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Have you ever wondered how people get their ads to show within Gmail accounts? Well, there’s two answers…

1. The ads down the right. These are automatically appear as part of the AdWords content system. If you have selected content, they can appear in that spot if they fit the context of the email being read. The downside is that these ads don’t get noticed.

2. The single ad along the top. There is a trick to appearing here, and it is a valuable spot to have. Not only does this location get noticed, the barrier to entry is high, for most of your competitors haven’t even thought of placing ads there, let alone know how to do it. Here’s how:

1st. Add mail.google.com to your list of placements in the Content Network. This can only be done manually, it will not show up as a choice in the Placement Tool

2nd. Choose to use this placement only when setting up your campaign

3rd. The box along the top within Gmail is known as the “funbox”. To have your ads only show there, change the placement to “mail.google.com::Inbox,Top center”

Tips:

• bid higher than usual
• remember that a funbox ad is all one line
• bid on keywords that might appear in the subject line of emails your target demographic read
• bid on the exact subject line of a popular newsletter (perhaps that of your competitor!)

Watch this video, by AdWords Media Planner Austin Lau - where most of the above info came from (yep, that means it is official):

While achieving the highest ranks possible is certainly a goal of SEO, and doing your utmost to generate sales or increase page views from visitors is very important, there is a much neglected area inbetween - who your site appears in the Google search results.

Some great tactics are detailed at SEOptimise.com, including:

• using special characters¥
• being reviewed at StumbleUpon
• having shorter titles and snippets
• create white space via perfect snippet lengths

These and the other dozen tactics all increase your organic click-through rate (CTR), and this may lead to an increase in rank.

While it is generally true that having lots of links pointing to your site will improve its ranking in Google, there is a lot more to it. To make it difficult for the system to be gamed, Google almost certainly have models of linking that represent the patterns and time-scales expected from genuinely popular sites.

Here are some quick tips intended to make to think about your linking strategies a bit deeper:

Numbers: most incoming links should be from low PageRank sites. This is because most sites out there have a low PageRank. If the only incoming links come from high PageRank sites, Google will smell something fishy. Ideally for every link you get from a PR5+ site, you should have dozens or even hundreds from sites with lower PR.

Pattern: chicken or egg? A recent post at Digerati suggests that the optimal pattern is to get a link from a highly trusted resource first (even if you put there yourself), and then get lots of “run of the mill” links. This feels natural - following the initial exposure on a trustworthy site, many people decided to also make a link.

Otherwise, if hundreds of “run of the mill” links suddenly appear, and Google cannot plainly see how they heard of you, it might look spammy.

Time: take plenty of it. This isn’t always an option, but slow organic growth will seem more genuine. A site that grows by 2 pages a week will be more trustworthy than one that has 1000 pages on day one. The former will seem like a site belonging to someone with a love of the topic, whereas the latter looks like they are on a mission to get search traffic.

The same goes with links. If your site appears in 500 directories overnight, you obviously used a submission service. Link building should be as slow and steady as you can tolerate.

This is a great example of how powerful having keywords in your URL can be. Compassive has applied some basic SEO principles to our Nintendo e-commerce site, nintendo-shop.co.uk, and when combined with the keywords in the domain name, we are outranking Nintendo themselves.

A Google UK search for “nintendo shop” has the Compassive site at #1, followed by Nintendo, Amazon, Nintendo and Kelkoo.

Using keyword-laden domain names, and white-label shopping sites or WordPress templates, can often provide more sales or leads than SEM keyword purchases.

Sure, you can write your own PPC ads. Most small businesses do, because it is easy - ten or so words and a headline!

There are substantial reasons why outsourcing you ad copy can save you money, and customers:

CTR

An ad that invites clicks can halve your costs. Google Adwords, for example, understands that if it shows the ads that get the most clicks, it will make more money. Consequently Google rewards such ads by lowering their cost per click.

Quality Score

There are numerous other factors that Google looks at, not just CTR. A skilled PPC copywriter is aware of these factors, and writes ads in a way that Google will like them. This is essential for avoiding the dreaded “Google Slap”

Pre-Qualify Those Clicks

While a high Quality Score and CTR are desirable, there is no point paying for clicks if the clicker doesn’t buy. It is critical that you make sure most people who click on your ad have an intention to make a transaction.

Focus

Most of your staff would rather be doing something else, instead of writing ads. Therefore you run the risk of them putting little effort in, or avoiding the task altogether. Get someone who likes writing ads!

A/B Testing

A non-professional will most likely write one ad and feel they have done their job. An expert will write many ads, and then return and write some more. There is always improvements that can be made.

Tricks of the Trade

For example, you can embed the search keywords into you ad. No matter what someone searches for, if it triggers you ad, their keywords can appear, emboldened, in your ad headline.

Disallowed Ads

Google has an automated system that will disallow you ad for various reasons, including grammar, trademark infringement, spelling and content. Sometimes the system makes crazy decisions, and it is easy to just give in. An experienced PPC copywriter knows how to get around this system (without breaking Google’s guidelines), and how to ask Google for exceptions.

Like many aspects of modern business, you have two choices when it comes to PPC marketing: inhouse or outsource. Questions you should consider before taking the inhouse route include:

• Have any of our current staff ever used PPC?
• Would we have to hire new staff?
• Do we know what to look for in new staff?
• Do we have enough work for full-time staff?

Depending on the size of your operation, you might consider looking for staff who can fill multiple roles. Regardless, you’ll need to following if you wish to do it all yourself:

• Copywriter - a wordsmith who understands A/B and multivariate testing. Hopefully they are also involved in landing page copy
• Mathematician - not a real mathematician, but someone very good at number-crunching, spreadsheets & data analysis. PPC data can be very convoluted & complicated, and ROI is not necessarily as easy as looking at Google Analytics
• Keyword Engineer - someone who understands what people search for, what converts, what gets clicks, and how to best use available keyword tool-sets
• Maybe a Programmer - we found that the only way to manage our campaigns effectively was to create our own software tools. Even if you outsource this task, you’ll need some programming expertise to be able to communicate your ideas effectively

Oh, and somebody to manage them!

In our experience, it is extremely hard to find one person who can wear multiple of the above hats. They require different types of brains and personalities.

The PPC space is dominated by Google (Adwords), Microsoft (AdCenter), Yahoo (YSM) and to a lesser degree Ask Sponsored Listings. Beyond those there are dozens of much smaller search engines and PPC ad networks, like Findology, ABCSearch and 7Search. You may have come across their offers of free advertising to get you started. Are they worth trying?

Here are 6 reasons why they might be a waste of your time, creating a negative ROE (Return on Effort):

Size

If you used every 2nd/3rd tier PPC service, at best they could only reach the last 5% of search queries that are not made via the Big 4.

Click Fraud

Simply put, the bigger services have bigger and better fraud detection tools.

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