Archive for the ‘adCenter’ Category
From what I’ve read in the past, one of the more controversial aspects of PPC methodologies has to do with search network keyword match types. Since the merger of Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter, the match types are exactly the same as those offered on Google AdWords: Broad, Phrase, and Exact. YSM was limited to just two and I often had difficulty remembering how the functioned exactly. Being so accustomed to how AdWords did things, it was a little confusing to use another PPC search engine that had a different syntax. Fortunately, things are now a bit more consistent after the “BingYoo” merger.
However, if you’ve read the previous posts in this series, you should know that assuming the AdWords and adCenter operate pretty much a like is to your detriment.
Though things on the outside may appear almost identical, things under the hood are constructed very differently. Keyword match types on adCenter do function very much the same as those on Google AdWords, at least with respect to the phrase and exact match types. If you’re not familiar with PPC keyword match types there a very good tutorials on this subject both on the AdWords and adCenter help pages.
After looking over the last to posts in this series, I realized that my naming convention was a bit dumb – at least from an SEO standpoint. So I decided to tweak it slightly for a bit more variation. I’m still not too happy with it, but the heck with it for now. Let’s get on to the next part, which while rather basic, is still pretty important and should not be glossed over.
I recall being on a Webinar a few years ago where the guest was an AdWords employee. All I really remember from that Webinar now is how the AdWords gal kept repeating over and over how important it was to have a “well-structured account”. From what I could tell this encompassed everything from the account level on down through campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads. We’ve had the thing about relevancy also pounded into our skulls by Google that many advertisers adopted the one keyword per ad group method. This always struck my as sort of backwards. It seemed more logical to start out with a tight group of keywords and then prune it down until you approached a single keyword ad group. But this is all rather moot now as most advertisers I know have been kicked out of the AdWords program for all eternity.
To continue on with the first part of this series of posts begun with the basics of choosing keywords to use with an adCenter Search N/W campaign, this post will look at how to further expand keyword lists. One of the problems I consistently run into on adCenter Search is finding targeted keywords for my campaigns that will generate more than only a handful of daily clicks. It actually happens quite often, especially when I’m attempting to build campaigns for ePN items.
As an example, many times I’ll research a product niche and find that it’s doing briskly on eBay.com. It meets the criteria of having a lot of listings and the median final price is above $20. Some people like much higher priced items, but I don’t want to ignore items between $20 and $100 as they have done well commission-wise on ePN. A prime example of such an item is “American Flyer Trains”. Taking a look at the completed listings (need to be logged into your eBay account to view), it shows a healthy number of successfully completed auctions/BIN events.
There was a time not that long ago, but seems like ages now, that on a typical day I could get 14,000 clicks from the Google AdWords Content Network. Compared to a lot of other AdWords advertisers that was a paltry amount. The thing is, it really wasn’t that hard once you found the high traffic keywords that could unleash a traffic gusher on the Content Network. Advertisers would then turn these very cheap clicks into gold.
There really wasn’t any limit to what you could drive these clicks to: CPA offers, ClickBank eBooks, eBay and Amazon product links, CJ, and just about anything else you wanted. My poison was parked pages with a bunch of ads plastered on them. Yes, times were good, but it all eventually came to an end like most easy money opportunities do. The lifetime AdWords bans were handed down and a lot of us went onto to exploring other PPC traffic sources on a deeper level.
