For whatever reason these videos only have like 100 views at the time of this writing..  A rare gem, check them out!

Went to SMX East today – just got an Expo pass as I didn’t even decide to go until the night before the conference started (Sunday October 3rd).  So sort of a last minute thing.  At any rate, this was my first time at an SMX conference and it was pretty good!  With the Expo pass, you’re entitled to walking the expo hall (duh) and talking to the exhibiors there, but they also have these mini (20 minute) presentations you’re also entitled to.  SMX calls those “theater presentations”.  Honestly some of them were quite basic (yes, I know it’s important to write a good subject line when crafting a piece of mail to my opt-in list), but of course there are always good nuggets to be picked up if you’re paying attention.  In light of that, it was great to hear about what PRWeb has been up to these days and how effective press releases can still be (seems like those guys have been around forever).  The speaker cited a few examples of some their clients who have had great success using images and embedded videos to really increase engagement rate…good stuff. 

As always, the folks over at Compete.com also provided a lot of good information.  If you’re looking for a competitive intelligence solution that covers both sides of search (organic and paid), take a look at these guys.  Next time I think I’ll grab a Networking Pass, as this would have enabled me to gain access to many of the other closed door sessions.  For instance, I would have loved to hear what David Szetela had to say about the current state of paid search.  At any rate, it was a good way to spend the day and worth my while for sure.

Anyone else attend?  If so, what did you learn or enjoy?

Well, to be honest, it’s not *all* a number’s game.  Direct response copywriting, knowing what a target market’s hot buttons are…these are all very important skills for the PPC specialist too.  But once you’ve done your market research and crafted some well-written ads, you need to spend a lot of time looking at the numbers.

What numbers, you ask? 

There are many statistics to be mindful of, but when you’ve first launched a campaign, it’s very important to make sure you don’t have any “stray” keywords that are draining your budget.  A keyword may be stray for any number of reasons – it could be that this keyword is attracting much more traffic than you thought it would.  In this case, a stray keyword can be a good thing assuming it is bringing in targeted traffic that converts.  So the action here would be to increase your (daily) budget.  On the flip side though, a stray keyword could be one that is only marginally related to your offer, but is receiving the lion’s share of the clicks (for any number of reasons).  In this case it may be best to pause the keyword so as not to deplete your budget.

In addition to stray keywords, you also need to monitor your click through rate (CTR).  AdWords makes this very simple to do within their native interface.  Similarly, you should be split-testing two ads per adgroup against each other to see which one brings the most profit.  In many cases, the ad with the higher CTR will also bring in the most profit, however that’s not always the case!  That is why it’s critical to not merely track CTR, but also conversions per ad. 

Other important metrics to keep track of?  Your conversion rate, for sure.  Do you know what your conversion rate should be in your market for a similar offer?  Hopefully you have an idea, but if not it’s time you find out with your own data.  Again, the native AdWords interface makes this quite simple assuming you’re firing Google’s pixel upon a successful conversion (be that an opt-in, sale, etc.).  After you gather some data in your campaign, you’ll want to pay close to your cost per conversion.  Simply put, this is the amount of adspend to acquire a single conversion.  You want to be doing everything you can to continually bring this number down.

This is a very high-level post on the subject.  To many of you this will seem quite basic and introductory, yet I know for many of you this might seem a little technical (unfortunately many advertisers don’t pay attention to metrics).  Rest assured we’ll be doing a follow-up post soon that goes into more detail on specific metrics you should be tracking.