Pay Per Click account management

Why Google is the king of Pay Per Click advertising

The more PPC marketing that I do, the more amazed that I get with the way the companies that offer pay per click operate. Is it any wonder that Google is dominating the market? Google offers some of the best tools available for managing a Google Adwords account. The other big players in pay per click are seriously lacking in user friendly software to manage an advertising account. There are hundreds of sites available for pay per click advertising which could learn from the Google advertising model. In the interest of time and space, I’m only going to discuss what people call the big three, Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Google’s free Adwords Editor

I’ve learned to love the free Google Adwords editor and wonder where the software is for the other two big players. In managing my advertising accounts, I had a need to split some campaigns up for more concentrated targeting of the ads I wanted to run. While I’m not going to list all the great features of the Google Adwords editor, the Adwords editor saved many hours in doing something I would consider very basic account management.

All I wanted to do was to split up an ad campaign into multiple ad campaigns. Seems like such a simple request. Just move some ad groups with ads and keywords intact from one campaign to another. The Google Adwords editor allows you to do this simple task with ease. I simply moved the ad groups I wanted to move using the Adwords editor on my computer, then uploaded the changes to my Google Adwords account. By the way the Adwords editor is conveniently located under the Tools tab in your Google Adwords account. Where are the software tools to manage an advertising account for MSN or Yahoo?

Change hundreds of ads in minutes

Anyone following this site will know that some of the pay per click advertising that I do is for Cost Per Action (CPA) offers. Some people call this type of marketing click flipping or traffic brokering. Now that my campaigns are split into more targeted ad campaigns, I can switch all the ads or links with a few mouse clicks! Making changes on the fly with minimal effort and time is the name of the game in this business.

You can use the spreadsheet templates that Microsoft provides for doing mass edits, but this method does not even come close to matching the power that Google gives you with the free Adwords editor. Google really seems to listen to their users and it’s clear that the Google advertising model works, the other players could learn some lessons here.

Yahoo and Microsoft have improved a little

Recently Yahoo made some long overdue improvements when they rolled out their new platform. All we can do is hope that Yahoo continues to improve. Forcing an advertiser to send traffic only to sites that you own is very limiting and it would be great to see Yahoo open things up and allow direct to merchant advertising. As long as this limit is in place at Yahoo, they are destined to lag way behind Google. If Yahoo added an editor similar to what Google gives their users, that would go a long way too.

On the other hand, I’m shocked by Microsoft and their lack of software to make advertising with them easier. Though I have to say that I’m not surprised, Microsoft adCenter seems to be in permanent beta testing mode. Just recently they added the ability to paste in keywords with broad match, exact match and phrase match set. Just a short time ago, you had to check a bunch of silly little boxes.

You would think that a big company like Microsoft would know that time is money. Creating a user interface that has cute little windows and toggles is not always fast and efficient. In this day and age, faster more efficient software is needed in order to compete. The fact that Microsoft is a software company would lead you to think that they could do a better job to compete with Google.

Advertising Business call to action

You would think that anyone in business knows that you should keep a close eye on the competition. Knowing what works for your competitors, you can improve on what they are doing and use it to grow your business. Who am I to suggest that Microsoft and Yahoo take a closer look at what Google is doing? Any business should take the time to go out in their markets to out what customers want. Then find out what the competition is doing to provide it.

Perhaps the obvious needs spelled out

With the massive resources available at Microsoft and Yahoo, it should be easy to become real competitors to Google. Simply survey the market, open accounts with all the players to see what they are doing and then improve on what is working. Providing the advertising market with more choices only improves business for everyone involved. Attention, Microsoft and Yahoo, more advertisers use Google Adwords for a reason! Find out what those reasons are, improve on what advertisers need and provide it to the world. Competition is good for the market, step up to the plate and compete with Google.

John Stiles

Tagged as: Google Adwords, Pay Per Click