Here are seven tips we share with clients to optimize their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns:

1. Track on a macro-action basis. Track every keyword/key phrase to conversion on a macro-action basis. A poor result for a particular keyword or key phrase doesn’t mean you should drop it. It means your Web site should better accommodate it.

2. Track on a micro-action basis. Track every keyword/key phrase to conversion on a micro-action basis. This clarifies how your visitors interact with your Web site’s persuasive dialogue. Micro-actions are key decisions that must be made before a visitor can decide to buy — the action that’s your ultimate goal. It lets you optimize your Web site’s dialogue to terms you use with persuasive architecture.

3. Select keywords based on buying process. Choose your keywords/key phrases based on an understanding of the buying process for your product or service.

There are four types of site visitors. The first arrive by accident. Make sure your unique value proposition is clear to ease him out and offer the next three types a reason to stick around. Make it easy for someone who knows exactly what she wants to find it. Ensure you can accommodate the typical shopper who only knows approximately what he wants. Offer him categorization tools to narrow down the selection. Don’t forget the last type, who is more of a “window shopper.” She may be enticed to buy depending on how you present to her.

4. Use visitor latency. Some terms won’t immediately convert well in a campaign, so track macro-actions and micro-action factoring in latency. In a recent study with a shared client, Jim Novo documented how visitors came in cycles of 14 days from PPC engine to actual purchase. PPC ad campaigns are just that — campaigns — not one-off tactics.

5. Define metrics clearly. Calculate return on investment (ROI) correctly. Divide the amount you spend per keyword/key phrase by your gross margin (gross profit minus cost of goods sold) on products or services bought from that keyword/key phrase. If you want to generate leads, establish a base amount every lead is worth. Divide the amount you spend per keyword/key phrase by your value per lead.

6. Go broad. Focus on those keywords/key phrases with the greatest ROI before those with the most traffic or gross sales. You don’t need to be ranked number one. Many of our clients have found the top position has lower ROI than other strategic positions. My ClickZ colleague Kevin Lee says, “Broad campaigns are worth the effort. Broader terms are cheaper and often equally, or even better, targeted. Added up, you could run one powerful campaign.”

7. Engage visitors in persuasive dialogue. Use persuasive architecture to anticipate visitors’ frame of mind, plan the action you want them to take, and tell them what they need to know before they can take that action. Match ad copy closely with keywords so the visitor perceives the relevance. Then, make sure the persuasive dialogue on your site is the dialogue your visitor wants to engage in.

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Source: www.clickz.com

By: Jason Lee Miller

Crashing right after launch is, apparently, a startup rite of passage. If, however, you’ve touted your new search engine as a Google killer, you might want to make sure crashes can’t happen. Google never goes down, and quite simply, can’t be killed with overloaded servers.

After Powerset’s sudden sale to Microsoft, the blogosphere needed a new contender. A former Google search architect and her Stanford professor husband, along with other former Googlers operating under the protective wing of the anti-noncompete laws of California (a law, ironically, Google likes to leverage when it can), thought for sure they could provide that new challenger.

And then all went blank at Cuil (cool), which was touted to have thrice the index of Google, scanning 121 billion web pages. Servers today couldn’t keep up with demand, illustrating what Powerset foresaw as their biggest hurdle: scalability. Microsoft provided that, along with enough cash to see it through. Even if you could get a query to return something today, though, reviews of the results have been mixed.

The results are supposed to be an alternative to Google’s ranking system, which is often criticized for being more of a popularity contest (among a myriad other criticisms) in the search results. Hence all the Wikipedia and YouTube returns.

Cuil is said to operate differently from Google’s distributed server, load-balancing concept—which incidently handles about a trillion URLs several times daily and manages to stay online—and has its servers divided according to category. If one searches for a sports-related query, for example, there are designated sports servers to handle that. One issue, as we’re seeing today: If a spike in sports queries knocks the sports servers offline, other non-specialized servers specializing in, say, cooking, will handle the results instead.

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1. WordPress

http://www.wordpress.com

Wordpress is free blogging tool. You can make SEO friendly blogs with the help of this tool. This is a beneficial SEO tool to upgrade Keyword Ranking. Blogger and Bloglines are other blogging alternatives you can use.

2. SeoQuake

http://www.seoquake.com

This is for Mozilla Firefox and for Internet Explorer. It gives you inestimable worthy SEO information on any site you’re looking, like Google PageRank, Number of Links, Traffic Rank, Whois, Keyword Density, NoFollow links etc.

3. SEO Book Keyword Research Tool

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

This tells how many searches are made each day for your targeted keywords. Most experts suggest you go for the mid to low range keywords if you’re just starting out and targeting long tail keywords (three or four words) yields the best returns.

4. Google Alerts

http://www.google.com/alerts

This is a good SEO tool to track and build links. You need just to create Google Alerts for important keywords of your site. Google will let you know the current updates for those keywords.

5. Detecting Online Commercial Intention

http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx

This tool can detect customer intent to acquire information or to purchase products based on their search queries or recently visited URLs. This MSN tool tells the percentage of someone clicking on chosen keywords is likely to buy. This tool can detect customer intent to acquire information or to purchase products based on their search queries or recently visited URLs.
For SEM, it is useful to find these keywords as they have low bid density (low price), but high commercial value. Similarly, for an advertizing engine, this can help increase ad relevancy by displaying fewer ads if a keyword has low online commercial intent.

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