Great video interview on Scobleizer with SEM analyst Jeff Figueiredo, in which they discuss the fine points of Google AdWords PPC strategy. Jeff is very well-spoken, and gives a good overview with a minimum of SEM technical jargon (though some is unavoidable).
Some interesting opinions from Jeff:
- AdWords continues to pull money away from Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter, just because it’s easier to use, has much more traffic and has a better conversion ratio. [that last point is not supported by independent research and my own experience]
- For continual AdWords fine-tuning toward higher clickthrough rate and conversions, turn off not only the content network, but the search network as well — target only the Google search engine. [again, this seems to be a "YMMV" opinion)
- Use broad match, but as a research tool: use the number of broad-match impressions as a clue to how much traffic is around the base phrase -- then use site analytics to mine the long tail of related results. [bingo! AdWords is the cheapest/easiest market-research tool ever invented]
Jeff described how PPC campaigns can grow to thousands upon thousands of phrases over time, through a combination of data-mining and manually entering newly discovered, relevant words/phrases into the PPC platform. [Been there, still doin' that! Eventually, after all this heavy lifting, the campaigns run almost by themselves, with some continual review and tweaking. But it can take a long time to get to that point.]
He touched briefly on landing-page quality, but I’m sure could’ve given an earful on that if Scoble had known enough about SEM to ask the right questions. [Google's recent Quality Score changes have affected just about everyone's AdWords campaign results.] Overall, however, it was an excellent off-the-cuff interview, done during a break at a Seattle tech conference.
