Are you excited about all this Christmas trade everyone’s been raving on about recently? Can you smell the scent of cash? Are you going to be PPC-ing your little heart out to get it? Are you like a little kid on Christmas day at the thought of a bumper festive season?

However, with till bells already starting to ring and many people running oodles of campaigns, it’s time for my festive warning….

Beware… The Christmas PPC Grinch is Out and About!

You see, during the heat of Christmas trade it’s very, very easy to get carried away and indulge in the upping of PPC bids based on good performance… and then forget completely to analyse how much festive bang you are getting for your PPC buck. When this happens, that sneaky little PPC grinch can nip in and nick a good whack of your profit on a campaign or campaigns.  The result?  Yep.  The PPC Grinch has stolen your Christmas!

As an aside, this is just as true at any other time of year.  However at Christmas that devious little Grinch weaves his wicked magic, throwing glittering dust into the eyes of bedroom affiliates up and down the country.  They often don’t notice until later until they’ve chucked away a distressing wodge of cash that evil influences were operating in their PPC campaign.

Let Me Give You An Example From One Of My Festive PPC Campaigns…

I increased the bid level on one of my small campaigns that is experiencing a nice little lift by 1p, hoping to increase my positions and traffic considerably.  This equates to a 20% increase in what I’m prepared to spend. I did this about 4 weeks ago with absolutely topping results so I could expect the same again, right?

After my changes, my campaign was still in profit and had increased a little.  As it was only a few pounds a day I then forgot about it for a while and never saw it again until I happened to get a mail from the merchant and it reminded me to have a looksee.  Here’s what I discovered the effect of my increase was: -

Old PPC Bid

Average impressions per day – 9,149

Average Clicks per day – 110

Average CTR -1.2%

Average CPC – 4p

Average Cost Per Day – £4.40

New PPC Bid

Average impressions per day – 9,653

Average Clicks per day – 140

Average CTR -1.46%

Average CPC – 5p

Average Cost Per Day – £7.00

**edit, I had to change the above figures after I umm… goofed them up!  I was re-doing them after miscounting the average number of days in the second part when Duncan rushed into the office to tell me about a Kookaburra in the garden.  So I lost my place and got them all back to front – sorry everyone!

Yes Thats Right Folks…

To achieve an additional 30 clicks per day (22%) I increased my PPC spend no less than 37% which was enough to stuff my campaign margins.  Now, you might well say “that’s all very well Kirsty but any idiot would notice if they’d done something like that”.  Which broadly speaking should be true.  However I know of at least one idiot who has fallen into this trap during Christmasses past and she’s the lady sitting writing this cautionary tale.

Why?  Because too often at Christmas you simply count up your daily take – there’s just way too many campaigns going on and too many distractions.  It’s not until afterwards when you really analyse what went on and realise you goofed up!

So Take Heed Of My Cautionary Tale…

Analyse each and every change you make to your Adwords campaigns.  Sometimes the increase you get from increasing your PPC spend isn’t really worth the extra outlay which means that mean and nasty old Christmas PPC Grinch can nick your hard earned cash and you won’t find out till his Christmas gold dust has cleared from your eyes.

I upgraded to the new Yahoo Search Marketing platform a few days ago. After an impatient 8 hour weight whilst the Yahoo servers gave birth to my shiny new account I finally got around to taking it for a test drive today.

I wanted to wait until I had something real to pop up there, and I completed my newest PPC site today. I must say, after some initial disorientation I was pleased with a lot of the changes. For me there are still a fair few points of frustration in terms of the usability that means they still just don’t compete with the Adwords interface.

These are only some brief impressions I jotted down whilst I set up a single adgroup within a new campaign. I’ll start with the negatives!

Yahoo Frustrations

1 ) Since they changed over to the new service, I can no longer see my UK ads when I log onto Search.Yahoo.co.uk out here in Australia. I e-mailed Yahoo support, and to their credit they actually answered within a few hours. With a response that, as usual, is absolutely no help whatsoever.

“Dear Mr. McCubbin,

In order to change this option, please click on the ‘Administration’
tab and then the ‘Edit’ button in the field ‘Account General
Information’.”

Apart from being mistaken for a man, the only way they know of for me to see how my ads are looking in the results is to activiate my ads within Australia. To be fair, that’s exactly the kind of response I’d expect from the Adwords support team… so they’re well up with Google on this one!

2 ) The new interface allows a maximum of 20 campaigns. Due to the way Yahoo have chosen to migrate the accounts (by allocating a campaign to each adgroup I had set up in the old Yahoo Search interface), I now have 83 campaigns. Most of these are dormant adgroups. So as soon as I tried to set up a new campaign I was hit with “sorry, no more than 20 campaigns”. To delete a single campaign requires you to visit 3 different screens. I’m in for a thrilling few hours

3 ) The migration process seems to have sorted my search terms within my old adgroups into several new adgroups. They are grouped by keyword type, and I can see the merit in this approach.. but to be honest, I’m just finding it confusing right now!

Welcome Yahoo Innovations

1 ) I’m liking the campaign setup process. The ability to target ads geographically is clearly presented and easy to use. They’ve even included a map for the bewildered and easily confused. Even Jade Goody could work out the geography of the UK with this addition.

2 ) Ahh… the new add keywords function. A breath of fresh air, making it easy to apply many keywords to a single ad.

3 ) The new Yahoo traffic forecasting tool is pretty neat. I love the little graph that shows you where the traffic starts to kick in depending on your bid amount. i.e. If you’re looking at spending 20p a click and that’s not getting you enough in the way it’s easy to see at which point other bidders start to get a reasonable volume of traffic.

4 ) The nice wee option that lets you preview other ads that are live for your search terms whilst you are writing your own ad copy. It’s great to be able to see how the competition are behaving in your targeted search space so you can seek to improve on their ads.

5 ) Dynamic titles! Hurahh!

Overall, I’m happy with the changes Yahoo has made. It’s a huge improvement on the old interface which has repeatedly resulted in my coming down with a bad case of computer rage (and has often led to me abandoning attempts to pop up listings.

There are still a few frustrations though Yahoo… so don’t rest on your laurels. Get the development team right back in there and continue the improvements!