Testing PPC is Good

MarketingSherpa has some tips on researching and determining a budget for new PPC clients (or existing, if you are re-evaluating the existing budget). It’s pretty informative and just reconfirms what most experienced PPC marketers already know and practice.

The one part in this article that really jumped out at me was creating a 10-15% portion of the budget for testing. This is key in growing business with any client. In quite a few cases, you can get maxed out on spending, and even to the point where optimizations don’t make a significant difference in CPC or anything else to allow you to get more traffic to a client’s site. Adding a test portion to the budget means that you have a little more elbow room to add keywords, change bids, etc. and not affect the base performance of the campaign. I really like this idea. Testing is good. It’s the only way to get a competitive edge. If you create the campaign and change very little moving forward, you can do fine, even great… but you’ll always just be treading water.

April Fool’s Day

Pretty much anywhere you go on the Web, there’s going to be an April Fool’s thing. Here’s a few of my favorites from today:

1. Nine Inch Nails announce release of new album TODAY! – Trent Reznor cleverly uses Twitter to spread the word.

2. Google announces CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity as a new feature. It can do things better than you (which I believe Google thinks, so that’s not part of the joke). Be sure to check out CADIE’s homepage. It’s so beautiful!

3. Google also announces Google Chrome in 3D! Download it now!

4. A CADIE feature is added to Gmail. It just never stops!

5. Of course, we are all expecting the armageddon brought down upon us by Conficker (at least, according to the media, who went into a y2k like frenzy over it). Wired has a frequently updated blog about possible Conficker-related events.

6. Honestly, I’m going to hand this off to someone who has already done the gruntwork. Here’s AprilFoolsDayOntheWeb.com.

Hope your day was fun!