I get asked a lot about the wisdom of running a PPC campaign when you are ranking well in organic searches (SEO).The combination of PPC and SEO is always worth testing in my opinion for a couple of reasons (ok, 5 that I can think of).

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Day parting is an important targeting technique that allows you to change your bid profile by time of day and day of week (which is technically called week parting). From a direct marketing/conversion perspective - this is important for several reasons:
1) Business to Consumer products/services have a different conversion profile than Business to Business products/services. This means that people tend to actually BUY at different times of the day depending on whether they are shopping for themselves or shopping for their work.
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I’ve been giving a presentation to the University of Washington’s MBA Direct Marketing class for the last 3 or 4 years courtesy of the professor Elizabeth Stearns. I recently updated the presentation and thought that I would post it on the site for your enjoyment. Click here for the .pptx file of the SEO/SEM 101 Presentation. Enjoy

I just spent some time playing around with VeryRelated.com. They use the Yahoo BOSS tools to draw some relationships between keywords and subjects. They look at both size relationship (home many of the two keywords are in the same phrases) as well as size of opportunities (the number of keyword searchs for the combination). It’s a nice way to present the data in an easy to digest manner while giving you a new way to consider additional keyword categories around your core terms.

Finally! Google has added some volume estimates to their keyword research tool (located here). This is a good thing as you can get a better idea for the total volume of terms vs the relative strength of terms you would get through Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker (still important tools to have in you kit).

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I’m sitting in a presentation by Matt Cutts - mostly Q&A - but he showed Searchmash.com which I hadn’t see before. It is owned by Google, but totally separate and is a sandbox. Some of the interesting items are wiki results on the right instead of in the results. Same thing with images, blogs and videos. There is also a flash version.

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One of the principles we base our direct marketing programs on is continuity. This is especially important in the online world where each interaction is a millisecond apart as potential customers click through creative > landing page/site > order process > confirmation email communications. Continuity refers to all elements of the creative through the acquisition and early retention process. For example, through testing we know that the connection between the text in a paid search ad needs to be reflected in the headline in the landing page - this continuity confirms that you are on the correct page to “pay off” the text that you clicked on. It is important to take this message as well as the colors, images, design that you’ve introduced on the landing page and carry through the order process.

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