Chinwag’s PPC earthquake event on tuesday night was entertaining. Hosted by Mike Butcher, as per his usual style, discussions cut to the chase immediately. This was a welcome break from the normal sanitized chat on PPC that occurs at these types of events. Panellists included three agencies, Blue Barracuda, Latitude and Neutralize and Nigel Leggat from Microsoft Adcenter. (names updated)Firstly, i liked to say that most PPC events tend to be pretty dull for anyone who knows about the industry becuase typically what happens is the agencies tow the line and refuse to get drawn into opinionated discussions whilst the search engines play a game of diplomacy. Which all leads to a rather luke warm discussion on what is now a more mature industry. Nonetheless, there were lots of things to nod at or mumble under your breath about.Highlights were:Microsoft’s complete frankness regarding the launch of AdcenterThey scored themselves a schoolmark of “B/B : room for improvement” on the success of their launch of their new pay-per-click marketing product, Adcenter. I would have given them an “A” for openness in their evaluation on how much the launch met advertisers expectations. Basically to sum up:Launch went ok - in that they got a fair amount of avertisers on board.Service & support USP was a winner. Telephone support for all advertisers regardless of size of customer was working well and not met any crisis. In my opinion, lowering the barrier to entry is A Great Thing for such a big player like MSN to offer. Certainly in my experience, telephone support helped me to get on board quickly. As an agency this would spell good news too as it’s a great story to tell your smaller advertisers and make them feel loved. PPC was the most fun 5 years ago when you could use Adwords to propel a tiny cottage industry into the stratosphere - so for a second i got the tingle of a rennaisance of old fashioned values. None of this “what is your budget” snobbery that is rife among google and other agencies now.Quality traffic is present on the MSN network. This was backed up by Latitude who had discovered great conversion for some of their advertisers. They tend to work on a CPA busines model so they probably know what they’re talking about.Distribution & Traffic volume has still got a long way to go but is clearly outshined by Google. Ho hum.Demographic targeting - their most touted USP - does work but unfortuanately not a lot of advertisers are not really using it. This makes perfect sense to me and not something to worry about; until the volume and competition reaches a critical mass, there is no real need to target demographically, as current traffic volume are no where near most medium and large advertisers spending power. At this stage most of us are quite happy with cheaper traffic than Google!User Interface is tricky to use. Wow - amazed and glad they admitted that! Apologies to the guys at Adcenter, but in my opinion it truly is a dog. However if they acknowledge it then i’ll suffer in silence in the hope that it will get overhauled.The house tended to agree that Yahoo panama hardly had earthquake potential but was a step in the right directionNeutralize felt that the close resemblance of the new Yahoo Panama interface to Google AdWords was going to make account management easier and that they would probably attract a few more current advertisers on Google as it is now so easy to import the latter into the former. The quality score was more of the same, but was ultimately a fairer system and teh fact that you can separate Content and Search ads was a definite improvement. Blue Barracuda felt that clients were aware of the impending shift to Panama and that it would improve their image of Yahoo Search, especially if the new quality score helped them to improve clickthrough rates.Frankly there is not much to say about Yahoo Panama except that it is very very welcome. Personally i would have added that Panama should bring back a lot of small business and niche advertisers who have been burnt by overtures particularly unwieldy and inflexible bidding engine. Everyone acts like these advertisers are not worth bothering with, they’re just small fry, but clearly they have not been reading enough Chris Anderson“A big hit is required”No one felt that any of these developments from MSN Adcenter or Yahoo Panama was going to bite into Google’s market share. Although this was obvious - i was slightly disappointed at the overall lack of fighting talk from MSN or details of any strategy remotely resembling disruptive innovation. Mobile Search, Local Search and Pay-per-call were all word dropped which made me groan. Not just becuase all three make up the PPC grail trinity that everyone has been wishing on for years. Or the fact that it is universally acknowledged by the panel that mobile search is too low volume at this stage - but becuase clearly Google is already winning the mobile search battle with mobile sitemaps and auto-optimising websites for mobile browsers/screens. Furthermore MIVA are abandoning Pay-per-call this month not for lack of advertisers but for lack of response from consumers and local search is just not that interesting without a social element. Personally i think it’s the companies experimenting with microformats, like Upcoming and Technorati, that have anything interesting to offer this area. Obviously if anyone wants to debate this with me or just tell me i’m wrong - please do so!So seemingly no big hitters were really on the horizon, although we did get one interesting insight into MSN’s skunkworks. They plan to roll out their search engine onto Xbox Live - which clearly presents a huge demographic targeting opportunity for advertisers.Yet it’s hardly what i’d call disruptive innovation. What i really wanted to hear was that MSN would come to the rallying cry of publishers all over the country, replace their useless on site search facilities, and deliver a revenue strategy to supply PPC ads from highly targeted and desired demographics like the b2b sector. But maybe the market is more complicated than i think - Google has got most of the publishers tied up becuase they are willing to spend money on them. For the richest company in the world - microsoft have missed a great land grab and a chance to bite into the market share of search queries.Sod talking about the big 3 anymore - Yahoo and MSN are fighting a losing battle by refusing to innovate or respond to the crisis traditional publishers are facing. The only search orientated companies that seem to value the publisher in the UK, the niche content producers, in my opinion are MIVA and AdPrecision, the latter whom spoke up at the event. Those smaller players are the ones recognising the demand from advertisers for genuinely better demographic targeting through branded partnerships and see the desperate struggle that traditional publishers face to avoid being completely dominated by the disruptive power of Google.So that’s my roundup of the PPC earthquake - any food for thought? I don’t claim to be a journalist or anything, just an online ranter. An alternative view and interesting discussion is taking place here.

It’s not terrorism that the highstreet stores have to worry about, it’s people looking for them.

To blame the fall in profits from high street retail stores on July 7th seems pretty narrow minded if you ask me. When I hear people say it, I immediately hear a subtext, like they’re saying something they don’t really mean. What I hear is: The Internet. Blame the internet- blame unlimited shelf space, blame comparison shopping, blame local warehouses, blame cheaper overseas competitors and the commercial prowess of every man and his kitten with a website.

Out of interest, I recently conducted some ‘candle burning’ (my term) research into 20 major highstreet shops from famous landmarks of London. I didn’t find one shop which was using pay-per-click advertising on all major search portals to boost their revenues and protect their brand.

What I did find was Ebay ads. No matter how much bricks and mortar went into building those stores, according to the search engine ads, they could be bought and sold on Ebay. Search just about any keyword and you can find it on Ebay. Old rope really can be bought and sold on Ebay, even ‘warts and all’. And every other major high street brand can seemingly be bought secondhand.

We (“the search experts”) like to laugh and joke about the ubiquity of Ebay ads, but in light of their mega-bucks acquisition of Skype, presumably just for it’s userbase, you’d be right to thinks it is not so funny anymore. Ebay is clearly doing something right and chances are they’ve been doing something right for a very long time.

So what are they doing right? They’re bidding on ‘undiscovered’ high traffic searches for major retail shop and supermarket names. What I’m really telling you is that they’ve identified Huge Gaps In The Market. And I don’t just mean huge. I mean Mega. “Hundreds of thousands of searches a month”, huge. Ebay have identified Mega Gaps In The Market. This surely cannot be purely coincidence.

Am I right in thinking that every company director would like to identify similar gaps in the market? Even if it were online? And am I alone in thinking that no brand manager, marketing manager or even sales director, of world famous retails outlets would want to be associated with second hand goods, let alone second or third in the search listings, when people come looking for them?

Evidently not. If Ebay are able to bid on these terms, then we can say that these trademarks have not been fully protected by law, and they are fair game. By now every important company executive must know that you can pay 10 or 20 pence for every click from the search engines and you’re guaranteed a first place position in the search results. Don’t you?

Maybe everyone is thinking that they are saving themselves a tonne of money by optimising their site to naturally appear in search listings or working through affiliates. “Cos all that stuff is free or I just pay out on commissions. I win either way.”

Perhaps, but my take on this is that you’re search marketing agency just hasn’t sold you on the real benefits of paid search advertising. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it straight.

WAKE UP!

Pay-per-click is another word for low risk, fast turnaround, high reward marketing.

Natural search is an absurdly competitive environment that has lengthy development cycles and no guaranteed results. Investment in SEO is speculative at best and ROI does not show up until months into a deploying a website. If it doesn’t work, well that’s just it. It didn’t work. Back to the drawing board.

Add to that, the fact that natural search listings appear two listings lower- under the sponsored listings. That means everytime someone searches famous computer and electricals store, the first thing they see is Ebay.

Affiliate marketing may increase your ‘real estate’ on the page but ultimately it follows that the people searching for you by name are looking for your website specifically. Sending people to your site via affiliates is not search marketing… It’s an easter egg hunt (Incidentally, we are only 75 days away from Christmas)!

All the time that users are being sent from search engines to your brand by “I made this in dreamweaver” string and sealing wax channels, you are losing valuable marketing data about your customers online behaviour and interaction with your brand. God forbid they might shop elsewhere if you carry on like that.

Now compare and contrast that strategy with pay-per-click.

New paid search ads can be uploaded in 90 minutes to five days (depending on your provider) and directed to any website. And you still get that guaranteed top spot. Kiss goodbye to SEO development cycles. Say hello to next day ROI stats.

Paid search ads are positioned higher on the page than natural listings. They really are the first result a user is likely to see. And that traffic can be directed to ANY page you want. Kiss goodbye to random entry pages, say hello to offer testing.

Paid search ads are easy to adapt and co-ordinate in real time. Setting up Ads on search engines is so simple, they can be changed week by week or month by month. Kiss goodbye to offer updates propagating through your affiliate network. Say hello to time sensitive online marketing drives.

Let your affiliates focus on the hard stuff like getting you traffic from high traffic generic terms such as ‘christmas’. Let your SEOs focus on the hard stuff like improving the architecture and building links to your site. Whilst you Mr Marketing Manager, concentrate on what you do best, squeezing ROI from every channel. Create time sensitive offers, targeted incentives and reasons to stick to buying from you through what has been (until now) a difficult time. Get your product out there now. Put funds into pay-per-click and you’ll still be paying on delivery, even when Santa arrives.

SEO, PPC, or ROI?

A few interesting points in this forum post.

I would always recommend a PPC approach initially, whether you are starting a new business or just launching a website. A PPC camapign is one of the most valuable experiments you can engage your company in. Why? Because...

• All the costs are controllable. Despite PPC being more costly than SEO in the long run, most PPC modules (particularly Google), are really versatile and allow you to terminate excess costs at the click of a button. Most changes you make to a PPC campaign take effect immediately and there are a number of other upper limits that you can place on your campaign budget to stop it getting out of hand- you can set a maximum cost-per-click and set a maximum daily budget.
  
  Investing in a PPC campaign will help you to get to grips with tracking all aspects of your business on or off the web. Implementing a robust tracking strategy, working closely with your optimiser, and calculating ROI on every penny spent will significantly reduce the experimental element involved in any marketing campaign.
  
  
• PPC costs money; SEO costs time. Whilst conventional SEO promises to deliver a higher ROI than any PPC campaign I would argue that it is not entirely the case because the overall time and skills needed for optimisation, work out to be a more expensive cost-per-click. Furthermore optimisation is significantly slower to deliver results or a return. You are looking at least a 3 month lead time before you start seeing any results that are really worth writing home about- can your business survive that long? Most startups and small businesses are loathe to frittering money away and they need to generate a return before they can invest further time and energy into their marketing.
  
  
• PPC automatically handles the most important aspect of your campaign. The most crucial thing you need to generate business from the web (after a website!) is a visible market position. This concept can be summed up as: "first page rankings on the search engine results pages". The vast majority of business on the web takes place through the first page of search engine listings. Over 90% of search engine users do not look beyond the first page of listings and 80% of these users only click the top three results. So that is basically where the market is: in the top three results, on the first page of search engine listings. To position yourself there is easy: pay the search engines a few pence per-click to stick your site at the top of the first page in the 'sponsored results?' sections (generally displayed as the top three results).
  
  
• PPC generates more results faster. Remember that if you really want to turn your website into a lead generation machine you need to be looking for high performance figures on at least three sets of results:
  
  
  1. Rankings
     
  2. Traffic
     
  3. Conversion
  
  
  As I mentioned above PPC delivers set 1 results immediately upon setup and starts generating set 2 figures from going live. Delivering set 3 results from PPC is only a matter of time. SEO, by contrast, takes at least a month before it is delivering high rankings, which stalls the overall performance of your campaign by about two months. Only after your site has "come alive" with traffic can you start to divine the user experience and properly identify the problems to iron out that may be stopping your users from converting to customers (e.g. poor usability, lack of information, hidden information, faulty emails and links). Implementing a PPC campaign leaps your site to the top of the search engines and immediately starts delivering traffic within 24hrs. Within a month you will know whether your site is converting or not. Before you know it you'll have identified your dead email, made the registration form less time consuming, and thought about a re-design that includes all those other things you always wanted to provide your users.
  
  
• SEO makes what works, work harder. This post is not about dissing SEO, if you got this impression, let me correct you. Contrary to current hype, SEO is alive and well. It is the only website marketing option that can deliver high rankings, traffic, and conversion at absolutely no cost-per-click. Basically SEO is the perfect compliment you can pay to your successful PPC campaign and the best way to spend your ROI. Mimic your success by targeting the same market position with SEO and cut out the long term (and probably escalating) pay-per-click costs entirely.