The first possibility is that you’ve reached your daily budget limit. When a user sets their monthly budget, they can also set a daily budget limit. If a campaign spends this amount before the end of any given day, it could result in the "Budget Paused" message, and ad won’t be served again until the next day.

Another possibility is that the campaign budget is divided up across the month. "With a $3,000 monthly budget, adCenter would allocate roughly $100 per day to a campaign running in a 30-day month," explains >Microsoft’s Tina Kelleher. "When that $100 has been spent on any given day, the campaign status changes to Budget Paused until the next day."

The other possibility is that the account has been set up to spend the budget until it’s depleted. This means that depending on the popularity of your keywords and the bids you have set for them, this could take any amount of time. Once that money is spent, the budget is paused.

So, the moral of the story is: know how your budget is set up, and monitor it. You can change it if need be, but if you don’t keep an eye on it, you may be wasting time with a paused campaign that you’d rather be spending actually having your ads shown.

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A couple tactics discussed by Van Wagner include:

- Determining what your competitors are paying for their ads, and approximately what their quality score is by doing a little "competitive analysis."

- Pulling reports from the search engines periodically and using excel to generate a an optimized bid list. He says this does 80% of what a lot of the good tools out there do – for FREE.

"Consumers care about prices more than ever, especially on day-to-day purchases," says Google. "When someone searches on a particular product, you know they’re interested; by using your ad to tell them that you’ve got the highest quality and the best price, you’re more likely to earn their click."

2. Use value-related keywords.

People are constantly looking for bargains. Google suggests using keywords that cater to this mentality. The company recommends using the AdWords Search-based keyword tool and Search Query Performance report to find higher-performing keywords that people are actually searching.

3. Make sure your ad groups are targeted and relevant.

"Ads perform best when their ad text reflects the ad group’s keywords; this makes ads more relevant to their intended audience," says Google. "Make sure that both the text and the keywords in each ad group focus on a specific topic or product."

4. Don’t waste money on irrelevant clicks.

Google suggests using negative keywords to filter out traffic from people looking for things that you don’t offer. They use an example that if you sell peanut butter, Purchase World of Warcraft Gold, you might want to use "allergy" as a negative keyword.

5. Make it easy for customers to buy.

This tactic is all bout the landing page. Put some thought into your landing page, because people don’t want to hunt around trying to find where they need to go to buy the item they clicked on the ad to buy in the first place. Why make it hard? It should be as easy a process as possible.

6. Focus your money on your high-performers.

Google has a free conversion tracking tool that will let you see what keywords and ads are performing best. It is wise to focus your time and resources on the ones you are getting the most value out of.

That’s the six tactics Google provides for maximizing you AdWords investment. Performance is more important than ever when there is not as much money to play around with. If you’re using PPC as an advertising method, focus on eliminating the waste of money by getting the most you can out of your campaigns. Google provides more resources for each of these tactics here.

The report helps users optimize campaigns and manage phrase and broadmatch keywords by tracking performance of keyward variations that trigger ads. The tool should be especially helpful considering recent data from comScore showing that people are searching with longer queries, and PPC click growth is actually suffering.

The report will now show all queries that resulted in a click, where the user hasn’t specifically blocked their referrer URL. " In other words, this includes all queries that you would see in your server logs or if you use a tool like Google Analytics," explains Dan Friedman on Google’s Inside AdWords Blog. "In requiring that the referrer URL be present, we are upholding our commitment to user privacy."

With the update, users will likely see longer lists of queries in the reports, and many of them will have low traffic. "We encourage you to focus your decisions about the performance of your keyword variations on those variations that occur most frequently and have a significant amount of performance data," says Friedman.

To run a search query performance report, sign into your AdWords account, click the "reports" tab, click "Create report," select "search query performance" as your report type. If you need help from there, this page at the help center should be of assistance.

Yesterday, they kicked it off by highlighting the new site and what users will find there. This includes a section for videos on the new interface that look at features and how they can help you better manage your account.

There is also a section for beta resources, which includes a how-to guide, a known-issues page, etc. Users who find bugs can use the known-issues page to see if it is known and report it if it’s not listed.

This week, The Inside AdWords Crew also discussed some new metrics for conversion tracking that come with the new AdWords Interface. The metrics will be introduced into AdWords Editor, the AdWords API, and the new AdWords interface over time. Google says they’ll also improve conversion tracking for display advertisers through the release of view-through conversion tracking.

You can learn more about the new metrics here. Google’s Help Center will also provide you with more useful information.

There are a number of reasons Microsoft gives to use the service that frankly don’t really stand out from its competitors, but they do provide some numbers that may stand out to advertisers:

- Our searchers are 51% more likely to convert than the average UK searcher and 61% more likely than that of our main competitor (via NNR UK, Oct-Dec ’08)

- Searchers are 32% more engaged on destination sites than the average UK searcher spending 4.37 minutes on average on destination sites (via NNR UK, Oct-Dec ’08)

- The MSN Portal has the largest audience in the UK along with millions of engaged users using our Hotmail and Messenger services. More likely to be action-driven searching than mere browsing (via **comScore August 2008)

Other reasons given include display/search integration and targeting tools, which aren’t really unique to adCenter. They do note however, that UK Microsoft Advertising was voted number 1 by IPA 2008 for outstanding customer service and support.

When calling for creativity and variety in PPC activities/engines, Microsoft’s Mairead McCarthy says"…if you were advertising on the TV you wouldn’t concentrate your entire budget on one channel." Ironically, Microsoft’s biggest competitor offers TV ads within its platform (granted not in the UK yet), a service adCenter is still lacking.

Furthermore, the beta is available in more languages now. They include Spanish, Japanese, French, and Brazilian Portuguese. Emel Mutlu of the Inside AdWords Crew shares some info about the new features: 

- Performance graphs: Spot trends over time with custom graphs on every campaign management page.

- Insight across ad groups: Focus on the high-impact areas of your account with new roll-up tabs on every page. You can see and edit keywords, placements or ads from all ad groups on a single tab.

- In-line editing: Want to change a keyword or bid? Click on it and make changes in-line instead of loading a separate page.

- Easier content network management: Improve content network performance through a new Networks tab. Look at statistics for the placements where your ads have appeared, and then take action by setting unique bids or excluding placements directly from the report.

Mutlu asks advertisers to keep in mind that the new interface doesn’t affect how ads run, and that bidding, ranking, quality score, etc. will not change just because the interface is changing.

There are more videos looking at the new interface features here. There is also a nice resource center with a how-to guide, a help center, a changes overview PDF, and more.

"When initiating a payment, you can choose to pay off your entire balance or just a portion of it, which is particularly useful if you’d like to divide your balance among several forms of payment," explains Christian Yee of the Inside AdWords Crew. "You can also make a payment for an amount larger than your balance if you’d like to prepay for a certain amount of advertising costs. For example, assume your campaign consistently reaches its daily budget of $2,000. Your billing threshold is $500, which means you’re charged $500 four times a day. If you initiate a payment of $10,000, then your next five days of advertising costs are covered, and you won’t have to incur multiple payments every day."

Google does note that advertisers will still be automatically billed according to their regular billing cycle, so they do not need to worry about missing any payments.

To get started with the Make a Payment feature, users just need to fill out a form, receive an email confirmation, and initiate a payment by going to the billing summary page and clicking "make a payment." The link is located right beneath the account balance.

For some reason the feature is not available in Ireland at this time, but Yee says Google is working on getting it included. More information on the feature is available at the Help Center.

Chris Crum: When should advertisers use Exact Match?

CD: First, let me ask a question: If you only sell women’s blue sweaters, do you really want your ads showing up for men’s blue sweaters?  Probably not.  Before we talk about Match Types, it’s important to define some vocabulary I’ll use: keywords and search queries.

Keywords are the words you buy, ex: blue sweater. Search Queries are the words the actual words someone typed that may, depending on your match type, trigger your ad to show up in the search engine, ex: men’s blue sweater.  Match Types are a tool to help you target search queries.

As we talk about in the Match Type Keyword Trap (see our paid search white paper), it’s okay to use the same match types for the same words.  Each step from Exact to Phrase to Broad exposes your ads to a wider audience of less specific search queries.  Some of these queries are relevant and will prove profitable, but many will be irrelevant, or at least low converting.

For example, if you buy “blue sweaters” on phrase match, you could easily pay for the click of someone who searched “men’s blue sweaters” when you only sell women’s. And on Broad Match you almost certainly will pay for clicks from searches that you wouldn’t choose to target – for example ‘blue sweaters’ may be matched to ‘dog sweater’.

So the trick to choosing and using Match Type is to understand that the trade off is between precision and volume. Exact Match will generally deliver less volume but you can be very sure of what those searchers are looking for. This generally means you can pay a lot for those clicks because their interest and your conversion rates should be high.

Conversely, Broad Match will deliver a lot of volume, but the searches will be a mixed bag of on-target, near-target, and off-target topics. You’ll want to pay less for these clicks since so many won’t convert.

There are two possible initial strategies: you could start with only Exact Match keywords, expanding outward with more tests and then moving groups of words that prove very successful as Exact Match down to Phrase and even broad over time. This will control your budget and minimize waste. Or you could start with Broad Match and find patterns to promote to Phrase and even Exact as you see what works. You’ll want to be vigilant about adding negative keywords too when using this method. This strategy will drive more traffic faster, but at a lower return.

CC: When should advertisers use Broad Match?

CD: Broad Match buys you a basket of search queries. Like any grab bag, it will contain some great stuff and some duds. Using Broad Match is a good way to experiment in a category (but keep your bids and budgets low) but as you get serious it’s best if you ‘promote’ winning search queries into their own Phrase Match and Exact Match keywords.

Over the long run, if you actively manage your account think of Broad Match as a research tool whose job is to find you good Phrase and Exact match keyword candidates.

If you have a limited budget, have a low conversion rate or are very new to paid search, then don’t use Broad Match until you’ve got a steady ROI on your Exact and Phrase Match campaigns.

CC: When should advertisers use Phrase Match?

CD: Phrase Match is a way to sweep up a lot of queries and cover the fact that people search in nearly infinite ways. You can’t possibly think of every search query to use in Exact Match, nor is it necessary or reasonable in every case.  Phrase Match opens up a wider audience without as many crazy matches as Broad Match.  Phrase Match is a great type for new campaigns or accounts or when you’re struggling for volume.

There are few key points to using Phrase Match effectively:

- Start with your most profitable products and search queries from successful Exact Match campaigns

- Use phrases that are at least 2 words and preferably 3 or more.

- Build out your negative list as much as you can.  You’ll never think of all possible negatives, but the time spent hear is well worth it.

It’s critical to monitor your search queries closely to find phrases to move into Exact Match ad groups and negatives to add to your list.  Phrase Match is just a net to help with your keyword research.  Profitable or unprofitable search queries shouldn’t linger here long.

CC: When should advertisers use Automatic Matching?

CD: Automatic Match is an even more expanded version of Broad Match and should be used with extreme caution, if at all. The premise of Automatic Match is that Google is offering to figure out how to spend any unused portion of your budget by selecting keywords that you have not chosen and displaying your ads for queries that match those keywords.

Think about this for a second. Optimistically, it’s an automatic traffic and lead generation machine. You don’t do anything, Google just figures your paid search advertising for you. More skeptically, it’s a vendor telling you that they’ll spend your entire budget with absolutely no visibility into how or why, or assurance that results will be anything more than disastrous. Sound appealing?

I would only recommend it with very tight budgets and a very watchful eye on results. Note that you can be opted into Automatic Matching without giving your permission – so check your campaigns carefully to make sure this is turned off unless you really want it on.

CC: What advice would you give to an advertiser on a very limited budget to get the most out of their ppc campaign?

CD: If you haven’t started yet, first see if you can find some coupons for a free $50 – $100 in AdWords credits (Here’s one source).  That way, you can stretch your budget and experiment a bit to learn what works.  Read paid search blogs to learn from other people who’ve managed paid search before.

Focus on your highest margin products that you have in stock first.   Start with a very limited number of campaigns and ad groups.  Focus your text ads and ad groups very tightly around answering the question your targeted searchers are asking.  Build out your negative list extensively to avoid clicks that don’t relate to your product.  I’d suggest that you start with Exact and Phrase match first.  We’ve also had good luck find low cost segments of the market with content network campaigns (just remember to run them in separate campaigns!)

It’s also important to make sure you’re landing pages (where you send paid search visitors after they click your ads) are effective.  A 2% conversion rate instead of a 1% conversion rate can make a huge difference in the profitability of your campaigns.  To learn about web analytics, I recommend you read Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik. To learn about landing page best practices and how to persuade visitors, I recommend you read GrokDotCom by Bryan Eisenberg and the folks at FutureNow.

Wrapping Up

In closing, I just want to thank Craig Danuloff for sharing his wisdom as it relates to PPC advertising. If you’d like to learn more about negative keyword campaigns, Mike McDonald interviewed Ken Jurina of Epiar, who offered some insight at PubCon a while back.

This video/article does not contain any breaking information about either organic or pay per click, but you should still read/watch it because it will give you a couple of up-to-date perspectives from some very respectable people in the industry.

WebProNews spoke with David Szetela about why his company, Clix Marketing, only uses pay per click advertising.

I also had an interesting conversation with Matt Bailey about his exclusive use of organic SEO for SiteLogic clients. Matt describes organic SEO as being similar to art, and goes on to explain pay per click as a science.

David and Matt also point out the large role that social networking plays in both organic and PPC.

Organically, social networks are a great way to build your online reputation and get your name known. David mentioned that Google now has site-targeted advertising and Facebook also launched their own pay-per-click advertising service within their site.

Still have questions about organic SEO and Pay Per Click? Catch the full story in the WebProNews video that includes sound clips from David Szetela and Matt Bailey as well as a host of other information.