Imagine if you could hand-pick competitor’s sites and then have your landing page/ad open up right in front of the visitors’ eyes when they went to any of those web sites.

Talking about pipping someone at the finish line!

This is just one of the advantages that pay-per-view (PPV) marketing has over pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.

In fact, there are a number of reasons why PPV marketing might be your cup of tea:

1. You can target precisely, even to the point of singling out specific web sites to target eg. If you were marketing insurance, you could display your ad in front of geico.com
2. It’s relatively cheap – pay-per-view bids are often far cheaper than pay-per-click bids
3. You can reach millions of people that you may not get in front of otherwise
4. This target audience has specifically opted-in so they are more receptive to the offers
5. There’s no such thing as a Quality Score rating
6. And for affiliate marketers, there is nothing to prevent you direct linking to a merchant’s landing page if you wish
7. You can reach different target audiences beyond Google and other search engines

Now, I’m not saying that PPV marketing takes the place of PPC marketing – not at all.

While I love PPC marketing as a means to target potential customers in volume – it’s not the be-all-and-end-all. No search engine is.

There are other advertising networks out there, with other customers whom I’m not going to reach through Google AdWords, however high my Quality Score and bid prices are.

This article is for those of you who want to place their eggs in more than one basket, and perhaps save some money in the process. Let me introduce you to PPV marketing…

What is Pay-per-view Marketing?

PPV marketing expands your reach into PPV networks that have target audiences in the millions, all of whom have agreed to be shown ads in context with what they’re looking for.

However, it works quite differently to search engine marketing, where the audience is comprised of searchers and web surfers.

A PPV network is comprised of advertisers and target audience, with the PPV network then giving advertisers a means to connect with their target audience.

How it works is that a person downloads software from a provider in exchange for freebies, eg. games, toolbars, screensavers, shopping tools, emoticons, ecards.

This is more commonly known as Adware, but not to be confused with Spyware, which doesn’t have the user’s consent and is usually nefarious or even harmful to the person’s computer.

Adware is not harmful and it’s permission-based, so users ‘opt-in’ so to speak. Because they’re aware of being presented ads, it’s not as intrusive as advertising to someone without invitation.

Also, because the ads are targeted contextually, they usually appear when the person is on a related site or looking for related keywords. It’s a “if you like this, you might like this….” concept of advertising.

Once a person downloads the Adware, they are then part of the PPV networks target audience, and potentially yours.

Who should try PPV Marketing?

I mentioned affiliate marketers just before, however PPV marketing can be used by both affiliate marketers and direct marketers.

PPV marketing is not always suitable for all products and services, although finding out usually requires some testing on one or more networks.

If you’ve got an offer that can be piggy-backed onto another relevant site, again along the lines of “if you like that, then you may like this”, then PPV marketing could be worth a trial.

What type of targeting can you do with Pay-per-view Campaigns

There are usually four different ways you can target an audience (depending on the PPV network):

1. Keywords – specify the keywords relevant to your offer, and what the user may be searching for
2. URLs – list the URLs of sites that you want your ad to appear in front of
3. Categories – specify the category of site that your product may be relevant to, eg. Shopping
4. Run of the network (RON) – very broad approach that markets to the whole network (not usually recommended)

For the uninitiated, I’d recommend starting with URL targeting, then once you’re proficient, expand onto keyword-targeting and maybe category-targeting, depending on your offer.

URL-targeting is one of the most exciting capabilities with PPV marketing. Here’s a scenario of what you can do:

Let’s say you’re marketing travel insurance – you could:

• Compile a list of keywords relevant to travel insurance and people looking to travel – create a keyword-targeted campaign for anyone searching on those keywords or visiting contextually relevant sites
• Create a broader category-targeted campaign based on Travel and Accommodation
• Compile a list of URLs, then create a URL-targeted campaign
• These URLs could be competitors’ sites or similar sites to your offer eg. travel insurance sites. They could also be sites where people would go that would be interested in what you have to offer, eg. people making travel bookings may be interested in travel insurance
• By choosing the top ranked free and paid listings on Google, these are likely to be sites that are highly trafficked, highly relevant and successful
• When any of those travel web sites are visited by someone who’s joined to the PPV network, your ad or landing page appears in front of them
• Eg. a traveller visits www.insuremytrip.com or www.tripology.com and is also presented with the option of your web site
• Conversion rates can be higher with URL-targeted campaigns because you are offering them another product that is directly relevant and helpful to what they’re looking for

NB: Porting PPC campaigns from your search engine accounts is not recommended. Treat PPV marketing as a different beast, with different research, ads, campaign set-up, reporting and tactics required.

How do you sign up as a PPV Marketer?

PPV Networks are very similar to PPC networks, although usually there’s less to fill out.

You can sign-up by going to the home page of the network, then clicking on the registration link. You’ll then be able to fill in your business details, billing details, initial deposit if required and occasionally provide proof of identity.

With many networks, you can be signed up and good to go within a matter of minutes.

Different Pay-Per-View Networks

Here are some of the main networks to check out for your campaigns:

TrafficVance

TrafficVance serves ads to people who’ve installed their Game Vance software, so it can be successful for the younger demographic, although the vast majority of their 50 million or so users are aged between 25-44.

According to TrafficVance, the majority of users earn in excess of $100+ a year, have a college education and are married with kids, most of them are also online every day. You can also target international traffic.

It is one of the most popular PPV traffic sources due to the audience size, so the competition and the bid prices are a little higher than the others (although still lower than PPC bids).

The user interface is more developed than some other PPV networks, with customer service to match. The main downside is that you are required to open an account with a minimum of $1,000 deposit.

Media Traffic

Media Traffic serves ads to people who’ve installed their Vomba screensaver product.

Traffic volumes and correspondingly bid prices can also be higher, though generally not as high or as competitive as TrafficVance. This is a slightly older demographic to TrafficVance as well as being US and international. The initial deposit is lower, currently only $200 to start advertising.

LeadImpact (formerly Zango)

Lead impact is another of the bigger networks behind Traffic Vance. For the traffic volume, the bid prices aren’t too bad. This targets an older demographic of 35+ with a majority being female. The minimum set-up deposit for LeadImpact is $200, the same as Media Traffic.

AdOn Network

AdOn gets serves ads to people with the My Geek Shopping Toolbar installed. It has lower traffic volume, and accordingly cheaper due to less competition. Ads are also shown in pop under windows, rather than pop ups and you’ve got different options besides pop-unders, such as banner ads, full page ads and search listings.

DirectCPV

DirectCPV are still a growing network, currently 12m strong, mainly from the US and Brazil, although other countries are steadily growing. The traffic volumes are on the increase and the bid prices are quite good.

The new interface and the tools available are also a lot friendly. DirectCPV only requires $100 deposit to get started.

Linksador

Linksador is currently in beta phase, so it’s quite a small network, but it’s one to watch. There’s not a huge amount of traffic at the moment, which is not usually an indicator of how well a network converts.

This does mean that there’s not a lot of competition either at the moment and the service and approvals are faster.

Adoori

Adoori is another growing network that offers pop-unders and contextual advertising. It’s fairly cheap with some good starting packages. You can target by keywords,URLs and geographically because they have an international user base. The minimum deposit is $100.

The following networks are commonly referred to as pay-per-view, however they work slightly differently to the traditional PPV networks listed above. Instead of serving ads based on Adware being installed, they serve ads based on the publisher’s web site content.

• Clicksor
• AdBrite
• Megaclick
• CPVMarketplace

Pay-per-view Ads

Each of these networks offers a variety of different ads, ranging from text, banners, toolbars to simply opening your landing page directly in front of the viewer.

• Pop-ups – these aren’t the usual garden-variety pop-ups. A new browser window is actually opened on top of the web site, usually contextually based when a match is made between the user’s browsing location and your targeted keyword, category or URL. Pop up blockers don’t stop these due to the technology used.
• Pop-unders – while they sound similar to pop-ups, pop-unders appear in your bottom tab where the “Start” button is, so it appears like a minimized window. A person might bring it up straight away or later on.
• Banner Ads – size may vary for display ads across networks.
• Full Page Ads – this could be an ad or your landing page opening in front of them.
• Text Link Ads – these are simply text ads that link to your landing page.
• Custom Sliders – These are like pop-ups, but they slide in from a particular area on the page. The user can then click on it or if they don’t, it disappears are 30 seconds or so.
• Toolbar ads – custom toolbar ads.
• Mobile Ads – ads specifically for mobile devices with full html browser capabilities.
• Inline Ads – these are hyperlinked keywords within the text, that then open to an ad.

This adds a new element to split-testing, because not only will you be testing different ad copy, you’ll be monitoring which types of ads perform the best for you on each PPV network.

Tracking, Testing & Optimizing PPV Campaigns

Each PPV network and campaign should be tested on its own merits.

PPV Networks have their own reporting, which can vary in quality. For any marketing, it’s great to have an independent report that gives you the conversions vs spend, so you can measure ROI properly.

Ideally, you also want to see which ads and landing pages are performing the best, so you can improve your PPV campaigns. Similar to PPC, you want to keep increasing views, click through rates and conversions.

Pay-per-view networks do allow you to insert tracking tokens in your destination URLs, so if you’re already using another tracking tool, it’s usually easy to integrate.

Different PPV networks will perform better or worse for different offers that you promote. Eg. some offers perform well on Lead Impact, but the same offer loses money on Media Traffic.

Success or failure on one network, doesn’t mean you’ll get the same result on another network. Each network has different software installed by different users and new people for you to market to. However, please test each network on its own merits.

To optimize your PPV campaigns means adjusting your targeting. For example, you could:

1. Try another demographic
2. Try a different network
3. Change your frequency capping
4. Cull the targets (either keywords or URLs) that don’t work and more aggressively promoting those that do. If you see URLs that are getting loads of traffic but not converting then get rid of them.
5. Use a different landing page – Direct linking the landing page or dedicated landing page (depending on what was tested)

Similar to Google’s Content Network, you can take the most successful URL/s, create a dedicated campaign for that URL, then create ads and landing pages targeted for that site, to increase your conversions yet again.

Pay-per-view Marketing with SpeedPPC

Because many PPV networks offer a bulk upload tool, you can use SpeedPPC to smoothly and quickly upload your pay per view campaigns.

SpeedPPC has a list of established PPV campaigns that you can target, and if you come across any more that aren’t listed, you can easily create a custom output to suit that particular network as well.

PPV marketing is new to SpeedPPC version 4.5, so SpeedPPC members should check out the Members Area for the tutorial video on how to create four PPV campaigns simultaneously and save even more time!

PPV Marketing Summed Up

If you’re already familiar with PPC networks, you’ll adapt to PPV marketing very easily.

Pay-per-view networks can be a very exciting and profitable medium to market through. Just remember that each network is very different, and more so than different search engines.

Test carefully and measure your profits, comparing different networks (audiences), different ads and different landing pages to find the sweet spot for your offer.

Over the past 6 or 7 years, I’ve consumed a lot of training materials on Pay Per Click advertising. I’ve seen some really great stuff and a lot of not so great stuff too.

One thing that has bugged me is the constant rehashing of the same material. Just to get everyone up to speed. However, I felt like most people who’ve done a fair bit of PPC in the past would already know 90% of the course material. It’s the 10% they don’t know that they are buying the course for.

Which is why we’ve created a 14 part (2 week) Advanced PPC Bootcamp.

We set out to create a course that tries to switch these numbers around. So giving you more of that 10% part, and less of the stuff you already know.

Each video is anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour plus long. We’ve designed them to be thorough and cover the material with specific examples. However, we’ve tried to ensure that they are fluff free and cut to the chases as quickly an efficiently as possible.

These are designed for intermediate to advanced users.

Tomorrow we’re putting together a big package to celebrate SpeedPPC turning 3. We’re planning on giving this course away during this birthday week as a free bonus (plus some other stuff). Look out for more details soon!

Here is the course outline if you are interested.

Day 1: Advanced keyword research techniques to find profitable keywords with lower competition

Learn what makes a profitable keyword and how to find money-spinning keywords that reach the customers that are ready to buy from you. This in-depth video will give you a guide to different keyword methods, including a practical demonstration on keyword research. See how you can multiply your long tail keywords in SpeedPPC with its powerful keyword mixing features. You’ll learn simple techniques that you can apply across any keyword tool. Find out what pitfalls to avoid with your keyword research and come out ahead!

Day 2: How to improve Google’s Quality Score to decrease costs and increase ROI

Google AdWords Quality Score is the single most powerful influence on whether your campaign makes it or not. With a poor quality score rating, your campaign will be stopped in its tracks. Find out the different types of quality scores, how they’re calculated for Search and Content Networks and most importantly, how you can harness it to significantly cut your costs and increase your return on investment. If your Quality Score card is currently low or needs improving, then pick up some practical tips on how you can get back into Google’s ‘good books’. Make or break your campaigns now.

Day 3: How to split-test your pay per click ads for peak performance

Split-testing your pay per click ads has never been easier! If you’re not sure how to split-test PPC ads how many to split-test or what to split-test, then watch this video and get a comprehensive guide to split-testing, You’ll see how easily you can start testing your ads using SpeedPPC and AdWords. You’ll also become skilled at analysing the relationships between your account statistics so you can diagnose the root of the problem and fix it straight away. Start testing like a pro in less than a hour.

Day 4: Advanced ad strategies to position your business for better profits

Which ad position would you like? After this video, you’ll be able to work out which ad rankings are most profitable for you, then target these positions specifically. Invest more money in the highest turnover positions and spend less money on the positions that are not as profitable. Using a combination of Google AdWords and Google Analytics, this tutorial will show you how to create a special custom report to give you information that is not readily available, then use it to set position preferences in AdWords. Rank consistently where the best profits are.

Day 5: Insider’s Guide to combining SEO and PPC in a powerful, integrated strategy

Whether you’re an SEO Expert, a PPC Guru, or neither, you’ll pick up straightforward tips that you can combine to benefit both your organic rankings and your PPC performance. While still powerful separated, this video shows you how to integrate your strategy and maximize the joined forces. Spend more time at the top of the search results, while saving time and effort getting there. If you’re interested in dominating more search engine real estate, this video will show you how.

Day 6: Advanced landing page techniques to boost your quality score and conversion rates

This video is a great all-round guide to creating powerful landing pages that pave the way for more conversions. See what makes a great landing page and gather tips on the content and design of your landing page. Learn what to avoid and what to include on a PPC landing page. Get the rundown on Google’s Landing Page and Web Site Quality Guidelines and how to implement them for greater success. Also learn about dynamic landing pages and how to create them, so you can promote your quality scores and increase conversion rates. Get your PPC landing pages converting now.

Day 7: Powerful techniques to build targeted email lists for long-term profit

A common saying among salespeople is that “you’re only as good as last month’s sales figures”. This can be a precarious way to run your business. Wouldn’t you like to have long-lasting profits that keep increasing? This video is all about creating long-term profits that grow and grow. Discover what list-building can do for you and learn how to build targeted email lists that you can sell to, time and time again. Learn a variety of methods to qualify your prospects, so you can market to high quality lists that want to hear all about your products or services. Start building your email list now with these clever tips.

Day 8: Essential Guide to PPC display advertising on the Content Network

What’s one of the quickest ways to get brand new customers that would never have found you otherwise? Google’s Content Network of course! Learn the ins and outs of advertising with a variety of different ad formats on Google’s Content Network. This video will give you a guide to what the Content Network is, how quality score differs for Content, why targeting is different for Content and how to set-up targeted campaigns directed at Content Network partners. Not sure how to measure it? You’ll also be given a guide on different reports to use so you can optimize your campaigns effectively. As well as setting-up your campaigns, you’ll fast-forward your knowledge to pick up different tricks of the trade to making money on the Content Network. Expand your reach and learn about Content Network marketing now.

Day 9: Get what you really need to know out of Google’s reports

How many of Google AdWords’ reports do you use? This video will take you through each report and the customizations available. You’ll learn which report to use for what, including a quick list guide that gives you the best reports to suit each purpose, so you can spend more time doing what’s important, instead of chasing data. By the end of this video, you’ll know where to look and how to troubleshoot account problems, uncovering information that may have been hidden from you before. Get the most out of Google’s free reporting now.

Day 10: Advanced Google Analytics – How to customize your analytics and turn it into more income

Ever wanted information that you thought Google didn’t give you? Chances are it’s there, and you just need to learn how to dig it out. Enter Advanced Google Analytics. Learn how you’re really performing with customized analytics reporting, segmentation and filtering. Following a quick introduction to what Google Analytics has to offer, you’ll then be taken on a tour through setting up your Google Analytics account so it returns the information you need to generate more income. If you’re new to Google Analytics or an experienced user that wants to get more out of it, tune into this video for more.

Day 11: How to conquer Local Search for your business

Local Search has been around for some time, but never before has there been so many ways to take advantage of it. Given that in 2009, there were 400 million local searches made per month, you should learn what local search is, the different types of local search and how to use it to impact conversions. Use this video to get your business listed for Local Search, learn great tips for local search optimization, and learn how it fits in with your SEO and PPC strategies. Even learn how to take advantage of the new Local Search for Mobile tab in Google. Everything you need to know about Local Search is here in this video.

Day 12: Master mobile marketing in an hour

As we get busier and busier, our lives are lived more on the go with mobile devices providing much of what used to be in home research. Learn all about how you can reach your audience wherever they are and whenever they want you, with mobile marketing. There are a lot of ins and outs with mobile advertising, so this video will take you through keyword research for mobile ads, the different mobile ads in Google, geo-targeting mobile campaigns, how to use ad extensions for mobile, tips on mobile-specific landing pages and how to measure your mobile search performance. It won’t take you long to get across Mobile AdWords marketing with this comprehensive video.

Day 13: Introduction to Pay-Per-View Marketing

Ready to try your hand at something new? We were, so SpeedPPC is now geared for Pay per view marketing across several networks. This video guide will give you a solid introduction to what PPV marketing is, what the differences are, where you can do it and most importantly – how to do it. Similar to Google’s Display Network, PPV marketing is another channel to get your ads in front of the right people. Whether you’re affiliate marketing or marketing your own goods and services, learn more about pay per view and how you can use it to get new leads for your business.

Day 14: How to advertise and optimize on Bing

If you’re not using Bing to its full potential, or not using it at all, then this video is for you. Learn the difference between MSN and Bing, where to sign-up as an advertiser, how to research your campaigns using MSN intelligence and create your campaigns specifically for Bing. You’ll also learn how to use the reports to get actionable data. As part of this video, you’ll also learn more about the current transition as part of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search alliance and how to prepare your Yahoo campaigns for integration with MSN.

In fact, in my web travels, I’ve not seen anywhere else showing this keyword research method.

It’s not even that it’s especially tricky really, just that it’s using many hidden features of Google AdWords’ free keyword tool that the average punter doesn’t know about.

So I’m going to shed some light on these hidden features and more importantly, show you how to get the information you need from them.

This is now my top trick of the trade for getting money-spinning keywords, before and particularly after you start a campaign. I get valuable (and hugely profitable) information from it that I don’t learn from anywhere else.

I recommend including this method in any keyword-based marketing you do, not just pay per click.

I’ll start by taking you through each section, with screenshots. At the end, I’ve also included a video that takes you through a very specific example. You’ll want to read the article in full first, so the video makes perfect sense.

So here goes:

Ideally if you’ve got a Google AdWords account, log-in first or if you don’t, you can still access the tool here.

(NB: There are some differences with the external tool so access it from within your account if you can)

Go to the Opportunities tab and then select Keyword Tool from the top of the tools list.

You'll find the Keyword Tool under Tools in the Opportunities tab.

You’ll be then be looking at a fresh instance of Google’s free keyword tool, which some of you may already be familiar with. If so, you’re about to take a fresh new look at it.

Now start by entering your web site URL into the web site field. It’s best if you use a URL for a site you’re already advertising.

Enter a word, search phrase and/or web site into the search fields.

Google presents you with the usual -- keywords, competition, global monthly searches, local monthly searches and a trend graph like you see here:

Default view in Google's Keyword Research tool

Interesting data -- but useful for anything but traffic estimates? Not really.

So let’s peel our eyes on this one.

Go to the Views button (you’ll see it on the top right of the screenshot above) and choose Customize Columns.

Choose and re-order columns in the Customize window.

I’m going to make this easy, tick “All Columns” -- the first option. (Don’t forget to click save)

I also re-order it so that the four default fields that are ticked above are placed last. This gives me the most important information first.

What you’re now going to see is a wealth of data that if you know how to read right, could make a serious improvement to your bottom line.

Keyword results re-engineered to be more useful.

I’ll run through each piece of data so you can translate it into usable information for your own PPC campaigns and web site.

Extracted from Web Page

If applicable, this tells you which page of the web site Google extracted the data from. This can be very handy for both PPC and SEO purposes; it’ll tell you three things:

1. What pages are strongest organically for particular keywords

From this information, you may then need to strengthen other pages for that keyword, particularly if the search is bringing up a page that you weren’t intending to be a first landing page. Don’t just focus on your home page for keywords and calls to action. Any other page that the search engine could present on a SERP, should be geared for action.

2. What your best PPC landing pages are for the highest quality score

Handily, this field will also tell you which landing page is best matched with the keyword, so you can send your PPC traffic to the most relevant landing page. As well as higher conversions, this is also going to help your Quality Score, which will in turn help raise ad rank and lower bid costs.

No more uncertainty (or manual research) on which page of your site to use for each keyword. Let Google tell you directly and then use SpeedPPC to automate the most targeted campaign based on real life research.

3. Where the gaps or opportunities are

What you may find is that some keyword ideas have no URL in the extracted from web page column.



PPC and SEO opportunity for this search term.

This can highlight an opportunity for you to add that keyword to your website and PPC campaign, and bring in “lost” traffic that you’re missing out on by not covering that keyword.

It’s a fantastic way to find new keywords for both SEO and PPC marketing campaigns.

Ad Share and Search Share

My two favorites are Ad Share and Search Share. Now for this, you do need to have [Exact] Match selected which is near the bottom left hand side of the page. It’s best to have all the match types ticked anyway so you can see the differences across all match types for that keyword. For example, you may find a keyword is being matched on exact match, but there’s even more opportunity with additional phrase matching.

The tool will default to Broad, just make sure you choose Exact and Phrase as well.

Choose all 3 match types for data on all keyword variations.

Here’s what each percentage figure tells you:

Ad Share -- This tells you what percentage of the time you have a Google ad that shows for the keyword.

Search Share -- This tells you what percentage of the time your organic web site ranking appeared on the first page of Google.

So these are all about new opportunities to make money.

Let me give you three useful examples:

1. Your keyword has high ad share but low search share -- PPC ads are showing a high percentage of the time for this keyword. However, the SEO for this keyword could be improved. In doing this, you’ll also improve your quality score for PPC because the landing page will match the keyword better. This is an easy way to reduce bid costs while improving ad position.
2. Your keyword has high search share but low ad share -- This keyword consistently puts your web site on the first page of Google’s search results, but it’s let down by having little or no presence in your PPC campaign. Add this keyword with different match types to your PPC campaign and raise your ad share for even more quality visitors.
3. Your keyword has low ad share and low search share -- If this is a keyword you definitely want in your arsenal, then you’ll need to get to work on adding it to your web site content for SEO improvement and to your PPC campaigns for paid traffic.

Three examples of different ad share and search share

Estimated Avg CPC

As well as identifying opportunities, you also have a guide to how much it will cost you (emphasis on the ‘guide’).

I’ve found Google’s CPC estimates to be a very inaccurate guide quite honestly.

The good news is it tends to err on the side of higher bids than reality -- usually.

Because of so many different variables, but mainly Quality Score, each advertiser’s bid prices for a keyword could be different. Those with poor quality score could be paying steep prices for every keyword, while those with high quality score are enjoying bid costs way below the estimate shown.

Using Google’s keyword tool combined with SpeedPPC gives you added transparency then the power to make positive changes to your quality score and your bank balance.

Advanced Search Filtering

In essence, filtering boosts your targeting ability so it’s well worth using the following filters. You’ll find them under “Advanced Search” when you enter your starting keywords or web site.

Advanced filtering targets your keyword results for better performance.

Geo-targeting -- set the target region and language to get results specific to your target audience. Keywords, spellings, bid prices, search numbers could change dramatically based on “where” you’re looking.

Mobile Search -- if you’re looking for the purposes of mobile advertising, then please make sure you tick this checkbox to find the results targeted for mobile ads, as opposed to broader search engine results.

All Keyword Ideas vs Ideas containing my search terms -- Choosing all keyword ideas will give you a greater breadth of keywords, because you’re not limiting the search results. This can be useful if you need to overhaul your keywords, or are just starting out with your keyword research.

Choosing the second option is useful if you’ve already got certain keywords that are working well and you want to expand on them. Simply enter those keywords and Google will bring you back a list of other ideas that use those performing keywords. It’s also useful if you’re being conservative with your budget and you just want to increase your spend gradually, after finding out what works.

Drop down Filter results by local monthly searches, global monthly searches, competition, estimated average CPC, search share and ad share.

You can filter by all, some or none of these. It depends on what fact-finding mission you’re on.

For example:

• If you want to find lower competition keywords, you can select competition and then tick the checkbox for low and medium.
• If you want high traffic keywords, enter filters for searches and enter in a figure.
• If you’re on a mission to improve your SEO -- choose Search Share and enter in a less than (<) percentage figure.
• If you’re looking for PPC opportunities -- choose Ad Share and enter in a less than (<) percentage figure again.

You can add as many filters as you want, so make use of these to target the results to what you most need to know.

Sorting

As well as filtering, you can also sort your terms alphabetically or by the highest count, ie. How many search terms contain those keywords.



Alphabetical and volume filtering by keywords contained.

You’ll probably get the most mileage out of the highest count so you can add keywords with a strong volume. This will also help you organize your keywords in SpeedPPC to generate hundreds or thousands more long tail search terms.

Categories

You’ll find all the categories the keyword ideas were drawn from highlighted in blue, while the others are grayed out. You can refine your categories further by clicking on the categories and selecting a sub category, particularly if your results are too broad or not in context.

This category list is quite helpful for targeting content placements as well, because you’ll see the categories Google deems as most relevant to your URL or keywords.

Google Insights

Next to each keyword, you’ll see a magnifying glass, which is a shortcut to Google Insights so you can view the trends for that keyword.



Magnifying glass is a quick link to Google Insights to research keywords further.

Click on the magnifying glass and you’ll be taken to a screen like this, where you can target your research even further using the filtering options. This is particularly useful for viewing seasonality and performance over time.



Google Insights will appear with the search term pre-populated and filters ready.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool Summary

You can bet most Google AdWords advertisers don’t use this tool to its full potential. Who can blame them? Most of this is not common knowledge and some features are well hidden from view.

But now you know how to use Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool to maximum effect -- outputting targeted results and knowing how to interpret and use them.

Make sure you include this keyword research method whether you’re creating a brand new campaign, fixing a poor performing campaign, or growing an existing campaign. It’s versatile for all of these purposes. You can even use it to look up a competitor URL, although Google isn’t kind enough to show you the ad share and search share for any accounts but your own.

In the short video, you’ll see a real life example of Google’s Keyword Tool in use. This is a practical tour so you can see where all of the above options can be found to speed up your keyword research. Enjoy!

I was chatting with a Google engineer last week at SMX discussing the future direction of search. As he was talking, the penny dropped.

Perhaps you’ve heard recently that Google officially announced that site speed will soon impact ranking.

I figured this was a little strange. On the whole, most sites load fairly quickly nowadays and as broadband speeds continue to increase around the world my thoughts were that page load speeds would become less of an issue, not more.

After all, if it were about user experience post search results, Google would have implemented this factor long ago when connection speeds were much slower than they are today.

As a result, I kind of didn’t pay much attention to how fast our sites were loading as I didn’t think it was an issue.

However, after talking with the Google rep, I’ve changed my mind. It’s going to be VERY important.


Google Caffeine

The important missing piece of the puzzle is Google “Caffeine”.

This caffeine project has been a huge deal for Google. It represents a massive investment in infrastructure and a big shift away from how they’ve been doing things. As I discovered, a big part of this project is moving to a “Live” index.

What this means in essence is that as soon as you publish a page, they want it in their index for people to find. When I asked this engineer, “How ‘fast’ do you want it?” he replied, “Our aim is the speed of light.” In other words, their goal is instant availability.

This is where site speed comes in. How will they be able to achieve this if each page on all of the sites around the world takes 15-30 seconds to download? The slower your site, the further they will be away from their live index goal. Crawl times will become an increasingly important factor.

So now I believe that site speed is simply an issue that we can no longer ignore. The bottom line is fast sites will be given preference and I know this is true after speaking to one of their top people.


How to get your site fast

As a result, I’ve done a lot of research on how to get our sites blazing fast. Now of course, you’ll want to have a lean, clean, lightweight site that doesn’t carry with it a huge amount of excess data like big unoptimized images. That’s a no-brainer.

However, as most websites use databases these days, along with big JavaScript and CSS files to execute their evolving interactive AJAX components, it’s becoming more difficult to own a REALLY fast site.

Nonetheless, here are a few cool (sort of advanced things) you can do to make your site fly. I would say that 99% of sites are not doing this stuff at the moment so you have a chance dominate them in this area.

These tips will go from easiest to hardest and are WordPress oriented, however the principles apply to any site building platform.


1) Install a caching plug-in for your content management system.

The caching plug-in will create static versions of the content so the site doesn’t need to talk to the database. It just serves up the content as quickly as it possibly can, without changing the URL’s at all.

We use WordPress for almost all our sites and have found the following caching plug-ins to be the best.

1. WP Super Cache
2. W3 Total Cache
3. Hyper Cache

2) Pull JavaScript libraries from the Google Content Distribution Network (CDN).

Lots of sites (especially if they use plug-ins) use common JavaScript libraries like MooTools and JQuery. These are JavaScript files that contain all the magical code that makes your site do all the Ajax type stuff like popping up light box windows, opening menu’s, sliding photos etc.

Unfortunately, these can add a fair bit of size to a page as the JavaScript file has to be downloaded before the page can load. Once it has done it the first time, it’s normally kept in your browser cache so you don’t notice it later. However, spiders and first time site visitors don’t have this luxury.

So here’s a little known trick. Rather than loading it from your site, load it from Google itself using their own public code libraries. The beauty of this is that if you load it from Google directly, it will be superfast for the Google spiders. Plus, if that visitor has been to another site that’s accessed the same file, the browser will pull it from the cache, rather than try to download it again, making it faster for the end user too.

Here’s how we do that for Prototype, JQuery and Scriptaculous.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
// You may specify partial version numbers, such as "1" or "1.3",
// with the same result. Doing so will automatically load the
// latest version matching that partial revision pattern
// (e.g. 1.3 would load 1.3.2 today and 1 would load 1.4.1).
google.load("jquery", "1.4.1");
google.load("prototype", "1.6.1.0");
google.load("scriptaculous", "1.8.3");
google.setOnLoadCallback(function() {
});
</script>


You can just remove what you don’t need. If you want to dig in more, check out the documentation here.

3) Serve all your page assets from a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

If you have a reasonably busy site (at least a couple of hundred people a day) you should consider pushing all your big files out to a CDN instead of loading them all from your own server.

Essentially, CDNs are big groups of servers spread out around the world. When you upload a file to a CDN (Content Delivery Network), it won’t live just on one server. It will live on servers around the globe allowing visitors to pull the file requested from a CDN node server that is close to them geographically, not off the original web hosting server.

So for example, we host our site on the Rackspace Cloud in the US. However, all our images, CSS and JavaScript are served via a CDN. So when I’m in Australia and I visit our site, the main page is loaded from the US, however, all the files that take the longest to download are served from a local server in Australia. All automatically using clever DNS.

Now this might sound difficult, but it’s actually VERY easy. Here is the coolest thing. The best CDN in the world is called Akamai. Most people agree on this. It’s what most of the biggest media companies in the world serve their content on. They have the best system, and the most nodes, so they tend to serve content from servers that are geographically closer to users all around the world.

However, it used to be that this was VERY expensive and really not within the realms of small companies like ours (and perhaps yours).

This has recently changed.

I found a cloud hosting provider called VPS.net that has started offering the Akamai service for amazingly low prices.

Right now, this information isn’t advertised publicly, so you’ll need to contact them direct for their prices. However, I’ve discovered that it ends up costing no more than most other CDN providers. You’ll need to buy at least 1000 gig in bulk, however, it’s pay as you go, and not a monthly fee.

Here’s a good tutorial on how you set it up.

Now it might feel a bit confusing at first, however, it’s surprisingly easy. It basically works like this:

• You specify the original server that hosts all the content in a config file in Akamai.
• You create a special subdomain like http://akamai.superlever.com
• You then point (via a CNAME) that subdomain to an edge subdomain you set up with Akamai. For example http://superlever.edgeserve.net.
• You then point all the references to http://akamai.superlever.com/images/image.jpg instead of http://www.superlever.com/images/image.jpg
• You can do this using wordpress plugins like CDN Re-writes, W3 Cache etc.

In doing this, here’s what effectively what happens:

Akamai receives (via the CNAME) the request of:

http://akamai.superlever.com/images/image.jpg

Which then maps over the top of:

http://www.superlever.com/images/image.jpg

The first time the file is requested, it is pulled onto the Akamai network and from there it is distributed across the nodes.

In future (for as long as you cache it), the Akamai network pulls the files from local servers around the world, instead of your original host.

The magic behind this is that the end user, regardless of location feels as if your site is hosted on a server within his or her city, not somewhere on the other side of the planet.

Pretty amazing stuff huh?

The Akamai documentation is a bit intense and at times, can seem confusing. Best to stay within the confines of this guide and you’ll find it a whole lot easier:

Plus, feel free to ask questions or to share your ideas below.

By the way, I know we still have other things we can do to make this blog faster. We’re not preaching here!