Rolling right along, and deviating my previous liveblogging plan, I’m covering Hardcore PPC tactics with John Ellis, Jennifer Evans-Cario, David Szetela and Brad Geddes.

Jennifer Evans-Cario, Founder, SugarSpun Marketing is moderating this session.  Jen, love your necklace, can I have it if the whole “jumping off a building” thing doesn’t work?

First up, we’re going to hear from Brad Geddes, Founder, Certified Knowledge about Profit Per Impression and ad copy testing.

Paid Search is 14 years old now, Google AdWords is 10 years old.  What numbers should you be using to measure success in AdWords?  Data is just numbers without interpretation.  Numbers make picking winning ads hard, unless you can do complex math in your head.  Impressions, Clicks, Impressions & Clicks & Conversions are all metrics that create conversions.

CTR is a decent metric for a lead gen site, but when getting in testing metrics, you should start with the impression, not the click.  Click metrics dont tell the whole story.  Need to look at cost and CPC, profitability by ad is a complicated metric.

Metric needs to take into account average sale amount.

Profit Per Impression is the best measurement when you’re testing.

PPI = (Revenue – Cost) / (Impressions)

$.08 PPI and $.11 PPI don’t look that different, extrapolate over 300K impressions and it’s significant.  Measuring Impression metrics is a way to see Ad effectiveness.  This is great for ad copy testing.

Google got rid of rotate evenly, then gave back rotate evenly and they’ll pick after 90 days, now have rotate indefinitely.  Don’t be afraid of the Google warning you see.  It’s a fine feature to use, especially for testing.  Don’t let Google pick your winners.  Stressing TEST TEST TEST from ad copy to landing page.

David Szetela, Author, Speaker and Consultant – @szetela

Check out #ppcchat on Twitter – great resource.  David is going to talk about hardcore display advertising.  There have been a lot of changes to the display network over the last 6-months.  Over the last months Google has made major changes but is poor with announcements.  Doing away w/ keyword and placement types of campaigns.  All targeting is going to move to AdGroup level.  Good and bad, good if you already understand targeting, bad if you are a brand new advertiser.  Hopefully Google gets better over time.

David is going through a brief history of display advertising, from keyword driven content network to placement targeted campaigns.  Late last year Google changed nomenclature from keyword & placement targeted to Broad reach and specific reach.

Google said this year they’re inventing a campaign called a Flexible Reach Campaign.  A new display network campaign now must be a Flexible Reach campaign, no more specific or broad reach campaigns.

Now if you look at an existing campaign, you’ll see the option to switch to a flexible reach campaign, once you pick it, you cant go back.  New display network campaigns can now ONLY be Flexible reach.

I’m not going to blog a lot about David’s explanations of Broad and specific reach since they don’t exist anymore.

Flexible reach allows targeting and bids at the AdGroup level, allows more fine control, more control leads to more complexity, so pay attention.

When you create an AdGroup for display advertising from scratch you are givein the choice of using keywords, interests & remarketing or “use a different targeting method.”  You can then choose targeting based on Topics, Placements, Age & Gender.  Choosing topics, be careful, there are over 2,000 topics.  Choosing to target by topics means show my ads on sites related to these topics.

There are a variety of targeting combinations – Keywords or topics dominant, Placements included for individual bidding, negative placements included for avoiding ad service on poorly performing placements.

Finally we hear from John Ellis, CEO and Owner, Crescent Interactive about Google’s Remarketing feature.

Be aware of Creepy, Define your Audience, Gain Internest, Use Social Media.

Many people get creeped out by the ads following them around for eternity.  John advises to not ignore that and be aware that it can happen.  His tips for being less creepy are:

• Use different ads and variations, use different colors and messages so the SAME ad doesnt follow them around.
• Set up frequency capping – give up point – if the ad follows them around and shows to them – set a give up point so they’re “let go” from the ad
• Combine audiences, use specific audiences based on their action.

What is an audience?  Audiences can be created for many different activities.  A visitor, an Interest, An abandoned chopping cart, buyers/conversions.  Create different messages for each type of audience.  Target buyers with ad-ons.

Visit audiences, don’t target ANYONE who visits.  Use email marketing and audience tags on a specific landing page.  Surveys can create a specific audience.  Facebook advertising can get the regular visitor into an audience.  Use facebook targeting to create audiences in Google remarketing.  John has some great tips, I’ll try to add resources for you soon.  Basically send Facebook targeted ad to a landing page that drops the cookie and creates the audience.