Well, many people have written about this, but two blog posts really stand out: Jerry west wrote “Google Updates their Keyword Tool” and Jim Morris wrote “The Initial Assessment of Google Unveiling Approximate Search Counts In Google External Keyword Tool”. (Haha, Jim, you crack me up with your beancounter language - but that’s exactly what makes you such a good fit as a keyword expert!).

I would say both of these posts are mandatory reading. So read them. Now.

It’s not exactly about PPC, but it’s what happens AFTER PPC: once a prospect has clicked your ad and landed on your site.

Do you convert this visitor into a member of your list, or better yet, a paying customer?

After all - even if you could get one-cent clicks on the term health insurance, what good would it do you if you had a 0% conversion rate? It would do you no good at all, you’d still be losing money.

Now a lot of the conversion is about copywriting, headlines, etc.

But a good part is also about layout!

Sometimes you can drastically (and I’m talking double-digit) enhance your conversion rates without changing a single word.

You’ve probably heard about the eye-tracking studies, that tell that the most important point of a landing page is the upper-left corner.

After all, this is where Google tells you to place your AdSense ads.

It’s the most expensive place you can buy when you want to buy advertising space on a website (usually).

Funny thing is, a guy who’s into PPC conversion deeply did some split tests and found that he upped his conversion rate a lot if he places the main elements in the upper RIGHT corner of the screen.

For example: split testing opt-in form in upper left corner, centered under headlines, centered under body text or upper right corner.

Upper right corner won every time.

This is an important thing to remember, so when you split test, don’t just split test your copy, also split test the placement of different elements.

But you can in fact get a better quality score (and thus cheaper clicks) without having to change one word of copy - just make your site look neat and professional.

Every website that you send traffic to, a Google editor will stop by and look at the page. They won’t read every word on they page, but they will look at the page - and if it looks like a professional site rather than a flimsy one you’ll get a much better quality score.

So, graphics and layout are becoming more important these days too.

And guess what I found? Well, of course googles local search listing, but what else? In the sponsored listings, in the number one spot? Again Google’s local listings - an advertisement for maps.google.de !

I thought that is really interesting. Considering that they are one of the biggest data mining companies worldwide they must have a pretty good grip on where the profits are to be made, and this step seems like they’re now pushing their way seriously into some local markets - I guess local magazines will find it increasingly hard to compete with that.

There are basically two thesaurus-websites that I user over and over again. One you probably know of already, and the other you probably never heard of yet.

1. http://thesaurus.reference.com/
2. http://www.lexfn.com
   

You should check both of them out. They’re totally free and different from each other, so each one is worth checking out. Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of PPC Marketing, so it’s good to diversify your keyword research strategy.

This is something that you might want to split-run for your campaigns and see how it affects CTR.

But let’s look at that number again: 44.6 billion US dollars and Yahoo did NOT want to sell for that amount of money. Do you know what that is all about? It’s all about Pay Per Click advertisements! That’s how Yahoo generates revenue! From PPC advertising! And they didn’t want to sell for 44.6 billion dollars. That’s a lot of money…

Anyway: Yahoo’s new advertising platform is currently under the name of APEX (advertiser-publisher exchange). According to the Decker it will make it much more easier for both buyers and sellers of online advertising. They are working together with around 500 newspaper publishers to make it easier for them to advertise on a broader, yet still targeted scale.

And Google is not the only company that aims at simplicity: Google tries to make things simpler, and so does Microsoft with their AdCenter and AOL with Platform A.

Visit this secret website:

http://www.leadsintogold.com/genius/

Check out these two pretty new (and FREE!) resources from PPC-giant Google and it’s smaller brother Yahoo Search Marketing.

• Google: Marketing and Advertising Using Google (a free, 156 page ebook that you can read online, download or print out full of information about how to advertise with Google)
• Yahoo: Smart Start Guide (another free ebook, but for some reason it doesn’t load on my Apple…)