The 80/20 Rule Applied To PPC

The 80/20 rule, also knows as the Pareto Principle, means that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Applied to search engine marketing, it means that roughly 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your keywords. A lot has been said on monetizing the long tail of search which I […]

Making Search Funnel Reports Actionable

I’ve been messing around with the new Search Funnel Reports in AdWords trying to figure out how to use the data that it provides. Here are a few conclusions that I’ve come to that I think are actionable. Path Analysis Under Top Paths in the left hand column, drill down to “keyword path (clicks)” under […]

Data Driven Keyword Strategy

The search query report in AdWords provides a great way to expand your keywords in a data-driven way. There are a lot of keyword tools out there to help you discover which keywords you should be bidding on so that your keyword list is perfect right out of the gate. I like the approach of […]

Managing the Long Tail of Search

Long Tail keywords individually might not make the biggest difference to your overall PPC account. But in aggregate these long tail keywords can sometimes mean huge amounts of traffic and lots of money. Setting up you PPC account with your most popular, or “head”, keywords set to broad match is not an effective strategy to […]

Example PPC Dashboard in Excel

If you’re working in an environment where you have to do weekly reporting on your AdWords performance, and the reports in AdWords aren’t cutting it, you may want to invest some time into making your own PPC dashboard in Excel. Plus I think putting the data together in this way leads to insights that aren’t […]