Trimming Your PPC Fat

In order to meet your conversion objectives in a pay per click campaign with AdWords, it will be of critical importance to manage the costs of your campaign. Controlling spending throughout your campaign occurs at a number of levels. You can make a small number of manual changes that can cut your costs. A more practical solution though is to employ automatic software— particularly software that has control over bid management—as these programs are able to automatically adjust costs for keywords.

First you will want to determine your costs on the level of the campaign. If your campaign is utilizing both Google’s ad networks as well as its content networks, then you will want to set up a campaign that exclusively targets the search aspect and a duplicate campaign that focuses on the content side. Creating these separate campaigns will allow to you control spending for each one separately, so you can find optimum costs that maximize the utility of each campaign. In your content based campaigns it is also important to use exclusions for both site and category terms that will prevent your click dollars being spent by putting your ads on unrelated websites.

When your campaign has gotten started and you are seeing some results, you will want to analyze the data coming back on your top performing keywords, and adjust their spending so that you can see even more returns on them. In addition to this, you can also add new query match formats for your existing and underperforming keywords to boost their functionality, allowing you to develop a unique bid for every match type that you are using.

Be sure to monitor the quality scores of all of your keywords. Stop using terms that have zero conversions and/or low quality scores, as they are essentially wasting your time and money. Remember, that your keyword’s quality score will affect its cost per click and its estimate in bids for the first page. Quality Score also affects the ranking of your ad and its eligibility to be featured in an ad auction.

When you are working with an insurmountable number of key words, it is simply not possible to manage them by hand, you will require the assistance of software to help manage your spending for each of your selected terms. The following list details a number of management tools that will help you to adjust your campaign spending in the most efficient manner possible:

• Acquisio SEARCH. This is a top of the line, well programmed pay per click bid management tool. It is able to offer suggestions on which keywords should be paused, alerts you by email to keywords that are given low quality scores, and allows you to set programmable cost per click values for your keywords.
• Clickable. This tool is able to offer performance enhancing recommendations for your campaign. It will indicate calculated and reasonable bid increases on high performing keywords, a reduction of bids on your lower performing keywords, or alerting you when keywords have not met their first page estimates.
• DoubleClick DART Search. This tool is able to automatically bid on any of your keywords a maximum of twelve times daily. You can create a bid strategy that is executed based on a variety of factors concerning your keywords.
• Omniture SearchCenter. This tool offers the standard bid management tactics that you find in such software which includes portfolio based or rules based routines. This tool also features day-parting, but this comes standard with almost any modern pay per click engine.
• Podium adCore. This tool can adjust your bids on a wide level and will allow you to remove underperforming words that do not meet specific performance requirements.

Though these tools sound like they will have your campaign running itself, it will still require regular human intervention, if only to collect your earnings. Though these tools will help maximize your profits, they still require solid human generated ideas to be truly effective. If you give your campaign the human touch that it needs and employ the tools above, your campaign will really start gaining steam and really getting your ads out there!

Demographics and AdWords…A Good Combination

Google AdWords has been
popular for a while, but it doesn’t always give people the results that
they’re looking for. To get good ads that are well-positioned, a person or a
company has to pay a lot of money. There is money to be made of course,
especially if a lot of people click on your ads and end up making a purchase.

This doesn’t mean that no one outside of that
demographic group will see your ads. If a man goes to a site that has women as
a targeted audience he may find your ad and you could make a sale that way.
The same is true for age, ethnic makeup, religious preference, or any other
criteria that might affect where your ads go and how much money you make
because of them.

Pay Per Click Strategies

1. Put up 3 ads at a time. Let them run a week or so, then look at the numbers. Get rid of bottom 2 — design 2 new ones based on winner, and run them for a week… repeat.

2. Keywords, keywords, keywords. Whenever you think of a possible term someone in your market would type in, email it to yourself right away. Then add it to campaign later. Also… use the word to create new words. There are many paid tools… but Google also has a free built-in tool. Use any tools available to you.

Example: You may think, oh yeah… someone that might buy my product would be looking up the xxxxxxx regulation that applies to their industry/hobby. Add that to the keyword list.

3. Ideally every keyword would have it’s own custom ad. But, that is not realistic. You might end up with 20,000+ keywords. Some of which rarely get traffic, making an ad for each is too time consuming. So you will want to break them into categories and have custom ads for each category.

Example: You may decide basic users/buyers of your product will have concerns about ‘ease of use’ — so that would go into the ‘Easy to Use’ campaign. Some die-hard, serious hobbyists may be more interested in the xxxxx power feature — put that into a different campaign that pushes that specific point in the ad.

Keywords can get moved back and forth. Keywords can each have a custom bid attached to them. (some convert better than others and are worth more).

Let things run a while. You need 1000 impressions to make an informed judgement on ‘click through’ …plus a week of time.

You need at least 100 clicks on a keyword to gadge the value of it.

Be patient, but always take some time to go back to the campaigns and look at the numbers. Make small adjustments, don’t over correct. Little changes here and there will slowly develop a low cost, high conversion campaign that you can profit from.