5 Tips For Optimizing A Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign
August 17, 2010
When pulling together a pay per click (PPC) strategy for a company you really have to think about what your company’s goals are. Better ROI from your PPC keyword campaigns or traffic for branding? Those goals influence what keywords you target, the development of your landing pages, ad content creation, and how you measure the success of the each pay per click campaign. Here are a few factors to consider when developing a PPC campaign.
1. Keyword Research:
- Conduct PPC research to determine what keywords competitors are using, and what keywords work for competitors.
- Consider using a social media monitoring tool like Radian6 to help find new keywords from social media related to your industry.
2. Take steps to manage a consistent PPC budget efficiently:
- Turn off ads where outside of customer support hours.
- Consider seasonality of keywords.
- Reduce the price of ads to improve cost per action.
- Make sure Ads appear consistently during the same periods, and over a period of time.
- Consider geographic turning off ads for geographic locations based on your volume of business in each geographic location, and competitive situation.
- Find negative keywords and remove them from campaigns.
- If keywords are not converting drop them.
- Check and review how ads are categorized into groups.
3. Optimize landing pages for ads:
- Make sure your landing page content includes keywords and is relevant to the keyword search.
- Make sure there’s a landing page for every ad and keyword.
4. PPC Ad creation optimization:
- Industry recommended practice is to program ads so that keywords are highlighted in the ads. Google’s quality score for ads is influenced by the keywords appearing in the ad. You either do that by specifically targeting ads to certain keywords, or building ads that are both generic enough to cover a range of keywords within a category but using PPC tools provided by search engines you can cause a keyword to automatically appear in an ad.
5. Use pay per click management tools.
- When managing a large volume of keywords it’s important to use automated tools. Using such tools also enables you to use a two pronged strategy when it comes to going after your top keywords and long tail keywords. You can bid higher for top keywords and lower for long tail keywords, but still achieve some of the same ROI for cost per action.