Have you wanted to run paid search ads on Google (Google Adwords) but don’t have a web site? This is *hot*. Merry Christmas – what a great time for paid search marketers! With yesterday’s roundup of free ads worth $550 and now free landing pages, you have no excuse!

Google will help create and then host landing pages free for small businesses. There’s an example on Google’s AdWords blog. That’s a small specific web site relating to your ad. When someone clicks on the ad, it’s the page they land on. It usually is designed with a specific goal in mind. So it won’t have press releases, or all of your products, it is designed to sell.

The best news is you don’t need to be technical to do it.

Google Checkout is giving $10 off $30 at selected stores. Until December 31, 2006 you can use Google Checkout to take orders and it’s free.

This is good news – Google is passing out great deals this holiday season, make sure to check it out!

Paul Allen has a great post about all the promotions right now with pay-per-click advertising. You can get a combined total of $575 worth of free paid search ads. MSN ($200), LookSmart ($300), and Ask.com ($50) and Enhance Interactive ($25 – nice landing page!). MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Ask.com $50 credit: sign up at sponsoredlistings.ask.com, and enter promo code SESCHI06 during the check-out process.

LookSmart $300 credit expires on Christmas Day. Visit AdCenter.LookSmart.com, and use this coupon code at check-out: SESCHQ4

If you’ve ever wanted to learn paid search marketing on someone else’s dime, start today. Promote your blog. Promote your article. Your product. Practice and learn what sells, what works, how it works, and then stay with the one giving the best results.

I wish I had time to do this. If you do, let me know how it goes. I’ve been partial to Google AdWords, but I’m curious about these other search engines. If they let you link directly to a product buy page, try using an affiliate link directly (Google doesn’t let you, not sure about these).

Help spread the word – digg this article.

The single most valuable lesson I learned that had immediate impact from Paul Allen‘s class last year is learning about Google AdWords and Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Jim Ericson was a guest lecturer and explained the technique. I later called and asked for a more detailed explanation.

Today I’m elated to see that since I started my new job our number of visits to our web site off Google ads has increased over 7X from what it was the months previous (it was holding steady). That’s in three months. It is without spending any more money. These are often high quality leads.

How did this happen? First, I babysit the campaign. I check it often and add new keywords as I read and learn more about the business I’m in. I test ads. I dayparted our campaigns so they only run when they’re more profitable or give higher quality leads.

However, one of my favorite ways is using dynamic keyword insertion. I know to many of you this is not big news. But if you’re not using dynamic keyword insertion you should be.

How Dynamic Keyword Insertion Works

Rather than making a new ad for a group of related keywords, make the title or headline of the ad change automatically depending on what someone types in. Here’s how: {KeyWord:INSERT DEFAULT TITLE HERE}. That’s all. If the keyword or phrase is too long it will show the default title. Otherwise it will show exactly what someone typed in to search.

Example: You make an ad with the title like this: Buy {KeyWord: Flowers} Online. If someone types in buy a dozen red roses, and red roses is one of your keywords, and you’re using dynamic keyword insertion, your ad title will show up: Buy Red Roses Online.

Watch the Numbers

I have only really run an extensive paid search campaign since I started this job. I had dabbled in it a little before that but it never got off the ground. At first spending someone’s money so fast (or my own) was either intimidating or disasterous. I hate to bleed money. If you make a mistake and don’t watch closely it could quickly end up costing you a lot. But the opposite is also true. Make a good ad and you can quickly see great results (strong conversion rates).

Paid Search – A Creative Outlet

I find running a paid search campaign a very creative and satisfying part of my job. I love writing the ads but especially love when I see the effect on conversion rates almost instantly. Instant gratification for my writing or creativity. It just doesn’t get much better than that.

I’ve had some great teachers in real life and books and hope to continue to see continued PPC success.

Now if I could just get a dedicated graphic designer and web programmer to build landing pages and do more versions to test. This usually gets pushed back but I believe the payoff could be huge.

Can someone help me with this Google Adwords question? If I want my ad to show up in ANY search with my branded terms, is there a wildcard option? Is it tied to a specific Adgroup or can it be applied to all at once? I noticed that if you search on our company name comma another term, we don’t show up. I noticed someone else always is. How are they doing this??

I tried Google AdWords help and I’m not sure I understood it. It seems like they’re saying you can make sure you come up for a term without periods in it, say newspapergrlwordpress, by putting in a “/”.

Sometimes people don’t put dots or put odd spacing (i.e. wwwnewspapergrl SPACE wordpress) or even just type  your domain name in the search box. It would be nice to capture this traffic in an easy way.

I’ve been working extensively on our Google Adwords keyword list at work. I use our Omniture stats to look at the list of keywords used to find our site. It gives me ideas on what people want to know. If I search on “How to” then I get ideas for articles to write. I also search on “what” because those are often questions too.

Negative Keywords

Another way I search is for possible negative keywords. Since we’re an enterprise level company we want to eliminate words that suggest a free or consumer product. Or simply words that don’t apply. That way we’re not wasting money.

Day Parting

I also use the day parting feature on Google to turn off our ads during the night and on weekends when we get low quality clicks. The clicks were often for other countries. Not many administrators are searching for a networking solution during the middle of the night!

Long Tail Keywords

I also use web analytics to find the long tail keywords. These are keywords that are low volume but have less competition and are often very specific. You’ll probably notice when you look at your keywords a few branded terms account for a good percentage of the total keywords. In my case, around 30% come from maybe 4 terms. Then there is the long tail. These make up about 60% of the total keywords searched on to find our web site. Most of them only have 1-3 searches.

At my last job my boss told me to ignor those because they didn’t pay enough to warrant attention! Wrong. Those are the gold in your keyword list. Why? Because they often cost next to nothing and they often have little or no competition. True, you may not get the volume of searches, but if they are so specific that they convert well, who cares?

Save Your Cash for Keywords that Get Results

Pay attention to the keywords that people are already using to find your site. It can tell you a lot about your potential customers. You know these people came to your site. Why? It can give you ideas on what to write about. It can give you ideas on what keywords to exclude. Also, don’t ignor the key words or phrases that get low volume but are inexpensive. They may convert to sales quite nicely.

Clickz reports that Google is going to charge more for people low quality pay-per-click advertising that link directly to landing pages. Google has tweaked natural search algorithms to weed out junk sites. They will continue to do the same with paid search. In natural you get delisted or drop in rank. In paid you will be charged more, poor quality will cost you.

I just listened to a short overview about how to design high quality landing pages. It was by Mark Widawer of LandingPageCashMachine at Affiliate Summit.

How to Design a Quality Landing Page, 5 Tips:

1. If they don’t take your offer, at least get their email address (give a free report or something else of value). If you’re really savvy get them to subscribe to your RSS feed and give their email at the same time.
2. Split test your ads. He recommended hypertracker.com or 1shoppingcart.com (shopping cart with ad tracker).
3. Spend the money or learn great copywriting. The words you use are of vital importance. http://www.breakthroughcopywriting.com/ is a resource (warning: sales page but no affiliate link, I haven’t checked out the quality).
4. Remove all obstacles to the sale. No distracting graphics. No links except to buy link or submit (when getting their email address). Don’t put extra information that isn’t needed like ‘about us’ or ‘contact us’. Remember a landing page has one purpose, which is to SELL.
5. Instead of thinking how you want to increase your conversion rate by 1% instead think of it as how to reduce the rate of failure by 1%.

Raad Google’s landing page and site quality guidelines.

Google now allows advertisers to control the day and time their ads are shown. This is big. For example, in my last job, I knew when customers were buying and when they weren’t by looking at Omniture. I could now run ads when the site got the most traffic and buying activity. If the weekends are slow, either change the ad to reach a different type of audience, or don’t run any ads.Is there an advantage to running more ads late at night because there will be less competition? Sort of like the infomercials folks? You’d make long video ads (research shows people view the whole ad so there’s a captive audience at least for now). I’ve never tried google videoads.
On busy days advertisers might burn through their ad budget by 3pm (and the superconference guys have a way to try to help your competitors do just that). That leaves the rest of the day for the #2 spot to be #1 (or for others to move up).

Anyone testing day parting? What impact is it having? I haven’t tried this yet, but I’ll let you know how it works for me.

For google to think you’re a real site you need things that are indicators of realness. Original content. Like comparing prices of products. A list of retail store locations. An actual customer service number or email address.

I also read that if you add graphics to your adsense links it will increase click-throughs. You use text ads but space them out in a table (is this google legal or is it tampering with code? I guess if you do a 1-ad for each one you’re OK). Put an icon above each ad. Basically it’s tricking people into not realizing they are google ads, which people usually ignor.

Remember: You can’t ask people to click on links on your page to increase your revenue or click on your the ads on your site.

I found a lot of good links lately for more google adsense info:
www.Jensense.com
http://allaboutadsense.blogspot.com/
http://www.petefreitag.com/item/413.cfm

Can’t wait for the day when yahoo gets more into paid search advertising. This is changing all the time and it’s an adventurous ride so far…need more competition out there to keep a flatter playing field.