• Centralized Structure
• Decentralized Structure
• Hybrid Structure (the Hub Model)

Centralized PPC Team Structure

• Overall PPC strategies are planned from the central
• All PPC operations are executed by the central team
• Marketing budgets are centrally decided and managed

Pros of Centralized Structure:

• All the best resources stay at one spot – All or most of the roles of an inhouse PPC team including Strategist, campaign specialist, data analyst, keyword specialist, copy writer, and web developer
• No overhead to manage regional teams and agencies
• Easy to manage marketing budgets and maximize ROI – Know exactly by spending in which regions Google Adwords will return the best results

Cons of Centralized Structure:

• Difficult to understand any local markets in depth
• Problems with campaigns that involve local languages in most European and Asia-Pacific regions – may require local search agencies for help

Decentralized PPC Team Structure

• PPC strategies are planned and executed locally
• Marketing budgets are allocated to each region
• Each region acts completely independently

An example of the decentralized team structure:

• US team in Silicon Valley manages US and Latin America Google Adwords campaigns
• UK team in London handles EMEA’s Adwords PPC campaigns
• Singapore team are responsible for the entire Asia-Pacific’s Adwords campaigns

Pros of Decentralized Structure:

• Highly efficient when executing PPC strategies
• Local teams understand the local markets better than anyone else
• Effective for regional campaigns (Europe, APAC, etc)

Cons of Decentralized Structure:

• Resources and expertise on PPC and other supportive roles in some regions (e.g. APAC, EMEA, etc) are stretched really thin
• Industry best practices and updates need to be regularly disseminated across each region
  Difficult to maintain the consistency of marketing messages
• Highly difficult to communicate across overall marketing and brand strategies

Hybrid PPC Team Structure

• The hybrid approach gets the best of both centralized and decentralized structures, when it is properly executed
• The central PPC team provides oversights and set strategies
• The central team initially builds the framework (keywords, ad copy, etc) and then let regional PPC teams to translate and localize against nuances in each market according to consumer behavior
• The regional teams execute the oversights and strategies which was initially set out by the central team based on each region’s customer behaviour

Pros of Hybrid:

• Industry know-how and expertise are disseminated across all teams
• Easy for globalization and localization – Central team has insights about the global market while local teams understand the local markets
• On regular basis, the central team can run special campaign tests and distribute results to the regional teams – This saves time and resources from the regional teams for running tests that are uncertain of any success
• Easier to coordinate with other non-PPC marketing efforts
• Regional teams manage their respective local search agencies, but the central ensures the industry best practices are applied by all

Cons of Hybrid:

• Low efficiency on communications: Regular communications are required between the central team and each regional team and among different regional teams
• Require more thorough upfront planning on marketing budgets for each region

Over the years, with the experience that I gained by working in and leading PPC teams under both circumstances (inhouse and agency), I believe when setting up an effective inhouse PPC team, the roles below must be included.

Head of PPC (Strategist)

The strategist is the leader of the PPC team, due to both his thorough overall knowledge in this field and his leadership ability. This role oversees the entire PPC operations and is responsible for the overall strategies. He/she must fully understand the corporate’s business model and is to incorporate paid search into the overall marketing strategies for the corporate.

The strategist has to be aware of the different PPC business models and should be able to manage multiple PPC projects for different client expectations.

PPC Campaign Manager / Specialist

A campaign manager works with all members of a PPC team and involves in the setup, optimization and maintenance of PPC accounts. He/she is responsible for monitoring account budgets and ensuring the correct daily/monthly spending.

Not only does a campaign manager operate with the paid search platforms, his/her possession of the “know-how” in optimization is essential. He/she should also be able to provide clients consultations and communicate with web developers and designers for creating landing pages.

Depending on their knowledge, a campaign manager may be more specialized than others in managing platforms other than Adwords. If this is the case with a team, he/she is assigned to manage for instance the Y!SM platform or the Adcenter platform. Some campaign managers are more specialized in managing and optimizing content-targeted campaigns than others.

Some campaign managers may have multiple language skills. In that case, he/she is able to provide assistance to other members of the team (keyword specialists or copywriters) when setting up non-English campaigns.

Copywriter

A copywriter is mainly responsible for creating and updating text ads for PPC campaigns. Professional copy writing can greatly improve the CTR and conversion rate of a paid search campaign. A copy is the key role to involve in ad text split testing, in which he/she is to work closely to campaign managers and keyword specialists.

Keyword Database Specialist

A large corporate’s website usually consists of over thousands of web pages of products. In some cases, a company has multiple websites and hundreds of brands. Maintaining the lists of product names with keywords becomes a full time job, as this is equivalent to building a keyword database.

Essentially, managing a keyword database is similar to managing a product database. The tricky part is that the relationship of keywords-to-products is many-to-one, and it makes maintaining the keyword lists being most updated a difficult task. To add to the complexity, the keyword specialist is to work closely with the campaign managers in providing them support in new keyword suggestions.

Data Analyst

Paid search is a numbers game. Receiving an accurate report about the performance metrics of your campaigns on a daily basis makes decision making of campaign optimization much easier.

Trend spotting is another task that belongs to a data analyst who should be able to identify unusual fluctuations of traffic and notify the campaign managers almost immediately. The campaign managers will use the data analyst’s input and assistance to pinpoint the possibly affected area, and apply actions to their campaigns.

Software Engineer

With a software engineer on board, his/her responsibilities should be to create applications / tools that will improve efficiency in campaign management. Building an inhouse performance tracking system with a fully integrated campaign management system is this role’s mandatory task. Enhancing the tools for spotting click fraud is also one of his/her tasks.

With the large search engines like Google and Yahoo providing API access, nothing is impossible anymore. Eventually, you may want the software engineer to build an auto bidding system so that your business can be more financially profitable. The involvement of campaign managers with the autobidding tool is necessary, as no matter how smart machines are, expertise and flexibilities of human are difficult to be replaced.

Graphic Designer / Video Producer

With the addition of Google’s other ad formats such as images and videos, some advertisers are setting aside marketing budgets for branding campaigns. Effective branding campaigns will require expertise in the design of videos and images. However, unless your corporation is moving big towards branding, you may want to employ graphic designers and video producers on non-permanent and contractual basis.

CTR

A well-written ad can generate more clicks over the same number of impressions. So it effectively increases click through rate (CTR). The top-tier PPC search engines all give discounts on keyword cost-per-click based on good CTR.

Conversion Rate

A well-written ad if being written in a way that connects well with the content of the landing page can improve conversion rate. After the searcher clicked your ad, he is taken to your landing page. If the landing page matches well with your PPC ad, the searcher has a higher chance of buying your products.

Quality Score

We all know that quality score applies to keywords, however, PPC ads somewhat play a part on relevancy and quality score of the corresponding ad group as a whole. So the bottom line is that your ad does affect quality score.

Efficiency

It would be more efficient for a person to have a single role (ad copy writing). This arrangement allows PPC campaign managers to focus on other important details of their campaigns which involve campaign structure, keyword management and optimization.

Scalability

Many PPC campaigns fail to grow as expected, not because PPC strategists and campaign managers do not know what to do. It is mostly because they cannot scale up the campaign as quickly and as accurately as possible. Even if you are sitting with hundreds of thousands of relevant keywords, you will still have to create thousands of ads and review thousands of landing pages. This is only possible with a professional ad copy writer working alongside the campaign managers and PPC strategist.

Final Words

The bottom line is that paid search marketing is becoming more competitive and you will require effective copywriting talents to keep up in the competitions.

PPC specialists with 2 years of experience who work for PPC agencies are likely to move to either traditional ad agencies or the client-side (aka the in-house paid search team). It is because most ad agencies and client-sides are able to easily offer 15% – 20% salary increase with a lateral move.

With the continuous improvements of algorithms and features in the PPC search engine platforms, paid search is a high-pace tactic and high-detailed profession with tight deadlines. It can also become repetitive and tedious when they are asked to manage hundreds of thousands of keywords on a daily basis. It certainly does not help when there is no definite career path ahead of the paid search specialists.

However, moving to the client-side will require the PPC specialists to adapt to profound changes including tempo, culture and locale. Moving to the traditional ad agency side will mean search is just a small part of the entire business and even the most experienced PPC specialists may be left out of strategic business planning.

One of the better options for the employers is to bring up your own PPC talents with no experience. With the help and systematic training of an experienced PPC specialist or a PPC manager, 3 – 6 months should be adequate.

For keeping the top PPC specialists, employers can promote them to more significant positions to head a team of PPC campaign specialists. Promoting them to search engine marketing managers will be another option should their knowledge qualify for the job. The latter option will allow them to oversee and manage the overall online marketing activities including both SEO and PPC.

Extract reports and necessary data from both the PPC search engine platforms and your own datacenter. Review the performance of your paid search campaigns by working out its ROI from the reports and data.

Stop spending on some of your campaigns or some sections of your campaigns that have not performed well during the holiday season, and pause spending those that were specifically set up to target the holiday season.

An alternative other than stopping campaigns is to reduce Max CPC of your under-performing keywords of those campaigns as a whole still performed acceptable. Also, use your experience or common-sense to pick the campaigns (based on sectors / industries) that you will have their keyword Max CPC reduced.

Pause or remove the ads that were specifically written for the holiday season and will not work well afterwards.

Plan your PPC campaign strategies for the next upcoming season. Also, launch next year’s holiday season campaign based on the experience and data you have gathered during this holiday season.

• Inside Adwords
• Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog
• Adcenter Community
• PPC Hero
• PPC lab
• PPC Discussions
• PPC Super Affiliate
• The PPC Book
• PPC Search Engine Marketing
• PPC Blog by Gordon Choi

The first 3 blogs on the list are certainly the official blogs set up by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. The rest, including my own blog, mostly provide in-depth information related to the top tier PPC search engine platforms (Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Adcenter). Some also occasionally went into discussing the smaller PPC search engines and contextual advertising.

The reasons I focus on blogging on PPC-related topics are below:

• My blog is a channel for me to get to know other PPC experts and keep closely in touch with the field.
• There are rarely focused PPC related blogs that share the techniques in-depth. Some people who want to learn and try out paid search marketing, and my blog can provide information to a certain extent.
• It is not as easy as you think to find great PPC talents, as it has been happening throughout my entire paid search marketing career. By having a PPC blog, it attracts the attention of the potentially interested candidates. Of course, it is up to them to decide whether they want to become one of us (PPC managers, strategies and experts).
• I have been doing PPC since 2002. Having a blog on my profession is a great way of branding.

#1: Cost-per-action (CPA)

You pay your PPC manager according to per action. An action is usually defined as a conversion which is most likely a sale made on your website via the traffic of the PPC campaign.

This PPC business model is similar to Pay-per-action (PPA) which is provided by Google Adwords on its content network.

#2: Cost-per-lead (CPL)

The cost-per-lead model is similar to cost-per-action except there is usually no payment required by the website visitors. Visitors to the client web site usually are required to submit some information via such as an online form.

The problem with CPL and the online form submission is that it is easy to create fraudulent submissions.

#3: Revenue Share

The revenue share business model may require great amount of trust between the client and the PPC manager. Many PPC search affiliates are willing to use this model.

The problem is that if the client has a fairly new business (or website) which is not yet well-known (or is lack of good brand-awareness), the experienced PPC managers are usually unwilling to work with this client.

#4: Profit Share

Profit share is slightly different to revenue share. With profit share, it also requires great amount of trust in the relationship between both parties. The client will have to reveal not only the actual revenues but also the actual profits. Another benefit of the profit share model can be supported by one of the researches on Vinny Lingham’s blog.

It is difficult for clients who have less known brands to get any real PPC expert to participate, as there is no guarantee of revenue for the work of the PPC expert..

#5: Percentage on Ad Spend

You may consider paying 10% or 20% (or sometimes even more) on ad spend of your campaigns to the PPC experts.

The one problem with this ad spend model is that when you own a website (or product) which will only have limited traffic (due to its business nature). For example, some paid search experts may not want to work with this model as 20% or even 40% of ad spend can be too little profit for them, if they cannot even spend over $1000 per month.

Even when traffic is high, there may not be enough motivation for the PPC manager(s) to continuously focus on optimizing your campaign.

#6: Once-off Setup

If you think setting up a PPC campaign is time-consuming, then obviously when you need your campaign being setup across multiple PPC search engines, your option may be to outsource this tedious task. If you have great knowledge on setting up, managing and optimizing PPC campaigns, your option is to have a PPC amateur setting up the campaign according to your full instructions (or specifications). All you do is to pay a one-time fee to this person.

#7: Consultation by Hours

If you do have one or more PPC managers who are good enough in setting up and managing campaigns, but you are not getting great results after some serious campaign optimization, then you may want to hire a PPC consultant. A really experienced PPC consultant usually can tell you what changes need to be made after quickly reviewing your PPC search engine account(s).

Final Words

If you are creative enough, sometimes it may be better to combine some of the above business models. For example as a client, you may want to pay a once-off setup fee and then CPA as the ongoing model. You may also combined revenue share with the hourly consultation fee if that suits your requirements. The bottom line is that you want to get the most out of the efforts of your PPC manager(s) and at the same time you want to fairly compensate the experts so that they are fully motivated to manage and optimize your campaigns.

With my experience of previously managing multiple paid search projects, PPC is becoming more competitive in 2007. A campaign that is being setup incorrectly or optimized ineffectively can often cost you a fortune.

• Managing Marketing Budgets
• Taking Financial Risks
• Making Marketing Decisions
• Deciding Performance Rewards

Search Agency Model

The client supplies the marketing budget in which the agency needs to spend on the search marketing campaigns per month, so there is no financial risk on the agency. The agency is often happy to charge a monthly fixed amount on the budget spent.

Often with this model, the client is the party that makes the marketing decisions. Depending on the client’s marketing goals, it can be to increase sales, to improve brand-awareness, or to do search arbitrage.

The client even has the right to enforce the agency to start with a list of potential keywords which is chosen by the client, though it may not be the best list of keywords in terms of conversions and sales (if the goal is not purely branding). Also, the client can enforce the agency to advertise on behalf only a set of selected products (or services), which may be highly profitable to the client in terms of profit margins.

The advantage is that the client can closely control the agency in terms of marketing spend. The client often can decide how much the agency should deserve to be paid. Also, the agency has advantage of communicating closely and regularly with the client regarding new promotions and marketing strategies that will take place and may affect the agency.

The disadvantage of this model is that the agency can often put very little efforts in keyword research and other optimization of the campaigns. As long as the agency can finish spending the monthly budget on a few high traffic and high cost-per-click keywords, the target is accomplished.

Search Affiliate Model

The search affiliate takes full risk on the financial side, as the marketing budget is pre-determined and self-funded by the affiliate. The search affiliate works on a performance-based goal usually such as revenue share on a fixed period of time (cookie period) or a fixed payment on a per sale basis (pay-per-sale).

The advantage to the client is that, the performance-based model forces the affiliate to be adventurous and expand the keyword lists towards the longer-tail. This long-tail approach will gradually lower the marketing cost, and eventually the affiliate will often recover more than sufficient financially to re-invest in more rounds of keyword expansion.

The disadvantage is that the client has no clue how much exactly the affiliate earns (as the affiliate is not required to disclose the marketing spend to the client). The leaves some important questions to the client as the affiliate has been growing on revenues: Should the revenue share be increased, decreased or the same in the coming month?

Besides marketing budgets, the client often has no real control over how many keywords, on what search engines and what products (or services) the affiliate advertises. Also, the client has no right to control when the affiliate should or should not spend to advertise.

• Campaign planning, strategy and implementation
• Conducting research, collating and reporting on competitive data, targeting, keyword research
• Setting up, trafficking and tracking of media campaigns
• Creating campaign optimization rule sets
• Campaign monitoring, data analysis and optimization
• Financial management of paid search campaigns
• Forecasting of financial performance

Having the qualities below will be advantageous:

• Knowledge of paid search marketing and affiliate marketing industries and/or experience in running and managing PPC Campaigns, specifically on Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing & MSN Adcenter Advertising Platforms
• One of these language skills: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Portuguese, Polish, or Russian
• Analytical, numerical, systematic and creative aptitude
• Extremely high attention to detail

Anyway, I have categorized the possible talents into 5 different source types:

• Have you worked as part of a PPC ‘In-house team’ of a business?
• Have you worked in a search marketing agency?
• Have you worked in both mentioned above?
• Do you have no PPC experience, but have some Internet marketing background?
• Do you have no PPC experience nor Internet related background, but have potential?

Those who have worked as part of a PPC ‘in-house team’ (or business)

Companies that have their own PPC in-house team usually are either of very large size or are in some specialized sectors (e.g. financial services, etc). The PPC guy is a real specialist in the sector of business with fairly good PPC experience.

If he (or she) happens to work for a large company, the environment can be a little more complex which should have allowed him (or her) to sharpen some important inter-personal skills.

However, the true problem with this is in-house team are usually small. Ideally with a large business and assuming the business has over 30 web properties, a team from 5 to 6 people should be able to handle. In some small businesses, a single person is the PPC team. With this type of environment, it is never easy for your PPC guy to grow in experience as there is simply lack in competition and co-operation.

Those who have worked in a search marketing agency

Comparing to a PPC guy from an in-house team, normally an expert from a search marketing agency is slightly less expensive and has a bit more solid experience to offer. He (or she) usually gained his (or her) experience from working with various types of clients in different sectors (For example, travel and retail).

Also in the same company, there are more employees specialized in paid search marketing, this means constant competition and collaboration in the same (or similar) skill-sets will only drive up skills of one another.

Those who have worked in both

The advantage of having this type of PPC expert in your company is that he (or she) would already be extremely experienced due to the exposure to large variety of clients including both internal and external clients. Those clients who may be in different sectors including travel, retail, financial services, education and more. This expert can give you a large range of business insights and directions besides his expertise in paid search marketing.

The one problem is that he (or she) can be extremely expensive. However, the person may worth his price, if you desperately require a guy with both experience and insights to drive your business to the right direction.

My own experience

About myself, I have experience from initially working in an in-house team of a business (in one of the very specialized sectors) and then in a highly performance-driven search marketing agency (affiliate) company servicing multiple sectors. The experience that I gained in both places allowed me to build up my in-depth knowledge both in PPC and a large variety of sectors.

As your paid search marketing business grows, you may have no time to personally manage the PPC campaigns of your clients. You may have to shift your focus to manage the relationship of your clients or the multiple projects that your PPC campaign team is running. Some really good leaders on paid search marketing are able to manage both efficiently and effectively.

In my last couple of years of either personally managing PPC campaigns or managing multiple PPC projects by outsourcing to PPC team members, I discovered that below are the key points that you should focus on, whether it is to manage a client relationship or to manage multiple projects involving a PPC team:

Setting the Goals

Goals (or targets) must be pre-defined and agreed upon by both parties (your client and your business) before any PPC campaign should be launched. A goal must be set to within an achievable level. Not every client will let you know what his online sales figures are, but you can set some reasonable targets such as:

• Improve the conversion rate by 30 percent in 3 months.
• Increase sales figures by 10 percent each month for the next 6 months.
• Increase the number of leads by 50 percent.
• Decrease the campaign marketing cost by 20 percent in the next 4 months, but maintain sales volume.

Certainly, you do not want to over-sell to your client a target that you may not necessarily be able to meet. If you do that, you risk your reputation as it will create a false impression to your client that your business does not have competent skills on PPC management.

Managing Marketing Budgets

As a project manager yourself, you are often given a marketing budget by your clients. You will have to communicate with your PPC team on how this budget should be spent. For example, it may take 6 weeks for your team members to grow a campaign to a relatively large size (in terms of number of keywords). This is one of those reasons you may want to include in your budget estimation.

Also, you want to spend the client’s marketing budget so that it can achieve the maximum effect for the campaign. For instance, you want to have your team pre-defined the keywords that will make the most out the campaign in terms of sales. In this way, every click sent to your client’s website will not be wasted.

Communicating with Your Clients

In reality, no matter how good you are with PPC management, occasionally you and your team do not necessarily meet some of the goals. The reasons can often be short of resources, lack of time, or even lack of understanding of the industries of your clients. Constantly communicating with your clients is very important and will allow you to grow your knowledge in your client’s business.

Maintaining Business Ethics

Integrity is vital in building a great relationship with any client. Be honest to your client with everything you do to whether it is to add 10,000 keywords that will allow the PPC marketing campaign to spend an extra $2,000 per month, or it is that you may have some human resource constraints to meet certain targets on time.

Also you should not want to disclose highly confidential information of one of your clients without permission, even it may enable you to improve the relationship to another client with potential.

Final Words

As PPC is becoming more competitive in 2007, it is not sufficient when you and your team have great knowledge and experience in PPC marketing and management. It is when you can manage your paid search marketing projects in terms of setting achievable targets, managing the budgets, communicating with your clients, and maintaining business ethics, you will become highly competitive.

Preparation

PPC campaign managers must be given sufficient time in preparing the setup of their seasonal campaigns. Preparation should always be a key to success, whether it is physically setting up the campaign, or mentally prepared.

Communication

Often PPC experts have limited knowledge about the seasonal products in which they will be advertising on their newly set up paid search marketing campaigns. Their clients are the people who know the products really well, though they often have limited knowledge on paid search advertising. Being able to constantly communicate with their clients will help them in understanding the products in depth.

Budgets

Seasonal promotions often do not last long – a month, a couple of weeks, a week, or even one weekend. PPC managers are often given a pre-defined budget for their seasonal advertising campaigns without any additional backup budget in case it runs out long before the promotion is to cease. This is simply because there are too many unpredictable factors to affect the speed of spending when running a seasonal project. Some seasonal products can be over-demanded and some can be under-demanded. In the case of under-budget, the clients will miss out great selling opportunities. The best practice is to always have a backup budget plan to replenish the original pre-defined budget.

Keyword Research

Advertising for a new seasonal product is like entering an unfamiliar territory. Before advertising for seasonal products, PPC experts should always conduct an in-depth keyword research. Another reason is that in the world of PPC, keyword popularity can change from year to year and even from month to month.

You can use either free and paid SEM keyword research tools for your keyword research.

Competitive Analysis

In this very competitive world, you can never underestimate competitions. Your client may want you to create a seasonal PPC campaign because his product is up for a seasonal product. The competitor of your client may often do the same. Sometimes the failure of a campaign like this should not be the fault of the PPC manager. The competition may be at the same time offering a seasonal product which is more compelling to the consumers. Indeed, your client needs to always be on top of his game. He is the one who knows his market and industry so well that he should conduct sufficient competitive analysis before making important marketing decisions.

Google Insights for Search is a free tool for you to get some traffic information about your competitors.

Final Words

Also, PPC in 2007 is becoming more competitive. So without following the check points above, many seasonal PPC campaigns will run into trouble retaining a good ROI.

#1: Identical IP Address

Checking the IP addresses of your visitors (clicks) is probably an old way in detecting click fraud, but it still works pretty well from time to time. You can do this by looking at your website’s log files. If you can see there is an IP address that has been clicking on your paid search ads over and over within the last 24 hours, record this trend immediately as this is definitely click fraud!

#2: Change In Number Of Clicks

Your keywords do not receive the exact number clicks everyday, but if yesterday one of your keywords got 5 times more clicks than it used to get on any other average days, not only you may run into problems with overall marketing budget, it is probably a sign to click fraud.

#3: Change In Clicks Over Impressions

Nowadays, there are still certain numbers of third-tier and even second-tier PPC service providers that do not provide impression data to advertisers. However, you can definitely have this information from the top-tier PPC platforms including Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter.

For example, one of your keywords has always been receiving about 5% click-through-rate (CTR) on any average day. When all of a sudden yesterday its CTR ramped up to 40%, you should really take a look and figure out why. Unless very recently you have made major changes to your ads or your campaign budgets, such as major increase in CTR is never normal.

#4: Change In Bounce Rate

Bounce rate (or pageviews per session) of your visits is another measure that you should carefully look at. Make sure you monitor the daily bounce rate of your website. Unless you have made significant changes to your landing page, you will not have a major change in bounce rate – e.g. from 30% of yesterday to 90% of today.

#5: Short Duration Per Visit

The duration of click fraudsters on your web pages is often very short – under one minute! You should track the length of your visitors (clicks) and compare it to your average value. Now if the figures are happened to be just slightly off, it could be due to other reasons such as brand awareness or seasonal change.

Also, watch out for those click fraudsters who landed on your website and very swiftly click a couple on a couple of internal links of your website. They simply do this to disguise their intentions.

Final Word On Click Fraud

If any one of the above method alone cannot justify a click fraud situation, by combining all of them it will give you a much clearer idea with more convincing evidence.

Paid search ads are bought by advertisers with the explicit understanding that those ads will only be viewed as a direct result of a search performed on a search engine. Contrary to this understanding, Distribution Fraudsters are taking search ad feeds (as distinct from contextual ad feeds) and showing them on domains whose sole purpose is to receive low-CPC clicks from Google AdWords and provide no option to the user but to click on a high-CPC *search ad* within the site; this constitutes a contextual ad, not a search ad.

I believe many PPC experts who have previously used Ask Sponsored Listings would agree reporting has been a major issue. The current reporting system simply does not make average position of ads and impressions available to advertisers, however the new platform’s reporting will include average position on the keyword level. Though CTR has been a major factor alongside maximum CPC in determining ad rankings, reporting on impressions data doesn’t seem to be included in this upgrade.

Reporting data will also be made available in more real time basis: real billable clicks are being updated hourly instead of estimated data are being shown. With the new system, advertisers will have the option to spread the advertising budget evenly on a daily basis.

Other improvements include the account structure. The new platform will be structured in Account-Campaign-Ads-Keywords, instead of the current format of Account-Campaign-Listing. This gives PPC advertisers the convenience to create one ad for multiple keywords.Overall, on the first glance it is moving further away from the Overture-like platform to the Google-like platform, though Ask’s new PPC platform may still have a long way in getting close to Google Adwords.

It means PPC experts and advertisers have discovered ways to advertise and bid smarter than before. The use of marketing analytics tools has been the key factor for PPC advertisers in better making decisions in terms of spending.

Individual keyword bids vary day-to-day, mainly depending on the bids of competitors. In some specific categories, there have been some daily spikes of traffic increase:

• Career training: 286%
• Pregnancy: 111%
• Consumer electronics (MP3 player and camcorder related keywords): 225%
• DSL and ISP related: Over 50%
• Loans to students: 40%