 2012 – Vol. 9, No. 3 Editor’s Note Reviews & Articles A’Plenty! If you haven’t visited our website lately, don’t wait a minute more! Over the last couple of months, we’ve added a bunch of new reviews of pay-per-click tools, updated the existing reviews, and written scores of new articles on everything you need to know about pay-per-click marketing.If we haven’t yet reviewed your favorite tool, send me an email and I’ll look into adding it to our list of tools to review. Likewise, if there’s a topic related to pay-per-click that you’d like to learn more about, email me and I’ll see if we can provide that to you. Any comments or suggestions for the Pay Per Click Universe Journal can be sent to me via email at  frances@searchmarketingstandard.com Findology PPC Network, CPV Network, Run-Of-Network Happy 2012 from Findology.com Deposit $100 and receive a $25 credit from now until the end of February Register at https://ala.findology.com/register Just enter the Promo Code PPCU — you will be credited $25 on your $100 deposit Recent Pay-Per-Click News and Announcements Follow-Up: How Much Do “Top” Advertisers Matter To Google? – February 2, 2012 Posted By The RKGBlog – “In a recent post, George Michie broke down the impact of an individual advertiser to Google’s bottom line. He concluded that in tightly packed, competitive auctions, an individual advertiser leaving the auction doesn’t impact Google’s revenue much at all.” Read the rest of the news item here. Finding Lost Impressions with the Share of Voice Report in Microsoft Advertising adCenter – February 2, 2012 Posted By adCenter Blog – “Now imagine that you’ve spent a goodly amount of advertising budget on your online search campaign. You want a good ROI, starting with your money’s worth of impressions, a decent click-through rate, and finally, some sales.” Read the rest of the news item here. Tips for Shaking Off PPC Frustration – January 31, 2012 Posted By PPC Hero – “PPC is bound to get you frustrated at one point or another. So here are some tips that can help you shake off the frustration and move forward with what you really want, which is doing really good, profound, meaningful, and smile-inducing work.” Read the rest of the news item here. 8 Quick Ways To Increase Your AdWords CTR – January 30, 2012 Posted By Search Engine Land – Paid Search – “There are times you just want to increase your click-through rates. You might need to raise it to help Quality Scores, increase traffic, or gain visibility for a new product.” Read the rest of the news item here. AdWords, Declining Click Prices (CPC’s), and Interface Optics: Two Theories – January 24, 2012 Posted By Traffick – “Google’s recent financial results weren’t nearly as bad as the markets seemed to think. By any rational standard, once again they turned in a strong Q4 and strong YOY growth.” Read the rest of the news item here. FREE Social Media and SEO Guide Book Download the free social SEO guide book that will help you understand the best ways to integrate your social media marketing and SEO efforts! Written by SEO experts Nick Stamoulis and the SEO firm Brick Marketing. Download this guide now! Special Deals for PPC Users Through PayPerClick Universe WordStream – Free 7-Day TrialPPCU readers will receive a free 7-day trial of WordStream’s PPC Advisor — innovative Quality Score and Account Management tools. Risk Free. No Credit Card required and no automatic sign-ups. To see all our current special deals, visit our Special Deals page. Search Blog by Search Marketing Standard Magazine Lonely Advertiser Seeks Google AdWords Consultant With GSOH“When you’re looking for Mr. or Mrs. Right, there are probably a number of things that you look for and that you couldn’t do without.Some people on their hunt for the perfect partner go to extreme lengths and even draw up a checklist that they can use to assess and compare their prospective partners with their ideal image. Singles columns are full to the brim with coded language to help attract that perfect someone, with GSOH (Good Sense of Humor) being top of the list. What about if you are on the hunt for the perfect Google AdWords Consultant? Do you have a checklist? Do you know what qualities you should be looking for? Do you know where to look for the Google AdWords Mr. or Mrs. Right? When people find it difficult to find a partner in their personal lives, it is sometimes just down to the fact that they aren’t looking in the right places. For instance, they’re looking for someone who likes to read lots and snuggle down with DVDs every night, but they’re looking for them in the biggest nightclubs in the city on the weekends. Doesn’t this just sound like a little bit of a wasted effort? The same applies to a Google AdWords Consultant. You need to know where to look.” Continue reading …  To view the Search Marketing Standard blog, visit SearchMarketingStandard.com. Featured Review – PPC Tools AdSpy Pro “If you are searching for another magical keyword research tool you are looking at the wrong set of PPC tools. AdSpy Pro is definitely not a keyword tool. It is a tool used to find profitable ads that are running in your niche right now. It requires quality input in order to deliver results and does not work in a hot second. AdSpy will not be able to give you quality results with a jumbled list of thousands of random keywords. However, if you take keywords that you already know are producing results then you will be able to gather great results from the software. The publishers of the software suggest that if a term is not receiving at least 30 unique hits per day then it is not worth pursuing in this campaign.” Read the entire review here. Attract Customers With News Releases: Free Writing Guide Millions of customers are on the Web every day searching for products and services. With a single, search-friendly online news release, you can get seen more, attract more clicks and earn more revenue. Get started by downloading our free Guide to Writing News Releases. Download Now Upcoming Events PubCon Paradise 2012 – Honolulu, Hawaii  -  February 13-15, 2011 Boston SEO Training Workshop – Boston, MA  -  February 22, 2012 Searchfest 2012 (SEMPDX) – Portland, OR  -  February 24, 2012 eTail Palm Desert – Palm Desert, CA  -  February 27 – March 1, 2012 Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West – San Jose, CA  –  February 28 – March 1, 2012 A complete calendar of upcoming events is located on the Search Marketing Standard site, along with details of available discounts for our readers. PayPerClickUniverse.com offers several newsletter options to suit your needs. Subscribe to all of our newsletters to get the most from your experience at PayPerClickUniverse.com. One-Click Unsubscribe Copyright © 2012 iNET Interactive. All rights reserved. Click here to view our privacy policy. 9100 West Chester Towne Center Rd. Suite 200 West Chester, OH 45069 United States

During the most recent reporting quarter of 2011 Google reported an average cost-per-click (CPC) of $1.24 while the Bing PPC search engine reported an average cost of $0.78 CPC for a nearly 37% difference in cost. While price is a significant difference with the combination the Yahoo!/Bing search volume increased to more than 56% in the last quarter of 2010 making Microsoft Search Advertising account for more ad spends as a percentage than any other search model available.

Bing Grows with Their Ability

Bing PPC advertising offers several advantages over the Google program. Because it is still relatively new, their prices remain low even though they are announcing a significant increase in the 2012. Conversions on Google were listed as a Click Thru Rate of 0.7% with a 6.8% conversion ratio while the Click thru Rate for Bing was reported at .09% with a conversion ratio over 9%. Bing also offers advertisers the ability to target age and gender, something that Google and most other search engines do not offer. The final advantage that Bing offers is the family connection to Yahoo! Search which accounts for more than 20% of all daily searches.

Signing Off or Signing On

Adding yourself as a advertiser on the Bing/Yahoo network is simple and free. It only requires a couple of lines of information and you are ready to begin searching for the proper combination to increase your clicks and conversions. As with any other pay-per-click service your account is charged after you set you your first advertising program and begin to receive clicks. Microsoft offers a certification training program that will help you drive additional business to your website by helping you to improve your campaigns. True marketers will complete the free training and earn the Microsoft Search bade of adExcellence.

The general perception is that Bing is a smaller search engine that produces good results when it comes to conversions. However, as with any marketing decisions the rubber meets the road when you can offer a lower cost per sale thus increasing your return on investment. While advertising costs are projected to increase during the next year by as much as 13%, the Bing – Yahoo combination looks to be a viable alternative for advertisers searching to lower their costs and still continue to see a rise in revenue. The Bing PPC model is not much different than any other model but at this point it seems to be providing a higher ROI at a lower cost-per-click.

The geographic keywords tool is simple to use and has a very short learning curve to take advantage of the powerful features listed here. With just a few clicks of your mouse and the entry of a targeted area you can see data for specific regions down to zip codes and up to the entire size of the US. Easy to read drop down boxes make choosing the correct region easier as there could be confusion within the US as to which county or metro area you are searching due to name similarities. State names, metro regions and regions above 1 million people in size are easy to pick and select. It will allow you to choose the matches based on your choices. After running the point you can then take your chosen cities or regions and put them into the keyword mixer along with your selected keywords and give you a geographic keywords list.

This is a great way to put your ads together for a specific region of the country. As set of a PPC tools, Geographic Keywords is a time saver if you are pinpointing specific regions and are not familiar with the area that you are targeting. In this instance a larger advertising firm or a dedicated AdWords marketer who is moving into a specific region for a particular niche may benefit from the use of this tool. If you are a local marketer and already have a niche in the area then this tool is not as important to you until you move into a region with which you are unfamiliar. The only information that this tool will generate for you is the list of cities and towns in the region that you are targeting. It is provided in a spreadsheet that can be imported into the keyword mixer and then used to generate geographic keywords.

For the average to small marketer this tool while handy is just an added bonus that allows them to quickly add city, state or region names to their keywords. However, for the large advertising agency that is doing work all over the country or for those marketers outside the US it can be easy way to do a task that could be easily messed up. Geographic Keywords is a part of the suite of tools that is included with a membership to Certified Knowledge’s site. This site offers 4 types of membership, which range in price from free to $1999 a month for premium consulting. The free membership is worth a shot just for the PPC Tips that are sent out weekly as well as for access to the forum where you can ask questions from the leading experts on PPC in the world. As for the other memberships, it would require an almost dedicated AdWords marketer to be able to invest either the $79 or $199 membership fees per month or quarter.

Mass Ad Copy Creator is a PPC tool designed to make the life of an AdWords marketer simpler. While it does this in the long run, unless you are running a massive number of ads and changing them frequently this may be too much firepower. There is a significant learning curve associated with the interface but once learned subsequent submissions become much simpler. The video tutorials supplied with test program and with the full program provide a great overview and walk you through the process of developing and deploying your first ad group using the Mass Ad Copy Creator. There is also a vibrant forum that allows you to ask questions and receive answers from some of the most knowledgeable experts in the field. (They work for Google, by the way, or at least that is the impression you are left with from the messages.)

Along with Mass Ad Copy Creator there are a number of other tools to help you along the way. These tools include a PPC tools that help you to improve the quality score of your ads, see the profit making ads in your groups, target the keywords you have chosen and more. You also get a report analyzer, Quality Score analyzer, broken link finder, confidence ratings calculator, geographic keyword locators, keyword mixer and a server header checker. These tools all come into play if you do this type of work for a living.

Mass Ad Copy Creator is a PPC Tool of tools. It goes beyond what the normal AdWords marketer does and helps to run large ad campaigns. There are 4 levels of membership but only three of them allow you to use the tools. The first is a free lifetime membership which lets you ask questions in the forums, watch a few videos and receive some weekly tips. This level of membership is a pretty good bargain just for access to the forums. Other memberships start at $79 per month and go up to a high of $1999 per month which is considered a premium coaching membership.

While useful it is a little pricey for the small entrepreneur, but for a mid-level agency or consultant who does a lot of AdWords creation this is a great tool that would more than pay for itself in nothing but time saved creating ads. That makes all the other options freebies to be exploited for your needs.

The benefits with BoostCTR include the ability to lower your Google AdWords cost as well as increased clicks and increased revenue. Not a bad deal considering that the cost of the service is begins at around $75 per ad group and reduces to a low of $50 based on buying 10 ad groups at a time. The service provided by BoostCTR puts smaller firms on the same footing as companies that are able to afford top-notch copywriters for their PPC campaigns. As far as PPC tools go, this is more a copywriting service than anything else.

BoostCTR offers guaranteed improvement for your ad and that means more revenue for the same amount of dollars spent, continued sales from the improved ads and a significant time savings as you no longer have to spend time split testing ads as BoostCTR does this for you. The writers at BoostCTR continue to supply you with ads until a clear improvement is found and all of this work is done for you. BoostCTR then uses a multi-step writing process and ads are produced for you to accept, reject or modify. Your ads are then spit tested for you and winners are based on statistically relevant results. You continue to receive ads until they defeat your control. This means you do not have anything to risk.

It is simple to sign up as a customer with just a few lines to fill out. You can then purchase credits and allow access to the company through your AdWords account or Facebook API. You can then which ad groups you want BoostCTR to work with and they will select your very best ads as the baseline for comparison and set writers to work by putting them in a competition to improve your work. Only the winner gets paid so writers strive hard to improve your conversions.

BoostCTR is an easy to use service that stands behind their work. They are producing quality work at a reasonable price and the when you do pay for the work you are guaranteed to get results. Working in this manner can only mean improved traffic, more conversions and increased revenue. In the economic climate today anytime you can get a guaranteed return on your advertising you need to take advantage and BoostCTR is one of the only companies on the market that is doing that right now.

If you are searching for another magical keyword research tool you are looking at the wrong set of PPC tools. AdSpy Pro is definitely not a keyword tool. It is a tool used to find profitable ads that are running in your niche right now. It requires quality input in order to deliver results and does not work in a hot second. AdSpy will not be able to give you quality results with a jumbled list of thousands of random keywords. However, if you take keywords that you already know are producing results then you will be able to gather great results from the software. The publishers of the software suggest that if a term is not receiving at least 30 unique hits per day then it is not worth pursuing in this campaign.

AdSpy Pro takes all the guess work out of finding profitable keywords. By allowing it to run over several days or so, it identifies profitable ads and the keywords that are being used to draw traffic to them. Users are then able to create a campaign based on these keywords that you want to track. The software then collects the data and identifies affiliate ads as well as non-affiliate ads. All of the ads are tracked during the time the user defines and reports are created.

AdSpy Pro is a little more complicated than just pasting keyword and pushing buttons. It requires the installation of a script onto your web hosting account. The download offers videos and step by step instructions that you must follow in order to get the program set up on your system. If you are not particularly good at doing this type of work they do offer an installation service. Once installed it is relatively easy to use, however for the technically challenged it can take a while to get the installation correct.

Once in place the software is easy to use and provides you with information that is almost unattainable at this level of detail. It provides reports based on your keyword lists, active keywords, most profitable ads and the most profitable affiliate ads. This software is designed to run over 3 to 15 days in order to track ads and provide good information. Currently Google is the only search engine you can use with AdSpy Pro but you can upgrade to AdSpy Elite if you would like to include Bing and Yahoo Search.

This is a difficult piece of software to install and get ready to use. It is very technical and requires a fair amount of time to see any results. However, the price of the software cannot be beat, since it is offered for free and the level and detail of the reports is wonderful. Once installed and allowed to gather information for a fair amount of time (1 to 5 days), you should be able to see what is working in the marketplace and develop a more profitable Pay-Per-Click campaign. By copying what is already working you will find yourself saving money while increasing your conversions.

Measuring ROI, for all your advertising, becomes a very important step when you get serious about your business. ClickPath offers a unique solution for tracking conversions from online as well as offline advertising. Each ad that you place can be tied to a specific keyword or source and online activities within your site as well as phone calls generated from offline ads can be linked with laser like quality to its origination point. This helps you to evaluate your advertising and gives you a much better avenue for determining your ad spends. While reading tracking reports can become tedious ClickPath has found a way to make their set of PPC tools interesting and informative.

Keyword research plays a huge part in developing your advertising placement. However, tracking where the conversions come from has become more of an afterthought than a priority for many online marketers who also have an offline component. ClickPath is able to track your conversions from specific keywords regardless of which type of advertising it comes from. The solution operates by assigning a unique toll free telephone number to your keywords and call sources. The phone number follows visitors through their navigation of your site or tracks the ad source when the number is called. The source data is then captured and matched to ad source, keyword, call data and referring domains.

ClickPath offers two types of tracing with a number of different variations. The first is Pay per Click (PPC) Tracking that follows and reports on the activities of conversions that start online and finish with an offline telephone call. They also offer an Organic Search Call Tracking which allows you to see which search terms are leading offline calls so that they can be optimized. Organic search tracking also allows you to find additional terms that may draw repeated calls from your website.

ClickPath produces numerous reports for analysis of your data. Account Drilldown reports allow you to see every report available except for the Call Detail. This drill down gives you access that enable you to information that happened in specific hours, produce duration of call reports, location reports and conversions. The call detail report gives you a detailed look at each call that includes the caller information and an MP3 recording of the call as well as the keyword or ad source that produced the call.

Ad tracking of this sort seems to be better suited for large retail outlets and larger professional services organizations with a fairly large budget. Pricing is not discussed but a guided demo is offered by the company. A large law office providing services across multiple states would do well since they often have advertising in number of different places at the same time. However, for the smaller online retailer or service provider this level of detail and the price that would be associated makes it inaccessible. Nevertheless, if you have the budget and receive and use the same type of keywords and phrases in your offline and online advertising this could be an option that allows you to combine some reporting tasks and remove your phone staff from having to ask clients how they heard about you.

KeyCompete is a keyword research and analysis tool used to identify the words and phrases that your online competitors are using to build their business through pay per click campaigns. Their sales copy provides a large number of claims that while intriguing produce doubts in the minds of many web savvy marketers. An open search of several forums produced several keyword lists that were supposed to have been produced by the software which led to a one day trial subscription.

At this point, prudence dictates that this is not a free trial but has a cost of $19.95 for a one day trial subscription. As far as PPC tools are concerned this is a high price for a single day of use. But if KeyCompete can produce the results they claim it may be a keeper. Signing up for the service is simple, with the input of an email address and a password you are immediately taken to a payment page. Payments are made through PayPal and the underlying company is Tiger Technologies with a DBA name of BetClub.

The PPC tool is an online tool that does not require downloading onto your machine, but is does deposit several cookies that make it easier for future searches to be completed. The tool returns a list of keywords and phrases that can exceed 3000 at times. The list is in a format that coverts to Excel compatible spreadsheets when downloading. It only requires two clicks to download your file which can be a real time saver when doing massive numbers of searches.

To use the program all you have to do is enter a keyword, key phrase or the domain of one of your competitors. In a relatively short period of time the software comes back with huge numbers of keywords and phrases. Manual review of the lists may be impossible because of the sheer number of results that are returned.

The cost of the program is the biggest drawback to its use. There are similar programs that may offer the same results at a lower cost. However, the output is easy to read and can be imported directly into a spreadsheet or text file for immediate upload and use into pay per click campaign management software. The size of the list of keywords is another drawback that may keep smaller marketers away, since it will require additional software to process, mix and prepare the lists for use in an AdWords, Bing or Yahoo campaign.

KeyCompete offers several variations of the basic search, with a long tail feature that provides not just the keywords but allows you to grab every item that your competitors may be using. It combines the key phrases to help you develop your list and provides a watch list so that you can see what words are being removed by your competition as well. KeyCompete tracks words on the Google Network, and the newly combined Microsoft AdCenter, which includes Yahoo and Bing.

KeyCompete appears to be a strong PPC tool that offers the ability to capture a massive amount of words for your campaigns. If you can afford the price tag then this may be the tool that can help you excel in your next PPC campaign.