One of the biggest advantages of PPC is that you can make adjustments quickly and easily and receive almost instantaneous feedback on how the campaign is performing. The ability to modify or cancel PPC quickly and easily is part of what makes PPC attractive to so many. The tricky part is knowing how long to give a PPC campaign before you determine that it is not giving you a Return On Investment (ROI). There are a number of companies that will try to lock you into spend requirements and long contracts. This, of course, interferes with the flexibility of the campaign and your ability to cut and run, respectively. It is vital that you have the ability to do exactly that, should you determine that you are not getting a desirable  Return On Investment.

That said, many people determine their PPC campaigns to be ineffective before the campaigns ever have an opportunity to become successful. Although PPC campaigns do provide near instantaneous feedback, it often takes a few cycles of feedback and campaign modification to see maximum results.  And when clients pull the cancellation plug too early, it is usually without discussing their concerns with their PPC Specialist. A good PPC Specialist will set up a well-organized and highly targeted campaign, but this does not mean that the moment the campaign goes live that the campaign will be successful. Why not?

Well, because if you did your research, you picked a company that limits the number of clients it takes in a particular market. This is important because you don’t want a company that is going to setup your campaign exactly like your competitors’ campaign. No matter how successful you may think your competitor is, setting up your campaign exactly like theirs will not bring you the same success. In the same way that different website designs are likely to convert differently, different campaigns convert differently. And besides, you don’t want to be as successful as your competitor, you want to be more successful than your competitor. And that requires hiring a company that will setup and customize a campaign for your success and take some time to properly modify your campaign based on the initial campaign results.

When a client prematurely pulls the plug on a PPC campaign, they will often times employ another PPC management company thinking that the new company will supply them with better results. The problem with this type of serial hiring is that it never provides an opportunity to develop a successful campaign. That is not to say that you should continue to work with a bad company hoping that if you give them enough time that the campaign will someday become effective. With any luck, you have done your own research and have chosen an experienced company that is completely transparent in its management, reporting, and fees. If you feel confident that you have hired a reputable and transparent company, then it is important to trust your PPC Specialist and give him/her an opportunity to properly modify the campaign before discussing whether or not you should continue to invest your marketing dollars in a PPC advertising campaign.

In a stunning display of miscalculation and all things feminine, Yahoo’s latest embarrassment is “striping” the company of credibility.

Yahoo has really struggled over the past two years, with falling profits and a revolving door of Ex-Yahoo executives. However, I don’t think anyone expected Yahoo’s latest debacle would take place at a corporate event. After Yahoo hosted an event for engineers and developers called Open Hack Day in Taiwan last weekend, a number of photos from the event managed to find their way onto the internet causing uproar.

Yahoo hired scantily clad young women to liven up the event, and give lap dances to event guests. Yahoo described this event as a “brainstorming” session, and opportunity to learn about programming and technologies. But when video and pictures from the event found their way onto the internet, it became clear that hiring the ‘Hack Girls’ was a misguided decision on the part of Yahoo.

What makes Yahoo’s misguided decision so interesting is that it involved lap dances at a corporate sponsored event, attended by Yahoo corporate executives, two years in a row. The details of this event have lead many to believe that the top execs at Yahoo was fully aware of the ‘Hack Girls’ and turned a blind eye, until the bad press started.

Here is the apology posted on the Yahoo Development Network blog by Chris Yeh, entitled “Sorry.”

I often get asked whether doctors and lawyers should do PPC advertising. There are a number of “experts” that say the costs are too high and the competition is just too stiff. They show you lists of keywords with high costs and say that it’s just not worth it when you can do natural listings for free. But what these self proclaimed experts or failed PPC advertisers don’t tell you is that……

PPC has nothing to do with getting lots of traffic for cheap.

The point of PPC is not to get as much traffic as possible, it is to get targeted traffic for the purposes of conversions. Now granted there are a number of different reasons why people start PPC campaigns, they want to show up at the top and aren’t in the natural listings, branding purposes, some can’t afford to pay for optimization services etc. But despite the various different reasons that people start a campaign, the point of any marketing is to get more business. Traffic isn’t necessarily business, that’s where conversions come in. So the when I see a blogger showing a list of keywords and costs, but never addressing the aspect of conversions, it’s a red flag to me that that person is not experienced. A true PPC advertiser knows that the costs associated with PPC, more often than not, are worth the return. How do I know this?

Well, after years of PPC advertising for professionals I have a dozens of examples of clients who weren’t sure that PPC was worth it for them, and were proven wrong. One particular client, a lawyer on the east coast has been doing PPC advertising as a way of boosting their results. Several months back they started to wane on their PPC advertising because they were showing up so well in the natural listings and felt like they no longer needed to do PPC as well. They went through the PPC conversions (emails) and verified how many of those emails translated into business over the past year, and were astounded when they realized they had made $480,000.00 in profit from their PPC advertising, in one year. Now this is only one example, and there are plenty of people out there who will tell you that it’s not worth it to do PPC advertising. But the key is too remember that most people doing PPC are inexperienced and/or using campaign management software. Neither of which commonly result in a return on investment.

So, PPC advertising is most definitely worth it, for any business, professionals included. But, you have to have an experienced person managing your campaign and you absolutely have to be tracking conversions.

Quality Score has transformed PPC and continues to play a central role in the success of a PPC campaign. Once upon a time you could buy your way to the top of the search engine using PPC simply by bidding higher than your competitors. With the advent of the “Quality Score,” you can no longer simply plunk down the money and expect to reap the rewards. Just like we eventually had to turn to experts in order to navigate the ever more complicated and time-consuming wold of SEO, PPC requires more and more expert oversight in order to make it worthwhile. So what is a Quality Score,and how can it make or break your PPC Campaign?

Because the subject of Quality Score is an extensive subject, I’ve broken it out into three parts more detailed parts.

• Part 1 – What is a Quality Score?
• Part 2 – How does a Quality Score Work?
• Part 3 – How to Achieve a High Quality Score

Because this is just an overview of what and how Quality Score works, I will continue to post additional information on this topic in the coming months as it is such an important part of creating and managing a successful PPC campaign. Whether you are personally overseeing your campaign or have hired an expert to manage it for you, it is really important to make sure that your campaign is being managed with Quality Score in mind.

For the visually inclined, here is a great video that covers all of the most important aspects about Quality Score.