Ok.  Everyone knows of the popularity of real estate and house flipping.  This is very popular for the “handy” person that can do most of the fix up work themselves.  They take a home that may be on the market for a great value, see the potential, remodel, fix it up, and sell it off for a profit!  This has been a popular and successful business strategy for the real estate savvy.  There’s even a reality show devoted to this for the high-end market.

So, let’s apply the same principles to the Internet.  I know SEO, I can do some web editing.  Can “site flipping” be a profitable business?  How long would it take to flip a site?  How much work would be involved?  How much of a profit (when you consider your time put into it) would be made?

I’m sure that it probably wouldn’t make for a good reality TV show… But, has anyone out there played with this in practice alone? How did it go?

Shanee

This one is for the PPC techies!

I was talking to a business colleague (another PPC marketer) the other day, and they mentioned that in a new PPC account (their identity will remain protected - Ha!) that they were managing, they found several instances of duplicate keywords across ad groups.  In search, they were able to validate multiple instances of their ads “double appearing” and outbidding each other!

Please don’t do this!  There are two reasons that quickly come to mind for why this is bad, bad, bad…

First, you are bidding against yourself!  So you are in effect in an auction AGAINST yourself.  The obvious reprocussion here is that you are driving up yor own CPC.  Silly!

Second, you are cutting your CTR in HALF!  Yes, you are.  Think of it this way.  If your ad shows twice for the same search, and one ad gets 100% CTR (which it won’t), that is cut in HALF b/c the impressions are doubled.  Now, you know that historical CTR is tied to Quality Score, which is tied to your Adwords CPC.  You see where this is heading.

So, bottom line:  Don’t duplicate your keywords across ad groups.  It won’t help you.  It is sloppy.

If you are curious if you are a duplicate keyword “offender,” use your Adwords Editor Tools to check and find duplicate keywords across ad groups.  It’s an easy mistake to make, but it’s also fairly painless (and important) to correct.

If you have hired a Pay Per Click advertising agency to manage your campaigns, please talk to them to ensure that they are following this practice.

Happy PPC’ing!

Shanee

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