PPC at TFM&A

Now, I’ve got to be honest here.  I meant to attend the PPC seminars, I really did.  But frankly, I spend at least an hour per day running PPC campaigns, and if I don’t know it all by now, I should be shot.  So, let’s pretend I did attend all the PPC seminars like a good little boy, in which case, this is what I learnt.

Even mother Google cocks up now and again.  Fair play to Dan Cobley, Marketing Director for Google UK for holding his hands up and admitting this.  You’ probably suffered from, or at least heard of the GMail outage that hit Google on Tuesday.

Now, what wasn’t interesting was the cock up itself (we all make mistakes). What was interesting was Google’s competitors, and their PPC response to the situation.  Within minutes of GMail going off line, your search for “GMail failure” would have brought up a flood of email provider adverts boasting reliability, zero downtime and the like.  That’s what’s so great about PPC.  You can respond, literally, in seconds, to millions of people if you want (and you have the budget).  In today’s economic climate, PPC isn’t going to be about throwing large amounts of money at a campaign – it’s about using your smarts to make that campaign work efficently, and in ways your competition hasn’t thought of.

There was a lot of talk about Google insights at the show.  Now, I’ve been using this tool for a few months now, and it really is a wonderful thing.  In essence, it allows you to compare search behaviour on Google (so basically the whole web then) on up to five key terms, all the way back to 2006.  It also highlights terms that are rising in popularity and terms that are ‘breaking out’.  I.e. brand new search terms.

Go on, have a play – it really is quite fun!