By: Katherine S. Strandberg

Pay per Click Campaigns require constant monitoring. We have to adjust our ad copy, landing pages, keywords, & bids pretty much 24 hours a day in order to run a successful, profitable campaign. It is exhausting, to be honest. As someone who is new to Pay per Click, (and still relatively green to the Denver internet marketing arena in general) I have found this specific breed of the ‘rat race’ to be incredibly tiring. The article “How to Stay a Step Ahead of Your Hungriest PPC Competitors” by Matt Van Wagner from SearchEngineLand.com proved to be very informative.

How DO we stay on top of the competition? Since any tweaks we make to a landing page or to ad copy can be ‘stolen’ by the competition just as soon as the campaign goes live, and our lists of keywords can be easily copied by anyone who knows their way around SpyFu or the likes, how do we keep campaigns successful and miles ahead of the competition? I am ready to admit to being one of the ‘kids’ doing keyword research that Van Wagner mentions, and, while I may be young, I like to think that my experience as a member of the ‘internet generation’ makes up for my status as a newcomer to Internet Marketing.  At any rate, Van Wagner proposes an interesting strategy; admitting to the fast-paced, cut-throat nature of PPC campaigns, he grounds his theory not in the formatting of the campaigns themselves, but rather in the PROCESS of creating and updating the campaigns. We can create better pay per click campaigns if we know the strengths and weaknesses of our company, and know our clients, as well as the statistics that surround our customer bases.  Finally, he suggests that we need to take the autodidactic approach and re-learn high school stats so that we can be sure that we garner useful information from reading the statistical reports on which we base PPC. We might have less time to make small and insignificant changes to our pay per click campaigns for now, but, in the end, we will have a better idea of who our customers are, who isn’t seeing us who should, and how we should approach pay per click. We shouldn’t be trying to beat out our competition using the same old feeble ‘quick-fixes’ and one-upmanship. We should be inspecting the process itself, familiarizing ourselves with statistics about our client bases and targeting based on these numbers. Lucky for me, as one of those ‘kids’,  its been only 3 years since my last stats class…