Our company had a PPC training today, which interestingly, all the SEO guys attended  (I think we are all secretly jealous cause they get instant traffic).  It was really really good.  I picked up a lot of things I didn’t know about PPC.   I have been running PPC ads on a personal project for a while now, but today showed me that I really didn’t know what I was doing.

Later Jared, one of the PPC managers, sat down with me and went though my account.  He was very polite and didn’t openly mock me, to much.  It pretty much came down to: you should delete that campaign and start over.  I was really resistant to that, until he showed me the report that tells you which keywords people are searching when they clicked on your ad.  I was shocked.   I have a ring related website and I was getting searches for rings for piercings in places you don’t want to talk about in civilized conversation.  I didn’t even know you could pierce some of these places…  *shudder*.  Anyway, it basically came down to, 2/3rds of my money was going straight out the window on keywords that had nothing to do with what I was trying to promote.  Part of that was a mysterious “Unknown” section that Google wouldn’t even tell us about that amounted to about 500 clicks.  I guess you doesn’t realize how much you don’t know until someone shows you.

So taking Jared’s advice, I promptly chucked my old campaign and started over.  We’ll see how it goes now.

Below are some of the great PPC related things I picked up today.  Enjoy.

Exact Match Keywords – [keyword keyword]

Your ad only shows up when that exact phrase is typed in.  No more, no less.

• Exact phrase only
• In that exact order

Examples: [red tennis shoes]

Your ad shows up if the search is: ‘red tennis shoes’.

But not for: ‘buy red tennis shoes’ or ‘tennis shoes red’ or anything else.

Phrase Match – “keyword keyword”

This seems to be the one that gets used most commonly.  Also use in conjunction with negative keywords.

• Plural and singular keywords are separate and distinct keywords.
• Keyword order specific

Examples: “red tennis shoes”

Ad shows up for: ‘buy red tennis shoes’, ‘red tennis shoes buy now’

Ad won’t show up for: ‘tennis shoes red’ (out of order), ‘red tennis shoe’ (singular)

Broad Match – keyword keyword

Your ad shows up for the entered keyword, as well as pretty much anything Google deems slightly related.

If you use this, good luck.  This is what I was using, without knowing what it would actually do to my campaign.

• Not order specific
• Not plural or singular specific
• Not order specific

Examples: red tennis shoes

Ad shows up for: ‘buy red tennis shoes’, ‘red tennis shoes buy now’, ‘bobs red tennis shoes’, ‘tennis shoes’, ‘red shoes’, ’shoes’, ‘red’, ’socks’ (cause they are feet related too), ‘Nike’ (cause it’s a type of shoe) etc.  The list is huge.

Ad won’t show up for: ‘Grandma’s knitting’.  Pretty much something completely unrelated.  Cause if it can find a link, it will try to put your ad there.

So yeah, it was a good day.  I learned I had been loosing money for a long time.  But on the bright side, I got to learn about the problem before launching any major projects! 

Oh, and on a side note, it snowed this morning here in Utah.  It’s frigg’in May 1st and its still snowing!  Damn this global warming!  It’s going to freeze us all to death!