Hot Tips from The PPC Summit, Day 1

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!