I handle pay per click campaigns for most of my customers. The front-end, setting up and tuning the campaign is the most time consuming part of the effort. Finding the right words and then determining which words best convert. After the initial set-up maintenance requires far fewer hours, with much of the time spent adjusting spend for postion. However diligence and attention are important as results should be fed back into the website to improve landing pages and improve organic results for top performing phrases.

It is interesting to see how people charge for this service (most of my clients are hourly). There is an excellent article about PPC management options here

When I started my consulting business, I imagined that I would be working with some larger firms with in-house web and marketing resources. I imagined that much like it had been for me as an in-house marketer, I would apply my SEO/SEM skills to a given situation and others would carry out the recommendations.

While it does work that way some of the time, I frequently work with small companies that have little or no marketing and/or technical expertise. It is unlikely they know or have anyone who knows what an <H1> tag is, or how to create an .htacess file.

I had one customer whose shared-hosting provider experienced frequent outages, sometimes several hours a week and another whose canned shopping cart was broken by a system-wide upgrade and was unable to process orders for months.

The long and short of this is that while my focus is SEO and SEM services, I frequently provide additional marketing services through relationships with local designers, programmers, and copywriters. Some of these folks I know from my days as an in-house marketer, others I have come to know and respect through clients projects.

I enjoy the challenges brought by different types of businesses and the opportunity to make a difference.

How about you, any stories you can share?

It appears that attitudes on mining the lesser used, but more specific “long-tail” phrases is changing. Quality Score is making it too expensive to go after these phrases. What this means is to improve the performance and lower the cost of your campaigns you need to clear out the deadwood.

If you must stubbornly clinging to your long-tail phrases, move them their own group so they aren’t needlessly impacting the Quality Score of your other campaigns.

More on this topic here in Yahoo’s Search Marketing Blog titled:
Chasing our Long Tails.

Previously I has said that you shouldn’t use broad match in AdSense campaigns. While I still lean in that direction, it would be more correct to encourage you to test both phrase and broad match and then base your decision on hard conversions data.

An excellent article on this topic: Google AdWords Marketing: Exact Match Bidding

How these differ:

Broad Match:

Broad Match actually matches the words from the phrase any order. What is a little harder to follow is broad also matches synonyms for your phrase. If you have the phrase “tennis shoes” in your campaign, you ad may be triggered by a search for “tennis sneakers”. So the complete phrase has to be there, but Google may accept a synonym for part or all of your phrase. So if your phrase is “tennis shoes” won’t get matched for “tennis elbows” or “running shoes”.

Here is the link to Google’s help on this topic: What are keyword matching options and What is broad match?

Phrase Match:

Exact Match:

Exact matches only when all the words are used in the exact order, but with no other words in the query.

Yahoo Marketing

Yahoo adds some confusion in that it uses the terms “standard and “advanced”. “Standard” is similar to Google’s “exact”, but introduces some minor variations to your phrase, including plurals and misspellings. “Advanced” is analogous to Google’s “broad”.

See: Overview: Match Types

So what should you use, broad or phrase??

I think the best answer is “it depends” and some testing will be needed to ferret out the differences. I have tried both with a number of clients and usually find that “phrase” performs better than “broad”. I say usually because there are other factors that affect the results.

You might come to the conclusion that “broad” was better because your ad will be triggered on a wider range of phrases. After all, your ad should accurately identify what you are selling and keep your clicks relevant. However, Google and Yahoo both use click-thru rate as part of there formula to determine what to charge. So, if “broad match” causes your ad to be presented for searches that are irrelevant to your ads, your click-thru rate will be lower and you CPC rate will go up. More relevant matches will drive more clicks, improve your click-thru rate and drive down the CPC.

See: Quality Score

So again I come back to the importance of using “cost per conversion” (also known at cost per acquisition, CPA), as your metric instead of “cost per click” (CPC). As long as you have a way to measure cost per conversion you have a reasonable handle on the value of the phrase and can make an educated choice about what match perform best at the least cost.

Added 3/10/2008 >> Another good article on this topic: Focus On Exact Match