Eighteen months ago, at the SXSW conference, entrepreneur and force of nature Timothy Ferriss launched his book The 4-Hour Workweek.

With a mantra of “outsource your life”, Timothy soon made #1 on both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists and continues to make the BusinessWeek top seller list week after week.  We were thrilled to be listed in The 4-Hour Workweek as a recommended resource for outsourcing PPC marketing, one of only three firms to be recommended in our category.

We believe that our execution on profit and performance-based marketing allow our clients to focus their attention on the things that are important to them, whether that is creating the next breakthrough product, or winning an Argentine Tango competition (as Tim once did).

Congratulations, Tim, on a book that has continued to win converts and stand the test of time!

Our friends over at FreshBooks have the perfect mix of Tech and Ghoulish Spirit going on. See how they did it on their blog.

Happy Halloween from everyone at Working Planet!

Google provides views into performance metrics from Google search vs. their search partners. This is good news for us, as it means easier auditing of this information and the potential for easier calibration against our third-party tracking data.  More importantly, it opens the door for separate optimization of the high-quality Google search traffic and the varying quality of their search partners.

We applaud any moves on the part of the ad engines that allow measurement and management at the most granular level. The more access there is to this data, the better and more efficient ad spend can be.

Yahoo has improved their geo-targeting capabilities with a new release to their management console allowing country-based geo-targeting.  We look forward to auditing the results of our geo-targeted campaigns to assess how accurate it is.

This is very good news and will allow us to more accurately geo-target campaigns, which always means more efficient management.

Recently, Tom Hespos wrote an article on iMedia about how Online Marketing ad budgets are more at risk in an economic downturn than traditional media. He correctly attributed this to brand managers having a better grasp of the contribution to branding/exposure of traditional vs. online media as they have been working with traditional media longer. However, he stopped short of an even more important point.

In an economic downturn it is more important than ever that ad budgets have measureable and efficient results. When the choice is between funding a branding campaign or a direct response and the direct response campaign can be driven by ROI/Profit metrics, the direct response campaign should win, because it reduces the risk of the marketing spend.

Not everyone can do direct response marketing. I wouldn’t try to market grocery items this way, for instance (although grocery delivery is another story). Most companies can, however, and almost every B2B company should. When you combine the power of testing and optimization in direct-response campaigns, and the flexible pricing controls in PPC, you suddenly have a combination that has the potential to drive profits while reducing risk. Even in a down market.

So, are online media budgets at a higher level of risk in this economic climate? Only if there are no measurement controls in place and the marketing team is not tasked with driving profits.

Here are articles featuring Working Planet that we’ve been meaning to link to for a while now:

WPMG featured in the Providence Business News

An article on the Providence Geeks networking group and local technology/startup scene from the Providence Phoenix

A Google case study on the success our client, Invistics, has seen in generating qualified leads through our optimization efforts. (pdf 1.2M)

Google AdWords made a big step in adding Placement Targeting, the ability to target and price content ads for a single publisher site. However, Placement Targeting is often a difficult media buy to manage. All of the challenges faced with the Content Network are magnified in Placement Targeting. These include shifting competition and limited impression inventory defined by a relatively limited number of positions available. Because Placement Targeting focuses on a single site, you have the added risk of a publisher making site changes that radically change user interaction with the ads. In the Content Network, this effect is largely absorbed by the multitude of publisher sites, but in Placement Targeting it can mean instant and dramatic shifts in the opportunity available for profitable customer generation from any given publisher.

Despite these challenges, we have seen a growing opportunity with Placement Targeting because of the relatively well-defined and stable nature of the audience that is self-selecting to visit the publisher site. Performance-based ad management is all about predictability, and having a stable and consistent audience mix means that there is less external variability for which we have to account. This is something that is not true in the Content Network, where the mix of publishers, and therefore audiences, shifts constantly.

What this has meant is increased positive performance for our clients as we have developed new ways to rapidly respond to changes by publishers, while understanding the opportunity offered by the audience for each Placement Targeting site. This has made it a growth area for us, and we believe we will see quality sites opting for Placement Targeting as they will reap the benefit of gaining advertising dollars that match the value of their core audience.

Microsoft has recently released a plugin tool for Excel 2007 that might rival all available engine keyword tools. It is called AdIntelligence and it provides a lot of interesting data.

The two features I find the most promising are the monthly traffic tool, which takes keywords you input and returns historical search data from the Microsoft search engine Live.com. The tests I have done show huge variations in month to month traffic, which is very interesting, if the reported numbers are accurate.

Here’s an example of a few car insurance keywords with a year of historic data, as well as 3 months of predicted performance. (Click the image to see the full version.)

This level of transparency and the amount of data provided directly by a search engine blows apps like the old Overture keyword tool out of the water. The spikes in data are curious, though.  Take for example “buy car insurance online” which vaulted from 9,096 queries in May to 105,523 in July. This would not be as suspicious to me if the same fluctuations were seen in other related keywords, but that’s not the case in this instance.  It makes it hard to chalk such a fluctuation up to seasonal performance changes.  Data integrity remains a question. Either way, this feature is very promising (the tool is still in beta) and should help anyone at least get an overall idea of the traffic behind their potential keywords.

The other interesting feature is a monetization breakdown, which takes a list of keywords you provide and returns the impressions, clicks, average position, CTR, and CPC for all advertisers on AdCenter. I was fairly surprised to see so much information freely provided by Microsoft, considering how closely guarded the engines traditionally keep this information.

Here are some of the same car insurance keywords from the last example:

According to this data, there were 971 clicks on the exact keyword “car insurance quotes” in the last month, at an average CPC of $15.00, all the advertisers bidding on this keyword averaged a 3.05% CTR.

Other features of AdIntelligence not covered here are a Demographic and Geographic breakdown of keywords, as well as several keyword research tools, that take either a URL or original keyword and return a list of similar keywords. There is also a tool that will return keywords that advertisers are bidding on related to your original keyword.

AdIntelligence is a plugin for Excel 2007, you can download the beta here. There is also a 60 day demo of Excel 2007 available at the link if you don’t have it. I highly recommend trying out the tool, and I hope Microsoft continues to add new features.

The Christmas gifts from the engines have arrived and we thank them for including us. Every year the engines send out holiday gifts to their advertisers who meet a certain threshold. (What that threshold is, I have no idea, but this is what you get for millions in annual spend.)

This year Yahoo sent a laptop case and a very thin rubber keyboard that can be rolled up and easily taken anywhere. This is texttyped ith the purple rubbr keyboard, as youcansee it is notvery easyto type. It is a great idea, though.

The other gift from Yahoo was a very nice laptop case, seen here in a picture from CPA-Affiliates. Our President was particularly amused to see his name emblazoned on the zipper. He chooses to believe Yahoo personalized it just for him.

Google’s gifts this year were a 2GB credit card sized USB memory stick, and a donation to a local school of our choice. They don’t mention the amount of the donation, but I think it is a very nice gesture and a unique way of supporting the local communities of their advertisers.

It is nice to be acknowledged and we are always grateful for what we receive. Happiest of Holidays!

The Yahoo Search Marketing Blog recently published another article on keyword insertion, one of my least favorite PPC strategies.

The reason I am down on keyword insertion is that it is a fundamentally lazy way of improving campaign performance. It was designed so that novice PPC managers could get better clickthrough rates without a lot of effort. The theory being that seeing the keywords emboldened in the ads will attract the attention of the searcher and thereby improve clickthrough rates.

So first, the disclaimer. If you have a campaign with large ad groups full of diverse search terms, it is possible, or even likely, that keyword insertion will improve your conversion rate. However, there is a limit to how much this can help.

The problem with keyword insertion is twofold. First, it can often result in fairly odd ads, for example:

What does this mean? Are they supporting charm sales or bicycle sales? Bicycle charm sales? If so, they don’t seem to be attempting to qualify a target audience and the ad copy doesn’t really work for any of these potential audience segments.

Second, it is tempting to create very large and diverse ad groups or avoid dealing with the issues that these types of ad groups can cause. The problem is that large and diverse ad groups don’t perform as well as small and cohesive ad groups in building quality score and in identifying diverging behavior in audience segments.

To use Yahoo’s example, they suggest combining the keywords “chardonnay” and “wine” to use in the same ad. However, if we create a user profile for these terms where the user attributes are:

“wine” - low wine education, searching for gift, cost-conscious

“chardonnay” - oenophile, searching for self, quality-driven, bulk-buyer

We can easily see that if we limit optimization to what works for both these audience segments, we may easily miss massive opportunity for increased clickthrough and conversion rates.

Keyword insertion can work, particularly where the ad groups are conceptually tight and the resulting ad text isn’t nonsensical, however, we would not consider it a good best practice in most situations.