SMX Recap: Updating Your SEM Toolbox with Shiny New Tools

There are not enough hours in the day for PPC managers. It is great to hear that this is a struggle shared by some of the stars of the PPC industry, Brad Geddes of AdAlysis, Sahil Jain of AdStage, and Daniel Gilbert of Brainlabs, as well as their tips and tools for better, more efficient management.

What was refreshing about this session was that the speakers barely, if at all, talked about their products. Even when they did, they stressed that not every tool works for every advertiser, depending on company sizes, advertising networks, etc. This session was packed full of useful information, not only for PPC managers. Here are some of my favorite highlights:

Brad Geddes – Time Management Tips

• PPC people are creators, and as such, we need large blocks of uninterrupted time to get our tasks done. This contrasts with managers that have tasks which individually take less time and so they can fit them into the time between meetings throughout the work day.
• The average person is interrupted 1 minute and 15 seconds into a task and it takes them 25 minutes to get back onto what they were doing.
• Heavy multitasking, including the use of multiple monitors (we are very guilty of this), lowers your IQ by 15 points. Geddes did later say that the user of 2 monitors is ok, so long as the secondary monitor is not used for email because of the distraction.
• Use email tools to quick reply with common responses.
• Establish rules for meetings. Examples of this were a penalty for someone that invites a person to a meeting who doesn’t contribute and locking the door to anyone who doesn’t arrive on time. Meetings should be a privilege to contribute to growth and not a burden.

Sahil Jain – Awesome Free Tools

• Ubersuggest – Returns the common Google Suggest terms by letter/number for a given query (we use this often here at Blue Corona).
• Answer the Public – Returns questions that people search for that your keyword would answer. This will become more important as voice search and personal assistants get greater use.
• 5 Minute Site Local Keywords – Generates geo-targeted keywords for cities, zips, etc. using a base keyword and selected area.
• CoSchedule Headline Analyzer – Rates your headlines for effectiveness, based on word choice and other factors. Primarily used for blogs but has PPC benefit as well.
• Xenu’s Link Sleuth – Checks websites for broken links and is helpful in making sure that all your ads are going to valid landing pages.

Daniel Gilbert – Top PPC Management Tools

Gilbert broke down which tools were best for small, medium, and enterprise-level companies. We’ll feature the small business (less than $1 million in PPC spend per year) here since that makes up the bulk of our clients.

• Tracking – Google Analytics
• Product Feed Management – GoDataFeed
• Management Toolkits – WordStream
• Reporting – Swydo
• Attribution – Google Analytics
• Bid Management – DoubleClick