Hot Tips from The PPC Summit, Day 1
March 3rd, 2008 by 
Amit
Okay, I’ll be honest, the only really compelling reason I decided to attend the PPC Summit is because it’s being held in Boston. In Back Bay actually, which is a 25 minute cab ride from where I live.
So I thought I’d check it out…
All I have to say is WOW, this little 2 day conference with all of 100 attendees is PACKED with information for newbies and advanced ppc marketers alike. All the sessions are excellent, covering everything from : how to set bids, web analytics for SEM, to the ins and outs of Google and MSN.
Now I really wish I had attended this conference when I was first starting out, it would have significantly cut down my learning curve.
The thing with the PPC summit is that it’s targeted toward corporate marketing people.
I gotta tell you…corporate people always give me a good chuckle!
One lady was asking me what I do. I told her I’m a full time affiliate marketer.
She responded : “Oh, so you work out of your basement in your pajamas? And only a few hours a day?? Hahahah!”
She was looking at me as if I was crazy, and snickering!
I just sat back and smiled.
If I actually told her how I lived, she won’t believe it anyway!
Here’s what I wanted to tell her in response: “Yeah that’s right. I work in my pajamas for only a few hours a day and make more in a month than you make all year. And while you’re hunched over your PC for 50 weeks out of the year typing away at your computer in your little cubicle, I’m traveling the world with my wife…Paris next week, then moving to Miami for 6 months after that…”
I know. That would have been too cruel. Haha!
Then later in that day I was talking to some other corporate people, I asked them what they thought of the PPC Summit. They simply responded that they were going be overwhelmed with all the work they’d have to do when they got back to the office, and how much that would suck!
One guy commented that he had to pull several all nighters finishing company project between the Super Bowl and Thanksgiving.
It’s amazing how hard people work for so little money, and they’re ok with it?!?
If only they had ANY idea what type of life they could live with the ppc skills they have!
Anyhow, I’m going to go more in depth about what I learned in future posts, but one truly incredible tool I learned about was Microsoft Adlab. Now I know that many of you may have heard of it, but may not be aware of some of some of its newest features.
I don’t have time to go into all the features in this post, but here’s a couple cool ones :
DEMOGRAPHICS PREDICTION
You can type in a keyword in this tool and it will tell you the demographics of users for this niche.
Check it out…
This type of information is really useful when setting up the graphics and copy on your landing page. You can also use this information to launch a demographic targeted campaign on facebook ! (TIP THERE)
MISSPELLING TOOL
The Adlab’s misspelling tool is based on actual search query data. Here’s some of the results I got for insurance :
THE COOLEST TOOL…DETECTING ONLINE COMMERCIAL INTENT
On a scale of 1-100, this tool basically tells you how well a keyword will convert to a sale, and it’s actually pretty accurate.
Here’s a screen shot for the query blue shoes :
One of the startling conclusions from this tool, which the presenter verified with a substantial amount of his own data, is that plurals (ie shoes) convert MUCH BETTER than singulars (ie shoe).
I’ll be using this tool extensively every time I go into a new market. A good strategy may be to first dig up a broad list of keywords and then start putting selected keywords into this tool to get a feel as to which type of keywords will convert best.
I’ll have to play around with this tool to get a better idea of how to best exploit it. One major pitfall of the tool is that it doesn’t seem to work for information products keyword (ie make money online).
More to come, so stay tuned!
microsoft adlab ppc summit
Posted in Industry News, Super Affiliate Mindset | 
Between Adlab and the Adcenter plugin for Excel, MSN is really stepping up their game lately!
Dude,
seriously. Nobody cares about how you talk to people about you being so cool.
I unsubscribed your feed.
I feel like hitting myself in the head for missing these.
I love Adlab with all my heart.
Amit,
Great post! I hope you are going to follow it up with another post soon!!
Was the PPC Summit filled with people that are not familiar with our industry? Or were they people doing PPC on the side of their normal job?
I love the Detecting Online Commercial Intent tool! I haven’t seen or heard of that before.
~Debby
Amit,
I didn’t know that you were based out of Boston. I run a boston seo event that had about 50 people attend last nights event. Most of the seo regulars that work for themselves to avoid the corporate world.
I also run a Boston affiliate marketing networking group. We’re looking for a great guest speaker for April. I heard your affiliate summit panel went really well. So it would be amazing to have you attend to chat about your affiliate experiences?
Thanks for your consideration,
Brian
Affiliate Manager
Pingo.com
pajamas?
who said anything about pajamas?
-leo
Hi Ric,
Suite yourself, it was a JOKE. I didn’t actually say that to the lady, even though I think she deserves it for sneering at affiliates and our industry as a whole.
Hi Brian,
I’d be happy to be a guest speaker for your group. You can drop me an email at : amit [at] superaffiliatemindset [dot] com
Thats amazing how people not familiar with the AM industry. Once someone told me that the MAX I can make with AM per month is $2000. It was so funny, I actually replied him: “OK sir, let me dream the dream and enjoy your 9-5 job.”. Yeah, it was a while ago. Meanwhile I stopped dreaming the dream and started living it.
Have a nice day,
everybody.
I will have to check this out. I’ve neglected MSN adcenter for many reason, but this tool looks really nice.
Amit:
I don’t think people enjoy working that hard. They don’t know what the alternative is. And why would anyone care that you work in your pajamas? Heck, if you are making money you can work naked. At the end of the day, it’s all about the money, not the attire.
Do you have a person or company that you’d recommend if you want to create good landing pages?
Amit,
Thanks for this post. I learned of this tool a few months ago, but I don’t think we’ve utilized it to it’s maximum capability. Thanks for inspiring another look at it; I’ve already thought of additional ways to utilize it’s information.
p.s. I’ve known about your AM prowess for sometime. I believe you were on a couple of panels at Affiliate Summit West 2007 or earlier. I just recently added your RSS feed, and look forward to reading killer future posts from you.
Have fun traveling!
- Eric Itzkowitz
AdLab looks like a cool tool; definitely worth trying out. Although we all know nothing replaces pouring some money into an actual test to see what works. I’m sure the tool would predict my biggest money makers don’t convert.
Hi Amit,
Great blog, I’m fairly new to the IM and AM thing, and have already failed, so I like to consider myself the exeption and not part of the statistics that newbies quit when they fail. I’m not quiting, but I sure don’t have thing together well enough. One of your posts said that when you talk to an affiliate manager you ask how much their top affiliates make, and that if they don’t make 100K a month you walk, which really shocked me! I gotta tell you, I’d be happy with 1K a month or even one sale would just make my day right now.
I guess the two little questions I have are, what makes a good landing page? I think you’ve also talked about that here, but some visual samples would be great if you know of any sources. When it comes to keywords and PPC, since I don’t have much of a budget, are there some alternatives to AdWords or any other methods of getting traffic that you would recommend?
Thanks
Charlie.
Hi Amit,
Robin Goad from Hitwise did a great post on plurals. It gives some additional insight into peoples intent when they use singular or plural nouns.
The post can be found at:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/03/plural_or_singular_search_term.html
Cheers, Simon.