Life in the Blue

Welcome to Life in the Blue. As you can tell by now, this site is my blog. I hope this site to be a lively discussion about living the good life – Life in the Blue. I am a PPC guru, and my ads live at the top of Google’s paid search listings – in the blue.

A little background on your host - I have worked in the search industry for three years, with my main focus in pay per click. I have worked in some of the most competitive industries learning from the ground up. I also have experience in web site conversion testing, and learn more about online behavior everyday. It is my goal in life to travel the world going to conferences, blogging and getting paid to drink.

Moving on to this week’s discussion about life in the blue. This may bore some of the professionals in the audience, but you will agree how often this comes up. Many times I hear someone who knows very little say something like “I want to start a PPC campaign and be in the top spot on the blue, and I’ll spend whatever it takes.”

Yawn…Here we go again. Now I respond, “While simply bidding thru the roof will help your ad position, you cannot simply start a campaign and be the top result. Google takes into factors such as click thru rate history of the keyword, adgroup and advertisement. They also look at the quality of your landing page.” People who are a really big deal may throw around the phrase ‘quality score’ to describe this. You don’t know what your quality score is, though I have heard there may be tools in testing to give you an idea. It is basically has to do with how relevant your landing page is to the keywords you are bidding on.

A similar statement is “I searched and I always see my ad in the blue, but today it was the top one on the right.” They then start panicking, get short of breath and start opening up their wallet to throw more money at Google to get their ad back living the life in the blue. This is a common occurrence. Sometimes Google wants to see how the ads really compare against each other in click thru rate. As long as you have a strong CTR history and maintain it, your ad will go right back to the premium position.

Some people are bothered by Google’s secretiveness in quality score and not being able to control everything. I am not. For organic search they have their sandbox. The CTR history is the same effect. It rewards people for a long positive history and prevents fly by night strategies from taking control of the top spots.

The point of this is to always remember, that some things are not always about money. Google uses a variety of factors to calculate ad position. And don’t waste your time trying to figure out exactly either to always control your spot. Bids and click thru rates are always changing. Trying to come up with a bid strategy to control your position for every single keyword will not yield positive results. You might as well have spent your time…blogging.

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