Your website sucks! Your mobile experience sucks! Your competitor’s website and mobile experience suck too! Guess what? My site sucks too!

As is often the case when I speak, I tell the audience that their website is like a leaky old bucket with traffic falling out the holes. I let them know we all know their website sucks and mine does too. However, when speaking at ConversionNation (formerly Fusion Marketing Experience) in Antwerp, I was politely shown by my friend Joost de Valk how badly I sucked.

Joost did his presentation after me and decided on the fly, while I was presenting, that he would use my website to show how with a little WordPress SEO (his speciality) and more importantly a little conversion help, I could suck a bit less. I’ll share with you some tips he gave me, but more importantly I’ll share with you why all our sites suck and what you have to do suck less.

As Joost picked through the issues on my blog and speaking page, I didn’t sit back and sulk. I didn’t say that he was wrong. I opened up my WordPress admin and went to work. Before his presentation was finished, 95 percent of his recommendations were in place. I’m always trying to improve. I was thrilled to have the feedback in order to suck less. Like you, I don’t have unlimited time and resources. We all have more things clamoring for our attention that we can ever handle.

However, to be successful today you must adopt a culture like Pixar’s willing to accept sucking and is willing to take criticism from everywhere within and outside your organization. Of course, getting advice from an expert like Joost is priceless and I was getting it for the price of being happily, publicly humiliated.

Your culture gets there by allowing for mistakes, letting people take calculated risks, by having your CEO be the chief experience officer and taking responsibility for your conversion rate, by having an executive in charge of optimization and by putting the tools, people, and processes in place to make quick and agile changes.

So, in order to suck less in 2012, use all the methods and tools available to get insight into your customers’ behavior and purchase processes, gather feedback from them, get some experts to review your efforts, make changes quickly, test, and measure and then respond to make things a little less sucky. According to research, the companies with the highest conversion rates tend to employ the greatest amount of optimization techniques.

Here are some of the tips that Yoast gave me and I’ll keep them general so that you may be able to use them too.

1. Avoid dates in your blog posts. This is especially true if you are not publishing news and your content is evergreen. Or make sure your dates are recent if you want people to click on the links in the SERPs (search engine results pages). In fact, with the release of WordPress 3.3 this week, Joost suggests you remove dates from your permalink URL using a tool to create the redirects for your old posts.

2. Optimize your meta tags not for spiders but to persuade people to click on the result.

3. Ensure that the thumbnails appearing in universal search are the most persuasive. (In the case for my speaking page, he wanted the thumbnail to show me speaking, duh.)

4. Plan for what happens next. I didn’t have a related post plug-in for my blog because when I first set it up, I had very few posts and thought I’d get back to it at some point. I forgot because it wasn’t a priority. So now when people get to the bottom of one of my posts, they are shown two related posts with thumbnails to make them more visually interesting.

5. Don’t make people click to another page to contact you. When I ran an agency, every page of our website had a contact form in the footer. We knew exactly what kind of lift in conversion and data that brought us. However, I didn’t have a contact form on my keynote speaker’s page - it was only on the contact us page. Now that has been added.

I wish you continued success in the coming year. May you suck every day a little bit less!

Marketer’s are always losing battles to time. Time is all you need to get everything done and to be most effective marketer possible. Marketing operations are more complex than ever before and the demands on our resources are constantly increasing. We need to identify solutions that help us get the most bang for the buck; because we aren’t about to get 25 hour days any time soon.

Marketer’s who were lazy and had poor corporate metabolisms were the ones most heavily impacted by Google’s Panda update because their SEO efforts were based on short cuts but not on the fundamentals of producing high quality, unique content. So much content gets created on a lowest-bid basis that is looks like a race to the bottom of the quality pile.

So like many businesses who found themselves in a hole and losing as much as 40% or more of their revenue when the Google Panda algorithm update hit, they scrambled to figure out what to do next. However, retailers like eBeanstalk.com got fed up and decided to put their heads down and go to work.

Ahead of them were thousands of product descriptions that needed to be rewritten and hundreds of product related videos were going to be produced.

Not that their product descriptions were the worse offenders I’ve seen but it certainly didn’t provide the visitor with much value. Here is an example of a before description:

This colorful all-cloth doll makes a great “first friend.” She has a cheerful painted face framed with a fleece cap and a soft scarf. 13 inches tall. Ages birth and up. Closed gift box. NOTE: If you have never purchased a Corolle doll, you are in for something special. We guarantee the recipient of this doll will have a new fast, favorite friend.

Why our Child-Experts Love It

We love almost every doll we′ve seen from Corolle (hey, nobody′s perfect). This pink doll (that your child will name) is adorable and super soft for a baby′s delicate hands to hold and play with! She is the perfect first doll for a baby (or a toddler)!

versus the new after description:

EVERYTHING IS BETTER IN PINK!

Great Core Training (and super fun) for the little ones! The Rody Horse is soft and easy to ride. It is made of super-strong, latex-free vinyl, and inflates according to the size and weight of the child with a hand or foot pump. And it is a very cute toy.

Why our Child-Experts Love It

Our physical therapist, Deanie, loves the Rody because it′s great at strengthening the core (stomach), helping with balance and getting kids to be more aware of their surroundings as they bounce around.

Overall, we tested lots of bouncing toys & rocking horses and Rody is the best…because it′s an attractive, well-made blow-up horse that is totally unique and great for a child′s physical development.

Use it with the base, and it′s a new spin on the rocking horse! Without the base it is a super fun bouncing toy great for balancing and outdoor play. Parents love Rody too because hey, he′s not too bad to look at when not in use!

eBeanstalk.com, knew it needed a more time efficient way to rewrite several thousand product descriptions if they were going to be ok for the critical holiday season. On my advice they agreed to participate in a business impact research study that I conducted along with Jay Baer and Pelin Thorogood. During the time of the study, they boosted search engine traffic by 27 percent, and conversion to sale by 17 percent on product pages that were optimized with search data leveraging a new tool called InboundWriter. InboundWriter brought the search and social research of the valuable customer words into the writing workflow and saved them time from doing the keyword research for each product before they began to write. Bottom line, it produced great SEO results with the minimum time commitment they needed. Anything that can product results and really save you time is critical.

Their effort also impacted their PPC as well.  Paid search impressions, meanwhile, rose 45 percent without any confirmed additional increases in spend, which the study authors attributed to a higher Google Adwords Quality Score because of Google’s increased factoring of landing page quality.

Have you had enough time to test and improve all your landing pages?

Why don’t people test? Some don’t believe in it but I think the majority do even if they don’t follow through. However,  I think it is the same reason many of us know what we should do to be healthy but still eat fast food and don’t find the time to exercise. It’s all about convenience.

Sure the tools are out there to test (many free and low cost ones) but we are resistant because of how long it takes to create and setup the test then to wait until the test runs and produces a statistically significant result. So I’ll often ask people – are you doing at least some PPC ad testing? Unfortunately many are not even doing that.

Shane Quigley, CEO at Epiphany Solutions said this past week:

“Advert testing is critical to the continuous improvement of an Adwords campaign. It’s a reasonable bet that many of your competitors are testing new adverts, and hence improving their click through rates and conversion volumes over time.

Where do you think those clicks and sales are coming from?

If your competitors are steadily increasing their click through rate, and you aren’t, your own CTRs are likely to drop steadily over time, even if your adverts remain the same.

And with that is likely to come a gradually reducing Quality Score, leading to higher cost per clicks or lower positions. It’s like standing on a down-escalator: the only way to stay in the same place is to keep trying to move up.”

So find tools like Omniture’s Search Center, Acquisio or for small businesses WordWatch and automate as much as you can of your PPC management efforts. Then get some help from a crowdsourcing company like BoostCTR, that uses it’s network to write and test ads against your existing ads (and you only pay if their new ads beat yours). Because no one has enough time to continuously rewrite and test their ads.

Then go and work on those landing pages to get the most return on your time spent. Or are your pages starting to show some rot and spoilage?

Disclosure: I am advisor for both InboundWriter and BoostCTR.

We came up with 5Rs of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to demystify the process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This 7 1/2 minute video interview with Dr. Ralph Wilson from Web Marketing Today covers how content on your site must be (1) Relevant, (2) build your Reputation, (3) Remarkable, (4) Readable, and (5) of sufficient Reach.

Men dread these moments: my wife’s errand was to go to the drugstore and pick up…diapers. My little guy was on his last one. I was ready to get him his Pampers when I was stymied by the store selection. The sale was nearly lost!

As I stood looking at the row of diapers, all I could see was Pampers Cruisers with Dry Max. My mission was to return with Pampers Baby Dry. No husband ever wants to return with the wrong diapers. Caution reminded me that there was some issue with these, so I called my wife and she was pretty adamant about not buying them because of a recall months earlier. I told her to search online for an update because it was all that was available and at the late hour I was shopping, there weren’t many other options.

So while I waited on the phone, my wife did a couple of searches on Google:

• Is the dry max recall issue fixed?
• Are pampers dry max safe now?

She checked out one of her favorite sites, BabyCenter, and of course hit P&G’s Pampers website. What did she find out? Zilch!

All she found was content related to the original recall in May: how some kids reacted to the Dry Max ingredient and one person asking recently about the issue with no response from Pampers. If the company did answer it somewhere it sure didn’t show up anywhere in her searches. And if I wasn’t willing to take the risk that my son wouldn’t react, I had to be willing to go driving around to try to find the Baby Dry option. Otherwise, Matthew was going to start potty training really early!

I can understand not wanting to highlight that your product was ever recalled, but if someone is searching if something is safe for their baby, trust me, that content better be found.

What would you do if you were Pampers?

Peek-a-Product

Another strange search event happened to me the other day. We wanted to buy our niece a game off her wish list, but it was selling out everywhere. So I figured I would try to search for it on Walmart.com.

So I go to the site and in its internal search engine I type in the game “hedbanz.” What do I get as a search result? A dead end.

However, if you go to Google and type in “walmart.com hedbanz” you get to the company’s product page, which tells you the item is out of stock. This wasn’t a big surprise, but it sure was a surprise to find a dead end search results page on Walmart’s website. Tell me the product is out of stock and at least offer me some alternatives.

The same thing happens when I search for old models of electronics or similar stuff. They get rid of the page, so you bounce right off the website. Why don’t they take you to an information page that can offer the visitor information about the product that may currently exist and with some possibly updated alternatives? For example, if I tell you how much I enjoyed my Sony DSC-W80, you might go to search for this outdated product but you’ll find little or no information and no guidance as to what model or models have taken over for it and why it was liked so much. The reviews would all tell you how quick the camera is, but the product description never highlighted the fast refresh rate it offered.

I know it takes work to maintain these pages, but it can be worth it. Oh, and of course Amazon maintains the page and let’s you know there is a newer version available. Do you just want to leave all the sales for Amazon?

Are you making sure your search strategy offline and online, internal and external, outlasts your customers’ memory?

Google is a money making machine; that is why it has tremendous influence in the online ecology. Google has a lot to teach the world about relevance, credibility, value & user experience. However, Google isn’t a training company; it derives more than 90% of its revenues from advertising. It’s fascinating that Google makes most of its money from advertisers (sellers) but is forced, like every media company, to think primarily about the experience of its audience (buyers).

When buyers “buy naturally,” and sellers “sell effortlessly” you have the ideal human-computer interaction. Interaction occurs in a non-linear system that delivers exactly what prospective buyers need, when they need it, so they can accomplish their goals in the manner most comfortable to them. That’s a user experience we (everyone from IAs to designers and even marketing folks) can all buy into if our interests were truly aligned. Google needs to train advertisers to do a better job while maintaining its revenues. So how is Google “training” advertisers?  With sticks, not carrots.

Quality Score: The Grand Equalizer

Theoretically at least, advertisers and searchers interests should be aligned. After all, an advertiser pays for an ad placement based on context. If Company A is advertising for widgets, when people search for widgets they should be able sell tons of widgets. That’s the theory. In practice, the user experience of paid ads is tragically broken; just go ahead and see how many paid searches send you to a home page or a generic landing page. That hurts Google‘s reputation for relevance. Google suffers when advertisers fail to deliver a good user experience. Google’s solution to this problem is Quality Score (“QS”).  QS acts like a tax for those advertisers too lazy, too structurally rigid or just too misinformed to deliver relevant answers to searchers queries.

QS is based on an algorithm that scores the value of the user experience the advertiser is creating from clicking on the ad to the target page. QS weights the value of a bid in the auction for ad placement and forces the advertisers delivering the worst user experience to pay more than those with better user experiences competing for the same query. The penalties are substantial; we’ve seen advertisers penalized more than 60% of their paid advertising budget; sometimes they weren’t even aware.

Google’s Enforcing Great Experiences

Bryan and I have been thinking a lot about Google’s Adwords program, QS and it’s consequences. It’s encouraging us to think that designers, developers, content creators and marketers may wind up on the same page someday soon.

Substantial penalties piled on top of large budgets have a way of forcing even those most entrenched in status quo to cat. You might also find it as encouraging as we do if we explain how we perceive the difference between conversion — which is mechanical — and persuasion that is based on a holistic user experience.

Conversion has only recently become the must-have piece of the pie. You could see it gaining interest when Call To Action, our second book, hit the NY Times bestseller list in 2006. In the last few years it’s become mainstream. When we started our former company in 1998 we never imagined that it would take so long. Unfortunately we’re not all on the same page yet.

The ability to achieve truly dramatic improvements in conversion rates still requires a shift in “conventional” thinking. Design teams need to understand that while the goal may be conversion, the practice must be persuasion.

Conversion is all about “the click.” We all understand the macro-level conversion, which is the business’s site objective. But it is important to realize that conversion also takes place at the micro-level — every single relevant click pulls the user deeper into the buying decision process. It’s imperative for sites to persuade prospects with each and every click.

Knowing What To Do Is Not the Same as Being Presented A Reason Why

Conversion is what the user does; it’s the “take action” part of the buying decision process. At the macro-level, the visitor converts from prospect to buyer. Helping prospects convert involves making it easier for them to buy by getting out of their way. Getting out of the way usually entails a copy, usability, or information architecture adjustment.

As we worked with clients in the early days of our business, we began to realize we could remove the obstacles to conversion, but that would only take us so far. If conversion is fundamentally about completing your linear scenarios, and people rarely go about accomplishing their goals in a linear fashion – how are you designing to address the buying process behavior of the majority of these non-linear prospects?

Consider this example: A site selling seminars, a complex selling scenario successfully funnels a majority of its traffic to a registration form, but few prospective attendees who land on that page complete the form and click through. The page rejection rate is staggering. Thinking they have a conversion problem, the company performs a variety of A/B tests on the form page with little success. Nothing they do to “fix” the conversion problem yields significantly improved results. They imagine themselves at a conversion dead-end.

In this situation, the problem isn’t always the form; assuming the seminar is a good one it’s the scenario visitors participate in before they reach the form. Perhaps prospective attendees haven’t acquired enough information or developed sufficient confidence to feel comfortable completing registering yet. Hopefully they would realize that this linear sales process is undermining their prospective attendees’ non-linear buying decision process – the  site is failing to persuade before it attempts to convert.

Persuasion is about meeting the buying needs of your audience. It’s a non-linear, multi-branched, integral part of your selling process – you present relevant information for your buyers in a way that suits you as the seller and hopefully allows you to make the case for buying from you.

Non-linear scenarios are the ones visitor segments create as they navigate your website. In this type of scenario we measure conversion differently, from where people enter to where they complete the intended scenario and whether or not they hit our key value pages.

Improving an Average Conversion Rate Produces Average Results

The goal is to focus on cumulative conversion rates for the website instead of simply an average conversion rate. This is accomplished by explicitly planning these non-linear scenarios, or persuasive design. When we dissect the buying process into its component parts for each persona, then measure those micro-conversions in the click-stream, not only can we better understand how well we are persuading but we can also segment our conversion rates by persona segment.

Persuasion is the next step in conversion rate marketing’s evolutionary chain; it’s the stage where we evolve beyond primitive relevance and weave into the user experience a compelling force that delights users. You may clear every last one of your conversion hurdles, but you will still face the question of how you move your prospects from click to click, how you orchestrate persuasive momentum.

Building persuasive, persona-based scenarios that allow prospects to “buy naturally” is the only way to achieve the dramatic results that are possible when you think beyond conversion.

From a conversion perspective, the designer now asks, “How do I build a single pipeline, or experience, that gets me the highest conversion rate?” From a persuasion perspective, the designer will ask, “How do I build multiple experiences that give me the highest conversion rates overall? It’s the difference between trying to increase your conversion rate from 2% to 4% (a 100% increase) and imagining what small percentage of all your visitors you will have to write off because they are simply “unconvertible.” Reach for only 4% or 100% of those intending to buy?

The Future of User Experience Driven by an Algorithm

The future is not about optimizing conversion, nor about maximizing conversion, it’s about spectacular user experiences that convert effortlessly from the users point-of-view. We are among the small community advocating that point-of-view for years but that future will most likely be driven not by people like us but rather by how an algorithm determines the quality of user experience. We’re feeling confident change is on the way and if it wasn’t for Google’s algorithm you might call that naïve.

Join us Thursday, August 26 at 1:30pm ET for a webinar with UIE – Produce a More Persuasive Site: Where Design & Marketing Meet.

[standing up] My name is Bryan and I am a screenshot addict.

When I fall off the wagon, it happens every so often, I pick a keyphrase and start clicking through PPC ads and their landing pages taking screenshots of the entire experience. It’s hard to imagine how often the experience from keyword to ad to landing page is broken. I fight the urge to call them, yell at them, and beg them to stop throwing away money. I don’t do it; but it’s so tempting.

After a few weeks or months pass the same advertisers, the smarter ones it turns out, drop those ads or pause them because their Quality Score is too low.  I can just hear their internal discussions as they analyze their metrics and rationally conclude that keyphrase X doesn’t convert for us.

(Maybe we should start the Internet Marketing Darwin Award for PPC ads.)

No, no, no, no, no! It’s not the keyword’s fault.

Keywords don’t fail to convert!!! It’s us who fail to convert visitors for that keyword.

Do or did you believe the keyphrase you chose is relevant to your business? If it is, then it’s  your responsibility is to show every visitor how that keyphrase is relevant to their needs. Every visitor that comes to your site is not completely unique. They have various, but mostly foreseeable,  motivations persuading them to buy and various foreseeable objections that would keep them from buying. Ask yourself:

• What is their intent in using those keywords?
• How does your PPC ad address the intent for all the keywords (and potential search queries) in your adgroup?
• What need or desire are they trying to fulfill?
• What is their goal?
• How do we align our goals to meet theirs?

PPC ads are just like tapping someone on the shoulder. PPC ads are only meant to grab attention not to convert. If you want to convert your visitor you need to work on the rest of the experience (the conversation) beyond the click.

Do you make any money when a visitor just clicks your ad? No. I don’t think anybody does.

So instead of thinking of PPC as pay-per-click start thinking of it as pay-per-conversation.

Devote some resources to optimizing your conversations.

How to Get Started Optimizing your Keyword Marketing

1. The first thing you need to do is bucket your keyphrases. Start with the first 100 or so top phrases that drive traffic to your website. For each one of those classify the terms by phase in the buying process. Does the keyphrase apply in the early, middle or late stage of the buying process?

If the term is driving traffic to your site but not really relevant to your business put it in a disqualified bucket for now.

For example: Someone is planning to buy a new television set. Early in their buying process they might use phrases like LCD tvs, best LCD tv, or LCD tv reviews. As they progress to the middle stage you might see keyphrases like compare Sharp and Sony LCDs, LCD tv 1080 dpi and then move on to specific models in the late stages like Sony KDL-52XBR6.

2. Define and realign your goals with your visitors. Would you expect every person you went out on a date with to marry you at the end of the first date? So why do we expect every keyword to convert visitors to our ultimate goal, the sale or the lead? Our job is to get them there, but based upon their buying preferences, they may not be able to move any faster than they are prepared to.

Start planning micro-goals along the way to your macro-goal (sale or lead). Someone earlier in their buying process might not be ready to commit on their first visit. Plan smaller milestones or micro-goals that may lead that person to convert at a later point in their process.

Why don’t many more early or middle stage landing pages have some easy way to capture a visitor’s email address with some kind of offer? I wish I knew.

If your web pages were sales people, how many of them would you fire or at least get trained?

Don’t pay for a keyphrase or a date if your only expectation is a full commitment at the end.  You need to romance them and show them all your best moves. (Warning – this is conversion advice and it works but I’m no dating expert, just ask my wife.)

Some examples: Maybe you can offer them a buyer’s guide download, a coupon for their first time purchase, an offer to see a webinar about how to choose the product/service they are considering or a price alert notification if this item goes on sale.

Every keyphrase should have a goal that is in alignment with the visitor’s stage in their buying process.

3. Measure your success and build confidence. Respect and support your customer’s journey along their buying process by pulling them along instead of trying to push them to commit too fast. That is the friction that is caused by your sales process colliding with, instead of aligning with, their buying process. This is what creates cognitive dissonance. What you need to build is confidence. Your visitors need confidence that you are there to support their buying process and confidence in your ability to address all their needs and wants in order to convert visitors at all stages.

Start tracking and evaluating your keyphrases and landing pages by how well they support moving visitors through the buying process.  Analyze these micro-goals and continuously optimize the experience to move further and further along so that you keep them on target. Every step closer to the macro-goal is a success, every visit that bounces is a failure.

Please let me know what is stopping you from taking these steps right now?

We want it simple!

Given a choice, human beings choose simple over complicated virtually every time.

Searching with Google is simple. You type in a few words and Google delivers the most relevant results.

So, what could be simpler than Google pay-per-click advertisements? People search for stuff, you craft a 95-character advertisement with a URL based on that search, you make a bid telling Google how much that searcher is worth to you, searchers click on your ad and go to its URL, and only then does Google get paid. That’s simple!

It’s so simple and powerful that it’s addictive.

Making things simple is hard work. Nobody does a better job of that than Google. That’s why in 2010, Google will sell well over $20 billion in PPC (define) advertisements.

Google’s PPC platform is a marvel of simplicity. The price of that simplicity is high. In reducing the inherent complexity, the opportunity to fine-tune becomes hidden, practically lost. Simplicity is a large part of what makes Google’s business model so great.

If you want it complicated, more powerful, and enhanced through the API to make your PPC efforts more efficient, that’s completely available, as long as you’re prepared to dig.

If you want it simple, then you overpay.

Thus, simplicity acts like a tax.

You could easily be paying 20 to 60 percent of your Google PPC budget to the “secret simple tax.” That was the case for one of our audit clients with a six-figure monthly PPC budget who was overpaying by over 50 percent. That’s right, millions of dollars could have been better invested if they realized that simple simply costs.

The secret simple tax affects small, medium, and large clients.

The secret simple tax affects in-house and agency clients.

The secret simple tax affects everyone who thinks of PPC as simple.

Google’s pay-per-click advertisement platform is not simple. It’s mindnumbingly complex. It’s hard and it’s humbling.

Can you handle the truth?

The truth is that Google’s PPC advertisement platform is simple to use but hard to master.

Our friends include some of the smartest, most up-to-date search marketers on the planet. We picked their brains when we started seeing quality score drastically affect our clients. We all considered ourselves smart, but our ignorance was astonishing. Every obvious question brought up at least seven less obvious follow-up questions. The complexity of the platform is profound, and when you overlay the complexity of a business’ products, services, customers, semantics, competitors, internal politics, and budgets, it makes your head hurt.

It can make you feel like a simpleton.

So, should you throw your hands up in the air, give up, and pay Google’s secret simple tax?

Heck no! Repeat after me: “We won’t pay that stinking tax no more!”

Hopefully you’re prepared to replace unconscious incompetence with conscious incompetence. Don’t worry, that’s a great thing. If you don’t understand why, then learn about the Four Stages Of Competence.

There are seven indications that you may be paying Google’s secret simple tax:

1. You favor audience reach instead of focusing on messaging relevance for every query
2. You favor audience reach instead of targeting, qualifying, and excluding searches
3. You don’t know how Google calculates your Ad Rank or the true impact of Google Quality Score
4. You favor brand messaging instead of focusing on the searcher’s buying intent
5. You organize using keywords instead of Ad Groups
6. You have many keywords but much fewer landing pages
7. You don’t constantly test ads and landing pages

There’s a lot more to say on the subject, I’ve said more here, here, and here. I won’t even start to ask what you’re measuring.

Are you willing to be wrong? Are you willing to question what you’ve been doing? Are you willing to unlearn what you think you know? Are you ready to handle the complexity of the world’s most powerful ad platform?

Or perhaps, I’m overcomplicating it all and you have everything under control.

Jeffrey, my brother and business partner, and I hope that you’re truly as smart as you think you are. We wish every one of our readers the best of luck in all their endeavors.

P.S. If you’d like to calculate your secret simple tax, download a spreadsheet here.

In my previous life, I was a social worker who helped mentally ill and chemically addicted adults on their road to recovery. I see many of the same symptoms of addictive behavior in too many pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers today. After all, there’s something terribly seductive about the simplicity of creating a PPC (define) ad; within moments your ad shows up and gets you clicks. As the high continues, you crave more, adding more keywords and new campaigns to keep increasing your dosage. However, sooner or later you realize that you have to put more and more into it to keep getting the same effects. Like every other addiction, it eventually catches up with you. The return becomes more limited; you need lots more to keep up your addiction, often times at the risk of pain.

As in all addictions, the first step to recovery is recognizing you have a problem. I often find most advertisers I speak with have a feeling something isn’t right, but they aren’t really sure what the issue is. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve performed PPC audits for clients to show them where things were failing. Nevertheless, to help people get over this addiction required us to find some simpler and faster ways to give advertisers the intervention they need to get help and recover. So, next week I’ll be offering a new workshop, PPC Addiction: The Road to Recovery, in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City.

To make sure the content would jolt attendees into recovery mode, I’ve been testing it on some former clients and friends. Let me share with you the letter one of my friends and former clients sent his agency (I changed the names to protect the guilty) after our 30 minute conversation:

I just had a long conversation with Bryan Eisenberg about some PPC audits they’ve been doing for clients. He said that a few months ago, Google really changed the game, and it’s all about Quality score, and it’s no longer just about bids. [Author note: If you don't understand this relationship, you should watch Google Chief Economist Hal Varian explain it.] And clients are contacting him to look at their accounts because they find themselves paying MUCH more for MUCH less.

So we pulled a few reports to see how our account is doing. The results are a bit frightening. Yet, they give some validation to a question that has been nagging me, “Why does PPC seem to be getting worse?”

1.) Conversion Per Month – As you recall, we stopped bidding on brand related keywords in Feb 2010 as an experiment. The PPC conversions went way down. No surprise there. Thankfully, my thesis has been proven correct as overall revenues have stayed the same. Unfortunately, PPC spending has increased without a jump in non-branded conversions!

2.) Impression Share – This shows how many impressions we’re getting for each campaign. Except in our case, our ads are hardly ever showing up. According to Bryan, this is a huge part of what changed in PPC and is directly related to Quality Score.

3.) Quality Score Distribution – We exported all the keywords and their corresponding quality scores, then totaled up the number of occurrences for each number. 7 and above is good. 6 and below is bad. 65% of our keywords are 6 and below. Ouch!

I believe Bryan has uncovered and demonstrated the reason for the numbers going down. In general, the problem – as best as I understand it and am able verbalize it – is that we’re going for “long-tail reach” with broad terms without using enough (any?) negative keywords, and this radically lowers Quality Score over time. Instead, we should be aiming for super-strong relevance using exact matches in small ad groups going to very relevant landing pages.

In addition, we looked at the ad copy, which frankly, has also been nagging at me. Our ads seem to lack keyword relevance and strong value statements. Plus, from what I can tell, very few (if any?) new variations have been tested in the past 12 months.

Joe Smith, you and I have a long history. And I like you very much. But I think I’ve let my personal feelings and faith in you get in the way from drilling deeper into this nagging PPC issue. I’ve sent several emails to you looking for your help to try and figure this out – and MAKE PPC WORK BETTER. Yet nothing your team has done has moved the needle in a positive direction.

This brings us to a fork in the road. Is your agency interested in keeping my company as a client? If yes, I need to know that you’re interested in doing everything it takes to improve Quality Score; starting with changing from broad to exact match on keywords, adding negative keywords, and re-arranging Ad Groups.

If not, then I’m afraid I’ll have to discontinue service with your agency immediately.

The first step to recovery is recognizing and admitting you have a problem. I think my friend has certainly done that. If you recognize you have a problem, you’ll be on your path to focus on improving relevance and quality and focused less on reach. Over $10 billion dollars were spent on PPC advertising last year. A portion of that came out of your pocket.

Are you satisfied you’re getting the maximum return on investment from it? Do you find it more and more challenging to continually increase your PPC effectiveness?

P.S. I have 1 Free ticket to give away in each city. If you are interested and can make it to the Boston, Philadelphia or New York event next week let me know in the comments below.

In a couple of weeks, I will be on the road again to help people optimize their Pay Per Click marketing efforts. From July 7-9th, I’ll be in Boston, Philadelphia and New York City for the Online Marketing Summit tour. Here is a description of the PPC Optimization workshop I’ll be doing:

Over $10 Billion dollars were spent on Pay-Per-Click advertising last year. A portion of that came out of your pocket. Are you satisfied you’re getting the maximum return on investment from it? Do you find it more and more challenging to continually increase your PPC effectiveness?

Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian estimates that the average AdWords advertiser sees about $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend. That means that if you have margins of less than 50% on your products, you may be losing money. Only about 2% of Google AdWords advertisers will get the type of return on investment that makes continuing worthwhile. Are you part of that elite group?

PPC management can be costly and overwhelming. Never have 95 characters seemed so simple, yet proven so challenging. In this intensive workshop, you will learn tips, tricks and processes to increase your ROI and make your PPC investments worth continuing.

You’ll learn how to increase your PPC advertising ROI by 3x while mastering:

• The 7 most common PPC mistakes to avoid
• 4 hot metrics you should be monitoring and including in your monthly reports
• A powerful 3 step process to increase Click-Through-Rates (CTR) and relevancy of your ads and landing pages
• How to boost your Quality Score rankings and lower CPC costs
• The simple technique that will make you stand out from your competitors
• A 12-Step process to optimize and improve your PPC management process

Join New York Times bestselling author, Bryan Eisenberg, and Acquisio‘s Internet Marketing Manager, Noran El-Shinnawy, in this fun, fast paced and informative workshop.

I’d love to see you there. You can register today.